Journalisms Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting
Author: John Maxwell Hamilton File Type: pdf In all of journalism, nowhere are the stakes higher than in foreign news-gathering. For media owners, it is the most difficult type of reporting to finance for editors, the hardest to oversee. Correspondents, roaming large swaths of the planet, must acquire expertise that home-based reporters take for granted-facility with the local language, for instance, or an understanding of local cultures. Adding further to the challenges, they must put news of the world in context for an audience with little experience and often limited interest in foreign affairs-a task made all the more daunting because of the consequence to national security. In Journalisms Roving Eye, John Maxwell Hamilton-a historian and former foreign correspondent-provides a sweeping and definitive history of American foreign news reporting from its inception to the present day and chronicles the economic and technological advances that have influenced overseas coverage, as well as the cavalcade of colorful personalities who shaped readers perceptions of the world across two centuries. From the colonial era-when newspaper printers hustled down to wharfs to collect mail and periodicals from incoming ships-to the ongoing multimedia press coverage of the Iraq War, Hamilton explores journalisms constant-and not always successful-efforts at dishing the foreign news, as James Gordon Bennett put it in the mid-nineteenth century to describe his approach in the New York Herald. He details the highly partisan coverage of the French Revolution, the early emergence of special correspondents and the challenges of organizing their efforts, the profound impact of the non-yellow press in the run-up to the Spanish-American War, the increasingly sophisticated machinery of propaganda and censorship that surfaced during World War I, and the golden age of foreign correspondence during the interwar period, when outlets for foreign news swelled and a large number of experienced, independent journalists circled the globe. From the Nazis intimidation of reporters to the ways in which American popular opinion shaped coverage of Communist revolution and the Vietnam War, Hamilton covers every aspect of delivering foreign news to American doorsteps. Along the way, Hamilton singles out a fascinating cast of characters, among them Victor Lawson, the overlooked proprietor of the Chicago Daily News, who pioneered the concept of a foreign news service geared to American interests Henry Morton Stanley, one of the first reporters to generate news on his own with his 1871 expedition to East Africa to find Livingstone and Jack Belden, a forgotten brooding figure who exemplified the best in combat reporting. Hamilton details the experiences of correspondents, editors, owners, publishers, and network executives, as well as the political leaders who made the news and the technicians who invented ways to transmit it. Their stories bring the narrative to life in arresting detail and make this an indispensable book for anyone wanting to understand the evolution of foreign news-gathering. Amid the steep drop in the number of correspondents stationed abroad and the recent decline of the newspaper industry, many fear that foreign reporting will soon no longer exist. But as Hamilton shows in this magisterial work, traditional correspondence survives alongside a new type of reporting. Journalisms Roving Eye offers a keen understanding of the vicissitudes in foreign news, an understanding imperative to better seeing what lies ahead.
Author: Mark S. M. Scott
File Type: pdf
Journey Back to God explores Origen of Alexandrias creative, complex, and controversial treatment of the problem of evil. It argues that his layered cosmology functions as a theodicy that discerns deeper meaning beneath the apparent injustices of the world. Origen asks why does God permit cosmic disparity - that is, why do some suffer more than others? On the surface, the unfair arrangement of the world defies theological coherence. In order to defend God against the charge of injustice Origen develops a theological cosmology that explains the ontological status and origin of evil as well as its cosmic implications. It interprets suffering as a stepping stone to the souls ascent to God. Essentially, Origens theodicy hinges on the journey of the soul back to God. Its themes correlate with the souls creation, fall and descent into materiality, gradual purification, and eventual divinization the world is a schoolroom or hospital for the soul where it undergoes the necessary education and purgation. Origen carefully calibrates his cosmology and theology, and portrays God as a compassionate and judicious teacher, physician, and father who employs suffering for our amelioration. Journey Back to God frames the systematic study of Origens theodicy within a broader theory of theodicy as navigation that is, as the dynamic process whereby we integrate our observations and experiences of suffering within our religious worldviews. Moreover, it unites the logical and spiritual facets of his theodicy, and situatesit in its third-century historical, theological, and philosophical context, correcting the imbalanced perspectives on Origen that pervade scholarship. Furthermore, the study clarifies his ambiguous position on universalism and its place in his theodicy. It demonstrates the contemporary relevance of Origens approach, which confronts the perennial questions of theodicy with a bold, constructive, and optimistic vision.
Author: Anthony Maniscalco
File Type: pdf
In spite of their public attractions and millions of visitors, most shopping malls are now off-limits to free speech and expressive activity. The same may be said about many other public spaces and marketplaces in American cities and suburbs, leaving scholars and other observers to wonder where civic engagement is lawfully permitted in the United States. In Public Spaces, Marketplaces, and the Constitution, Anthony Maniscalco draws on key legal decisions, social theory, and urban history to demonstrate that public spaces have been split apart from First Amendment protections, while the expression of political ideas has been excluded from privately owned, publicly accessible malls. Today, the traditional indoor suburban shopping mall, that icon of modern American capitalism and culture, is being replaced by outdoor retail centers. Yet the law and courts have been slow to catch up. Maniscalco argues that scholars, students, and the public must confront these innovations in commercial design and consumer practices, as well as what they portend for contemporary metropolitan America and its civic spaces.
Author: David R. Swartz
File Type: pdf
In 1973, nearly a decade before the height of the Moral Majority, a group of progressive activists assembled in a Chicago YMCA to strategize about how to move the nation in a more evangelical direction through political action. When they emerged, the Washington Post predicted that the new evangelical left could shake both political and religious life in America. The following decades proved the Post both right and wrongevangelical participation in the political sphere was intensifying, but in the end it was the religious right, not the left, that built a viable movement and mobilized electorally. How did the evangelical right gain a moral monopoly and why were evangelical progressives, who had shown such promise, left behind? In Moral Minority, the first comprehensive history of the evangelical left, David R. Swartz sets out to answer these questions, charting the rise, decline, and political legacy of this forgotten movement. Though vibrant in the late nineteenth century, progressive evangelicals were in eclipse following religious controversies of the early twentieth century, only to reemerge in the 1960s and 1970s. They stood for antiwar, civil rights, and anticonsumer principles, even as they stressed doctrinal and sexual fidelity. Politically progressive and theologically conservative, the evangelical left was also remarkably diverse, encompassing groups such as Sojourners, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Evangelicals for Social Action, and the Association for Public Justice. Swartz chronicles the efforts of evangelical progressives who expanded the concept of morality from the personal to the social and showed the wayorganizationally and through political activismto what would become the much larger and more influential evangelical right. By the 1980s, although they had witnessed the election of Jimmy Carter, the nations first born-again president, progressive evangelicals found themselves in the political wilderness, riven by identity politics and alienated by a skeptical Democratic Party and a hostile religious right. In the twenty-first century, evangelicals of nearly all political and denominational persuasions view social engagement as a fundamental responsibility of the faithful. This most dramatic of transformations is an important legacy of the evangelical left. **
Author: James Baldwin
File Type: mobi
A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwins early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two letters, written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism. Described by The New York Times Book Review as sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle...all presented in searing, brilliant prose, The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of our literature.
Author: Thane Gustafson
File Type: pdf
p margin 1em padding border noneThe Russian oil industrywhich vies with Saudi Arabia as the worlds largest producer and exporter of oil, providing nearly 12 percent of the global supplyis facing mounting problems that could send shock waves through the Russian economy and worldwide.Wheel of Fortuneprovides an authoritative account of this vital industry from the last years of communism to its uncertain future. Tracking the interdependence among Russias oil industry, politics, and economy,Thane Gustafsonshows how the stakes extend beyond international energy security to include the potential threat of a destabilized Russia.p margin 1em padding border noneGustafson, a leading consultant and analyst of the politics of energy in the former Soviet Union, draws on interviews with key players over the course of two decades to provide a detailed history of the oil industrys evolution since the breakup of the Soviet Union. At its center is the complex and fraught relationship between the oil industry and the state, which loosened its grip under Yeltsin only to tighten it again under Putin. As oil becomes harder to find and more expensive to produce and deliver, Gustafson warns, Russias growing dependence on revenue from oil exports, along with its inefficient and often-corrupt management of the industry, is unsustainable.p margin 1em padding border noneA rich but troubled Soviet legacy, the conflicting ambitions of politicians and industry oligarchs, and the excesses of capitalism Russian-style threaten to lead Russia to an impasse. Involving the oil industry in the countrys modernization agenda and remaking its relationship to the state, Gustafson argues, is Russias best path toward a stable economy and a safer world.
Author: Theodor Adorno
File Type: epub
p Segoe UI, serif 13pxA reflection on everyday existence in the sphere of consumption of late Capitalism, this work is Adornos literary and philosophical masterpiece. p Segoe UI, serif 13px**
Author: Nancy MacLean
File Type: azw
An explosive expose of the rights relentless campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatize public education, and change the Constitution. Behind todays headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Democracy in Chains names its true architect--the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan--and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority. In a brilliant and engrossing narrative, Nancy MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last gasp attempt to preserve the white elites power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. In response to the widening of American democracy, he developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest of us. Corporate donors and their right-wing foundations were only too eager to support Buchanans work in teaching others how to divide America into makers and takers. And when a multibillionaire on a messianic mission to rewrite the social contract of the modern world, Charles Koch, discovered Buchanan, he created a vast, relentless, and multi-armed machine to carry out Buchanans strategy. Without Buchanans ideas and Kochs money, the libertarian right would not have succeeded in its stealth takeover of the Republican Party as a delivery mechanism. Now, with Mike Pence as Vice President, the cause has a longtime loyalist in the White House, not to mention a phalanx of Republicans in the House, the Senate, a majority of state governments, and the courts, all carrying out the plan. That plan includes harsher laws to undermine unions, privatizing everything from schools to health care and Social Security, and keeping as many of us as possible from voting. Based on ten years of unique research, Democracy in Chains tells a chilling story of right-wing academics and big money run amok. This revelatory work of scholarship is also a call to arms to protect the achievements of twentieth-century American self-government.
Author: Ben Procter
File Type: epub
William Randolph Hearst was one of the most colorful and important figures of turn-of-the-century America, a man who changed the face of American journalism and whose influence extends to the present day. Now, in William Randolph Hearst, Ben Procter gives us the most authoritative account of Hearsts extraordinary career in newspapers and politics. Born to great wealth--his father was a partial owner of four fabulously rich mines--Hearst began his career in his early twenties by revitalizing a rundown newspaper, the San Franciso Examiner. Hearst took what had been a relatively sedate form of communicating information and essentially created the modern tabloid, complete with outrageous headlines, human interest stories, star columnists, comic strips, wide photo coverage, and crusading zeal. His papers fairly bristled with life. By 1910 he had built a newspaper empire--eight papers and two magazines read by nearly three million people. Hearst did much to create yellow journalism--with the emphasis on sensationalism and the lowering of journalistic standards. But Procter shows that Hearsts papers were also challenging and innovative and powerful They exposed corruption, advocated progressive reforms, strongly supported recent immigrants, became a force in the Democratic Party, and helped ignite the Spanish-American War. Procter vividly depicts Hearsts own political career from his 1902 election to Congress to his presidential campaign in 1904 and his bitter defeats in New Yorks Mayoral and Gubernatorial races. Written with a broad narrative sweep and based on previously unavailable letters and manuscripts, William Randoph Hearst illuminates the character and era of the man who left an indelible mark on American journalism.
Author: Jean-Marie Abgrall
File Type: pdf
March 1997 One year after the massacre of Saint-Pierre-of-Charennes and the death of 16 cult members of the Order of the Solar Temple, in Saint-Casimir, Canada, five other members of the order rejoin their brothers in death. In San Jose, California, 39 members of the Gates of Paradise follow their guru in death to reach the Hale Bopp Comet that was to take them to a faraway planet. Not all cults manifest in such a dramatic way, but many achieve their goals subtly and incrementally. As with drug addiction, the phenomenon of cults hits all social strata and plants its roots in the deepest core of the individual. Mental manipulation uses the most up-to-date techniques of communication, marketing and persuasion, and requires a complex organization. Jean-Marie Abgrall, psychiatrist, criminologist, expert witness to the French Court of Appeals, and member of the Inter-Ministry Committee on Cults, is one of the experts most frequently consulted by the European judicial and legislative processes. The fruit of 15 years of research, his book delivers the first methodical analysis of the sectarian phenomenon, decoding the mental manipulation on behalf of mystified observers as well as victims. To describe this psychopathology and the means to resist it, the author applies the framework of criminology and medico-legal psychiatry. He feels that cults, whose brainwashing essentially equates to enslavement, should be subject to criminal law. Some cults resort to severe methods to subjugate and re-indoctrinate rebellious initiates (sleep deprivation, starvation, daily public confessions), some use sexual entrapment or drugs, [but] most cults ... use subtle techniques. Jean-Marie Abgrall details the mechanisms by which cults attract, ensnare and brainwash new members. The book discusses types of people most vulnerable to cult recruitment in fact, it gives you everything youd need to know, if you want to start a cult of your own! Not all cults manifest so dramatically many weave their spells quietly and patiently. Like drug addiction, the cult phenomenon hits all social strata and plants its roots in the deepest core of the individual. Cults use state-of-the art techniques to manipulate their followers, and develop complex organizations to expand and grow. Cult members are led to dissolve their individual selves into the group, to become emotionally dependent on the guru, to espouse a certain doctrine and gradually to cut themselves off from normal life.