| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Newspaper Indian: Native American Identity in the Press, 1820–90. By John M. Coward . (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. x, 244 pp. Cloth, $39.95, isbn 0-252-02432-X. Paper, $18.95, isbn 0-252-06738-X.)

While few white Americans would be surprised to hear that our nineteenth-century forebears regarded Indians as inferior savages, worthy of dispossession, The Newspaper Indian reveals how advances in journalistic professionalism and technology shaped this prejudiced view for the public. The brevity of telegraphic reports, for example, stripped Indian attacks of context and made them appear unmotivated, while the development of the illustrated press privileged dramatic images of marauding Indians over scenes of peaceful village life. When John M. Coward moves from these and other useful specifics to more general observations, his study fails to provide its chronological framework with sufficient context. By the last quarter of the century, Coward finds, the press was entertaining the idea of a civilized Indian, but he does not correlate this relaxation of white attitudes with the waning of Indian threats. . . .

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