Overview

What can century-old advice columns tell us about the Internet today? This book reveals the little-known history of advice columns in American newspapers and the virtual communities they created among their readers.Imagine a community of people who had never met writing into a media outlet, day after day, to reveal intimate details about their lives, anxieties, and hopes. The original ""virtual communities"" were born not on the Internet in chat rooms but a century earlier in one of America's most ubiquitous news features: the advice column.Newspaper Confessions is the first history of the newspaper advice column, a genre that has shaped Americans' relationships with media, their experiences with popular therapy, and their virtual interactions across generations. Emerging in the 1890s, advice columns became unprecedented virtual forums where readers could debate the most resonant cultural crises of the day with strangers in an anonymous, yet strikingly public, forum. Early advice columns are essential--and overlooked--precursors to today's digital culture: forums, social media groups, chat rooms, and other online communities that define how present-day American communicate with each other.By charting the economic and cultural motivations behind the rise of this influential genre, Julie Golia offers a nuanced analysis of the advice given by a diverse sample of columns across several decades, emphasizing the ways that advice columnists framed their counsel as modern, yet upheld the racial and gendered status quo of the day. She offers lively, surprising, and poignant case studies, demonstrating how columnists and everyday newspaper readers transformed advice columns into active and participatory virtual communities of confession, advice, debate, and empathy.

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9780197527788

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Reviews

In this engaging study, Julie Golia illuminates how, when, and why Americans-especially women-began to seek advice for their most personal and intimate problems from total strangers writing in mass circulation newspapers. Newspaper Confessions not only traces the changing relationship between newspapers and their readers, but also uncovers the struggles confronting Americans of all backgrounds as they came to terms with modernity. * Elaine Tyler May, author of Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era * Julie Golia's Newspaper Confessions is a terrific book. Full of interesting, at times eye-opening details and boasting a fascinating cast of characters, it sheds new light on a form of journalism that has been routinely disparaged, demonstrating its importance and revealing its influence on contemporary online communities. * Charles L. Ponce de Leon, author of Self-Exposure: Human-Interest Journalism and the Emergence of Celebrity in America * From Dorothy Dix to Princess Mysteria to Ann Landers, newspaper advice columnists have served as revenue drivers and cultural brokers, developing a democratic and interactive discourse in which women readers lay bare the practical as well as the existential challenges of modern life. In Julie Golia's fine book, these journalists craft self-identities that cloak their ambitions, exercise professional power, proffer advice that challenges as well as supports the status quo, and develop a genre that is as adaptable as it is therapeutic. * Jennifer Scanlon, Bowdoin College *

Author Information

Julie Golia is the Curator of History, Social Sciences, and Government Information at the New York Public Library. An active public historian, she tweets at @JuliethePH.

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