A Show & Tell & Touch Presentation, with Original Newspapers from 1685 to 1941

Dave Nord taught journalism history at IU for many years. For class use, he gradually collected dozens of original historic newspapers spanning three centuries of American history. For this presentation, he is bringing in a sampling of this collection to illustrate both change and continuity in the newspaper as a material product of manufacturing. If you have never handled an 18th-century or 19th-century newspaper before, this is your chance.

Nord is a professor emeritus of journalism and adjunct professor emeritus of history at Indiana University. He is the author of Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004) and Communities of Journalism: A History of American Newspapers and Their Readers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001.) He is a former interim editor and associate editor of the Journal of American History. In retirement, he has been exploring the history of Monroe County and southern Indiana. A recent project is Mapping Monroe County, Indiana: An Annotated Bibliography, 1815–1941 (Bloomington: Monroe County History Center, 2021). It is available as a pamphlet at the Center’s bookstore and as a downloadable PDF with clickable links through the online catalogs of the Indiana Historical Society, the Indiana State Library, and IU-Bloomington.