This chapter examines a US Central American experience at the end of the long nineteenth century, as reflected in Centro America, a newspaper established by the Comité Unionista Centroamericano de San Francisco in support of the final, formal effort to establish an isthmian nation in 1921. A rare literary text, Centro America provides a cultural account of the complexities and contradictions that shaped the transnational lives of an early Central American diaspora in the US. The weekly paper published unionist essays, the latest local and global news, literary reviews, poems, society columns, and passenger arrival and departure notices that catered to an audience composed of primarily Central American coffee and other elites. However, Centro America also published a letter written by Abel Romero, a Salvadoran, working-class machinist, urging the paper to speak out against El Salvador’s authoritarian government. By allowing different forms of writing to cohabitate, a complex imaginative space emerges in the paper wherein clashing political and class interests create conflict among Central American communities. Print culture, I contend, visibilizes ruptures that emerged in Centro America when elites were confronted by the economic precarity that burdened their countrymen in San Francisco, from whom they asked and largely received unionist support.

As judged by our three proxy measures of corruption, the fifty states vary greatly in terms of the pervasiveness and types they experience. We analyze those contrasts employing a range of empirical measures and find the political, economic, and institutional factors matter greatly. Particularly intriguing are the ways contrasts in corruption relate to Daniel Elazar’s three major political subcultures – Moralistic, Individualistic, and Traditionalistic – and to the ways they differ and mingle state by state. Contrasts in our corruption measures are linked to a range of explanatory variables in ways consistent with theory. Such links to fundamental influences not only point to the systemic nature of corruption, its causes, and consequences, but also help explain its tenacity and the difficulties we face when we attempt to implement reforms.

In Chapter 7, we discuss how best to analyse mediated political monologues. As news and other forms of media present political events, they are important to study, and for the pragmatician a key issue is how to tease out the dynamics of such monologues, making them pragmatically relevant. We believe that it is important to consider how such monologues gain interactional effect with the public because gaining such effect is the goal of these monologues. Thus we focus on textual features through which a monologue covertly interconnects the readers with politicians and political entities. Here we will refer to the concept of alignment, proposed by Goffman, arguing that many seemingly ‘innocent’ phenomena in political monologues aim to trigger the alignment of the public with politicians or political entities represented by the monologue. As a case study, we examine a corpus of political monologues published in Chinese newspapers in the wake of a national crisis. Following our cross-cultural pragmatic contrastive view, we will compare various types of political monologue, in order to tease out the interactional dynamics through which they trigger the alignment of their readers.

Seen from Europe and America, exhibitions reinforce our understanding of World War I as watershed, marking a turn from the confident embrace of industry and empire to a world of economic anxiety, colonial ambivalence, and modernist experiment. Japan shared in these too, but the evidence of exhibitions also points to continuities, of municipal aspiration, ongoing commercialization, and colonial development. This chapter shows how ongoing urbanization and continental empire increased the demand for exhibitions from private companies, local governments, and colonial authorities, both to tie themselves to the nation and to find a distinctive place for themselves on the imperial map. They were also eager to cater to the emerging middle-class demand for the things that would provide them with a cultured but moral urban life. The demand, in turn, provided employment for a new breed of showmen (rankaiya), who were able to provide the attractions and advertising to make sure the visitors would come.

In United States v. Alvarez, the US Supreme Court ruled that an official of a water district who introduced himself to his constituents by falsely stating in a public meeting that he had earned the Congressional Medal of Honor had a First Amendment right to make that demonstrably untrue claim. Audience members misled by the statement might well be considered to have a First Amendment interest in not being directly and knowingly lied to in that way. Other members of the community might be thought to have a First Amendment interest in public officials such as Xavier Alvarez telling the truth about their credentials and experiences. Nevertheless, as both the plurality and the concurring justices who together formed the majority in Alvarez viewed the case, it was the liar’s interest in saying what he wished that carried the day. Why is that? Crucial to answering this question is whether ‘the freedom of speech’ that the First Amendment tolerates ‘no law abridging’ is understood to be primarily speaker-centered, audience-centered, or society-centered.

Chapter 4 is an extensive study of runaway slave advertisements that mention that a slave speaks Dutch. For this chapter, I have compiled a database of 487 enslaved persons, coded by year of flight, name, age, Dutch language ability, name of master, county, and original source. I demonstrate that runaway slave advertisements in New York City and environs plateaued in the period 1760–1800, but peaked later in the Hudson Valley, with exceptional growth in the 1790s and 1800s. The data provide evidence for the persistence of the Dutch language in New York and New Jersey and contribute to a picture of Dutch-speaking slaves presenting a sharp economic challenge to the institution of slavery. By the 1790s, Dutch-speaking slaves were running away at a rate of at least 1 per 500 per year. For Dutch slave owners, this meant a significant loss of capital and, moreover, a risk on their remaining slave capital. Runaway slaves tended to be prime working-age males, and the loss of the best field workers frustrated New York Dutch farmers. The pressure of runaway activity also lowered the value of retained slaves and made New York slavery more costly in general. Runaways put pressure on slaveholders to manumit their slaves, extracting the most labor possible from them before agreeing to let them go.

This chapter covers Haitian periodical culture in early nineteenth-century Haiti (1804–1843) and the spirited, fraught process of national literary formation under Henry Christophe, Alexandre Pétion, and Jean-Pierre Boyer. It considers early periodicals and their engagement in political combat and partisan confrontation, within Haiti and in the broader Atlantic world. Early Haitian writers refuted European racial pseudoscience that sustained slavery and engaged in internal polemics on the nature of Haiti’s independence; the best form of governance for the nation’s survival; and the meaning of freedom, civilization, and literature. The chapter argues that these aspects of early periodical culture were central to the development of Haitian literature. It traces the development of an idea of Haitian national literature in that culture. Whereas earlier newspapers presented ‘literature’ as the inclusion of occasional verse and creative poetic production in their pages, newspapers, magazines and eventually specialized journals began to theorize the existence of a national Haitian literature national literary culture—an idea that would become fully realized by the late 1830s.

Chapter Six explains how Rogers contributed greatly to a media revolution that reshaped American culture in the early 1900s. Beginning in 1922, he reached a vast new popular audience by becoming a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist (first with a weekly column, then a shorter daily one), writing regulary for magazines, making advertisements, cutting phonograph records, and making sporadic appearances in the new medium of radio. He also updated the old tradition of the lecture,regularly traveling throughout the nation to appear before audiences in town halls, lyceums, and churches. Throughout, Rogers deployed his talents as a cracker-barrel philosopher and down-home wit to interrogate America’s move to embrace a new consumer, urban, leisure-oriented culture.

This chapter explores the range of essayistic writing in nineteenth-century newspapers: leaders (political and topical in focus and the principal genre of the Victorian daily and weekly press), middles (a shorter version of the leader and characteristic of some weeklies), correspondence columns from journalists at home and abroad, and reviews of both books and theatre. It charts the expansion of the press at mid-century following the abolition of the ‘Taxes on Knowledge’ and an influx of literary talent that raised the quality of newspapers, and it notes the transformation of newspapers at the end of the century with the creation of literary pages, supplements, and special features (following the demise of many quarterly reviews and monthly magazines). The second half of the chapter examines the newspaper writing of John Stuart Mill, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot, and argues that each made a unique contribution to the newspapers of their day.

This chapter traces the development of the essay in the context of a world of early eighteenth-century sociability constituted by coffee shops, periodicals, and a variety of informal clubs and societies. Never simply a reflection of a prior social reality, the periodical essay developed as part of a self-consciously created mythos of ‘polite literature’ designed to regulate manners in the inchoate and often contentious social world from which it represented itself as emerging. In the skilful hands of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, among others, the polite essay shaped values of agreeableness, conversability, and formal equality that helped define a remarkably durable idea of polite literary culture still in play – if increasingly represented as passing away – for essayists like William Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt writing a century later.

How does an essay change when it appears in a newspaper, aimed at a mass reading public that includes people of varied class backgrounds? This chapter takes up how periodical publication shaped nineteenth-century essays, looking at the effects of serialisation, republication through excerpting, and the intertextual nature of Victorian journals and papers. It explores how the political journalism and social protest movements of the 1830s and 1840s influenced the essay, in contrast to the notion that political campaigning is opposed to the contemplative and reflective values associated with the genre. Focusing on Thomas Carlyle’s response to the social movements of his time, the chapter argues that not only did Carlyle engage ideologically with popular protest but that the writing he encountered in the radical press shaped his style by encouraging an oratorical mode, melodramatic language and rhetorical excesses.

Anger and frustration over Indigenous ethnic identity fraud have reached fever pitch across social and official media, within cultural and political institutions, and in Indigenous communities. It seems a day doesn’t pass without new revelations of people who have lied about and capitalized on Indigenous identity. Joy Harjo decried such “identity crimes,” saying that “Some claim identity by tenuous family story and some are perpetrating outright fraud.” These arguments go beyond simply outing individuals; increasingly, they call for publishers, universities, and other institutions to do a better job of verifying Indian identity claims. In doing so, however, many are pulling toward a problematic benchmark: enrollment in a federally recognized tribe. I respond to this with a reading of two urban intertribal newspapers – Los Angeles’ Talking Leaf and Boston’s The Circle – published before many tribes achieved their federal recognition. For Native nations that have experienced ethnocide, state detribalization, and rejection of their federal recognition claims, such newspapers have helped tribal members find each other, remember their histories and collectively imagine their futures

What is the role of “trusted communicators” in disseminating knowledge to the public? The trigger for this question, which is the topic of this set of chapters, is the widely shared belief that one of the most notable, and noted, consequences of the spread of the internet and social media is the collapse of sources of information that are broadly trusted across society, because the internet has eliminated the power of the traditional gatekeepers1 who identified and created trusted communicators for the public. Many commentators argue this is a troubling development because trusted communicators are needed for our society to create and maintain a common base of facts, accepted by the broader public, that is essential to a system of democratic self-governance. Absent such a common base or factual consensus, democratic politics will tend to collapse into polarized camps that cannot accept the possibility of electoral defeat (as they arguably have in recent years in the United States). I aim here to examine recent proposals to resurrect a set of trusted communicators and the gatekeeper function, and to critique them from both practical and theoretical perspectives. But before we can discuss possible “solutions” to the lack of gatekeepers and trusted communicators in the modern era, it is important to understand how those functions arose in the pre-internet era.

The commercial market for local news in the United States has collapsed. Many communities lack a local paper. These “news deserts,” comprising about two-thirds of the country, have lost a range of benefits that local newspapers once provided. Foremost among these benefits was investigative reporting – local newspapers at one time played a primary role in investigating local government and commerce and then reporting the facts to the public. It is rare for someone else to pick up the slack when the newspaper disappears.

In February 2021, the Australian federal government enacted the “News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code,” which requires Facebook and Google to pay domestic news outlets for linking to their websites. It was a first-of-its-kind mechanism for redistributing revenue from Big Tech platforms to legacy journalism, and it has attracted global attention from policymakers looking to halt the internet-fueled decline of the traditional news industry. Thus, the success or failure of what critics call Australia’s “link tax” has significant implications for the future of both the World Wide Web and the news industry writ large.

This chapter examines newspaper discourse in the Donetsk and Luhansk ‘People’s Republics’, analysing the content of twenty-six local newspapers between the start of the Euromaidan demonstrations in late 2013 and the end of 2017. The goal of this chapter is to uncover the themes and narratives in DNR and LNR print media, and examine how these narratives relate back to ideology and identity building. Three main narratives are identified: ‘business as usual’, ‘war and memory’, and ‘loss and guilt’. Newspapers in the Donbas ‘Republics’ continued to perform ‘typical’ activities as a source of information for local communities. However, a significant part of their content did address the development of collective identity, for example, through references to newly instated public holidays and a kinship with Russia and the Russian language. However, this ‘ingroup’ identity remained impoverished, projecting an identity discourse without a sui generis, unifying coherence. Instead, negative descriptions of the ‘outgroup’ (i.e., Ukraine/the ‘Kyiv regime’) received much more attention, with a view to demonising Ukraine and Ukrainians in the eyes of the local population.

Despite the sharp decline in the number of local newspapers, it’s important to understand that other legacy news-delivery platforms – particularly local TV news – have not been suffering the same degree of loss. Pew Research Center found that local TV news actually saw its audience increase across the evening and late-night timeslots in 2020, and that local TV companies earned more revenue than the previous year.1 In fact, local TV was deemed to be on par with or outpacing cable and network TV. Pew survey data show more Americans still prefer to get their local news from television than from any other medium, including online. Even with an increasing preference for digital delivery, “local television stations have retained a strong hold in the local news ecosystem.”2

It is usually a mistake to suppose that a company is the best judge of how its business works.1 Or that an industry is the best judge of how the industry works. AT&T is a good example. When the Justice Department sat down with management in 1981 to negotiate a breakup of what was then a monopoly provider of telephone service, government lawyers asked which part of the company management wanted to keep after the breakup – the long-distance operations or the regional networks.2 The long-distance operations had long been the company’s most profitable, so management asked for those.3