Page:The Newspaper and the Historian.djvu/84

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women on a higher plane than when these interests are separated by arbitrary barriers.[1]

There has recently been an extraordinary increase in America in the number of newspapers and other periodicals published by or in the interests of labor and industry. A bulletin of the Library of the United States Department of Labor, Washington, D. C., 1919, lists nearly five hundred such journals, exclusive of general economic and statistical periodicals.

The foreign language press has met the needs of new arrivals in a foreign country, it has existed until familiarity with the language of the country has made it unnecessary, and then it re-appears in another locality to meet the needs of a new group of prospective citizens. Long as is the list of foreign language newspapers in a country, the individual papers have as a rule an uncertain tenure of life; their very success often the more quickly hastens their dissolution.[2] In great metropolitan centers, however, it is the clientele that constantly changes, while the same newspapers continue.

Somewhat similar is the class of newspapers that show the tentative efforts of partly undeveloped groups "to stand on their own feet" and the change in point of view and in direction of effort with the development of experience and of maturity.[3]

Prison journalism has had a fluctuating development, beginning apparently in 1799, with the Forlorn Hope, a weekly published by convicts in the New York State Prison,[4] and continuing

  1. W . Stephens, Madame Adam, 1918.
  2. Much important information in regard to the German-American press and the work of press correspondents, reporters, and editors is given in the Memoirs of Henry Villard, 2 vols., in the Reminiscences of Carl Schurz, 3 vols., and in Carl Schurz: Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers, 6 vols.
    A. Belisle, Histoire de la Presse Franco-Américaine, 1911, and A. O. Barton, "The Beginnings of the Norwegian Press in America," from the Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1916, illustrate this point.
    R. E. Parks, in The Immigrant Press and Its Control, gives a general survey of the subject.
    
  3. I. G. Penn, The Afro-American Press; W. E. B. DuBois, ed., The Crisis; R. T. Kerlin, The Voice of the Negro; F. G. Detweiler, The Negro Press in the United States.
  4. I. N. P. Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island, II, 419.—The Library of Congress has a partial file of the Forlorn Hope,—from May 3 to August 23, 1800; one number is in the library of the Wisconsin State Historical Society.