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The first book to trace the history of early advice columns in American newspapers,
Newspaper Confessions reveals how advice columnists and contributors established the idea of the virtual confessional to ease the anxieties of modern life, creating a genre that continues to shape the way Americans talk publicly and anonymously about their feelings today.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Ch. 1: Making Advice Modern: The Birth of the Newspaper Advice Column
- Ch. 2: America's Confessional: Early Twentieth-Century Advice Columns and their Readers
- Ch. 3: Queen of Heartaches: The Newspaper Advice Columnist as Icon and Journalist
- Ch. 4: Advising the Race: Princess Mysteria and the Black Feminist Advice Tradition
- Ch. 5: The Modern "Experience": Loneliness, Interactivity, and the Virtual Community
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Julie Golia is the Curator of History, Social Sciences, and Government Information at the New York Public Library. An active public historian, she tweets at @JuliethePH.
Summary
What can century-old advice columns tell us about the Internet today? This book reveals the little-known history of advice columns in American newspapers and the virtual communities they created among their readers.
Imagine a community of people who had never met writing into a media outlet, day after day, to reveal intimate details about their lives, anxieties, and hopes. The original "virtual communities" were born not on the Internet in chat rooms but a century earlier in one of America's most ubiquitous news features: the advice column.
Newspaper Confessions is the first history of the newspaper advice column, a genre that has shaped Americans' relationships with media, their experiences with popular therapy, and their virtual interactions across generations. Emerging in the 1890s, advice columns became unprecedented virtual forums where readers could debate the most resonant cultural crises of the day with strangers in an anonymous, yet strikingly public, forum. Early advice columns are essential-and overlooked-precursors to today's digital culture: forums, social media groups, chat rooms, and other online communities that define how present-day American communicate with each other.
By charting the economic and cultural motivations behind the rise of this influential genre, Julie Golia offers a nuanced analysis of the advice given by a diverse sample of columns across several decades, emphasizing the ways that advice columnists framed their counsel as modern, yet upheld the racial and gendered status quo of the day. She offers lively, surprising, and poignant case studies, demonstrating how columnists and everyday newspaper readers transformed advice columns into active and participatory virtual communities of confession, advice, debate, and empathy.
Additional text
This book serves as an effective historical record of an area of journalism that may not be 'high status' in the way that the war reporter or undercover journalist might be considered, but through careful and detailed accounts of her evidence-base, Golia presents us with a wealth of testimony to the important role the advice column played in the twentieth century, providing insight into why it remains an enduring part of periodical journalism today.
