Editor’s Note

During my dissertation days, I spent a full week working out of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library before moving on to Harry S. Truman’s, followed by archives across Northern Ireland, London, Manchester, and Bristol. (I packed way too much into those three weeks abroad.)

Yes, it was certainly a heady period—moments that Facebook reminds me of every time I look at my digital “memories.” In many ways, they serve as a diary of sorts. The historian in me appreciates the documentation of the critical point in my life when I evolved from journalist to student to scholar. I have spoken to enough colleagues to know that anyone who has spent time in an archive has those “aha” moments. Times when they opened a folder expecting a particular document and found something entirely different. Among my memorable archival moments include:

• Pulling a folder out of an archival box at Ike’s library to discover a map of an Italian battlefield. Talcum-fine dust from that space still clung stubbornly to the thick paper that felt like it had not been opened since an archivist first put it there. It took my breath away.

• Filling with American self-righteousness over a World War II memo among British officers that mocked their US peers for not knowing the difference between Scotch and Irish whisky. (Yes, that inspired me to celebrate my dissertation defense with a twelve-year-old Scotch. I still have that long-empty bottle.)

• Fighting back rage at the National Archives in Maryland when I had finally found a folder that promised to contain military records of racial unrest among US troops during WWII—only to discover a small note documenting the destruction of said papers in 1954. Maybe it was 1956. Either way, they were gone. It was as if nothing had ever happened. I fought back tears. Part researcher frustration. Part sadness for the individuals involved, whose experiences were erased from memory by a bureaucrat.

Archival work is quiet. Hushed rooms filled with others, like you, on the hunt for that one elusive document. It is work usually done in isolation. Just your thoughts and whispers from the past.

For many of us, it is work we have not been able to do since March 2020, when COVID-19 first wreaked havoc on our world—stealing away some of us; hospitalizing others; quarantining us from everyone; causing fear, then relief, over a vaccine that could restore a glimmer of our former lives.

In June 2021, the Library of Congress reopened its reading rooms. They had been closed to researchers since mid-March 2020. Back when we naïvely believed everything would reopen by April 1, 2020, then July, and finally, a more realistic June 1, 2021. We still do not know if it will last.

It is hard not to contemplate the importance of archival documents as I prepared this issue. Two of these articles would have been impossible without these materials. Each reflect time spent by individuals with a hunch, who sifted through poorly written finding guides, haphazard boxes, scraps of paper, and letters.

Elisabeth Fondren spent time at the New York Public Library’s holdings to comb through the papers of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis. She uncovered how the darker side of public relations—wartime propaganda—has long plagued those who seek to better understand it and help others see through it. Her piece, “‘We are Propagandists for Democracy’: The Institute for Propaganda Analysis’ Pioneering Media Literacy Efforts to Fight Disinformation (1937–1942),” sheds light on efforts to improve American media literacy in the years leading up to World War II.

Meanwhile, Young Joon Lim and Michael S. Sweeney turned to the papers of the late journalist Byron C. Utecht in a special collection at the University of Texas at Arlington Libraries for their examination of “Selling Mexico’s Robin Hood: Pancho Villa and His Public Relations Campaign to Target the Press and Public Opinion.” They give us a glimpse into how the Mexican military general and quasi-politician Pancho Villa used public relations techniques to woo Americans, Mexicans, and war correspondents, long before those practices were widely adopted.

Rounding out this issue is “We Are Nobody’s Fools: The Radicalization of the Hampton Script from 1930–1959 to Advance Black Activism,” in which author Sheryl Kennedy Haydel explores the Black student press. If collegiate press has been ignored by all but a few scholars, surely the Black collegiate press has been disregarded even more. This study looks at the Hampton Script for evidence of how college journalists at one HBCU were influenced by the Black press of their day—and sought to influence the long civil rights movement with the power of the pen.

And finally, Autumn Lorimer Linford’s “‘They’ll Never Make Newspaper Men’: Early Gendering in Journalism, 1884–1889” reveals how as early as 1884, journalism was gendered in trade journals—and women who dared to pick up the pen were subjected to added layers of criticism. I love the quote Linford cited from reporter Adela Rogers St. Johns, who described journalism in her autobiography this way: “Newspaper work is the most exciting thing in the world to me, it’s where I live. I would do it for nothing.”¹ I felt the same way when I was a reporter, and remain thankful for those who continue the challenging work of telling us the news. Historians of the future will need that documentation to help tell the stories of this moment.

Notes

1 Adela Rogers St. John, The Honeycomb (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969), 114.