The French and Indian War strengthened the bonds of the British colonists settled on the eastern shores as they eagerly sought news about the outcomes of the battles at Ticonderoga, Niagara, Duquesne, and Quebec, battles that would determine if America would be a French or a British colony. During the War of Independence newspapers would once again serve as a national clearing-house for reports of the first stirrings of the revolutionary movement, the gloomy first years of defeat and retreat, and finally of resurgence, triumph, and sovereignty.

Democracies cannot sustain unpopular wars. Vietnam was the most divisive for war for the American people. The enemy's tenacity was not accounted for in U.S. war plans until there was frustration in the field, skepticism in the press, and splintered support at home. After the Vietnam debacle the press's latitude to cover military action was increasingly curtailed by the military and the government, which sought to control the flow and content of the news better than they had in Vietnam by forcing reporters into supervised media pools.

Young America's next encounter with Britain came during the War of 1812, when the nation's press called for all Americans to defend their recently won independence and protect their territorial integrity and national rights. The Mexican-American War was the nation's first war of westward expansion, the reporting of which was greatly affected by the emergence of the telegraph and military censorship of news from the war zone.

Violent, destructive, and murderous like nothing before or since, the world wars mobilized entire societies to support the war effort. Propaganda, censorship, security demands, and military control of press credentialing pressured the media in new and novel ways. Blacks and women became war correspondents in numbers for the first time, while live radio broadcasts and combat film and photography enabled newsmen to report the heroism, tragedy and violence of war in new, more visceral, ways.

Called the first modern war and our greatest national calamity, the nation's press conveyed news of the Civil War to the citizens North and South who looked to newspapers as their primary source of information. Circulation pressures, political partisanship, scarce materials, and the unyielding public appetite for the latest news all contributed to how the growing numbers of professional journalists covered the pressing political and military events during those crucial years.

Beginning with a day that would live in infamy and ending with a war-weary sigh, reporters covering war-ravaged Asia during World War II and the Korean War had to contend with a reading public unfamiliar with the region's politics and geography, and who were more interested in European events. Some of the most storied and savage fighting of the twentieth century occurred during these two conflicts, and reporters found themselves caught between the demands of truthful reporting and the need to sustain public support for the war.

On a cold, rainy dawn in late November 1872, Lieutenant Frazier Boutelle and a Modoc Indian nicknamed Scarface Charley leveled firearms at each other. Their duel triggered a war that capped a decades-long genocidal attack that was emblematic of the United States’ conquest of Native America’s peoples and lands. Robert Aquinas McNally tells the wrenching story of the Modoc War of 1872–73, one of the nation’s costliest campaigns against North American Indigenous peoples, in which the army placed nearly one thousand soldiers in the field against some fifty-five Modoc fighters. Although little known today, the Modoc War dominated national headlines for an entire year. Fought in south-central Oregon and northeastern California, the war settled into a siege in the desolate Lava Beds and climaxed the decades-long effort to dispossess and destroy the Modocs. The war did not end with the last shot fired, however. For the first and only time in U.S. history, Native fighters were tried and hanged for war crimes. The surviving Modocs were packed into cattle cars and shipped from Fort Klamath to the corrupt, disease-ridden Quapaw reservation in Oklahoma, where they found peace even more lethal than war. The Modoc War tells the forgotten story of a violent and bloody Gilded Age campaign at a time when the federal government boasted officially of a “peace policy” toward Indigenous nations. This compelling history illuminates a dark corner in our country’s past.

The defeat of George Armstrong Custer and the Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Bighorn was big news in 1876. Newspaper coverage of the battle initiated hot debates about whether the U.S. government should change its policy toward American Indians and who was to blame for the army’s loss—the latter, an argument that ignites passion to this day. In Shooting Arrows and Slinging Mud, James E. Mueller draws on exhaustive research of period newspapers to explore press coverage of the famous battle. As he analyzes a wide range of accounts—some grim, some circumspect, some even laced with humor—Mueller offers a unique take on the dramatic events that so shook the American public. Among the many myths surrounding the Little Bighorn is that journalists of that time were incompetent hacks who, in response to the stunning news of Custer’s defeat, called for bloodthirsty revenge against the Indians and portrayed the “boy general” as a glamorous hero who had suffered a martyr’s death. Mueller argues otherwise, explaining that the journalists of 1876 were not uniformly biased against the Indians, and they did a credible job of describing the battle. They reported facts as they knew them, wrote thoughtful editorials, and asked important questions. Although not without their biases, journalists reporting on the Battle of the Little Bighorn cannot be credited—or faulted—for creating the legend of Custer’s Last Stand. Indeed, as Mueller reveals, after the initial burst of attention, these journalists quickly moved on to other stories of their day. It would be art and popular culture—biographies, paintings, Wild West shows, novels, and movies—that would forever embed the Last Stand in the American psyche.

Beyond Article 19: Libraries and Social and Cultural Rights addresses the subject of libraries and cultural rights, a topic that has received relatively little attention in the past, but which librarians and others concerned with human rights are beginning to recognize and talk about. Librarians have long been concerned with individual rights and have worked tirelessly - indeed making it a basic tenet of the profession - to protect and preserve those rights. Little has been written about the role that libraries can play in protecting and promoting group rights, specifically cultural rights. This book examines this shortfall by exploring the relationship between libraries, cultural rights, and community life and identity.