Ethnic Press
While the English language press served the general population, practically every ethnic group had its own newspapers in their own language. At one point there were a thousand German-language papers. The German papers nearly all folded in World War I, and after 1950 the other ethnic groups had largely dropped foreign language papers. After 1965, there were many new immigrants but they set up few major papers.
Representative was the situation in Chicago, where the Polish Americans sustained diverse political cultures, each with its own newspaper. In 1920 the community had a choice of five daily papers - from the Socialist Dziennik Ludowy (1907–25) to the Polish Roman Catholic Union's Dziennik Zjednoczenia (1921–39) - all of which supported workers' struggles for better working conditions and were part of a broader program of cultural and educational activities. The decision to subscribe to a particular paper reaffirmed a particular ideology or institutional network based on ethnicity and class, which lent itself to different alliances and different strategies. Most papers preached assimilation into middle class American values and supported Americanization programs, but still included news of the home country.
Read more about this topic: History Of American Newspapers
Famous quotes containing the words ethnic and/or press:
“Caprice, independence and rebellion, which are opposed to the social order, are essential to the good health of an ethnic group. We shall measure the good health of this group by the number of its delinquents. Nothing is more immobilizing than the spirit of deference.”
—Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985)
“Television ... helps blur the distinction between framed and unframed reality. Whereas going to the movies necessarily entails leaving one’s ordinary surroundings, soap operas are in fact spatially inseparable from the rest of one’s life. In homes where television is on most of the time, they are also temporally integrated into one’s “real” life and, unlike the experience of going out in the evening to see a show, may not even interrupt its regular flow.”
—Eviatar Zerubavel, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life, ch. 5, University of Chicago Press (1991)