pondering the nineteenth century urban space via the daily newspaper

My own research relies partly on looking at nineteenth century newspapers.

In tomorrow's class we will look at the ways in which baseball and the "metropolitan press" contributed to emerging urban life. In light of last Saturday's field trip, which was canceled, Dr. Richard Megraw will join us to lead a discussion on the former.

I will draw on my own knowledge of the sport to make connections to the metropolitan press. To be sure, I will try to approach the lecture with new eyes. Indeed, I was a newspaper journalist for the better part of a decade, having started as a high school intern before working as a staff copy editor, reporter and assistant editor for three newspapers once owned by Knight-Ridder (now The McClatchy Company), a large chain once based in my hometown. By 2000, I could see the decline of daily newspapers with the public's growing attention to the Internet and left the company. After working as a freelancer for a bit, I applied to graduate school. Eleven years later, I'm teaching and have more time to tell a story as an academic.  I sometimes miss the adrenaline rush from running after after a good story. I miss, too, having a copy editor (So does my husband who once jokingly said - I hope - of one of my academic typescripts, "If I never see this again, it won't be too soon").

During my newspaper days, I had no knowledge of how newspapers contributed to nineteenth century urban dwellers sharing a "common humanity," as Gunther Barth writes. On the basis of my own research on the migration of freedwomen and children to Ohio, it certainly appears true. In the pages of archival newspapers I've seen hints of a rapidly changing world. Take for example,  Jourdan Anderson, a former enslaved man and Dayton, OH-resident whose 1865 letter to his former master was printed in the New York Daily Tribune. Apparently his master wanted him to return to the South after the Civil War and work for him. Anderson worried about the impact of such a move on his two daughters Milly and Jane. He wanted them to be safe from sexual abuse. Anderson also wanted back-pay from his earlier days of working as an enslaved person.

I recall, too, reading about Cincinnati white man of means who published a notice alerting area merchants that he'd no longer be paying the bills of his wayward wife; the African American domestic worker who avoided conversation with the abolitionists  knocking on the door of the house in which she worked, lest her employer hear her doing as much(these visitors were in search of signatures for their cause; she was trying to keep her job); and numerous newspaper advertisements for school books, which evidently unveiled the growing access to education some people had by mid-century. It is a topic that the students and I have discussed. I've seen, too, many advertisements from people in search of property in an increasingly crowded Cincinnati.


In the years leading to the Civil War, and prior to the formation of ghettoes, African Americans were by and large dispersed throughout Cincinnati’s white residents, among them, Irish and German immigrants fleeing a famine and a failed revolution in their homelands, respectively. Between 1840 and 1850, Cincinnati’s population increased from 46,338 to 115,434. It was third behind only New York and New Orleans in volume of commerce.

How do such individuals from varying backgrounds find the "common humanity" via the metropolitan press?  How do issues like entertainment, leisure and language figure into this conversation from the perspective of readers? How does honesty figure in from the perspective of newspaper businesssmen? What practical purposes did newspapers serve? The students should be curious about the answers to these questions and  come to class prepared to have a productive conversation on these and other issues.

what baseball has to teach us about city life

I know very little about baseball, but was intrigued to learn that it is a sport that we can look at to learn more about the beginnings of city life in the United States.  In his book City People: The Rise of Modern City Culture in Nineteenth-Century America, Gunther Barth tells us that in the 1840s a group of "New York gentlemen" spent their "sunny days" playing ball on one Madison Avenue corner. As ball clubs sprung up in New York, Brooklyn and other cities like Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston, the everyday man became fascinated, needing a distraction from work life. The earlier development of newspapers drew more attention to the sport, which is actually a descendant of British ball games, one of them dating back to the 1700s. Spectators welcomed hearing stats. Rules eventually governed this game just as they had governed what happened outside of ballparks.This morning, NPR had a great story about the Birmingham Barons breaking the racial divide in baseball in the early 1960s. It is worth listening to in order to learn more about a sport that became big business although always one about which the public has had some say. Think about what umpires often hear. I don't even want to share what I once heard in the stands at a Cubs game. This semester, students enrolled in this course will learn more about this game as we make discoveries about American culture and the story of the nineteenth century city. Baseball fan and scholar Dr. Richard Megraw of Alabama's American Studies Department will join us September 11 as we explore this topic.