Crying the News:
Vincent DiGirolamo examines childhood labor and print culture
On Thursday, November 10, the Suffolk County Vanderbilt Museum will host Vincent DiGirolamo, an award-winning historian, for an evening lecture on print culture, newsboys, and the labor practices of the press.
DiGirolamo’s lecture will draw heavily from his years of scholarship and from his acclaimed 2019 book Crying the News: A History of America’s Newsboys (Oxford University Press). In Crying the News, DiGirolamo offers an epic retelling of the American experience from the perspective of the famed newsie, a young man who once hawked newspapers on street corners and contributed to the birth of the American press. In his research, DiGirolamo examines a wide berth of historical phenomena, from newsboy strikes and protests to the development of corporate welfare schemes, scientific management practices, and employee liability laws. DiGirolamo takes a well-represented cultural figure, the “little merchant” of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and traces how he evolved into a dominant symbol of entrepreneurship, print capitalism, and popular democracy.
Crying the News is the winner of the Fredrick Jackson Turner Award, the Philip Taft Labor History Prize, the Frank Luther Mott Research Award, the Eugenia M. Palmegiano Prize, and the Vincent P. DeSantis Book Prize from the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
The lecture will take place at 7:00pm in the Vanderbilt Museum’s Charles and Helen Reichert Planetarium. Tickets are available online at the Suffolk County Vanderbilt Museum’s website. Support for this lecture comes from museum members and the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation.
Vincent DiGirolamo is an associate professor of history at Baruch College of the City University of New York, where he specializes in 19th- and 20th-century United States history, with an emphasis on workers, children, immigrants, city life, and print culture. His articles have appeared in popular and academic journals, including “Time Magazine,’ ‘Labor History,’ ‘Journal of Social History,’ and ‘American Heritage.’ His research has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society, the Eugene M. Lang Foundation, and the CUNY Office of Research.
Vincent DiGirolamo received his Ph.D. from Princeton University.
Address: 180 Little Neck Rd., Centerport, NY 11713
Date & Time: Thursday, November 10th (11/10/2022) at 7:00pm