Duane C.S. Stoltzfus's Books

Freedom from Advertising

E. W. Scripps's Chicago Experiment

By: Duane C.S. Stoltzfus

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Freedom from Advertising

E. W. Scripps's Chicago Experiment

By: Duane C.S. Stoltzfus

Disgusted by publishers and editors who refused to cover important stories for fear of offending advertisers, the press baron E. W. Scripps rejected conventional wisdom and set out to prove that an ad-free newspaper could be profitable entirely on circulation. Duane C. S. Stoltzfus details the history of Scripps’s innovative 1911 experiment, which began in Chicago amid great secrecy. The tabloid-sized newspaper was called the Day Book, and at a penny a copy, it aimed for a working-class market, crusading for higher wages, more unions, safer factories, lower streetcar fares, and women’s right to vote. It also tackled the important stories ignored by most other dailies, like the labor conflicts that shook Chicago in 1912. Though the Day Book’s financial losses steadily declined over the years, it never became profitable, and publication ended in 1917. Nevertheless, Stoltzfus explains that the Day Book served as an important ally of workers, a keen watchdog on advertisers, and it redefined news by providing an example of a paper that treated its readers first as citizens with rights rather than simply as consumers.

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Page Count

279

Publisher

University of Illinois Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0252051068

ISBN 13

9780252051067

Pacifists in Chains

The Persecution of Hutterites During the Great War

By: Duane C. S. Stoltzfus

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Pacifists in Chains

The Persecution of Hutterites During the Great War

By: Duane C. S. Stoltzfus

Documents the disturbing history of four pacifists imprisoned for their refusal to serve during World War I. To Hutterites and members of other pacifist sects, serving the military in any way goes against the biblical commandment “thou shalt not kill” and Jesus’s admonition to turn the other cheek when confronted with violence. Pacifists in Chains tells the story of four young men—Joseph Hofer, Michael Hofer, David Hofer, and Jacob Wipf—who followed these beliefs and refused to perform military service in World War I. The men paid a steep price for their resistance, imprisoned in Alcatraz and Fort Leavenworth, where the two youngest died. The Hutterites buried the men as martyrs, citing mistreatment. Using archival material, letters from the four men and others imprisoned during the war, and interviews with their descendants, Duane C. S. Stoltzfus explores the tension between a country preparing to enter into a world war and a people whose history of martyrdom for their pacifist beliefs goes back to their sixteenth-century Reformation beginnings.

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