Contains chapters on the discipline of oral history, especially as it relates to public history; starting an oral history project, including funding, staffing, equipment, processing, and legal concerns; conducting interviews; using oral history in research and writing, including publishing; videotaping oral history; and more.
Doing Oral History is considered the premier guidebook to oral history, used by professional oral historians, public historians, archivists, and genealogists as a core text in college courses and throughout the public history community. The recent development of digital audio and video recording technology has continued to alter the practice of oral history, making it even easier to produce and disseminate quality recordings. At the same time, digital technology has complicated the preservation of the recordings, past and present. This basic manual offers detailed advice for setting up an oral history project, conducting interviews and using oral history for research, making video recordings, preserving oral history collections in archives and libraries, and teaching and presenting oral history.
In the second edition of The U.S. Congress, Donald A. Ritchie, a congressional historian for more than thirty years, takes readers on a fascinating, behind-the-scenes tour of Capitol Hill, pointing out the key players, explaining their behavior, and translating parliamentary language into plain English. No mere civics lesson, this eye-opening book provides an insider's perspective on Congress, matched with a professional historian's analytical insight. After a swift survey of the creation of Congress by the constitutional convention, he begins to unscrew the nuts and pull out the bolts. What is it like to campaign for Congress? To attract large donors? To enter either house with no seniority? He answers these questions and more, explaining committee assignments and committee work, the role of staffers and lobbyists, floor proceedings, parliamentary rules, and coalition building. Ritchie explores the great effort put into constituent service-as representatives and senators respond to requests from groups and individuals-as well as media relations and news coverage. He also explores how the grand concepts we all know from civics class--checks and balances, advise and consent, congressional oversight--work in practice in an age of strong presidents and a muscular Senate minority.
Sixty essays on American news reporters, editors, publishers, and broadcasters, including Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, and Connie Chung, whose careers significantly advanced or symbolized major changes in journalism.
In 60 essays, this volume profiles American journalists from colonial times to the present--reporters, editors, publishers, photographers, and broadcasters--whose careers reflected major developments in their profession and in the history of the United States. In a speech to Newsweek correspondents in 1963, publisher Philip Graham described journalism as "the first rough draft of history." These journalists confronted and helped to shape the discussion of major issues and events in American history, from the American revolution through abolition, westward expansion, the Civil War, the civil rights movement, immigration, and the women's movement, as well as major constitutional issues involving the First Amendment protection of freedom of the press. Biographies of well-known journalists, from Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine to Walter Cronkite and Rupert Murdoch, appear alongside some who may be less familiar, such as Elias Boudinot, founder of the first Cherokee language newspaper; Abraham Cahan, editor of the Jewish Daily Forward; and Daniel Craig, who in the 1830s used carrier pigeons to ferry the news. Other subjects include Margaret Green Draper, the revolutionary printer; Claude Barnett, founder of the Associated Negro Press; photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White; war correspondent Ernie Pyle; and Allen Neuharth, founder of USA Today. Illustrations, fact boxes, and quotations from the subjects themselves make this volume an indispensable reference for students of American history as well as a fascinating read. Journalists profiled include: Horace Greeley Frederick Douglass Mark Twain Thomas Nast Joseph Pulitzer Nellie Bly William Randolph Hearst Ida Wells-Barnett H. L. Mencken Dorothy Thompson Walter Winchell Red Smith Edward R. Murrow Walter Cronkite Bernard Shaw Cokie Roberts Manuel de Dios Unanue and many more
Long before Wikileaks and social media, the journalist Drew Pearson exposed to public view information that public officials tried to keep hidden. A self-professed "keyhole peeper", Pearson devoted himself to revealing what politicians were doing behind closed doors. From 1932 to 1969, his daily "Washington Merry-Go-Round" column and weekly radio and TV commentary broke secrets, revealed classified information, and passed along rumors based on sources high and low in the federal government, while intelligence agents searched fruitlessly for his sources. For forty years, this syndicated columnist and radio and television commentator called public officials to account and forced them to confront the facts. Pearson's daily column, published in more than 600 newspapers, and his weekly radio and television commentaries led to the censure of two US senators, sent four members of the House to prison, and undermined numerous political careers. Every president from Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon--and a quorum of Congress--called him a liar. Pearson was sued for libel more than any other journalist, in the end winning all but one of the cases. Breaking secrets was the heartbeat of Pearson's column. His ability to reveal classified information, even during wartime, motivated foreign and domestic intelligence agents to pursue him. He played cat and mouse with the investigators who shadowed him, tapped his phone, read his mail, and planted agents among his friends. Yet they rarely learned his sources. The FBI found it so fruitless to track down leaks to the columnist that it advised agencies to simply do a better job of keeping their files secret. Drawing on Pearson's extensive correspondence, diaries, and oral histories, The Columnist reveals the mystery behind Pearson's leaks and the accuracy of his most controversial revelations.
This completely revised and updated edition contains more than 200 articles, arranged alphabetically, that provide a concise and easy-to-use guide to the people, issues, vocabulary, and activities of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives." "Fully illustrated and using first-person observations excerpted from memoirs, oral histories, committee hearings, and debates in the Congressional Record, this student companion captures the drama, humor, triumphs, and tragedies of congressional history."--BOOK JACKET.
With the landmark election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932, decades of Republican ascendancy gave way to a half century of Democratic dominance. It was nothing less than a major political realignment, as the direction of federal policy shifted from conservative to liberal-and liberalism itself was redefined in the process. Electing FDR is the first book in seventy years to examine in its entirety the 1932 presidential election that ushered in the New Deal. Award-winning historian Donald Ritchie looks at how candidates responded to the nation's economic crisis and how voters evaluated their performance. More important, he explains how the Democratic Party rebuilt itself after three successive Republican landslides: where the major shifts in party affiliation took place, what contingencies contributed to FDR's victory, and why the new coalition persisted as long as it did. Ritchie challenges prevailing assumptions that the Depression made Roosevelt's election inevitable. He shows that FDR came close to losing the nomination to contenders who might have run to the right of Hoover, and discusses the role of newspapers and radio in presenting the candidates to voters. He also analyzes Roosevelt's campaign strategies, recounting his attempts to appeal to disaffected voters of all ideological stripes, often by altering his positions to broaden his popularity. With the advent of the New Deal, Americans came to enjoy a wide federal safety net that provided everything from old age pensions to rural electricity-government innovations so embraced by voters that even later conservative presidents recognized their importance. Ritchie traces this legacy through the Reagan and Bush years, but he relates how FDR in 1932 was often vague about the specifics of his program and questions whether voters really knew what they were in for with the New Deal. As pundits, politicians, and citizens eye the upcoming 2008 campaign, Electing FDR reminds incumbents not to take their party support for granted or to underestimate their opponents-and reminds students of history that understanding the New Deal begins with the 1932's transformative election.
Oral history is vital to our understanding of the cultures and experiences of the past. Unlike written history, oral history forever captures people's feelings, expressions, and nuances of language. But what exactly is oral history? How reliable is the information gathered by oral history? And what does it take to become an oral historian? Donald A. Ritchie, a leading expert in the field, answers these questions and, in particular, explains the principles and guidelines created by the Oral History Association to ensure the professional standards of oral historians. Doing Oral History has become one of the premier resources in the field of oral history. It explores all aspects of oral history, from starting an oral-history project, including funding, staffing, and equipment to conducting interviews; publishing; videotaping; preserving materials; teaching oral history; and using oral history in museums and on the radio. In this second edition, the author has incorporated new trends and scholarship, updated and expanded the bibliography and appendices, and added a new focus on digital technology and the Internet. Appendices include sample legal release forms and information on oral history organizations. Doing Oral History is a definitive step-by-step guide that provides advice and explanations on how to create recordings that illuminate human experience for generations to come. Illustrated with examples from a wide range of fascinating projects, this authoritative guide offers clear, practical, and detailed advice for students, teachers, researchers, and amateur genealogists who wish to record the history of their own families and communities.
Had Elizabeth "Bess" Clements Abell (1933–2020) been a boy, she would likely have become a politician like her father, Earle C. Clements. Effectively barred from office because of her gender, she forged her own path by helping family friends Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson. Abell's Secret Service code name, "Iron Butterfly," exemplified her graceful but firm management of social life in the Johnson White House. After Johnson's administration ended, she maintained her importance in Washington, DC, serving as chief of staff to Joan Mondale and cofounding a public relations company. Donald A. Ritchie and Terry L. Birdwhistell draw on Abell's own words and those of others known to her to tell her remarkable story. Focusing on her years working for the Johnson campaign and her time in the White House, this engaging oral history provides a window into Abell's life as well as an insider's view of the nation's capital during the tumultuous 1960s.
Doing Oral History is considered the premier guidebook to oral history, used by professional oral historians, public historians, archivists, and genealogists as a core text in college courses and throughout the public history community. The recent development of digital audio and video recording technology has continued to alter the practice of oral history, making it even easier to produce and disseminate quality recordings. At the same time, digital technology has complicated the preservation of the recordings, past and present. This basic manual offers detailed advice for setting up an oral history project, conducting interviews and using oral history for research, making video recordings, preserving oral history collections in archives and libraries, and teaching and presenting oral history.
This completely revised and updated edition contains more than 200 articles, arranged alphabetically, that provide a concise and easy-to-use guide to the people, issues, vocabulary, and activities of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives." "Fully illustrated and using first-person observations excerpted from memoirs, oral histories, committee hearings, and debates in the Congressional Record, this student companion captures the drama, humor, triumphs, and tragedies of congressional history."--BOOK JACKET.
In the Washington Merry-Go-Round, a nationally syndicated newspaper column that appeared in hundreds of papers from 1932 to 1969, as well as on weekly radio and television programs, the investigative journalist Drew Pearson revealed news that public officials tried to suppress. He disclosed policy disputes and political spats, exposed corruption, attacked bigotry, and promoted social justice. He pumped up some political careers and destroyed others. Presidents, prime ministers, and members of Congress repeatedly called him a liar, and he was sued for libel more often than any other journalist, but he won most of his cases by proving the accuracy of his charges. Pearson dismissed most official news as propaganda and devoted his column to reporting what officials were doing behind closed doors. He broke secrets-even in wartime-and revealed classified information. Fellow journalists credited him with knowing more dirt about more people in Washington than even the FBI and compared his efforts to Daniel Ellsberg with the Pentagon Papers or Edward Snowden with WikiLeaks, except that he did it daily. The Columnist examines how Pearson managed to uncover secrets so successfully and why government efforts to find his sources proved so unsuccessful. Drawing on a half century of archival evidence it assesses his contributions as a muckraker by verifying or refuting both his accusations and his accusers"--
This volume profiles 60 American journalists from colonial times to the present and focuses on news reporters, editors, publishers, and broadcasters whose careers significantly advanced or were symbolic of major changes in their profession. Illustrations, fact boxes, and quotations from the subjects themselves, together with the depth and breadth of historical information, make this volume an illuminating and fascinating read.
In the second edition of The U.S. Congress, Donald A. Ritchie, a congressional historian for more than thirty years, takes readers on a fascinating, behind-the-scenes tour of Capitol Hill, pointing out the key players, explaining their behavior, and translating parliamentary language into plain English. No mere civics lesson, this eye-opening book provides an insider's perspective on Congress, matched with a professional historian's analytical insight. After a swift survey of the creation of Congress by the constitutional convention, he begins to unscrew the nuts and pull out the bolts. What is it like to campaign for Congress? To attract large donors? To enter either house with no seniority? He answers these questions and more, explaining committee assignments and committee work, the role of staffers and lobbyists, floor proceedings, parliamentary rules, and coalition building. Ritchie explores the great effort put into constituent service-as representatives and senators respond to requests from groups and individuals-as well as media relations and news coverage. He also explores how the grand concepts we all know from civics class--checks and balances, advise and consent, congressional oversight--work in practice in an age of strong presidents and a muscular Senate minority.
Donald Ritchie offers a vibrant chronicle of news coverage in our nation's capital, from the early days of radio and print reporting and the heyday of the wire services to the brave new world of the Internet. Beginning with 1932, when a newly elected FDR energized the sleepy capital, Ritchie highlights the dramatic changes in journalism that have occurred in the last seven decades. We meet legendary columnists--including Walter Lippmann, Joseph Alsop, and Drew Pearson --as well as the great investigative reporters, from Paul Y. Anderson to the two green Washington Post reporters who launched the political story of the decade--Woodward and Bernstein. We read of the rise of radio news--fought tooth and nail by the print barons--and of such pioneers as Edward R. Murrow, H. V. Kaltenborn, and Elmer Davis. Ritchie also offers a vivid history of TV news, from the early days of Meet the Press, to Huntley and Brinkley and Walter Cronkite, to the cable revolution led by C-SPAN and CNN. In addition, he compares political news on the Internet to the alternative press of the '60s and '70s; describes how black reporters slowly broke into the white press corps (helped mightily by FDR's White House); discusses path-breaking woman reporters such as Sarah McClendon and Helen Thomas, and much more. From Walter Winchell to Matt Drudge, the people who cover Washington politics are among the most colorful and influential in American news. Reporting from Washington offers an unforgettable portrait of these figures as well as of the dramatic changes in American journalism in the twentieth century.
The Oxford Guide to the United States Government is the ultimate resource for authoritative information on the U.S. Presidency, Congress, and Supreme Court. Compiled by three top scholars, its pages brim with the key figures, events, and structures that have animated U.S. government for more than 200 years. In addition to coverage of the 2000 Presidential race and election, this Guide features biographies of all the Presidents, Vice Presidents, and Supreme Court Justices, as well as notable members of Congress, including current leadership; historical commentary on past elections, major Presidential decisions, international and domestic programs, and the key advisors and agencies of the executive branch; in-depth analysis of Congressional leadership and committees, agencies and staff, and historic legislation; and detailed discussions of 100 landmark Supreme Court cases and the major issues facing the Court today. In addition to entries that define legal terms and phrases and others that elaborate on the wide array of government traditions, this invaluable book includes extensive back matter, including tables of Presidential election results; lists of Presidents, Vice Presidents, Congresses, and Supreme Court Justices with dates of service; lists of Presidential museums, libraries, and historic sites; relevant websites; and information on visiting the White House, the Capitol, and Supreme Court buildings. A one-stop, comprehensive guide that will assist students, educators, and anyone curious about the inner workings of government, The Oxford Guide to the United States Government will be a valued addition to any home library.
Donald Cole analyzes the political skills that brought Van Buren the nickname Little Magician," describing how he built the Albany Regency (which became a model for political party machines) and how he created the Democratic party of Andrew Jackson. Originally published in 1984. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Donald Ritchie examines the lives of early, self-styled congressional journalists such as Horace Greeley, Emily Briggs, Benjamin Perley Poore, Jane Grey Swisshelm, Horace White, James G. Blaine, and others who were positioned in the hub of government when the Civil War, the purchase of Alaska, the Crédit Mobilier scandal, and the Johnson impeachment hearings were making front-page news. Rich in anecdote, this lively book illuminates an important era of journalism and American history. The nascent issues of censorship, right to privacy, and conflict of interest that it describes are still very much with us.
With the landmark election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932, decades of Republican ascendancy gave way to a half century of Democratic dominance. It was nothing less than a major political realignment, as the direction of federal policy shifted from conservative to liberal-and liberalism itself was redefined in the process. Electing FDR is the first book in seventy years to examine in its entirety the 1932 presidential election that ushered in the New Deal. Award-winning historian Donald Ritchie looks at how candidates responded to the nation's economic crisis and how voters evaluated their performance. More important, he explains how the Democratic Party rebuilt itself after three successive Republican landslides: where the major shifts in party affiliation took place, what contingencies contributed to FDR's victory, and why the new coalition persisted as long as it did. Ritchie challenges prevailing assumptions that the Depression made Roosevelt's election inevitable. He shows that FDR came close to losing the nomination to contenders who might have run to the right of Hoover, and discusses the role of newspapers and radio in presenting the candidates to voters. He also analyzes Roosevelt's campaign strategies, recounting his attempts to appeal to disaffected voters of all ideological stripes, often by altering his positions to broaden his popularity. With the advent of the New Deal, Americans came to enjoy a wide federal safety net that provided everything from old age pensions to rural electricity-government innovations so embraced by voters that even later conservative presidents recognized their importance. Ritchie traces this legacy through the Reagan and Bush years, but he relates how FDR in 1932 was often vague about the specifics of his program and questions whether voters really knew what they were in for with the New Deal. As pundits, politicians, and citizens eye the upcoming 2008 campaign, Electing FDR reminds incumbents not to take their party support for granted or to underestimate their opponents-and reminds students of history that understanding the New Deal begins with the 1932's transformative election.
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