David Nord

Biography

David Paul Nord is professor emeritus of Journalism and adjunct professor emeritus of History at Indiana University.  He is a former interim editor and associate editor of the Journal of American History.

Nord did his undergraduate work at Valparaiso University and completed the M.A. in history at the University of Minnesota and the Ph.D. in mass communication research at the University of Wisconsin.

In the early 1970s he worked as a reporter for the Vidette-Messenger in Valparaiso, Indiana, and for the Associated Press in Minneapolis and Bismarck, North Dakota, and as a researcher/writer for the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.

He came to Indiana University in 1979 and retired in 2011.

Nord’s research interests lie in the history of journalism, religious publishing, and readership.  He is the author of Faith in Reading:  Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America (New York:  Oxford University Press, 2004), and Communities of Journalism:  A History of American Newspapers and Their Readers (Urbana:  University of Illinois Press, 2001), and co-editor of A History of the Book in America, Vol. 5:  The Enduring Book:  Print Culture in Postwar America (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2009).  He has published articles in a variety of scholarly journals, including the Journal of American History, American Quarterly, Journal of the Early Republic, Journal of Urban History, Journal of Communication, American Journalism, and Journalism History.

In 2012 he received the Sidney Kobre Award for Lifetime Achievement in Journalism History, given by the American Journalism Historians Association.

For many years, Nord has been involved with the Center for the History of the Book in American Culture at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts.  He served on the Center’s Board of Overseers, and in 2008 he was Mellon Distinguished Scholar at the AAS. In the summers of 2015 and 2021, he taught AAS/NEH summer institutes for high school and middle school teachers.

In retirement, as a volunteer historian for Spring Mill State Park, he developed an interest in the economic history of southern Indiana. He has explored the history of river, road, and rail transportation in the decades before the Civil War and the history of flour milling in Indiana, 1820–1920. He has also compiled illustrated and annotated bibliographies of the historic maps of Lawrence County and Monroe County, Indiana.

• Newspapers and New Politics:  Midwestern Municipal Reform, 1890-1900.  Ann Arbor:  UMI Research Press, 1981.
• Communities of Journalism: A History of American Newspapers and Their Readers.  Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001.  Paperback edition, 2006.
• Faith in Reading:  Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America, 1790-1860.  New York:  Oxford University Press, 2004.  Paperback edition 2007.
• The Enduring Book:  Print Culture in Postwar America (co-editor).  Vol. 5 of A History of the Book in America.  Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
• Mapping Lawrence County, Indiana: An Annotated Bibliography, 1818–1941. Bedford, Ind.: Lawrence County Historical & Genealogical Society, 2018.
• Mapping Monroe County, Indiana: An Annotated Bibliography, 1815–1941. Bloomington, Ind.: Monroe County History Center, 2021.
• Rivers, Roads, and Rails: A Transportation History of Spring Mill Village. Bedford, Ind.: Lawrence County Historical & Genealogical Society, 2024.

• “James Carey and Journalism History:  A Remembrance.”  Journalism History, 32 (Fall 2006).
• “Accuracy or Fair Play?  Complaining about the Newspaper in Early Twentieth-Century New York,” in American Reception Study:  Reconsiderations and New Directions.  Edited by James Machor and Philip Goldstein.  New York:  Oxford University Press, 2008.
• “The History of Journalism and the History of the Book,” in Explorations in Communication and History.  Edited by Barbie Zelizer.  New York:  Routledge, 2008.
• “Benevolent Books: Printing, Religion, and Reform, 1790-1840.” An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation.  Edited by Robert Gross and Mary Kelley.  Vol 2 of A History of the Book in America.  Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2010.
• “‘Plain and Certain Facts’:  Four Episodes of Public Affairs Reporting in Eighteenth-Century Boston.”  Journalism History, 37 (Summer 2011).
• “Benjamin Franklin and Journalism,” in A Companion to Benjamin Franklin.  Edited by David Waldstreicher.  Malden, Mass.:  Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
• “Interest Groups, Political Communication, and Jeffrey Alexander’s Sociology of Power.”  Journal of Communication Inquiry, 39 (April 2015).
• “The Victorian City and the Urban Newspaper,” in Making News:  The Political Economy of Journalism in Britain and America from the Glorious Revolution to the Internet.  Edited by Richard R. John and Jonathan Silberstein­Loeb.  Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2015.
• “Historical Readership Studies:  A Methodological and Autobiographical Note.”  American Journalism, 33 (Winter 2016).
• “History,” in International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy.  Edited by Klaus Bruhn Jensen.  Hoboken, N.J.:  John Wiley & Sons, 2016.
• “Historical Roundtable: ‘Historians and American Exceptionalism,’” co-author, Historiography in Mass Communication, 4:1 (2018).
• “During Epidemics, Media (and Now Social Media) Have Always Helped People to Connect.” Washington Post, 27 April 2020.
• “The Flour-Milling Revolution in America, 1820–1920: The Indiana Experience.” Indiana Magazine of History, 116 (December 2020).
• “Three Railroads, Two Cities, One Success Story: The Revolution in Flour-Milling in Mitchell and Seymour,” Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History, 36 (Summer 2024).