This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,845) on Friday, February 24, 2023. Attempts to silence writers are as eternal, and as futile, as attempts to ban books themselves. In a couple of recent high-profile instances, we have seen author Salman Rushdie physically attacked and Harry Potter creator J. K. Rowling become • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,845) on Friday, February 3, 2023. During my academic career, I was fortunate enough to be able to write and publish several textbooks. Writing textbooks was a central focus of many of my efforts, and I enjoyed it immensely. One of the things I enjoyed • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,234) on Friday, June 3, 2022. In recent days I have had the opportunity to take a look at lists of words commonly used as slang a century ago. The lists have been both interesting and instructive. Many of the phrases in these list are • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,234) on Friday, April 29, 2022. A popular myth that animates much of our political life is that the U.S. Supreme Court decides an issue. The justices, in their collective wisdom or ignorance, may make a ruling, but they rarely if ever decide an issue. • Read More »
Chances are, there’s a group in your community that wants to dictate what books you and your children can read. They often do this by telling public libraries what they should not put on the shelves. Most libraries resist this kind of pressure, and the American Library Association keeps track of these challenges. Here is • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,5xx) on Friday, July 3, 2020. An international cabal of industrialists and watercolorists has met in secret (not sure when, probably at night; not sure where, probably Switzerland) and decided that July will be International Watercolor Month. I will continue my investigations and report my • Read More »
You can shield yourself from ideas that make you uncomfortable or that you disagree with. You may be able, to some extent, to limit the exposure that the young people in your care have to those ideas. But you cannot shield your community from the things you disagree with. That’s called censorship, and in any practical • Read More »
That’s what school officials in Duluth, Minnesota (and a few other places, unfortunately) would have you believe. The school system in Duluth is the latest to remove To Kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the required reading list for ninth graders. The reason they give: the language used in these books • Read More »
Moore discovered a gold mine for his artwork in 1979 when he produced “The Goal Line Stand,” a photo-realistic oil painting of the moments when Alabama prevented Penn State from scoring in the Sugar Bowl.
More than 50 years ago, the Alabama-Georgia matchup resulted, not in a national championship, but in a legal ruling that expanded the First Amendment protections we now enjoy.
J.K. Rowling has a point of view: Intolerance of alternative viewpoints is spreading to places that make me, a moderate and a liberal, most uncomfortable. Only last year, we saw an online petition to ban Donald Trump from entry to the U.K. It garnered half a million signatures. Just a moment. I find almost • Read More »
March: Women’s History Month Plans for a gigantic suffrage parade along Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., in 1913 began as soon as Alice Paul and Lucy Burns convince the National American Woman Suffrage Association to put them in charge of its Congressional Committee in late November 1912. Paul and Burns, who had been friends since • Read More »
The nation seems to be in a state of perpetual war, and during times of crisis, individual freedoms are always in danger. Professor Dwight Teeter of the University of Tennessee discusses the state and strength of First Amendment freedoms today.
University of Tennessee professor Dwight Teeter discusses the case of Luther Baldwin, a New Jersey man who was prosecuted under the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. Baldwin became a symbol of Federalist intolerance during the 1800 presidential election.
This video is part of the Tennessee Journalism Series and was produced and edited by Jim Stovall.
In this two-and-a-half minute video, Dr. Dwight Teeter explains some of the political maneuvering that occurred to get the an amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech into the hotly-debated Constitution in the late 1780s. The freedoms protected by the amendment — religion, speech, press, assembly and petition — were not foremost in the minds of the Founding Fathers. Discussion questions are included with this video.
Americans waited nearly two years before the news media printed a combat photograph that showed a dead U.S. serviceman. The reasons for that wait were that such producing such photos are too shocking for the friends and families of the deceased and that the public’s morale and support for the war might be diminished.
The story of the Life magazine photo is an interesting one and demonstrates the controversy surrounding photographing the deceased, particularly those who have died in combat.
Below is a set of photographs of soldiers killed in battle during the Civil War.
Journalists write for a living. They use words precisely and efficiently. They present accurate, verified information in a way that a mass audience will understand it by reading or hearing it only once.
Designed by the people who helped create and maintain the Interscholastic Online News Network (ISONN), Going Online presents brief, practical lessons in the journalism of today and tomorrow. It shows teaches and students how they can practice journalism on a daily or hourly basis, something they were unable to do before the advent of the World Wide Web.
Feature Writing presents the basic concepts and techniques of feature writing for students who want to explore this vital part of journalism. It is brief and designed to be highly accessible to the beginning student.
Many of the things that happened first during the Penny Press era have become the staples of today’s journalism: the dominance of non-partisan news; the emphasis on speed; new areas of reporting, including sports reporting; an expansion of readership to include working classes. The list could go on. Much that is on that list began with James Gordon Bennett.