ABSTRACT
History offers perspective, wisdom, and surprises. This chapter offers an intellectual history of news, reviewing the colorful, conflicted history of the press in American history, moving from the biased Revolutionary Era Press through the partisan newspapers, penny press, which fundamentally introduced the contemporary notion of news, and the searing racial and gender biases of 19th-century news. The chapter discusses the import of the penny press, along with scholarship debating its relative importance in newspaper history; the development and meanings of the fraught term, objectivity; and the high-modern period of news in the 20th century, culminating in its focus on adversarial news and commercial-driven entertainment, followed by economic doldrums, presaging some of the problems that face news today.
