The American Revolution—an event that gave America its first real "story" as an independent nation, distinct from native and colonial origins—continues to live on in the public's memory, celebrated each year on July 4 with fireworks and other patriotic displays. But to identify as an American is to connect to a larger national narrative, one that begins in revolution. In Popular Media and the American Revolution, journalism historian Janice Hume examines the ways that generations of Americans have remembered and embraced the Revolution through magazines, newspapers, and digital media. Overall, Popular Media and the American Revolution demonstrates how the story and characters of the Revolution have been adjusted, adapted, and co-opted by popular media over the years, fostering a cultural identity whose founding narrative was sculpted, ultimately, in revolution. Examining press and popular media coverage of the war, wartime anniversaries, and the Founding Fathers (particularly, "uber-American hero" George Washington), Hume provides insights into the way that journalism can and has shaped a culture's evolving, collective memory of its past. Dr. Janice Hume is a professor and head of the Department of Journalism in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia. She is author of Obituaries in American Culture (University Press of Mississippi, 2000) and co-author of Journalism in a Culture of Grief (Routledge, 2008).

Presents a collection of primary source newspaper articles and correspondence reporting the events of the Revolution, containing both American and British eyewitness accounts and commentary and analysis from thirty-seven historians.

As television screens across America showed Chinese students blocking government tanks in Tiananmen Square, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and missiles searching their targets in Baghdad, the connection between media and revolution seemed more significant than ever. In this book, thirteen prominent scholars examine the role of the communication media in revolutionary crises -- from the Puritan Revolution of the 1640s to the upheaval in the former Czechoslovakia. Their central question: Do the media in fact have a real influence on the unfolding of revolutionary crises? On this question, the contributors diverge, some arguing that the press does not bring about revolution but is part of the revolutionary process, others downplaying the role of the media. Essays focus on areas as diverse as pamphlet literature, newspapers, political cartoons, and the modern electronic media. The authors' wide-ranging views form a balanced and perceptive examination of the impact of the media on the making of history.

This book studies the relationship and portrayal of the American Revolution in the British popular media, and how the distant rivals viewed and interpreted the Revolution.

Addressed to the Inhabitants of America, on the Following Interesting Subjects, viz.: I. Of the Origin and Design of Government in General, with Concise Remarks on the English Constitution. II. Of Monarchy and Hereditary Succession. III. Thoughts on the Present State of American Affairs. IV. Of the Present Ability of America, with some Miscellaneous Reflections

Daily newspapers are closing across America. Washington bureaus are shuttering; whole areas of the federal government are now operating with no press coverage. International bureaus are going, going, gone. Journalism, the counterbalance to corporate and political power, the lifeblood of American democracy, is not just threatened. It is in meltdown. In The Death and Life of American Journalism, Robert W. McChesney, an academic, and John Nichols, a journalist, who together founded the nation's leading media reform network, Free Press, investigate the crisis. They propose a bold strategy for saving journalism and saving democracy, one that looks back to how the Founding Fathers ensured free press protection with the First Amendment and provided subsidies to the burgeoning print press of the young nation.

When the Revolutionary War began, the odds of a united, continental effort to resist the British seemed nearly impossible. Few on either side of the Atlantic expected thirteen colonies to stick together in a war against their cultural cousins. In this pathbreaking book, Robert Parkinson argues that to unify the patriot side, political and communications leaders linked British tyranny to colonial prejudices, stereotypes, and fears about insurrectionary slaves and violent Indians. Manipulating newspaper networks, Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and their fellow agitators broadcast stories of British agents inciting African Americans and Indians to take up arms against the American rebellion. Using rhetoric like "domestic insurrectionists" and "merciless savages," the founding fathers rallied the people around a common enemy and made racial prejudice a cornerstone of the new Republic. In a fresh reading of the founding moment, Parkinson demonstrates the dual projection of the "common cause." Patriots through both an ideological appeal to popular rights and a wartime movement against a host of British-recruited slaves and Indians forged a racialized, exclusionary model of American citizenship.