"Newspaper Confessions chronicles the history of the newspaper advice column, a genre that has shaped Americans' relationships with media, their experiences with popular therapy, and their virtual interactions across generations. Emerging in the 1890s, advice columns became unprecedented virtual forums where readers could debate the most resonant cultural crises of the day with strangers in an anonymous yet public forum. The columns are important - and overlooked - precursors to today's digital culture: forums, social media groups, chat rooms, and other online communities that define how present-day American communicate with each other. This book charts the rise of the advice column and its impact on the newspaper industry. It analyzes the advice given by a diverse sample of columns across several decades, emphasizing the ways that advice columnists framed their counsel as modern, yet upheld the racial and gendered status quo of the day. It shows how advice columnists were forerunners to the modern celebrity journalist, while also serving as educators to audience of millions. This book includes in-depth case studies of specific columns, demonstrating how these forums transformed into active and participatory virtual communities of confession, advice, debate, and empathy"--

Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins (Northern Paiute) has long been recognized as an important nineteenth-century American Indian activist and writer. Yet her acclaimed performances and speaking tours across the United States, along with the copious newspaper articles that grew out of those tours, have been largely ignored and forgotten. The Newspaper Warrior presents new material that enhances public memory as the first volume to collect hundreds of newspaper articles, letters to the editor, advertisements, book reviews, and editorial comments by and about Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins. This anthology gathers together her literary production for newspapers and magazines from her 1864 performances in San Francisco to her untimely death in 1891, focusing on the years 1879 to 1887, when Winnemucca Hopkins gave hundreds of lectures in the eastern and western United States; published her book, Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883); and established a bilingual school for Native American children. Editors Cari M. Carpenter and Carolyn Sorisio masterfully assemble these exceptional and long-forgotten articles in a call for a deeper assessment and appreciation of Winnemucca Hopkins’s stature as a Native American author, while also raising important questions about the nature of Native American literature and authorship.