The European Enlightenment fostered ideals that still animate democratic societies, but those ideals were freighted with received notions of white supremacy and patriarchy. This presentation traces the ways in which those ideas affected the development of the norms and practices of American journalism in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The Enlightenment’s Contradictory Legacy and the Evolution of American Journalism by Kim Pearson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.