Gunslinging meets typesetting in this sporadically interesting
history of frontier reporting. Dary (Seeking Pleasure in the Old
West, 1995), head of the School of Journalism at the University of
Oklahoma, considers the role of newspapers in the framing of
Western history - and Western myths. He notes that most frontier
newspapers were organs of the Democratic Party, advancing that
organization's political aims; he also writes that in some
instances papers "sold their editorial opinions to the highest
bidder," whereas many others, more honestly, got by taking on job
printing on the side. For all that, Dary has a tendency to lionize
frontier editors as "masters of vigorous English" who "knew or
concocted virile expressions," rather than expose them as servants
of the political machine. Dary's narrative skips about in time and
theme and is often repetitious. The author also prefers anecdote to
analysis, so that his book is really a catalog of stories about
newspapers and newspapermen - and, in a late chapter, a few
newspaperwomen - and not a meaningful history of Old West
journalism as such. Some of those stories do much to enliven the
book, however, including one involving an exchange of editorials
between rival paper owners in Doniphan County, Kansas; one calls
the other a "skunk," and the latter replies with an astonishing
string of invective, calling his foe a "crane-necked,
blobber-lipped, squeaky-voiced, empty-headed, snaggle-toothed,
filthy-mouthed, box-ankled, pigeon-toed, red-footed . . . Black
Republican." Dary also profiles journalistic heroes like E.W. Howe,
the editor of a free daily paper in Atchison, Kansas, who wrote 40
items a day and whose work became nationally popular. Dary's book
has its moments, but it doesn't quite make the price of admission.
(Kirkus Reviews)
In Red Blood and Black Ink, bestselling author David Dary
chronicles the long, exciting, often surprising story of journalism
in the Old West -- from the freewheeling days of the early 1800s to
the classic small-town weeklies and busy city newsrooms of the
1920s.
Here are the printers who founded the first papers, arriving in
town with a shirttail of type and a secondhand press, setting up
shop under trees, in tents, in barns or storefronts, moving on when
the town failed, or into larger quarters if it flourished, and
sometimes forced to defend their right of free speech with fists or
guns.
Here, too, are Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Horace Greeley -- and
William Allen White writing on the death of his young daughter.
Here is the Telegraph and Texas Register article that launched the
legend of the Alamo, and dozens of tongue-in-cheek, brilliant, or
moving reports of national events and local doings, including
holdups, train robberies, wars, elections, shouting matches,
weddings, funerals, births, and much, much more.
General
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