Journalism History – 2025-26 Essay Competition Call
The colonial-era US printer Benjamin Franklin is credited with responding to a question about what the Constitutional Convention of 1787 had produced by saying, “A republic – if you can keep it.”1 The convention was the United States’ second attempt to form a national government after its revolutionary break from Britain – a break that was codified by the signatures of Franklin and fifty-five fellow delegates on July 4, 1776.
Of course, Franklin and his contemporaries’ vision of a democratic republic for propertied white men was significantly narrower than what most people in the US conceive today. That original vision of representative democracy was transformed by President Abraham Lincoln’s rhetorical reframing during the Civil War and subsequent constitutional amendments granting citizenship and basic rights to formerly enslaved people.2The vision was further expanded by the nineteenth amendment granting women the vote in the early twentieth century and by the civil rights laws of the 1960s that added enforcement mechanisms to the amendments passed a hundred years earlier. By the turn of this century, many US institutions had, at least rhetorically, embraced the notion of working toward a truly pluralistic multiracial democracy.
But in recent years – and particularly the past twelve months – the question of whether the United States can keep its republic has grown increasingly urgent. And as the calendar turns to the 250th anniversary of the original Declaration of Independence in 1776, the time is ripe for revisiting that year with an eye toward how the media contingencies of the time helped to launch a quarter-millennium of intermittent democratic advancement and backsliding – not just in the US, but around the world.
Accordingly, the Journalism History journal calls for scholarly essays that explore the media conditions of 1776 and subsequent revolutionary movements across a variety of global contexts – from the eighteenth century newspapers and pamphlets of the new United States, as well as from contemporaneous media and political developments around the world. We encourage an expansive and inclusive view of media that encompasses writing and printing, but also oral communication and illustration in cultures where writing and literacy were not emphasized. And we’re also interested in when and how later revolutionary movements took up, invoked, echoed, and/or critiqued the principles of the US Declaration of Independence in any national context.
Hence, the fundamental questions for the call are:
1. How were people anywhere on earth communicating about relations of power in 1776, the year of the US Declaration of Independence?
2. How have the principles of the US Declaration of Independence been mediated in other historical revolutionary or post-colonial contexts?
3. What do historical representations of the Declaration’s principles suggest about how things have turned out in the present?
Essay topics could include, but are not limited to:
- New primary evidence or arguments from the revolutionary-era United States.
- How producers of international newspapers, letters, and other forms of communication discussed the revolutionary events in North America from local perspectives.
- How local media conditions in various national contexts were unfolding distinctly from the events of the US revolution in the late eighteenth century.
- The earliest known mediated references to the Declaration of Independence in any national context, and how those references interpreted the Declaration’s meaning and implications.
- The explicit embrace or repudiation of the Declaration’s principles in any historical colonial or revolutionary context across nations.
- Other explorations of media influence on historic revolutionary eras in any global context.
The winning essay will receive a $100 (US) prize. Top essay(s) will be published in the Journalism History journal; runners-up will be published on the Journalism History website.
To be considered for inclusion in the essay series, please submit the following to jhistoryjournal@gmail.com by 11:59 p.m. Pacific time December 25, 2025:
- A brief CV (including publications).
- A 500-word synopsis of the topic you plan to discuss in your essay, along with a short list of key primary and secondary sources you plan to draw from.
- An affirmation that the essay has not been proposed or published elsewhere.
Essay selection will be decided by January 30, 2026, with a schedule of publication to follow. Completed essays will be due by April 30, 2025.
Completed essays will be 1,200 to 1,500 words, excluding citations. Authors should cite primary and/or secondary sources to support their arguments. Both abstract and full essay submissions must be in English. The Chicago Manual of Style must be used for accepted essays.
Questions may be directed to Josie Vine, online content and essay coordinator for Journalism History, at jhistoryjournal@gmail.com.
Notes
1 See Julie Miller, “‘A Republic if you can keep it’: Elizabeth Willing Powel, Benjamin Franklin, and the James McHenry Journal,” Library of Congress Blogs, January 6, 2022. Retrieved from: https://blogs.loc.gov/manuscripts/2022/01/a-republic-if-you-can-keep-it-elizabeth-willing-powel-benjamin-franklin-and-the-james-mchenry-journal/
2 Gary Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America (Simon & Schuster, 1992).
Journalism History journal 