What’s the news?

Today my task: to find and read newspaper accounts of Lutheran mergers in 1917, 1918, and 1930.  The idea: to consider what ‘others’ found newsworthy about Lutherans and how they portrayed that news.

I started out optimistically, expecting to be able to find what I wanted easily and to capture those articles for later use.

Not so easily as it turned out.  First, ProQuest has dropped the Minneapolis Tribune.  Not to worry, our ever helpful reference librarian also found that the MHS’s archive includes it.  But wait, that archive does not talk to Zotero. Neither can either of us figure out how I can print from the public computer in the library using STOprint.

Okay, use what you can find.

Back to ProQuest where I searched the LA Times, the New York Times, and the Atlanta Constitution.  ProQuest does talk to Zotero so I skimmed and saved for later more careful reading.  Progress on the technology front!

And, I did learn about how ‘others’ portrayed Lutherans.  The mergers are covered, usually with some background.  In the 1910s, not surprisingly, there was also interest in the 400th anniversary of the Reformation and in challenges to and defenses of Lutherans’ loyalty to the United States.  Nebraska figured significantly despite the fact that all three of these papers were long distances from it.  One article together all three themes–loyalty, anniversary, an merger.  LUTHERANS ACTIVE IN WAR WORK FOR NATION.: Churches have Raised Over a Million Dollars for Soldiers’ Camps, Los Angles Times (March 11, 1918). In 1930 similar themes were present.  That, after all, was the anniversary of the Augsburg Confession as well as the year that the American Lutheran Church was founded.

There was also coverage of more mundane matters: the dedication of a new building by a Danish Lutheran Congregation in LA, the monthly meetings and program titles for the Lutheran Men’s Brotherhood in Atlanta, images of classified ads for regular weekly worship services.  There were notices of real estate transactions. The sermons and comments of notable pastors, Trexler of St. James, Manhattan for example, were reported on occasionally.  There were even a couple of stories about legal cases, though not many.

Now I need to go back through what I saved, reading more carefully, and figure out how to read coverage from a few more cities.