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Giving Meanings to the World The First U.S. Foreign Correspondents, 1838-1859
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Book Code: GM2290
ISBN: 0-313-32290-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-313-32290-7
162 pages
Greenwood Press
Publication: 6/30/2002
List Price: $95.00 (UK Sterling Price: £54.95)
Availability: In Stock
Media Type: Hardcover
Also Available: Ebook
Trim Size: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Subjects: Reviews:
  • Giving Meanings to the World is a useful introduction to the early history of foreign news reportage in U.S newspapers. Dell'Orto provides a concise framework for explaining the emergence of increased foreign news coverage in U.S newspapers in the two decades preceding the Civil War. Her inclusion of foreign correspondence by women and minority journalists makes this study all the more valuable. Her focus on the content of foreign news reportage points the way toward further scholarship.
    —American Journalism
    2003
  • Endorsement From Hazel Dicken-Garcia
    Professor, School of Journalism and Mass Communication
    University of Minnesota:
    Focusing on images of other countries transmitted by the first formally organized American foreign correspondents (between 1838 and 1859), this important book begins to fill at least two long-standing voids in journalism history literature: First, it transcends the who-did-what-when paradigm to call attention to implications--culturally, politically, internationally--of what was reported; and it explores relationships of images to who was reporting them. Second, standing out against the very slim (emerging) literature about international communication history, the book epitomizes the importance of scholarship in this area and points up the need for continued research about international reporting across time. This gracefully written, well-researched, easy-to-read book will be valued by scholars and students in international communication history, journalism history, media studies, history and American studies programs.
  • Endorsement From David B. Sachsman West Chair of Excellence in Communication and Public Affairs
    Founder and Director of the Symposium on the 19th Century, the Civil War, and Free Expression
    University of Tennessee at Chattanooga:
    Giovanna Dell'Orto combines traditional history, quantitative analysis, and discourse analysis to examine the role played by the foreign correspondents of the 19th century in the formation of America's 'commonsense understanding of the world.' Modern day journalists have a lot to learn from history in 'giving meanings to the world.'
Description: How did the first United States foreign correspondents help shape an American common sense about the rest of the world? This new study is the first to address this key question, examining the images of foreign countries that emerge from the first formally organized American foreign correspondence. Its focus is on the discourses of the "world" constructed in mid-19th-century correspondence, which provided American newspaper readers with their first cohesive view of the world outside its borders. By emphasizing the emergence of foreign correspondence across its first two decades (1838-1859), and by comparing it to images in editorial and congressional debates of the time, Giovanna Dell'Orto's analysis addresses the pivotal question of what meanings were ascribed to foreign cultures during this key time. Giving Meanings to the World also establishes for the first time in scholarly literature the early history of the content of foreign news and editorials in American newspapers while also exploring "alternative" constructions of foreign cultures in the correspondence for an African-American newspaper and by women writers. Unique in both subject matter and approach, this work gathers together and puts into perspective an array of information and discussion about how America viewed other nations in the early days of foreign correspondence.
Table of Contents:
  • Preface
  • Expanding Meanings of the World
  • Early American Journalism and News from Abroad
  • The Shaping of Foreign News: Improving on the Single Electrician at a Seaport Town
  • Images of the "World" in Mid-Nineteenth Century U.S. Culture
  • Constructions of the "World" in the Mainstream Press
  • Alternative Constructions of the "World"
  • The Earliest American Foreign Correspondence: Giving Meanings to the "World"
  • Bibliography
  • Index
LC Card Number: 2001058636
LCC Class: PN4888
Dewey Class: 070
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