WHC’s Amram Scholar Series is pleased to welcome author Kathryn Olmsted to Temple on Sunday, February 4, to discuss her new book, The Newspaper Axis, as part of our Amram Scholar Series.

This program is free, and open to the entire community, but we request that you RSVP.

RSVP HERE

WHC is pleased to present Kathryn Olmsted as this year’s Leslie Maitland Amram Scholar Series Lecture.

About the Book:

As World War II approached, the six most powerful media moguls in America and Britain tried to pressure their countries to ignore the fascist threat. The media empires of Robert McCormick, Joseph and Eleanor Patterson, and William Randolph Hearst spanned the United States, reaching tens of millions of Americans in print and over the airwaves with their isolationist views. Meanwhile in England, Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail extolled Hitler’s leadership and Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express insisted that Britain had no interest in defending Hitler’s victims on the continent.

Kathryn S. Olmsted shows how these media titans worked in concert—including sharing editorial pieces and coordinating their responses to events—to influence public opinion in a right-wing populist direction, how they echoed fascist and anti-Semitic propaganda, and how they weakened and delayed both Britain’s and America’s response to Nazi aggression.

Click here to purchase this book through WHC’s Mitzvah Mall

About the Author:

Kathryn S. Olmsted is chair of the history department at the University of California, Davis. A historian of anticommunism, she is the author of several books, including Right Out of California: The 1930s and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism (The New Press), Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI, Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley, and Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11. She lives in Davis, California.