The coming of the frontier press : how the West was really won / Barbara Cloud ; foreword by Alan K. Simpson.

The coming of the frontier press : how the West was really won / Barbara Cloud ; foreword by Alan K. Simpson.

9780810125087 (pbk. : alk. paper)
0810125080 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Evanston, Ill. : Northwestern University Press, 2008.

English

xxi, 270 pages ; 21 cm.

PN4894 .C56 2008

071.809

"In The Coming of the Frontier Press, Barbara Cloud describes how newspaper publishers joined nineteenth-century Americans as they headed west to settle the frontier. Unable to make their fortunes in gold mining, these publishers returned to their first calling, newspapers. Focusing on the period from 1840 to 1890, Cloud argues that these early papers played a crucial role in civilizing the West, bringing spread-out communities together by providing a forum for political discourse and a source for community news, as well as stories from the East. Cloud investigates both the positive and negative influences of the frontier press, from the role of newspapers in railroad expansion to their excessive zeal to make room for settlers who would become their subscribers and their advertisers. Ultimately, few papers survived into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but Cloud rounds out this study with an analysis of those that did endure and a look at how the innovations in content and appearance of western news sheets would affect print media nationwide."--BOOK JACKET.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Visions of the American press.

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