Current Issue: Winter 2025
EDITOR’S NOTE
Lori Amber Roessner
ARTICLES
Transgressions: An Editor’s Crusade to Thwart America’s First Black Shakespearean Acting Company
Brian Carroll
A reading of newspaper coverage of the first Black Shakespearean stage productions in the United States reveals a great deal about the challenges facing Black underclasses striving for legitimacy, social mobility, even a pleasant evening of theater. Coverage in New York City’s newspapers of the 1820s demonstrates the lengths mainstream society and a partisan press were willing to go to resist the inclusive, intercultural, multiracial national imaginary as projected by the country’s first Black-run theater company. This research reveals why white editors led by the National Advocate’s Mordecai Manuel Noah, as well as white theater owners and patrons, would seek to divest this pioneering Black theater company of its artistic agency. This research also seeks to better understand the many comedic enactments of race that would come after the African Grove Theatre’s brief, violent, but important run.
Richard Lee Strout: A Young American Reporter in Revolutionary Ireland
Mark Holan
Richard Lee Strout (1898–1990) had a successful career as a journalist, working for more than six decades as correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, while also being for four decades a columnist at The New Republic under the byline “TRB from Washington.” His earlier career included reporting from Ireland during its war of independence against Britain from 1919 to 1921. He visited Ireland at the peak of that war, in November 1920, and his articles on it appeared principally in the New York Globe during January and February 1921 and in an issue of The Open Road, a “magazine for young men” published in Boston, in May/June 1921. The present article highlights his reports from Ireland, placing his visit in the context of others by American journalists and in the context of his later career. Noting that “Strout’s Law” was “Sell every piece three times,” the article examines in particular a certain story that Strout filed in a number of forms about his meeting with a lord mayor of Cork city. The article argues that such variations illustrate the need to cross-check not only the work of different journalists on the same topic but also reports filed by the same individual at different times.
Fleischmann’s ‘Yeast for Health’: A Cure for Boils, Acne, Constipation, and Plummeting Sales
Lisa Mullikin Parcell
Moving into the 1920s, the Fleischmann Yeast Company faced financial ruin: bread consumption was declining overall, home baking was at a low, and Prohibition had shut down Fleischmann’s sales of gin, a natural part of the yeast production process. The Fleischmann Company used extension advertising to convince the public to eat two to three cakes of yeast a day to cure boils, acne, constipation, and a general feeling of being run down. The Fleischmann’s Yeast for Health campaign resulted in a 300 percent sales increase of yeast in the first few years. More importantly, it sustained the company until Congress repealed Prohibition in 1933. While few people still eat yeast for health, Fleischmann’s Yeast remains the top-selling brand of baker’s yeast in the United States and an excellent example of a company’s use of extension advertising as a creative and hugely successful response to an industry in crisis.
‘Now We Are One’: How Japanese American Internment Camp Newspapers Helped Create Communities, 1942-1943
Glen Feighery
The internment of Japanese Americans during World War II was an extraordinary chapter in US history. After Pearl Harbor, 120,000 people, two-thirds of them US citizens, were evacuated from the West Coast because of their Japanese ancestry. They were housed in crude camps that became small cities with their own newspapers. Previous studies have demonstrated that camp papers were subject to government regulation, but they nevertheless had agency. An unexamined aspect of these newspapers is their role in building communities behind barbed wire. These communities did not automatically coalesce. They were fostered by papers appealing to unity, morale, and self-reliance to establish new societies at the margins of a nation that had shunned them. Through their newspapers, members of this marginalized community had a voice at a time of crisis.
BOOK REVIEWS
Social Justice, Activism and Diversity in U.S. Media History
Q. McElroy
Sam Lacy and Wendell Smith: The Dynamic Duo That Desegregated American Sports
Jason Peterson
Newshawks in Berlin: The Associated Press and Nazi Germany
Ross F. Collins
A History of Disinformation in the U.S.
Lorraine Ahearn
Hedged, How Private Investment Funds Helped Destroy American Newspapers and Undermine Democracy
Karin Assmann
The Image of Environmental Harm in American Social Documentary Photography
Eric H. Boll
DIGITAL MEDIA REVIEWS
LA84 Foundation Digital Library, https://digital.la84.org/
C. Nathan Hatton
Slow Burn, Season 10, “The Rise of Fox News,” directed by Josh Levin, Slate.com, (2024)
Jason Lee Guthrie
ENDNOTES
Endnotes