Tracing McClure’s Magazine from its meteoric rise to its dramatic combustion, Stephanie Gorton’s Citizen Reporters is a thrillingly told biography of a powerhouse magazine that forever changed American life and a timely case study that demonstrates the crucial importance of journalists who speak the truth. Book signing to follow.

The president of the United States made headlines around the world when he publicly attacked the press, denouncing reporters who threatened his reputation as “muckrakers” and “forces for evil.” The year was 1906, the president was Theodore Roosevelt – and the publication that provoked his fury was McClure’s magazine.

One of the most influential magazines in American history, McClure’s drew over 400,000 readers and published the groundbreaking stories that defined the Gilded Age, including the investigation of Standard Oil that toppled the Rockefeller monopoly. Driving this revolutionary publication were two improbable newcomers united by single-minded ambition. S. S. McClure was an Irish immigrant, who, despite bouts of mania, overthrew his impoverished upbringing and bent the New York media world to his will. His steadying hand and star reporter was Ida Tarbell, a woman who defied gender expectations and became a notoriously fearless journalist.

The scrappy, bold McClure’s group – Tarbell, McClure, and reporters Ray Stannard Baker and Lincoln Steffens – cemented investigative journalism’s crucial role in democracy. From their reporting on labor unrest and lynching, to their exposés of municipal corruption, their reporting brought their readers face to face with a nation mired in dysfunction. They also introduced Americans to the voices of Willa Cather, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, and many others.

The Spring 2020 program season is generously sponsored by the Providence Tourism Council and Bank of America.

SALON: Citizen Reporters | February 28, 2020

A moving story of an America that seems ever more possible, The Resisters is also the story of one family struggling to maintain its humanity. Award-winning author Gish Jen discusses her new dystopian novel, called “required reading for the country” by author Ann Patchett. Book signing to follow.

The time: not so long from now. The place: AutoAmerica. The land: half under water. The Internet: one part artificial intelligence, one part surveillance technology, and oddly human–even funny. The people: Divided. The angel-fair “Netted” have jobs, and literally occupy the high ground. The “Surplus” live on swampland if they’re lucky, on water if they’re not.

The story: To a Surplus couple – he once a professor, she still a lawyer – is born a Blasian girl with a golden arm. At two, Gwen is hurling her stuffed animals from the crib; by ten, she can hit whatever target she likes. Her teens find her happily playing in an underground baseball league.

When AutoAmerica rejoins the Olympics, though – with a special eye on beating ChinRussia – Gwen attracts interest. Soon she finds herself playing ball with the Netted even as her mother challenges the very foundations of this divided society.

A moving and important story of an America that seems ever more possible, The Resisters is also the story of one family struggling to maintain its humanity and normalcy in circumstances that threaten their every value – as well as their very existence.

Extraordinary and ordinary, charming and electrifying, this is Gish Jen at her most riveting and irresistible.

Providence Athenæum