Politics and the American Press

Richard Kaplan is Lecturer in the Sociology Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His work on media history has received the Catherine Covert Prize for best published article in Mass Communications History (1996). He has published in Journalism History; Media, Culture, and Society; and American Journalism.

• Introduction; 1. Partisan news in the early reconstruction era: African-Americans in the vortex of political publicity; 2. Economic engines of partisanship; 3. Rituals of partisanship: American journalism in the gilded age; 4. The two revolutions in urban newspaper economics, 1873 and 1888; 5. 1896 and the political revolution in Detroit journalism; Conclusion; Methodological appendix.

"Politics and the American Press is one of the most thought-provoking works on partisan journalism to appear in recent decades...Kaplan's critique of the press in the 19th and early 20th centuries is impressive and often persuasive because he is so well grounded in the context of the period." - Political Communication, Gerald J. Baldasty Political Communication