3a. War reporting

General 

  1. Wikipedia has a long list of individual war correspondents. 
  2. Possibly the best known book is the The First Casualty by Phillip Knightly.  The title is based on the quote by US Sen. Hiram Johnson in 1917:  “The first casualty when war comes, is truth.”

Crimean War    

  1. William Howard Russell reports the Charge of the Light Brigade, 1854, for the London Times. Compare the way the Light Brigade is written to Henry Villard’s account of the battle of Bull Run in the US Civil War.
  2. Reaction to the disaster in the Crimea included a famous poem by Tennyson about the Charge of the Light Brigade. The ill treatment of troops also led to bitter complaints. Rudyard Kipling’s “Tommy” is one example.

Civil War 

  1. Hezekiah Niles: the Editor who tried to stop the Civil War — Niles was a Baltimore editor who saw war coming as early as the 1820s and attempted to find ways to mediate the conflict.  More about Niles here.
  2. Nathaniel Hawthorne writes “Chiefly About War Matters” for the Atlantic Monthly, 1862
  3. William Howard Russell reports on the Civil War in My Diary North and South
  4. Personal narratives of Civil War soldiers
  5. Charleston (S.C.) Mercury , Editorial Against Black Confederate Troops, January 13, 1865
  6. Three Months Among the Reconstructionists, 1866 article in the Atlantic Monthly
  7. Albert D. Richardson, New York Tribune correspondent, The Secret Service, the Field, The Dungeon and the Escape, NY: American Publishing, 1865.
  8. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment,  1869.
  9.  Ephraim Douglass Adams, Great Britain and the American Civil War, published 1924.
  10. Joseph T. Wilson, The Black Phalanx: African American soldiers in the  War of Independence,  the War of 1812, and the Civil War. New York:  Da Capo Press, 1890.

Native American genocide 

  1. The Battle of Little Big Horn — Harpers Weekly 1876 and Chief Red Horse 1881
  2. Autobiography of Apache war chief Geronimo, 1903.
  3. Native American Genocide (Wikipedia overview)
  4. Chinese government view of Native American genocide (significant in the context of China’s 21st century genocide of Uyghur people.)

Labor wars in the US 

  1. Esau scrip and the company store, WVa Public Radio
  2. Ludlow Massacre, April 20, 1914
  3. Battle of Blair Mountain, West Virginia, August 1921
  4. Remembering the stories of those who gave their lives at Blair Mountain

WWI in the US and UK press

  1. The Wipers Times — A company of British sappers found a printing press during the battle of Ypres in 1916 and published a humorous newspaper they called the Wipers Times.   A movie by the same name was produced in 2013.
  2. Selected US newspaper articles, 1914 – 1917 Library of Congress
  4. Will Irwin,  A Reporter at Armageddon,  D. Appleton, 1918. (full text)
  5. Richard Harding Davis — Project Gutenberg has a large collection of Davis books and articles, especially   Notes of a War Correspondent from WWI.    Another Davis story is   With the Allies, 1919.
  6. The Battle of the Somme, (online video), by Geoffrey H. Malins, 1916.  How I Filmed the War, by Geoffrey H. Malins, 1920.
  8. The Daily Mail and the First World War, Adrian Bingham, History Today, 2013.
  9. Persecution of German – Americans   by Authentic History magazine.
  10. Legacy of Propaganda — British Library.
  11. Bryce, the historian who sold out — George Mason
  12. Primary sources, WWI — Yale library

WWI in the German and Austrian press 

  1.  Kriegszeit: Künstlerflugblätter — Part of the large University of Hiedelberg collection 
  2. German-language press in America during WWI   — Villanova University
  3. German and English propaganda in WWI — Jonathan A. Epstein, 2000.
  4. Allegations of German atrocities in WWI — A sober look by the National Archives of the UK.
  5. “German Newspapers beat the war drums,” a not very sophisticated look at pre-war propaganda.
  6. German soldier’s newspapers more numerous than news to US and UK soldiers.
  7. Belgian war press censored

The Russian Revolution  

  1. The Journalist and the Revolution, Jack Shenker, New York Times, Oct  16, 2017
  2. Ten Days that Shook the World, Wikipedia
  3. Ten Days that Shook the World, original 1919 book, online at Project Gutenberg

WWII and the press  

  1. Some American papers cozied up to Hitler in the 1930s (Daily Beast).
  2. The Press in the Third Reich
  3. Ernie Pyle’s last column from Europe 1944 and an Ernie Pyle tribute video.
  4. A journalist and Auschwitz survivor covers the Nuremberg Trials in 1946 and meets Nazi leader Hermann Goering — BBC Witness program.
  5. Bill Lascher’s kickstarter book:  Melville Jacoby never got to write his book:   The true story of the first Time Magazine reporter to die in combat in 1943, and that young foreign correspondent’s adventures amid the outset of WWII.
  6. Hemingway’s war wounds —  D.T. Max, New York Times, 1999.
  7. Martha Gellhorn reports on D-Day, 1944.  The famed war correspondent, Gellhorn was married to Ernest Hemingway.
  8. George Orwell’s post-war defense of P.G. Wodehouse, Windmill magazine, 1947.

World War II on radio

  1. “No one in Europe wants to fight.” — Mutual Broadcasting Service’s John Steele tells Americans not to worry as Austria becomes part of Germany in March, 1938.  (Also see Wikipedia background on what was called  “the Anschluss.”   And for more see  the Nazis take over Austria March 1938. )
  2. Hans Kaltenborn reports August 27, 1939 on   The eve of war
  3. Nauen Transmitter Station – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 
  4. William L. Shirer covers the beginning of WWII (broadcast)
  5. Elmer Davis on the French surrender June 21, 1940.
  6. Edward R. Murrow covers the Blitz: “This is Trafalgar Square,”  Sept. 22 1940.
  7. “Orchestrated Hell“ – Edward R. Murrow describes an air raid over Berlin, Dec. 3, 1943.
  8. D-Day — Charles Collingwood, CBS eyewitness report, D-Day June 6, 1944.
  9. Drew Pearson reports on the Soviet advance on Berlin, April 22, 1945.
  10. Edward R. Murrow reports on the liberation of the Buchanwald concentration camp, May 1945.
  11. Hiroshima —  CBS reports the Hiroshima bomb from the home front Aug 7, 1945.
  12. Nagasaki — British Group Captain Leonard Cheshire, designated as an observer of the US  atomic bomb by Winston Churchill, reported for the BBC on the Aug. 9, 1945.
  13. WWII propaganda personality ‘Tokyo Rose’ never existed. 

Korea, Vietnam & the Cold War 

  1. Higgins, Marguerite. The war in Korea: Report of a woman combat correspondent. Doubleday, 1951. (Internet Archive link)
  2. Walter Cronkite reports from Vietnam: “To say that we are near victory today is to believe the optimists who have been wrong in the past.” — 1968.
  3. The legend of spat-upon veterans — Out of all the status-quo-sustaining fables we create out of military history, few are as enduring as Vietnam War myths. June 2012.   Also see this 2006 Harper’s Magazine opinion on the way Nazis used the “stab in the back” myth and how it resonates in the way we remember the history of the Vietnam war.

Film and television

  1. World War I films    (Wikipedia list)
  2. Reporting America at War, PBS series, 2013; See especially David Halberstam
  3. How I Filmed the war by Geoffrey Malins, 1919

Essential reading  

  1. Mander, Mary S.  Pen and sword : American war correspondents, 1898-1975. Carbondale, Ill: University of Illinois Press, 2010.
  2. Knightley,Phillip. The first casualty : from the Crimea to Vietnam : the war correspondent as hero, propagandist, and myth maker.  New York: Harcourt-Brace, 1975.
  3. Danner, Mark. The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War. Vintage Books, 1994
  4. Hedges, Chris (2002). War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. PublicAffairs.
  5. Peace Journalism by Steve Youngblood, Routledge, 2017.  Guidance is offered on framing stories, ethical treatment of sensitive subjects, and avoiding polarizing stereotypes through a range of international examples and case studies spanning from the Iraq war to the recent unrest in Ferguson, Missouri.Youngblood teaches students to interrogate traditional media narratives about crime, race, politics, immigration, and civil unrest, and to illustrate where—and how—a peace journalism approach can lead to more responsible and constructive coverage, and even assist in the peace process itself. 

In print and probably in your library  

  1. Gellhorn, Martha (1988). The Face of War. Atlantic Monthly Press.
  2. Higgins, Marguerite,  War In Korea: The Report Of A Woman Combat Correspondent. New York: Doubleday & Co. 1951.  
  3. Knight, Oliver. Following the Indian Wars : The Story of the Newspaper Correspondents Among the Indian Campaigners.  1933.
  4. Hersh, Seymour. My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath. Random House, 1970.
  5.  May, Antoinette.  Witness to war : a biography of Marguerite Higgins  New York : Beaufort Books,  1983.
  6. Steinman, Ron. Inside television’s first war : a Saigon journal, University of Missouri Press, 2002.
  7. Stein, M.L. Under fire; the story of American war correspondents, New York, J. Messner, 1968.  
  8.  Reporting World War II, Mazal Holocaust Collection, includes articles by Ernie Pyle, William L. Shirer, Dorothy Thompson, A.J. Liebling, Edward R. Murrow, Margaret Bourke-White, Howard K. Smith, E.B. White, Brendan Gill, Richard Tregaskis, John Hersey, Homer Bigart, I.F. Stone, S.J. Perelman, Robert Sherrod, Ernest Hemingway, Irwin Shaw, Bill Mauldin, Eric Sevareid, Richard C. Hottelet, James Agee, and others.