E-Journals: New Issues This Week

New issues of the following journals are available online this week:

• Communication Research
  
• Communication Studies
  
• Information, Communication & Society
  
• Journal of Public Relations Research
  
• Media History
  
• Public Relations Review

Click on a title to access the issue. (Login with your BC username and password is required for off-campus access.)

The Making of an Icon: The Iwo Jima Photograph

Joe Rosenthal, whose World War II picture of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima became one of the most iconic photographs of all time, died yesterday in San Francisco at the age of 94.

Rosenthal's AP photo showed five marines and a Navy corpsman raising the flag on Mount Surabachi after the peak had been captured by the Marines in one of the bloodiest battles of World War II. (The same scene was captured on film by Marine cameraman Bill Genaust, who was killed on Iwo Jima nine days later.)

It's been called "the most memorable image of American participation in [WWII]," "the single most reproduced photo ever," and "probably the most famous American photograph ever produced."

The image appeared in newspapers around the U.S. within days of the event. It was turned into a War Bond poster, a postage stamp, and, most famously, the giant statue of the Marine Corps War Memorial near Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.

It was even echoed -- if a picture can be echoed -- in another iconic photo, that of three firefighters raising an American flag over the ruins of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. (That photo, too, has been turned into a statue.)

Scholars and others have had much to say about the flag-raising photo and its emergence and use as an icon of America and American values. The following are just a few examples:

• Rollins, Peter C. "Iwo Jima: the pains of memory." World and I 13 (6) (1998), 72(6).


• Linenthal, Edward T. "Shaping a heroic presence: Iwo Jima in American Memory." Reviews in American History 21 (1993), 8-12


• Spratt, Meg, April Peterson, and Taso Lagos. "Of photographs and flags: uses and perceptions of an iconic image before and after September 11, 2001." Popular Communication 3 (2) (2005), 117-136.


• Edwards, Janis L. and Carol K. Winkler. "Representative form and the visual ideograph: the Iwo Jima image in editorial cartoons." Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 93) (1997) 289+


• Thomey, Tedd. Immortal images : a personal history of two photographers and the flag raising on Iwo Jima. Annapolis, Md. : Naval Institute Press, 1996. (O’Neill Stacks D810.P4 T46 1996)


• Marling, Karal Ann and John Wetenhall. Iwo Jima : monuments, memories, and the American hero. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1991 (O’Neill Stacks D767.99.I9 M28 1991 )


• Bradley, James with Ron Powers. Flags of our fathers. New York : Bantam Books, 2000. (O’Neill Stacks D767.99.I9 B73 2000)
  

New Communication Books at BC

The August edition of New Communication Books in the BC Libraries is now online.

This edition features 22 books added to the collection in recent weeks, including titles in such areas as: Advertising & Public Relations; New Media; Political Communication; and others.

Follow the links on the New Books page to view the catalog records for each of these titles and see if they are available. Links to past editions of New Communication Books are at the bottom of the page.

New Communication Books at BC

The May edition of New Communication Books in the BC Libraries is now online.

This edition features 33 books added to the collection in recent weeks, including titles in such areas as: Interpersonal Communication; Journalism & News Media; Television & Radio; and others.

Follow the links on the New Books page to view the catalog records for each of these titles and see if they are available. Links to past editions of New Communication Books are at the bottom of the page.

E-Journals: New Issues This Week

New issues of the following journals are available online this week:

• Asian Journal of Communication
  
• Communication Quarterly
  
• Communication Research
  
• International Communication Gazette
  
• International Journal on Media Management
  
• Journal of Advertising
  
• Journal of Contemporary Ethnography
  
• Journal of Language and Social Psychology
  
• Research on Language and Social Interaction
  
• Science Communication
  
• Visual Cognition
  

Click on a title to access the issue. (Login with your BC username and password is required for off-campus access.)

What to Wear to a Non-Protest

Washington Post fashion editor (and 2006 Pulitzer Prize winner) Robin Givhan had an interesting take, from a communication perspective, on the organized effort of gay and lesbian families to make their presence felt at the annual Easter Egg Roll on the White House lawn last week.

Although criticized by some for politicizing an event that has taken place annually at the White House since the Rutherford B. Hayes administration, organizers said their actions were not a protest, but a chance "to give our fellow citizens the opportunity to see us as real families, participating in a great American tradition..."

That effort, wrote Givhan, put the gay and lesbian participants "in the difficult position of wanting to underscore the averageness of their families, while simultaneously and quietly identifying themselves as a group that is different."

Their solution, she reported, was to reject initial plans to wear t-shirts identifying them as LGBT parents and families and, instead, wear rainbow leis.

A T-shirt [wrote Givhan] is fashion's equivalent of a billboard. They are not subtle or nuanced, boiling a complicated issue down to a few words, a symbol or a slogan. (Silence = Death. A peace sign. Choose Life.) T-shirts are not a tool for dialogue or diplomacy. They are not a gentle form of persuasion.

Accessories such as necklaces, rubber bracelets or satin ribbons, on the other hand, whisper one's affiliation, mumble something about ideology, politely request support through all the proper channels. Thank you very much. And please, sir, will you hear me out?

The result, according to Givhan, was mixed: "The symbolism of a T-shirt is loud. It's braying. It's in people's faces. Those leis were polite, but they also mumbled the message."

PressDisplay: Same-Day Newspapers from Around the World

PressDisplay, the newest addition to the BC Libraries' collection of online databases, lets you look at more than 250 newspapers from around the world, exactly as they appear in print and on the same day they are published.

PressDisplay includes papers from more than 50 countries and in more than 30 languages, with the current edition and a 60-day archive.

To select a newspaper in PressDisplay, click on the Newspapers tab on the right of the opening screen. You can click to view a list of newspapers from a particular country or, via the drop-down menu, by language or from an A-to-Z list.

After selecting a country (or a language or letter of the alphabet), the screen will show a list of titles in that category in the far left and the front pages of each of those newspapers in the center. Click on a title or a front page to go to that newspaper.

To zoom in on a particular article, click on any part of the text or click on the magnifying glass icon at the bottom of the screen. Once you are in an article, you can move around the page by holding down the button on your mouse and moving the mouse up or down, left or right. To zoom back out, double click on the page or click again on the magnifying glass.

Among the papers included in this online service are:

• Washington Post
  
• USA Today
  
• Chicago Tribune
  
• Los Angeles Times
  
• New York Daily News
  
• Columbus Dispatch
  
• Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
  
• Le Figaro (France)
  
• La Nacion (Argentina)
  
• Irish Times (Ireland)
  
• Kathimerini (Greece)
  
• Huriyet (Turkey)
  
• Asharq Al-Awsat (Saudi Arabia)
  
• The East African (Kenya)
  
• and many others

A detailed tutorial for PressDisplay will be available on the BC Libraries Web site soon.