Forerunners

Celebrating a decade of Columbia Global Reports, the Forerunners series revives groundbreaking works of investigative journalism and incisive analysis published a century before CGR's founding. These texts, once forgotten or underexplored, reflect CGR's core mission: fearless reporting, global perspective, and intellectual rigor. Each selection remains strikingly relevant today, offering historical insights that challenge contemporary perspectives and reaffirm the power of journalism to shape the world. Before Martin, before Malcolm-before Du Bois and Garvey sharpened their ideological blades-there was Kelly Miller. A pioneering mathematician, sociologist, and columnist, Miller was one of the most widely read Black intellectuals of the early twentieth century. Race Adjustment, first published in 1908, stood as his response to the tumult of Jim Crow America-a fiery, clear-eyed set of essays that refused to choose sides between Booker T. Washington's cautious pragmatism and W.E.B. Du Bois's elite-driven activism. Collected here with a trenchant new introduction by Jonathan Scott Holloway, this volume restores Miller to his rightful place as the intellectual center of gravity in a period of radical transition. His critiques of political cowardice, economic exploitation, and the hypocrisies of American democracy ring out with undiminished power. Written from the "middle ground," Miller's words carried far and wide-from the pages of the Black press to the corridors of power. This selection reveals a moral voice unafraid to indict injustice wherever it appeared-and to ask, over a century later: Has the nation truly adjusted?

Celebrating a decade of Columbia Global Reports, the Forerunners series revives groundbreaking works of investigative journalism and incisive analysis published a century before CGR's founding. These texts, once forgotten or underexplored, reflect CGR's core mission: fearless reporting, global perspective, and intellectual rigor. Each selection remains strikingly relevant today, offering historical insights that challenge contemporary perspectives and reaffirm the power of journalism to shape the world. In Drift and Mastery, a twenty-five-year-old Walter Lippmann surveyed what he saw as the chaos of newly industrial America and dreamed of a bold new future. Published in 1914, at the height of the Progressive Era, this audacious manifesto diagnosed the spiritual and political confusion of a nation grappling with unbridled capitalism, mass immigration, and the collapse of old certainties. Rejecting the sentimental populism of William Jennings Bryan and the moralizing of Woodrow Wilson, Lippmann embraced Theodore Roosevelt's "New Nationalism," envisioning a society led not by profiteers but by trained experts-scientists, managers, and professionals working for the common good. More than a period piece, Drift and Mastery is striking in its embrace of centralized knowledge, its optimism about reform, and its blind spots about power. Nicholas Lemann's incisive introduction places the book alongside the contemporary work of thinkers like John Dewey and W. E. B. Du Bois while highlighting its relevance in an age of populist backlash and elite mistrust. Lippmann's flawed but fearless vision challenges us to rethink democratic leadership today.

Celebrating a decade of Columbia Global Reports, the Forerunners series revives groundbreaking works of investigative journalism and incisive analysis published a century before CGR's founding. These texts, once forgotten or underexplored, reflect CGR's core mission: fearless reporting, global perspective, and intellectual rigor. Each selection remains strikingly relevant today, offering historical insights that challenge contemporary perspectives and reaffirm the power of journalism to shape the world. Initially published in 1897, Cuba in War Time brought readers onto the battlefields with a style that was urgent, immersive, and unmistakably modern. Richard Harding Davis, the most famous journalist of his generation, filed vivid, morally charged dispatches, capturing everything from Spanish atrocities to the execution of a young Cuban rebel, and helped transform frontline reporting into a new literary form and a potent political force. Davis's work helped ignite public support for the Spanish-American War, and his account of the Battle of San Juan Hill turned a young Theodore Roosevelt into a national hero. Yet his work often blurred the line between fact and spectacle, revealing how easily journalism could be swept into the causes it chronicled. This edition reexamines Davis's legacy with a searching new introduction by Peter Maass, a celebrated war reporter himself. A foundational text in the history of American media, Cuba in War Time remains as gripping and unsettling as the events it describes.

Celebrating a decade of Columbia Global Reports, the Forerunners series revives groundbreaking works of investigative journalism and incisive analysis published a century before CGR's founding. These texts, once forgotten or underexplored, reflect CGR's core mission: fearless reporting, global perspective, and intellectual rigor. Each selection remains strikingly relevant today, offering historical insights that challenge contemporary perspectives and reaffirm the power of journalism to shape the world. Campaigns of Curiosity chronicles American journalist Elizabeth Banks's bold entry into London's rigid class system at the height of the Victorian era. Determined to make her name, Banks went undercover as a housemaid, laundress, flower girl, and heiress, bringing sharp wit and keen observation to her exposés of working-class life and the role of women in British society. First published in 1894, Campaigns of Curiosity marks a pivotal moment in the rise of investigative journalism, a form pioneered and shaped by women using ingenuity and audacity to break new ground. Following Nellie Bly's trail, Banks showed that "stunt" reporting could achieve both literary merit and lasting social insight. With a new introduction by longtime correspondent Brooke Kroeger, this edition restores a forgotten pioneer to her rightful place in journalism's history.