Books by Rodger Streitmatter

Now in paperback: 300 letters between Eleanor Roosevelt and her "first friend" shed new light on their legendary, passionate bond.

In this engaging examination of the media's influence on US history and politics, Streitmatter visits sixteen landmark episodes, from the American Revolution to the present-day fight for gay and lesbian marriage equality. The text offers students and professors a highly readable and accessible alternative to journalism history textbooks.

Highly readable and powerful case studies of landmark events in US history- from the American Revolution to Watergate to the Supreme Court decision to strike down DOMA- demonstrate the enduring power of the news media.

Streitmatter tells the stories of dissident American publications and press movements of the last two centuries, and of the colorful individuals behind them. From publications that fought for the disenfranchised to those that promoted social reform, Voices of Revolution examines the abolitionist and labor press, black power publications of the 1960s, the crusade against the barbarism of lynching, the women's movement, and antiwar journals. Streitmatter also discusses gay and lesbian publications, contemporary on-line journals, and counterculture papers like The Kudzu and The Berkeley Barb that flourished in the 1960s. Voices of Revolution also identifies and discusses some of the distinctive characteristics shared by the genres of the dissident press that rose to prominence-from the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. For far too long, mainstream journalists and even some media scholars have viewed radical, leftist, or progressive periodicals in America as "e;rags edited by crackpots."e; However, many of these dissident presses have shaped the way Americans think about social and political issues.