Reading Newspapers: Press and Public in Eighteenth-Century Britain and America

Abstract

Kitch, Carolyn. Pennsylvania in Public Memory: Reclaiming the Industrial Past. University Park: The Penn State Press, 2012. 260 pp. $59.95Carolyn Kitch, professor of journalism in the School of Communications and Theater at Temple University, spent three years visiting industrial landmarks, memorials, and events as well as conducting impeccable research via libraries and archives to write Pennsylvania in Public Memory: Reclaiming the Industrial Past.She learned along the way that like many projects, hers was full of contradictions that even the most well-intentioned servants often did not see. A fascinating aspect of this lively read is the author's recurrent theme of history, heritage operations, and industrial as part of a modern restlessness, a search for meaning in life and self-identity. That undercurrent rises in surprising ways as she analyzes how memory, history, and industrial merge in twentyfirst century contexts, frequently involving economie renewal of areas paralyzed by the loss of major industries. Kitch convincingly demonstrates that Pennsylvania's experiences provide a lens for looking at the same national problems.Although the process of decline began in Pennsylvania and other places across the nation much earlier, the peak decades for closing anthracite and coal mines, shutting down steel mills, and eliminating railroad lines had begun by the national bicentennial in 1976 and continued through 1980s and 1990s. Kitch investigates the cultural impact of the exodus of the jobs, the closing factories, and the way of life that had shaped communities in her state. She offers valuable insights into the nexus of memory, history, tourism, and blue-collar blight.Ironies emerge in the eight chapters and epilogue. For example, the term public history at first seems a bit redundant because tells people's stories, but then Kitch explains the difference. Public refers to the attempts of those who lived it - -for example, unemployed steelworkers - to shape the community's understanding of what happened rather than trained academics who seek the objective truth. These ordinary people become storytellers for heritage sites intended to restore local pride and build solidarity even more than to attract visitors. Kitch recalled that she usually was the only person from outof-town at some industrial sites. She includes this observation from a regional tourism official: Not everybody wants tourists - some people just want their story to be told and preserved for their families. Later she points out that emphasis on the distant past of most of these sites offends some recently unemployed workers and engenders bitterness in some towns. …