Print and Politics offers a cultural history of a late Qing newspaper, Shibao, the most influential reform daily of its time. Exploring the simultaneous emergence of a new print culture and a new culture of politics in early-twentieth-century China, the book treats Shibao as both institution and text and demonstrates how the journalists who wrote for the paper attempted to stake out a “middle realm” of discourse and practice. Chronicling the role these journalists played in educational and constitutional organizations, as well as their involvement in major issues of the day, it analyzes their essays as political documents and as cultural artifacts. Particular attention is paid to the language the journalists used, the cultural constructs they employed to structure their arguments, and the multiple sources of authority they appealed to in advancing their claims for reform.

Literary study of the popular radical press in England, 1800-1830.

A lively portrait of Horace Greeley, one of the nineteenth century's most fascinating public figures. The founder and editor of the New-York Tribune, Horace Greeley was the most significant—and polarizing—American journalist of the nineteenth century. To the farmers and tradesmen of the rural North, the Tribune was akin to holy writ. To just about everyone else—Democrats, southerners, and a good many Whig and Republican political allies—Greeley was a shape-shifting menace: an abolitionist fanatic; a disappointing conservative; a terrible liar; a power-hungry megalomaniac. In Horace Greeley, James M. Lundberg revisits this long-misunderstood figure, known mostly for his wild inconsistencies and irrepressible political ambitions. Charting Greeley's rise and eventual fall, Lundberg mines an extensive newspaper archive to place Greeley and his Tribune at the center of the struggle to realize an elusive American national consensus in a tumultuous age. Emerging from the jangling culture and politics of Jacksonian America, Lundberg writes, Greeley sought to define a mode of journalism that could uplift the citizenry and unite the nation. But in the decades before the Civil War, he found slavery and the crisis of American expansion standing in the way of his vision. Speaking for the anti-slavery North and emerging Republican Party, Greeley rose to the height of his powers in the 1850s—but as a voice of sectional conflict, not national unity. By turns a war hawk and peace-seeker, champion of emancipation and sentimental reconciliationist, Greeley never quite had the measure of the world wrought by the Civil War. His 1872 run for president on a platform of reunion and amnesty toward the South made him a laughingstock—albeit one who ultimately laid the groundwork for national reconciliation and the betrayal of the Civil War's emancipatory promise. Lively and engaging, Lundberg reanimates this towering figure for modern readers. Tracing Greeley's twists and turns, this book tells a larger story about print, politics, and the failures of American nationalism in the nineteenth century.

In Print the Legend: Politics, Culture, and Civic Virtue in the Films of John Ford, a collection of writers explore Ford's view of politics, popular culture, and civic virtue in some of his best films: Drums Along the Mohawk, The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Stagecoach, How Green Was My Valley, and The Last Hurrah. John Ford, more than most motion picture directors, invites his viewers into a serious discussion of these themes. For instance, one can consider Plato's timeless question 'What is justice?' in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, vengeance as classical Greek tragedy in The Searchers, or ethnic politics in The Last Hurrah. Ford's films never grow stale or seem dated because he continually probes the most important questions of our civic culture: what must we do to survive, prosper, pursue happiness, and retain our common decency as a regime? Further, viewing them from a distance of time, we are subtly invited to ask whether anything has been lost or gained since Ford celebrated the civic virtues of an earlier America. Is Ford's America an idealized America or a lost America?

An exciting interdisciplinary study based on new literary, historical, and bibliographical evidence, this book will appeal to students and scholars of the Italian Renaissance, the Reformation, and the history of the book.

The Cacophony of Politics charts the trajectory of the Democratic Party as the party of opposition in the North during the Civil War. A comprehensive overview, this book reveals the myriad complications and contingencies of political life in the Northern states and explains the objectives of the nearly half of eligible Northern voters who cast a ballot against Abraham Lincoln in 1864. The party’s famous slogan "The Union as it was, the Constitution as it is" was meant to have broad appeal and promote solidarity among Northern Democrats by invoking their core ideological commitments to nationalism, law and order, tradition, and strict construction. But, as J. Matthew Gallman shows, the slogan was a poor reflection of the volatile, fluid, messy, and improvisational reality of political life for men and women, across the public and private spheres. Democrats experienced the war as a cascading series of dilemmas, for which their slogan did not always offer guidance or resolution. Offering a definitive account of the Democratic Party in the North, The Cacophony of Politics shows the limits of ideology and the ways the Civil War—and the nature of nineteenth-century political culture—confounded the Democrats’ self-image and exacerbated their divisions, especially over the central issue of slavery. A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era

How can a state be represented by Jesse Helms and John Edwards at the same time? Journalist Rob Christensen answers that question and navigates a century of political history in North Carolina, one of the most politically vibrant and competitive southern states, where neither conservatives nor liberals, Democrats nor Republicans, have been able to rest easy. It is this climate of competition and challenge, Christensen argues, that enabled North Carolina to rise from poverty in the nineteenth century to become a leader in research, education, and banking in the twentieth. In this new paperback edition, Christensen provides updated coverage of recent changes in North Carolina's political landscape, including the scandals surrounding John Edwards and Mike Easley, the defeat of U.S. senator Elizabeth Dole, the election of the state's first woman governor, and voters' approval of an African American candidate for president. The book provides an overview of the run-up to the 2010 elections and explains how North Carolina has become, arguably, the most politically competitive state in the South.