David Sloan is a professor emeritus at the University of Alabama. He is the founder of the American Journalism Historians Association, the AJHA Southeast Colloquim, and the Southeast Journalism Conference and is co-founder of the Southern Christian Writers Conference. He has received a number of awards and in 1998 was honored with the AJHA's Kobre Award for Lifetime Achievement. In addition to receiving the Kobre Award, he was selected in 2000 as one of the five “most significant” members of Kappa Tau Alpha on the honor society’s ninetieth anniversary. He has published approximately 45 books. Two of them won Choice magazine’s “Outstanding Academic Book” awards, and his American Journalism History in 1990 won an American Library Association “Best Bibliography in History” award.
Along with his books about mass communication, history, and writing, he serves as editor of a series of historical Christian books. Included in the series are mainly books related to theology and biography. Titles in the series can be found on Amazon by searching for "Regimen Books Christian Classics."
From an interview in the journal Historiography in Mass Communicaton:
Q: Tell us a little about your family background — where you were born and grew up, your education, and so forth.
Sloan: I was born in West Texas, in Midland, in 1947, the fourth of six children. My father, Guy Sloan, was a carpenter, and my mother, Fay, was a homemaker. Both my parents were from farming families, and each had a limited formal education. My mother finished the eighth grade, and my father, the seventh. Because my father worked in construction, we moved many times before we finally settled in the small town of Mt. Vernon, Texas. I say “in” when actually we lived about two miles from town. Mt. Vernon, which I consider my hometown, had a population of about 1,400. It is best known as being the hometown of Don Meredith, the Dallas Cowboys quarterback who later was a commentator on Monday Night Football. I once caught a pass from him — even though he was nine years older than I. But that — as fascinating a tale as it might be — is another story!
Even though my parents had only a few years of education, they were serious that their children do better. I assumed, by the time I finished junior high, that I was supposed to go to college. I have about fifty cousins, and the first of them to graduate from college was my next older brother. I was the third. I attended a regional state university about forty miles from Mt. Vernon, East Texas State University (now Texas A&M at Commerce).
I loved college, and during my freshman year I decided that I wanted to be a professor. Already, I had begun to think that the academic life would be the perfect one. Mainly, I was thinking about working in a setting where one got to deal with ideas all the time. Of course, as readers of this interview know, I romanticized. It didn’t cross my mind that one would have to grade papers and attend faculty meetings and deal with administrative paperwork. Ideas were what I imagined the professorial life was all about.
I thought I would be an English professor, for English was the major I had originally planned. My older brother, by the way, became an English professor. But, as sometimes happens, life had something else in store for me.
In the late 1960s, East Texas State had one of the best photography programs in the nation, and it was housed in the journalism department. I wanted to take photography — and since I thought I would be more likely to be allowed to enroll in a photo course if the faculty thought I was planning to be a journalism major, in the fall semester of my sophomore year I signed up for an introductory MC course, as well as an introductory photography course.
It was while I was out on campus for the first assignment in the photo course that I saw someone who would become the most important and influential person in my life: Joanne Stuart. Like me, she was a sophomore. She was majoring in education, English, and European history. Thinking she was beautiful (an observation that was correct), I made a photograph of her, without introducing myself. As Providence would have it, though, I met her later that week at a Young Democrats party, and we began dating — which led, three months later when we both were just 19 years old, to our being married during the break between the fall and spring semesters. She has told people that she knew immediately upon our meeting that I was the person she wanted to marry. That just goes to show that her strongest suit was not good judgment. But as it turned out, we were very compatible. Our academic interests, work ethics, and various other outlooks were similar — but Joanne had different, good character traits, so that she helped me become, I hope, a better person.
Then, a year-and-a-half later, we had a daughter (Cheryl) born to us — just two weeks before the start of our senior year. Since Joanne and I couldn’t afford childcare, we scheduled our courses so that one of us always could be home with Cheryl while the other was in class. I also was working on a newspaper. So that complicated our scheduling. Nevertheless, both Joanne and I graduated on time, in four years, in May 1969.
Q: What did you do professionally before going into teaching?
Sloan: When I was in college, when I needed a job for income after Joanne and I married, I was fortunate to work during my junior year as a night reporter and assistant copy editor on a small daily in a nearby town. Then from the following summer through my senior year, I worked as editor of the Commerce Journal, the weekly newspaper in the town where East Texas State was located. The paper had a circulation of about 3,500, and so it was large enough to take newspapering seriously. For example, along with the news pages, it had a sports section and an opinion page. Along with editing, I did some specialized reporting — and being 21 years old and naturally thinking I knew everything, I wrote a weekly opinion column in which I pontificated about all the problems facing the world, along with their solutions.
I did, though, take the news job earnestly, and the Journal was just as earnest. It was not reluctant to deal with issues. One was the condition of streets in the “poor part of town.” I wrote several investigative news stories, as well as a few editorials and columns about the situation. For the work, the paper won the state weekly press association’s awards for editorial writing and community service. By the time the contest results were announced, Joanne and I had graduated from college and moved on, but I’m still pleased — as you can tell from my account here — with the work the paper had done.
I truly enjoyed weekly newspaper work, and if I had planned a newspaper career I probably would have stayed with the Journal for a while after graduation. But I was already looking toward becoming a professor and figured that I needed a different type of newspaper experience. So upon graduation I took a job as a copy editor at the Avalanche-Journal in Lubbock, Texas. The paper had both a morning and an afternoon edition, with a combined circulation of about 120,000. The news operation was much more complex and sophisticated than that at the two papers I had worked on while a student, and the experience served me well when I began to teach reporting and editing classes.
Nevertheless, before the summer was over, Uncle Sam drafted me, cut my hair, and sent me to boot camp. It was at the height of the Vietnam War, but I wound up spending most of my two service years working in information at Fort Bragg, N.C. Looking back, I see that even my time in the Army was helping me to become a professor. I got more experience that I could use, but most importantly it entitled me to G.I. Bill financial assistance for graduate education.
So immediately upon getting out of the Army, I entered graduate school at the University of Texas, with a major in journalism and a minor in sociology. After completing the coursework for my M.A. degree, I took a job as managing editor at a small daily, the Corsicana (Tex.) Sun, and, during the year that I worked there, researched and wrote my masters thesis.
Q: Where, and what courses, have you taught?
Sloan: I was fortunate enough, immediately upon receiving my degree in August 1973, when I was 26 years old, to start teaching at the University of Arkansas. I stayed there ten years, mainly teaching photography but also courses in law (my second favorite subject at the time), history, reporting, editing, magazine editing, and feature writing. The course load was heavy, but I enjoyed it thoroughly.
It was also at Arkansas, from my first year, that I became a chapter advisor for Kappa Tau Alpha, the honor society for mass communication. Along with teaching and history, KTA was my great academic love during most of my college career. After moving from Arkansas, I continued to serve as a KTA advisor for another twenty-five years. When I finally gave up the job, KTA’s national executive secretary did some research and found that my tenure as a chapter advisor was the longest in KTA’s history, which had begun in 1910. Along with the AJHA’s Kobre Award, I suppose the honor I’m most pleased with is one I got from KTA. In the year 2000, the KTA membership, at the behest of the Association of College Honor Societies, chose five people to recognize on KTA’s 90th birthday. I was one of them. Among the others, coincidentally, was Frank Luther Mott, the JMC historian who had served as KTA’s executive secretary in the 1950s.
Although I enjoyed everything about my job at Arkansas, I realized that a Ph.D. would be valuable. So I entered the program at the University of Texas in 1975 — taking courses in the summer and getting a leave from Arkansas for an academic year. I chose Texas because it was convenient geographically to Arkansas and because the faculty members were very good to me.
A couple of years after completing my Ph.D., I moved to the University of Alabama, where I taught occasional courses in such subjects as opinion writing, reporting, editing, media issues, and feature writing, but my main subject was history. A short time after I arrived at Alabama, our College of Communication added a Ph.D. program, and I was fortunate to get to teach mostly history, undergraduate as well as graduate. At the graduate level, the courses generally focused on historiography.
Q: Tell us about your background in history — When did you first get interested in historical research? How did your education prepare you to be a historian?
Sloan: I enjoyed history from as young an age as I can remember, but I never considered specializing in it until I was working on a Ph.D.
I originally had intended to specialize in law in my Ph.D. program, and Texas had an excellent law emphasis. However, during my first year in the program, I decided to change to history. I wish I could say that was because of a deliberate intellectual reason — but the truth is that at Arkansas we hired a new faculty member whose two favorite teaching subjects were law and history. The department chair, Jess Covington, thought we should let him have one of the courses, but he was kind enough to give me my choice of the two. So, almost on the spur of the moment, I chose history. Then, at Texas, I changed my main research area from law to history.
I can’t say that my graduate education did anything in particular to prepare me to be a historian. In studying mass communication history, I learned mostly on my own. However, a professor in the history program at Texas, Philip White, introduced me to how historians interpret history, and those lessons stayed with me. He later served on my dissertation committee, and it was his interest in American history of the early 1800s that influenced my decision to research the national party press of the era.
When I researched and wrote my dissertation, no member of my committee was much familiar with the subject — as was true with nearly everyone else at the time. So my committee essentially gave me a free hand and hardly any guidance. Perhaps that was unfortunate, but it also allowed me to learn on my own.
Q: Who or what have been the major influences on your historical outlook and work?
Sloan: Well, I mentioned in answer to the previous question that Philip White introduced me to historical interpretation.
But I can say without hesitation that the individual who most influenced me was Jim Startt. He knows more about historical research than anyone I know. I met him at the second convention of the American Journalism Historians Association, in 1983. From then, I developed a wonderful friendship with him, and he and I collaborated on a variety of books and other projects. I don’t hesitate to say that I learned more about methods and the historical mindset from him than I have from anywhere else. The knowledge I gained was worth more than an entire Ph.D. program. If I had not met him, I doubt that I ever would have done much good work. So I owe him a great debt.
Q: What are the main areas or ideas on which you concentrate your historical work?
Sloan: Much of my work has been historiographical in nature. That is, it has dealt with how to study history. By the time I finished my Ph.D., I was starting to think about how historians have explained JMC history. As I mentioned in one of my earlier answers, my doctoral program introduced me to interpretations of American history. In the same period, the journal Journalism History had begun publication, and its inaugural issue carried Jim Carey’s article “The Problem of Journalism History.” It got a lot of buzz. Carey said that all journalism historians had written within the Whig interpretation. As an aside, I’ll mention that three years later Journalism History published an article by Joe McKerns that claimed that all journalism historians had written within the Progressive interpretation. Shortly afterwards, I wrote a conference paper in which I argued that all journalism historians had written within a different interpretation that I identified — but I must confess that now I can’t remember what it was. After presenting the paper, I reflected on how presumptuous I had been to claim that “all” historians had written from a particular viewpoint when I had not read all historical works. It was the same mistake that Carey and McKerns had made. Each of us had read a small portion of all works and then leaped to uninformed generalizations. I was embarrassed to be so superficial.
So I set out to read every book and article about journalism history ever published. About a decade later I had finished what turned out to be a book, an annotated bibliography with about 2,600 entries. That bibliography required a lot of time and work, but I must say that it was the most valuable thing I ever did in getting an education about JMC history.
Once I had read the body of work published about journalism history, I then wrote some conference papers, journal articles, and eventually a book — Perspectives on Mass Communication History — that laid out the various schools of interpretation in journalism history.
As part of historiography, I’ve tried to spend time on historical research methods. In 1989 Jim Startt and I wrote a research manual, Historical Methods in Mass Communication, that explains the procedures that historical research requires and tries to explain the mindset required of historians. I was clearly the junior author for the book, and it shows the expertise and depth that Jim possesses. After the second edition, Jim retired from teaching, and I’ve tried to carry it on.
Sound historiography has, I think, pedagogy as an important dimension. If a field is to improve, it must do so generation after generation. Sound teaching is essential. In my own teaching, I hope I upheld high standards — or at least tried to do so. Since teaching good history was important to me, I focused a large share of my research and writing efforts on teaching material. The book that, over the years, required the most time was a textbook, The Media in America. When I first thought about doing a textbook, my main goal was to produce one that used high historical standards. I wanted it to tell history as accurately and fairly as possible. I immediately realized that acquiring the expertise necessary to explain centuries of material would require a lifetime of study — and that if one person attempts to do the entire job, the result will be a superficial and faulty textbook. So I recruited a different author for each chapter, an author who was an expert on the chapter topic. If I had tried to develop an equivalent expertise myself, I calculated that I would have to do research for 127 years! The book turned out well and just this year was published in its tenth edition. Jim Startt served as co-editor for the first four editions, and his expertise in American history helped assure that the chapter accounts were grounded soundly. The publisher estimates that 50,000 – 60,000 students have used it. Of course, such numbers make one realize just how important the job of producing a textbook is. That is, I think, the main thing that has motivated me to spend the large amount of time with the book that I have.
Along with historiography, the other main areas in which I’ve concentrated my time have been the American colonial press, newspapers of the early American republic, and good journalistic writing. I compiled several book-length collections of editorial writing and news reporting, all of which I’ve enjoyed — and all of which have had a historical, rather than contemporary, dimension. Along with those areas, I’ve done a few books in research methods and media issues — but they’ve not held the same interest for me that history does, and as I was doing each of them I was itching to finish so that I could get back to history.
Q: Summarize for us the body of work — books, journal articles, and so forth — that you have done related to history.
Sloan: If I count second editions, I’ve published around forty-five books. For most of them I served as the editor and a chapter author. Early on, I realized that there are so many worthy books to be done that one could not, alone, write them all. So I decided that, rather than spend several years researching and writing a single book and then complete a handful of books over my career, I would recruit chapter authors and produce a lot of books, each of which would require less of my own time than it would if I alone had done all the research and writing. Then there have been some books for which I served as the author or co-author. I’m not sure how many historical articles I’ve written, but the number is probably around twenty or so.
In recent years, I've served as the editor of a series titled "Regimen Books Christian Classics." It contains works mainly of theology and biography. On average, it adds about five title each year. As of April 2020 it has, I think, twenty-three titles.
Q: Of the books you have written, from which ones did you get the most satisfaction?
Sloan: I found satisfaction in almost every book that I’ve done, especially the history ones — although I must confess that I did some books, mainly the non-historical ones, almost from a sense of duty. On occasions, publishers approached me, and I did some other books that started as graduate class projects mainly as a way to focus a class and get the students involved.
Of the historical books, I think I found most satisfaction, in the long run, from The Media in America. It is intended as an undergraduate textbook, but it means much more to me than just a dashed-off text. From the beginning, I saw it as a challenge to produce a book that undergrads would find interesting but that would, nevertheless, use a high standard of scholarship. I wanted students to come away from it with a sophisticated understanding of history. I also believed producing a history textbook to be a great responsibility. Most of what most JMC students will ever know about history comes from undergrad textbooks. And most graduate students who become historians will be influenced by the first textbook they use. So authors and editors have a daunting duty to produce an honest, accurate account. I’ve continued to work with the book for almost thirty years mainly because I consider the job so important.
Next to The Media in America, I suppose the two books that have given me the most satisfaction are Jim Startt’s and my Historical Methods in Mass Communication and my Perspectives on Mass Communication History. Both contributed in their own way, I hope, to elevating the level of scholarship in JMC history.
And then, just because of the aesthetic satisfaction I found, my collections of journalistic writing — particularly Great Editorials, Masterpieces of Reporting, and The Best of Pulitzer Prize News Writing — kept me interested. I simply enjoy good writing, and those collections demonstrate that journalistic writing, which almost by definition is intended to be read one day and tossed into the trash or recycling bin, can be so good that it deserves to be read and re-read and then re-read many more times.
Of a very different nature is a book that Julie Williams and I co-authored, The Early American Press, 1690-1783. Even though there were two of us working on it, it took several years to research and write, but the immersion into the research and time period was fascinating. It made me wish I had had more time so that I could have done more long-term projects. An added source of satisfaction was that, in the end, I think Julie and I provided some new explanations that have helped historians better understand newspapers of that early period.
Q: We realize that it is difficult to judge one’s own work — and that the most accomplished people are often the most modest — but if you had to summarize your most important contributions to the field of JMC history, what would they be?
Sloan: I hope I’ve contributed — mainly through my historiographical works — to raising the standards in our field. Most people probably want to make a contribution to helping the people with whom we come in contact, but it’s hard for most of us to know if professionally we’ve done anything more than throw a little pebble into a big pond.
Q: As you look back over your career, if you could do anything differently, what would it be?
Sloan: Foremost, I wish I had been a better teacher.
Professionally, there were times when I wished I had majored in history rather than journalism and, later, mass communication. But then reality would hit me, and I would remember that getting a good teaching job in history is much more difficult than getting one in mass communication. Had I majored in history, I probably would have chosen America sometime in the 1800s; or, now with a long view, I would have found it exciting to study church history. That field has such scholarly vitality, and Christianity played an immeasurably important role in Western civilization. I’ve done some study of its history and found it both challenging and immensely satisfying.
But as for what I’ve done in mass communication, perhaps if I had gotten into history sooner, I might have done more. But, other than that (and the fact that I spent valuable time producing some non-history books), I’m mostly satisfied with what I decided to do.
