Arcadia Publishing

Robert Sengstacke Abbott had a vision, purpose, and a slogan that said it all: ""American race prejudice must be destroyed.""

In 1905, Abbott created the Chicago Defenderwith 25¢ and a dream in his landlady's kitchen. The Defender was a platform and voice for talents such as Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and W.E.B. DuBois. What began as a humble weekly grew into the largest and most influential Black newspaper in the country, inspiring roughly a million African Americans to leave the oppressive South for a better life in the North. Born in 1868 on the heels of the Reconstruction Era, Abbott--the son of former slaves--managed to influence the first two decades of the 20th century and was a major contributor to the prolific movement known as the ""Great Northern Migration."" Boasting a circulation of over 300,000 nationally, the Defender was secretly delivered by Pullman porters across the United States. By 1920, the paper's tagline read, ""The World's Greatest Weekly."" The story of the Defender is one of inspiration, struggle, triumph, and irreversible pathways being forged.

R.H. Wessel was the owner, editor, and publisher of the Frederick Enterprise / Frederick Press, and a leading citizen from the day he first came to Frederick, Oklahoma, in 1902 until his death in 1956. He is best known for his column "The Observer," for which this book is titled. He left behind a considerable legacy of his adventurous life through letters, photographs, documents, and historic files. His experiences in Lawton during the 1901 Land Lottery and the following homestead years in Frederick are covered in this book.

As a newspaperman, with a love for telling a story, his letters are an incredible documentation of life on the Oklahoma frontier, as well as his love story by mail with Margaret Scow, the bride he brought to Oklahoma after "proving up" on his homestead and obtaining his own newspaper.

New York City has earned its place as the media capital of the world, and its newspapers have chronicled life, death, triumph, and tragedy. While people like Damon Runyon, Walter Winchell, and Jimmy Breslin are remembered for how they wrote about the news, the people who documented it visually are mostly forgotten. For many decades, photographers who captured iconic images for New York's newspapers did so anonymously—picture credit lines were a rarity. This is the story of the people behind the pictures, a history of the historians. In 1915, a group of lensmen formed a fraternal organization to promote their craft and support one another through hardship. A century later, the New York Press Photographers Association (NYPPA) is regarded as the oldest press association in America, and it still advocates for its members in an ever-changing field. At work or at play, New York's photojournalists are hardly the nameless, faceless bunch history would have us believe them to be.