Red Blood and Black Ink: Journalism in the Old West - Softcover

Dary, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0700609555 ISBN 13: 9780700609550

Publisher: University Press of Kansas, 1999

Synopsis

In Red Blood and Black Ink, bestselling author David Dary chronicles the long, exciting, often surprising story of journalism in the Old West—from the freewheeling days of the early 1800s to the classic small-town weeklies and busy city newsrooms of the 1920s.

Here are the printers who founded the first papers, arriving in town with a shirttail of type and a secondhand press, setting up shop under trees, in tents, in barns or storefronts, moving on when the town failed, or into larger quarters if it flourished, and sometimes forced to defend their right of free speech with fists or guns.

Here, too, are Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Horace Greeley-and William Allen White writing on the death of his young daughter. Here is the Telegraph and Texas Register article that launched the legend of the Alamo, and dozens of tongue-in-cheek, brilliant, or moving reports of national events and local doings, including holdups, train robberies, wars, elections, shouting matches, weddings, funerals, births, and much, much more.

About this title

Review

After a reader shot the editor of a Kansas newspaper, the jury refused to convict the culprit. "That's just the way it is with some juries," reported another newspaper. "They think it no more harm to shoot an editor than a Jack-rabbit." Indeed, the men who reported the news on the frontier (including such luminaries as Mark Twain and Bret Harte) had to be a wild bunch. Red Blood and Black Ink provides an informative and very entertaining look at how the frontier press covered the news in the roughest towns around and helped set a cultural tone that resonates to the present day.

From the Back Cover

"Exuberant, evocative, and all joy to read. One of the very best of David Dary's masterfully well-informed and entertaining histories of life in the Old West."--Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., author of Now That the Buffalo's Gone

"Humorous, entertaining, and informative."--Dee Brown, author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

"A very good, far-ranging, and indeed surprising history of newspaper journalism in the Old West."--Howard Lamar, editor of the Reader's Encyclopedia of the American West

"At long last, we have a proper assessment of the neglected role of the free press in the settlement of the American West. The newspaper publisher, editor, and printer (often all rolled into one) brought something that passed for civilization to each new and raw town on the frontier before schools or even churches could arrive. Only a few of them (Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Bill Nye) rose beyond anonymity, but all of them now have their Boswell in David Dary."--Richard Dillon, author of The Legend of Grizzly Adams

"A significant contribution to the history of the American West."--Robert Utley, author of Billy the Kid and The Lance and the Shield

About this edition

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0700609555
• ISBN 13: 9780700609550
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 360