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Northern newspapers used the Klan to talk about the nature of citizenship, the expansion of the state, and their anxieties that the individual was subject to manipulation by an increasingly robust and centralized government and centralized newspaper press. The national conversation about the Klan largely occurred during two periods—the first from early 1868 through early 1869, the second from late 1870 through 1872—and the nature of the discussion differed dramatically between those two periods, revealing changing approaches to Klan violence. Throughout, it is striking how few articles on the Klan include descriptions and mentions of actual Klan attacks on freedpeople and their white allies. Rather, northern newspaper articles on the Klan became a way to reflect on broader issues. By the 1871 and 1872, northern newspapers had adopted a strikingly sympathetic posture to Ku-Klux, who they increasingly portrayed as victims of federal aggression rather than as perpetrators of attacks on freedpeople.

This chapter examines Margaret Fuller’s relocation to New York City to join the staff of the New York Tribune in 1844 under Horace Greeley as a literary critic. Her work in the press started on December 1, 1844. This chapter describes Greeley’s political beliefs and writing style, the factors that contributed to the success of his newspaper and Fuller’s opinion of him. It also describes the development in Fuller’s personal and professional life in New York City.

This chapter examines the developments in Margaret Fuller’s career as literary critic for the New York Tribune. In June 1845 Fuller started to pick up the pace of her writing and decided to throw away her personal Romantic gendered formula. She later started receiving appraisals for her work and became involved in the so-called Wars of the Literati with other authors of literary magazines in the city. Her allies in this war were the Young America literary circle, whose leaders were the editors Evert Duycknick and William A. Jones.

Examines the 1888 and 1892 presidential campaigns that pitted Republican Benjamin Harrison, who favored a protective tariff, against Democrat Grover Cleveland, who wanted to lower taxes on imports. The New York press was predominantly Democratic, which enabled Cleveland to win the 1884 election. The pro-Republican Protective Tariff League sponsored Judge John L. Wheeler’s wildly popular stereopticon lecture The Tariff Illustrated in 1888x, which was hailed as contributing to Harrison’s victory (a brief recession and Tammany Hall’s hostility to Cleveland were additional factors). In 1892 Republicans nominated New York Tribune publisher Whitelaw Reid as vice-president and had six orators who toured the Northeast, delivering illustrated lectures and promoting the protective tariff. Nevertheless, Cleveland proved victorious in the rematch.

This chapter examines Margaret Fuller’s assignment to England as the first female foreign correspondent of the New York Tribune in 1846. During these travels, Fuller wrote about her experiences, and in the process created a new literary genre called travel narratives. After arriving in England, she had the opportunity to interview several prominent writers of the time including Thomas Carlyle and George Sand.

This chapter views the New-York Tribune and the New York Times—the first in the industry to use skyscraper architecture as the medium for corporate image construction—in the context of the growing power of the press. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the city was reimagined with new patterns of circulation, spaces, conduits, and nodes of power. Alongside the growth of the banking and insurance industries, the press colonized lower Manhattan and the value of land rose precipitously. New construction and printing technology required capital investment and new forms of corporate governance. Media architecture transformed from rented space in low buildings to purpose-built signature buildings with lawyers, press agents, and advertising firms as tenants. The shift to taller buildings reveals a preoccupation with both the symbolic and economic value of the skyscraper, as media content became more attentive to the built environment.

This chapter examines the experiences of Margaret Fuller in Italy during the revolution from 1848 to 1849. During this period, there was much speculation back in American about why she was lingering in Rome. Some speculated that she was completing her book. In Italy, Fuller and Giovanni Angelo Ossoli supported Giuseppe Mazzini. This chapter also discusses Fuller’s work as foreign correspondent of the New York Tribune.

This chapter examines Margaret Fuller’s experiences in Italy as foreign correspondent of the New York Tribune covering the local political situation related to the revolution. It suggests that Fuller failed to recognize the possibility of foreign intervention after Giuseppe Mazzini was installed as leader of the Roman Republic and the pope fled. In July 1899, Mazzini’s government was overthrown by the French. This chapter discusses the details of Fuller’s dispatches to her newspaper and her correspondence with Mazzini.

Margaret Fuller’s transnational conversations gained political force in the dispatches for the New-York Tribune that chronicled her friendships with European radicals and her involvement in the Italian Revolution of 1848. Modeled on the patterns that she developed as a transcendentalist educator in her Boston ‘Conversations’ series, Fuller’s journalistic dialogues – forerunners of fellow journalist Karl Marx’s dialectical missives – led her to address the nation in print and to urge its citizens to follow cultural developments in other countries. Fuller’s theory of journalism forcefully contradicts Benedict Anderson’s assumption that newspaper writing reinforces the imaginative boundaries of a nation. The United States should never isolate itself, Fuller argues, but rather seek out an ‘American’ spirit abroad and use that energy to renew its own national covenant.

Chapter Eight explores the internal dynamics within the Republican Party that made any seeming compromise unacceptable. Once the party formed in the mid-1850s, most of its candidates for office in New England and New England exodus regions to the west could count on robust margins in general elections. They had to worry, instead, about intraparty challengers. That meant paying close attention to the sensitivities of the most ideologically committed rank-and-file members of the party—those Republicans who saw slavery as an urgent moral problem. Often former Free Soilers, these upright men and women exercised influence beyond their numbers. They were positioned to make or break party nominees, and they used their power unhesitatingly. Conciliatory Republicans who feared war hoped that the constitutional amendment might strengthen the Upper South’s Unionists, who held their states out of the secession vortex. But hard-line Republicans from the Upper North faced intense constituent pressures to “not give an inch.”

This chapter first narrates Stravinsky's impressions on American music, expressing in his 1916 interview with the New York Tribune his admiration for American “jazz.” Stravinsky himself was no stranger to American audiences—though he would have to wait nearly a decade before he would first tour several American cities. In fact his image was already fondly etched in the minds of American critics, composers, and concertgoers although reactions to his music were not exactly generally favorable. The chapter narrates the history behind Stravinsky's composition of Apollon Musagète and how American jazz had influenced him. It would be Stravinsky's study of American jazz that would land him this hailed classic in the annals of ballet. The chapter goes on to reflect on how Apollo was a benchmark in many ways for both America and Stravinsky, and how it may have been connected to the movement to remake Washington in the image of the older American musical centers of the eastern seaboard, headed by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge.

This chapter narrates the events in the life of the Brown women a few weeks after Brown's capture, particularly the visit of Thomas Wentworth Higginson. The man appeared as emissary for a group of abolitionists who hoped that an appeal from his wife would persuade John Brown to agree to a rescue plot in Charles Town. However, the rescue plan did not materialize, and after Brown's hanging, Marry's journey back to North Elba dispelled any illusion that the Brown women would soon return to obscurity. Mary arrived at North Elba. The New York Weekly Tribune painted the scene of the Brown women's reunion. This news was followed by similar reports. The Brown women were thrust into a national spotlight, held up by many as symbols of Brown's noble cause.

Jacob Nathaniel Raymer becomes a self-appointed journalist of the war: “All I promise is an account of what came under my immediate observation, and such incidents as I can prove to be actual facts.” Like other rebel reporters, he is a soldier, but unlike them he does not indulge in pro-Confederacy propaganda. His “letters” from nearly every major battle in the east are widely printed in newspapers across the state. On the U.S. side, 500 professional correspondents cover the war, often distorting or sensationalizing it to attract more readers. The newspaper version of the war on both sides becomes as much fiction as reporting. In a time when neither army notifies the next of kin of dead or wounded soldiers, Raymer faithfully accounts for every fallen soldier he can, providing a valuable service to both the soldiers and their families.