Edwin Emery's textbook A half-century of journalism history
How a University of Minnesota scholar turned the messy story of American newspapers into a discipline and why his work still shapes how journalists understand their own history.
Most histories of American journalism begin with the assumption that understanding the past clarifies the present. But Edwin Emery's *A Half-Century of Journalism History*, published in 1954, suggests something more unsettling: that the story we tell about the press often obscures as much as it reveals. Emery didn't simply aim to chronicle events; he sought to understand how narratives of journalism's evolution were themselves constructed and why. That professor was Edwin Emery. His textbook, The Press and...
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