This article explores responses in the Black press to the rapidly expanding U.S. deportation regime during the interwar period. While their perspectives have been largely absent from scholarship on deportation, Black journalists, editorialists, and commentators have historically been highly engaged with the issue. Black periodicals provided extensive coverage of the expulsion of Black immigrants, as well as of non-Black immigrants who violated the racial structures of American society (either through antiracist political advocacy or through interracial relationships). In doing so, the Black press insisted that deportation was a Black issue, and that antiblackness was central to the functioning of the early-twentieth-century immigration control system. By surveying roughly 1,100 articles on deportation in the Black press, I highlight how Black writers construed deportation as a powerful tool of white supremacy and a threat to Black immigrants and African Americans alike.

If the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk, what are we to make of the recent flurry of popular histories about foreign correspondents? In 2021, with You Don't Belong Here, Elizabeth Becker told us “How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War” in Vietnam, and Judith Mackrell gave us the stories of “Six Women Writers on the Front Lines of World War II” in The Correspondents.1 The year before, Nancy Cott, the pioneering scholar of U.S. gender history, explored the intertwined biographies of interwar journalists Dorothy Thompson, Vincent Sheean, Rayna Raphaelson, and John Gunther in Fighting Words.2 And then, in 2022, Deborah Cohen, an acclaimed historian of British and European cultural politics, subbed the relatively obscure Raphaelson out of Cott's quartet and added in H. R. Knickerbocker, the Pulitzer Prize–winning European correspondent in Last Call at the Hotel Imperial.3 (Cohen also elevates the role of Frances Gunther, John's wife, who suffered from crippling writer's block but was perhaps the most interesting thinker of the bunch.) When two leading, accomplished historians at the height of their games write essentially the same book, you know that something is in the air. So what era's eclipse are these works marking?

When incorporating the press into historical narratives, scholars have often relied on published newspaper and magazine articles without interrogating how those pieces were produced. This article relies on the under-used archival papers of journalists in the early Cold War period to argue that they actively created a Washington consensus on foreign policy that kept economic determinism out of the U.S. public's understanding of policies like the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. In private, however, the more anticommunist public narrative was contradicted by a discourse that emphasized the importance of access to colonial raw materials. This private discourse was enabled by the Washington press corps’ social spaces, which were segregated by race and gender and helped create a worldview that acknowledged the hypocrisy of the U.S. government but not their own.

The media outlets usually identified as building blocks of New Right are niche ideological journals (such as National Review) and radio broadcasts. As crucial as these outlets were, other mainstream publications propagating similar ideas had a far greater reach—foremost among them the New York Daily News, the highest-circulation newspaper in the country. From the 1940s through the 1960s, the Daily News espoused a conservative populism further right than National Review, binding its readers into a community based on anti-elitism and white working-class identity.

As the televised Watergate hearings captivated the nation during the summer of 1973, they provided innovative programming that stimulated civic activism and taught Congress about the political power of television. Both of these developments ultimately boosted the fortunes of the cable television industry. The Senate hearings, which initiated a dramatic conclusion to a presidency that redefined the place of media in American political life, served to elevate a national conversation about the role of television in politics and to catalyze, across the political spectrum, a reconsideration of the structure of the broadcast network oligopoly. The post-Watergate era provided multiple opportunities to reimagine cable TV as a tool to assert political leadership, encourage civic engagement, and govern the public.

In 1974, women at the New York Times made national headlines when they filed a class-action sex discrimination lawsuit. The drama of the court case, however, has overshadowed the formation of the Times Women's Caucus two years prior, in 1972. A focus on the Caucus, the daily labor its members undertook in the years before and after filing suit, and the behind-the-scenes negotiation of internal office politics reveals the years-long process of consciousness raising and workplace organizing required to undertake a lawsuit in this novel legal area. Activist newswomen operated with unique restrictions and necessarily distanced themselves from the feminist movement, while quietly advocating for feminist goals. Caucus members drew from the feminist, labor, and union movements strategically rather than ideologically, and laid the foundation for substantial shifts in women's participation and representation in the mainstream media.