Newspaper Confessions: A History of Advice Columns in a Pre-Internet Age (May 2021)
Published by Oxford University Press, Newspaper Confessions is the first history of the newspaper advice column, a genre that has shaped Americans’ relationships with media, their experiences with popular therapy, and their virtual interactions across generations. Emerging in the 1890s, advice columns became unprecedented virtual forums where readers could debate the most resonant cultural crises of the day with strangers in anonymous yet strikingly public forums.
Newspaper Confessions shows how early advice columns are essential – and overlooked – precursors to today’s digital culture: forums, social media groups, chat rooms, and other online communities that fundamentally shape how present-day American communicate with each other.