Courtier to the crowd


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Foreign Agents


Book Description

A stunning investigation and indictment of a segment of the United States' foreign lobbying industry, and the threat to end democracy. For years, one group of Americans has worked as foot-soldiers for the most authoritarian regimes around the planet. In the process, they've not only entrenched dictatorships and spread kleptocratic networks, but they've secretly guided U.S. policy without the rest of America even being aware. And now, some of them have begun turning their sights on American democracy itself. These Americans are known as foreign lobbyists, and many of them spent years ushering dictatorships directly into the halls of Washington, all while laundering the reputations of the most heinous, repressive regimes in the process. These foreign lobbyists include figures like Ivy Lee, the inventor of the public relations industry—a man who whitewashed Mussolini, opened doors to the Soviets, and advised the Nazis on how to sway American audiences. They include people like Paul Manafort, who invented lobbying as we know it—and who then took his talents to autocrats from Ukraine to the Philippines, and then back to the White House. And they now include an increasing number of Americans elsewhere: in law firms and consultancies, among PR specialists and former lawmakers, and even within think tanks and universities. In Foreign Agents, Casey Michel shines a light on these foreign lobbyists as some of them—after decades of installing dictators and corrupting American policy—embark on their next mission: to end America’s democratic experiment, once and for all.




Courtier to the Crowd


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Courtier to the Crowd is the first full-length biography of the public relations pioneer Ivy Ledbetter Lee. This book traces the story of Lee through his early training in the family of a Methodist minister and in schools, in the newspaper office, as a fledgling publicist, and then as a pioneer public relations counsel for some of the greatest corporations in the world. Ivy Lee was born at a crucial moment in history. In the last half of the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution brought exploitative capitalism to a crisis. Unbridled competition was suffocating business from the inside, while public clamor for more control was stifling it from the outside. Lee understood that organization and cooperation were indispensable for success in the new order. And he realized that public acceptance was necessary in a democratic society. To win acceptance, the public had to be fully informed, but it also had to be fully understood. Lee¿s own success in persuading corporate adoption of these new methods of dealing with the business public made him one of the most influential and controversial men of his time. The use of these techniques eventually became known as the practice of public relations. Lee helped bring professional status to those who devoted their time to this kind of activity, and those who have followed in his footsteps regard him as a founder of ¿modern public relations.¿Lee often said he didn¿t know how to describe his work, perhaps because there was as yet no glossary for what he did. Looking back, says author Ray Hiebert, Ivy Lee was practicing social responsibility, conflict resolution, and with his international interests, public diplomacy long before those terms were conceived. These pages are a stimulating combination of history, biography, economics, theology, and journalism. The book should have a place on the shelf of every person who practices in the fields of public relations or journalism, and readily available as a source of information and guidance for corporate executives, businessmen, clergymen, politicians, lawyers, newsmen, and editors.




A Strategic Nature


Book Description

A look at how public relations has dominated public understanding of the natural environment for over one hundred years. In A Strategic Nature, Melissa Aronczyk and Maria I. Espinoza examine public relations as a social and political force that shapes both our understanding of the environmental crises we now face and our responses to them. Drawing on in-depth interviews, ethnography, and archival research, Aronczyk and Espinoza document the evolution of PR techniques to control public perception of the environment since the beginning of the twentieth century. More than spin or misinformation, PR affects how institutions and individuals conceptualize environmental problems -- from conservation to coal mining to carbon credits. Revealing the linkages of professional strategists, information politics, and environmental standards, A Strategic Nature shows how public relations restricts alternative paths to a sustainable climate future.




The Public Relations of Everything


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The public relations of "everything" takes the radical position that public relations is a profoundly different creature than a generation of its scholars and teachers have portrayed it. Today, it is clearly no longer limited, if it ever has been, to the management of communication in and between organizations. Rather, it has become an activity engaged in by everyone, and for the most basic human reasons: as an act of self-creation, self-expression, and self-protection. The book challenges both popular dismissals and ill-informed repudiations of public relations, as well as academic and classroom misconceptions. In the age of digitization and social media, everyone with a smart phone, Twitter and Facebook accounts, and the will and skill to use them, is in the media. The PR of everything – the ubiquitousness of public relations – takes a perspective that is less concerned with ideas of communication and information than with experience and drama, a way of looking at public relations inside out, upside down and from a micro rather than a macro level. Based on a combination of the research of PR practice and critical-thinking analysis of theory, and founded in the author’s extensive corporate experience, this book will be invaluable reading for scholars and practitioners alike in Public Relations, Communications and Social Media.




Courtier to the Crowd


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Public Relations and Religion in American History


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Winner of The American Journalism Historians Association Book of the Year Award, 2015 This study of American public relations history traces evangelicalism to corporate public relations via reform and the church-based temperance movement. It encompasses a leading evangelical of the Second Great Awakening, Rev. Charles Grandison Finney, and some of his predecessors; early reformers at Oberlin College, where Finney spent the second half of his life; leaders of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League of America; and twentieth-century public relations pioneer Ivy Ledbetter Lee, whose work reflecting religious and business evangelism has not yet been examined. Observations about American public relations history icon P. T. Barnum, whose life and work touched on many of the themes presented here, also are included as thematic bookends. As such, this study cuts a narrow channel through a wide swath of literature and a broad sweep of historical time, from the mid-eighteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth century, to examine the deeper and deliberate strategies for effecting change, for persuading a community of adherents or opponents, or even a single soul to embrace that which an advocate intentionally presented in a particular way for a specific outcome—prescriptions, as it turned out, not only for religious conversion but also for public relations initiatives.




Titan


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National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist From the acclaimed, award-winning author of Alexander Hamilton: here is the essential, endlessly engrossing biography of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.—the Jekyll-and-Hyde of American capitalism. In the course of his nearly 98 years, Rockefeller was known as both a rapacious robber baron, whose Standard Oil Company rode roughshod over an industry, and a philanthropist who donated money lavishly to universities and medical centers. He was the terror of his competitors, the bogeyman of reformers, the delight of caricaturists—and an utter enigma. Drawing on unprecedented access to Rockefeller’s private papers, Chernow reconstructs his subjects’ troubled origins (his father was a swindler and a bigamist) and his single-minded pursuit of wealth. But he also uncovers the profound religiosity that drove him “to give all I could”; his devotion to his father; and the wry sense of humor that made him the country’s most colorful codger. Titan is a magnificent biography—balanced, revelatory, elegantly written.




Jack London, Enhanced Ebook


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Jack London (1876-1916) found fame with his wolf-dog tales and sagas of the frozen North, but Cecelia Tichi challenges the long-standing view of London as merely a mass-market producer of potboilers. A onetime child laborer, London led a life of poverty in the Gilded Age before rising to worldwide acclaim for stories, novels, and essays designed to hasten the social, economic, and political advance of America. In this major reinterpretation of London's career, Tichi examines how the beloved writer leveraged his written words as a force for the future. Tracing the arc of London's work from the late 1800s through the 1910s, Tichi profiles the writer's allies and adversaries in the cities, on the factory floor, inside prison walls, and in the farmlands. Thoroughly exploring London's importance as an artist and as a political and public figure, Tichi brings to life a man who merits recognition as one of America's foremost public intellectuals. This enhanced e-book edition of Jack London features significant archival motion picture footage. Eight ebook enhancements take readers into the motion-picture world of Jack London's 1900s--to the very sights that impacted his bestselling writings. Readers get front row seats to the terrifying San Francisco earthquake of 1906, to the Hawaiian beachfront where London first saw the Waikiki "surf riders," to ringside where prizefighters battled for championships. These and other historic film footage clips make this an ebook for the twenty-first century.




Mr. Lee's Publicity Book


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This book, newly discovered from the archives of his biographer, is Ivy Lee¿s only known full-length manuscript. Written in the mid-1920s, a time when the public relations field was first coming into its own, it is a guide not as much for the practitioner, but wisely, for a Jazz-Age public facing its first-ever bout of ¿information overload.¿ Lee advises the reader how to identify and cope with the seemingly relentless flow of messages¿emanating from radio, newsreels and other new media¿in order to separate out truth from reality, news from propaganda. He coaches the reader how to be a smart consumer of media, and shield himself from the newly emerging influence of motivational research and consumer crowd behavior. Although the book was written just as ¿talkies¿ were consuming the screen, the guidance it offers is just as valuable, perhaps even moreso, as YouTube and Twitter consume our screens, 90 years later.Readers of Mr. Lee¿s Publicity Book: A Citizen¿s Guide to Public Relations will also enjoy fascinating observations from some of today¿s pre-eminent scholars and historians of media and public relations. Their comments point to fascinating parallels between Lee¿s day and today, and also explore the progress, or lack thereof, in the public¿s comprehension of publicity¿s impact today.




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