« Media settler colonialism: Cecilie Larsen, Settler Colonialism, Environmental Justice and the Media: A Thematic Analysis of the National, Regional, Local, and Indigenous Newspaper Coverage of the Keystone XL Pipeline in theUnited States, MA dissertation, University of Agder, 2022
Rustbelt settler colonialism? Steven High, ‘”With Iron We Conquer”: Deindustrialization, Settler Colonialism, and the Last Train out of Schefferville, Quebec’, Canadian Historical Review, 2023 »

The last settler fantasy? Julie Cohen, ‘”Flipping the Script”: Alma Whitaker, Newspaperwomen, and the Settler Fantasy in Los Angeles’, California History, 100, 1, 2023, pp. 27-55

21Feb23

Abstract: This article examines the work of Alma Whitaker—feminist, reporter, and columnist for the Los Angeles Times from 1910 to 1944. Widely known in her time but almost totally forgotten today, Whitaker’s work illustrates the formative role of newspaperwomen in the expansion of Los Angeles in the early twentieth century, and specifically in promoting a settler fantasy that redefined notions of white women’s selfhood in the frontier space of Los Angeles. Her popular articles and columns both bolstered the white settler campaign to create Los Angeles as a white settlement and challenged patriarchal norms. Situating Whitaker within the emergence of the mass-circulating urban newspaper industry and the colonization of Los Angeles, this article contributes to the fields of women/gender history, hegemonic feminism, borderlands/California, and recent scholarship on settler colonialism as a framework for understanding U.S. history.


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