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Walter Lippmann

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What history tells us about the dangers of media ownership | Psyche Ideas

What History Tells us About the Dangers of Media Ownership

Is media bias attributable to corporate power or personal psychology? Upton Sinclair and Walter Lippmann disagreed.
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"Public Opinion" at 100

Walter Lippmann’s seminal work identified a fundamental problem for modern democratic society that remains as pressing—and intractable—as ever.
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David Halberstam’s title The Best and the Brightest was steeped in irony. Did these presidential advisers earn it?
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How Can the Press Best Serve a Democratic Society?

In the 1940s, scholars struggled over truth in reporting, the marketplace of ideas, and the free press. Their deliberations are more relevant than ever.

Five Myths About World War I

The United States wasn't filled with isolationists, and it wasn't exactly neutral before 1917.
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All You Need Is Love

The complex history, career, and legacy of one of America's most popular speakers and reformers.
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AT&T’s early leaders used PR to sway public opinion, casting their monopoly as a public service and obscuring its political roots.
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A Portrait of Japanese America, in the Shadow of the Camps

An essential new volume collects accounts of Japanese incarceration by patriotic idealists, righteous firebrands, and downtrodden cynics alike.
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Photo-Illustraton of Adolph Ochs.

The Invention of Objectivity

The view from nowhere came from somewhere.
Miles Davis, Howard McGhee, and unknown pianist. NYC, September 1947.

Michael Kramer on Menand’s "The Free World" and Dinerstein’s "The Origins of Cool in Postwar America"

Two differing explorations of post-WWII culture, politics, and ideals.
Eugene Debs mug shots at the US Penitentiary in Atlanta.

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The crusade against civil liberties during World War I.
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Trump champions “law and order” while calling for the Constitution’s suspension. But there’s no tension between the two.
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Can Standardized Testing Escape Its Racist Past?

High-stakes testing has struggled with overt and implicit biases. Should it still have a place in modern education?
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The Justice Who Wanted the Supreme Court to Get Out of the Way

Felix Frankfurter warned that politicians, not the courts, should make policy.
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You’ll Miss Us When We’re Gone

The rise and fall of the WASP.
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The Birth of the American Foreign Correspondent

For American journalists abroad in the interwar period, it paid to have enthusiasm, openness, and curiosity, but not necessarily a world view.
Class photo, Geyer, Ohio, 1915
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Lessons from the History Textbook Wars of the 1920s

A century ago, pundits, special interests, and politicians weighed in on what should and shouldn't be taught in history and social studies courses.
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Who’s Afraid of Isolationism?

For decades, America’s governing elite caricatured sensible restraint in order to pursue geopolitical dominance and endless wars. At last the folly may be over.