Category Archives: Media history

Illustration from the Red Kimono movie poster.

In 1915, Gabrielle Darley killed a New Orleans man who had tricked her into a life of prostitution. She was tried, acquitted of murder and within a few years was living a new life under her married name, Melvin. Then a blockbuster movie, “The Red Kimono,” splashed her sensational story across America’s silver screens.

The 1925 film used Darley’s real name and details of her life taken from transcripts of the murder trial. She sued for invasion of privacy and won.

In deciding in favor of Darley, a California court said that people have a right to rehabilitation. “We should permit [people] to continue in the path of rectitude rather than throw [them] back into a life of shame or crime,” the court said. It is a sentiment that is harder to put into practice today, when information is much more readily available. Nonetheless, policymakers and media outlets are looking at the issue.

As a scholar of media history and law, I see Darley’s story as more than an interesting slice of legal and cinematic history. Her case provides an early example of how private people struggle to escape their pasts and how the idea of privacy is linked to rehabilitation.

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Klaatu barada nikto

These pages are for students and anyone else who might be interested in my historical work or  links to publishing projects. By way of introduction, here’s a photo taken by Linda Burton in the science fiction gallery of the Seattle Museum of Pop Culture. 

Gort was the robot from a movie called The Day the Earth Stood Still. Despite the uncanny resemblance, I’m the handsome one on your right. The museum is  extremely cool, and if you don’t see it next time you’re in Seattle, Gort will know where to find you.

So — Why do historians  like science fiction?  It has something to do with what history is and what it ought to be.

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There is an endless fascination with Johannes Gutenberg, the impact of the printing press, and the town of Mainz, Germany where he grew up and began the world’s first major printing operation in the 1450s. You see it in the crowds making something of a pilgrimage to the Gutenberg Museum there, and you see it in the thriving city itself — the flower stalls, the cathedral, the students singing as they pedal the bicycle-powered beer wagons. Madhvi Ramani of the BBC captures this in a May 8, 2018 article, How a German City Changed How We Read, and quotes from my book Revolutions in Communication.
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• Radio and the Titanic —  Radford University, April 5, 2012 — If Guglielmo Marconi had not been so stubborn, perhaps 1,600 would not have perished when the Titanic sank in the icy Atlantic 100 years ago.
• Hezekiah Niles: a patriotic newsmagazine editor in the 19th century —Baltimore Sun, Sept. 4, 2011 — Niles was a devoted patriot and an editor with vision. He managed to put aside his own partisanship in order to reach out in the spirit of compromise. He hoped that spirit might hold the nation together. Although his ideas were widely accepted in the North, he found attitudes in the South hardening during his years as editor.
• Public Broadcasting’s Fight for Funding —Roanoke Times, Feb. 20, 2011 — … The Corporation for Public Broadcasting was created by President Lyndon Johnson in 1967, but the roots of educational and public broadcasting go back to the early days of radio, when communities, schools and churches started their own services, according to Radford University communications professor Bill Kovarik. “Federal licensing for commercial stations basically pushed all those educational stations off the air,” said Kovarik, who has written a media history textbook titled “Revolutions in Communication.”