Author: Nicole Nelkin

The coolest primary source find I came across while researching Christopher Miniclier ’57 was the Associated Press Name/Subject Card index, which organized the articles AP authors had written by date under their author. It was the key to figuring out Miniclier’s story. Reading through the article titles alone is enough to get an idea of what he experienced, but its research value is so much more than that.

It was a real cipher, both in the sense that it was like a code and in the sense that it symbolized his impact on the public perception of events. I decided to look deeper into the index as a case study of historical research: what did they represent? who saw them? what did they not say? what contradictions could they give up? More importantly, what conclusions could I draw from my analysis of them? (And most importantly, how much could I work on the project at the same time as doing research for my thesis?)

Being an index, the cards did not tell me nearly enough information to tell what was going on when Miniclier was writing his articles; they could only point me to other things. While I was organizing my database of evidence, I had to do some on-the-fly historical research: many of the titles in his Name/Subject index cards contained names with which I was unfamiliar. He had spent seven years as a foreign correspondent in Northern Africa and the Middle East in the late 1960s/early 1970s, and he’d written about coups, wars, tenuous alliances, drought and political assassinations—there was a lot going on.

Conclusion #1: The cards didn’t have all the information I needed to understand their full value. But that much was obvious. They did, on the other hand, often hint just enough at something that I could either look up the article in a newspaper database or look up the figures, places and events the subject titles referenced.

For example, Miniclier wrote several articles about George and Joy Adamson, who were European wildlife conservationists in Kenya. Both would later be murdered.¹

I wanted to see what I could learn about Miniclier’s job as a reporter in general and a foreign correspondent in particular, so I used JumpStart to find some sources related to the Associated Press and foreign correspondents. Some parts of Ulf Hannerz’s Foreign News: Exploring the World of Foreign Correspondents were not relevant to my research, because they dealt with a later time period, but one passage particularly struck me:

On New Year’s Eve 2001, Leif Norrman (2001), in Cape Town, had a reflective piece in Dagens Nyheter, occasioned by a telephone call he had received from a young woman from a Swedish radio station. She was doing a program on foreign correspondent life (I was also on it) and asked him how his experience compared to that of foreign correspondents in the movies. He felt a bit embarrassed because it was not much like that. […] Yes, there were times of fright, and uncertainty, and the stench of dead bodies. But the most destructive part of a correspondent’s everyday life, he concluded, was emptiness: the emptiness that comes when one’s beat is out of focus, when nobody seems to care what happens there.²

The burden to “represent groups to spectators” who are quite far away is a heavy one.³ And as Hannerz points out, these representations often have to compete for primacy in the public sphere, shared by a public that may be interested in the goings-on around the correspondent, but not necessarily more so than they are the goings-on around themselves.⁴  Hannerz (and Norrman) articulate a tension between “communication” and “publicity,” where communication—what the foreign correspondent may wish to engage in—involves a transmission of information, and publicity involves a sense of shared spectatorship.⁵

This aspect of publicity is effected by the newspaper medium, which visibly and invisibly links acquaintances and strangers alike by creating “a collectivity consisting of strangers who realize each other as the spectators of the same thing,” because newspapers, and the “pieces” of news they contain, are understood to be distributed among the public.⁶

Conclusion #2: The index represents not just Miniclier’s story but an impression of his audience (including the AP) and their impact on him; it is the story of a negotiation between their expectations and his work.

Skimming through the two databases that list articles Miniclier wrote—the Associated Press Name/Subject card index and Newspapers.com—I noticed that many of the articles I was finding in the newspapers were not the same ones listed in the AP index. Most of the ones listed in the AP index were published without a byline that named Miniclier, instead giving the location (“Nairobi, Kenya (AP)”). The hiddenness of the author contributes to the publicity of whatever event the article describes, and it obfuscates any personal bias or subjectivity on the part of the author.

Yet, some people obviously knew which articles Miniclier had written. The AP Name/Subject Card index, then, is the site of a power differential between the author (Miniclier), the Associated Press and the two groups—his countrymen/reading public and the people he wrote about—for which Miniclier was, in a way, responsible.⁷ It is a removed site, placed out of reach of the general public, and even out of reach to those who have access to archival databases, because deciphering the story still requires effort. Removed sites, though, are still accessible.

Conclusion #3: The index disrupts the publicity/passive spectacle of current events/history built up by the uncredited AP articles by assigning subjects to their authors, grouping titles together by author and date to create a subjective narrative.

That’s what the work of history is about: it’s the grouping of facts that counts more than the finding.

If journalists manipulate time, lists that put the events journalists write about right next to each other condense it even further, creating a strange temporality.⁸ Events just keep on happening. Or, if one pays attention to the dates next to each subject listed in the index, sometimes there are gaps between articles that last months. Did nothing happen? Were the events put on hold for a bit? Because newspapers report on things of note, descriptions of the everyday are likely to be only incidental to setting the scene.

The subject lines for 1971-74, during which years Miniclier was in Egypt, reference the 1973 war between Egypt and Israel. They don’t mention what was doubtless another topic of much discussion among the residents of Cairo: the monthly radio concerts by Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum that were broadcast all over the Arab world, and that singer’s illness and death in the latter half of Miniclier’s stay.⁹ Did Miniclier and his family listen to these concerts? How immersed were they in the culture of the countries he reported on? The articles don’t tell us very much.

Conclusion #4: By grouping together all the articles in a (relatively) full list, the index betrays what storylines were privileged over others, and gestures toward the ways public perception is shaped by the intersection of political agendas.

I knew Miniclier’s time as a correspondent had to have been characterized by the Cold War. Although he was not near Vietnam, he probably felt its impact as a journalist: the New York Times and the Washington Post published the “Pentagon Papers,” documents about that war, in 1971, in a move that declared their control of public information against government interests.¹⁰

That wasn’t the first time a news company had used news as leverage or as property. Miniclier himself was employed by one of the organizations that worked to “establish control over news reports through contracts that excluded other providers,” a strategy that “shaped the business of news and competition” and put the investigation and dissemination of information firmly under the yoke of capital.¹¹

Conclusion #5: Even if certain storylines are privileged over others, the index reminds us researchers to be compassionate to the author of the source and to consider all nuances, no matter what the storyline is.

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[1] “Joy Adamson,” Britannica Academic, Accessed April 3, 2023, https://academic.eb.com/levels/collegiate/article/Joy-Adamson/485.

[2] Ulf Hannerz and Anthony T. Carter, Foreign News: Exploring the World of Foreign Correspondents (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 213.

[3] Ari Adut, “A Theory of the Public Sphere,” Sociological Theory 30, No. 4 (December 2012): 244.

[4] Hannerz, 213.

[5] Adut, 244.

[6] Adut, 244.

[7] James L. Baughman, “The Decline of Journalism Since 1945,” in Making News: the Political Economy of Journalism in Britain and America from the Glorious Revolution to the Internet, ed. Richard R. John and Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb, first edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 169.

[8] Hannerz, 208.

[9] Virginia Danielson, “The Voice of Egypt”: Umm Kulthūm, Arabic Song, and Egyptian Society in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 1.

[10] Baughman, 169.

[11] Heidi J. S. Tworek, “Protecting News Before the Internet,” in Making News: the Political Economy of Journalism in Britain and America from the Glorious Revolution to the Internet, ed. Richard R. John and Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb, first edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 198.

Bibliography

Adut, Ari. “A Theory of the Public Sphere.” Sociological Theory 30, No. 4 (December 2012): 238-262. [JSTOR]

Associated Press File Drawers of National, International, News Feature Name/Subject Cards, 1937–1985. Microfilm, 1114-1154. Associated Press Corporate Archives, New York, NY. [Ancestry.com]

Baughman, James L. “The Decline of Journalism Since 1945.” In Making News: the Political Economy of Journalism in Britain and America from the Glorious Revolution to the Internet. Edited by Richard R. John and Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb. First edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. [EBSCO]

Danielson, Virginia. “The Voice of Egypt”: Umm Kulthūm, Arabic Song, and Egyptian Society in the Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Hannerz, Ulf, and Anthony T. Carter. Foreign News: Exploring the World of Foreign Correspondents. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. [ProQuest]

“Joy Adamson.” Britannica Academic. Accessed April 3, 2023. https://academic.eb.com/levels/collegiate/article/Joy-Adamson/485. [BRITANNICA ACADEMIC]

Tworek, Heidi J. S. “Protecting News Before the Internet.” In Making News: the Political Economy of Journalism in Britain and America from the Glorious Revolution to the Internet. Edited by Richard R. John and Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb. First edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. [EBSCO]

“FM SECSTATE WASHDC,” the message read, “TO AMEMBASSY NEW DELHI.” Dated September 28, 1979, the telegram from the Office of the Secretary of State to Richard Smith contained only one line of message text: “KIT MINICLIER SAYS HE IS LOOKING FORWARD TO MEETING YOU ON OCT. 3.” It was signed merely “VANCE”—Cyrus Vance, then Secretary of State.¹

When I first saw this telegram in the Central Foreign Policy Files database in the National Archives on my initial search through the archive databases available through Dickinson, all I knew about Christopher “Kit” Miniclier was that he had graduated from Dickinson two decades before the message was sent, in 1957, and that he had written an editorial in the Dickinsonian protesting the dismissal of Professor Laurent R. LaVallee the year before that, in 1956.²  How had the Secretary of State come to know him?

An Intriguing Story

I had decided to do an preliminary search on Miniclier to see if there was any more to the LaVallee story from the perspective of students on campus, but my first stop—Ancestry.com—turned up a much more interesting story that held the key to deciphering the telegram. Among the passenger records detailing the travels of a teen-aged Christopher, his parents Louis and Lois, and other members of his family; the high school and college year books; the city directories; and the birth records were several Name/Subject index cards for the Associated Press, which list articles written by AP journalists. Under “Miniclier, C. C.” there were forty cards in all, from 1964 through 1978—a year shy of the telegram to New Delhi.

The first card has story titles like “Eric Goldman, the new idea man for Pres. Johnson” and “What’s a wife worth?” and the last lists “Institute for Religious Studies opens its doors (Peking),” but in between these are titles that reference places and political leaders in Burundi, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Israel, Jordan, Kenya, Libya, Nigeria, Palestine, Somalia, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, Yugoslavia and Zambia.³ As I skimmed through the cards, I quickly realized that Miniclier’s life was a story in its own right, independent of the LaVallee case. Here was a sprawling story about journalism, international politics and interpersonal ties—from Fairfax County, VA (where Miniclier attended high school), all over North Africa, and then back to Denver, CO, and through the turbulent years of the Cold War.

And in the middle of all that, Dickinson College: first during his undergraduate days, and then in 1979, when he sent an article describing his impressions of China to the Dickinson magazine after he became “the first American news agency journalist to be granted a working visa, and permission to travel extensively without a delegation” in the People’s Republic of China.⁴

Dickinsonian Editor… and Mermaid Player

In order to find out more about Miniclier’s time at Dickinson, I browsed the digital collection at the Dickinson College Archives and Special Collections, which gave me an idea of what materials would be easy to find and what might be lurking under the surface, so to speak. In addition to Miniclier’s 1979 article on China, I found a few photographs, including one that does not seem to come from a yearbook (though it is not in his drop file). The close-up of his face (right) helped me identify him in other places, such as photographs in the Microcosm yearbooks.

The Microcosm yearbooks were a great way to find out what sort of things Miniclier had been involved in on campus. His senior portrait was accompanied by his oft-used sayings and a list of his on-campus activities, which included the Mermaid Players (started the year before he arrived to campus) and ROTC.⁵ Searching through the Dickinsonian for his name proved not as fruitful as I had hoped, because the editors, including him, were listed on multiple pages. However, I was able to find out that he had majored in political science and minored in economics.⁶

At the Dickinson Archives, archivist Malinda Triller-Doran helped me find out more about Miniclier. Although the drop file for “Miniclier, C. C.” only contained the magazine article about China, Malinda knew that he had been in a production of Our Town in 1954.

There was a drop file for the production, which contained photographs, as well as a file for the 1954-1955 Mermaid Players season. Although only one photograph was labeled, I was able to identify Miniclier in other photographs. It turns out he was only a named character in one production that season—he was the “First Dead Man” in Our Town (and credited as “Kit Miniclier”).⁷ Tickets were 75 cents apiece.

My visit to the Archives didn’t turn up much that aided me in figuring out what had happened to Miniclier after he’d left Dickinson, but it gave me some background on him. I’d gotten a general sense of his character—actor, journalist, smiling in nearly every photograph. It was time to dig a little deeper.

Organizing Evidence

The AP Name/Subject Card Index had given me a good starting point for analyzing Miniclier’s journalistic activities. I headed to Newspapers.com to see what I could dig up there. Searching “Christopher Miniclier” brought up hundreds of results, most of them about our man. He’d authored so many articles! I had to scroll through the repetitive ones—“What’s a wife worth?” must have been reprinted in at least thirty papers. There were a few that were credited to him that matched the ones in the AP Name/Subject Card Index. One thing I learned by browsing through those newspapers, though, is that articles weren’t always attributed to an author. One article would have “by Christopher Miniclier (AP)” printed at the top, but the next one would simply say something like “Nairobi (AP)” without crediting an author.

Being able to see not only the individual articles but also the whole pages on which they appeared helped me to see the context in which the articles might be read. Sometimes they appeared next to sensational stories of murder. Sometimes they were the sensational stories—Miniclier himself wrote about coups, wars, child murderers, famine and assassinations—and appeared next to advertisements for baby clothes. I guess not much has changed in that respect—the biggest differences between that kind of newspaper and Twitter are the time-frame and format—but a lot has changed in the world since Kit was acting in plays at Dickinson, and Miniclier was right there in the middle of it, documenting, analyzing and exploring.

How many articles did Miniclier actually write, and where did he actually go? To get a sense of the scope, I picked out some of the more interesting articles gleaned from Newspapers.com and put them in a database using Notion. I also input the headlines of the articles in the AP Name/Subject Card Index, as well as all the evidence I’d gathered so far. By noting the date of publication (or date of event) and tagging for region and source type, I would be able to organize the list of references in a timeline, or by region. For each entry, I included all relevant photographs and notes.

I didn’t only find articles written by Miniclier, though. Keeping in mind his nickname, I searched for both “Christopher Miniclier” and “Kit Miniclier” and found a few articles that mentioned him and his family. The earliest examples are from 1944, when he and his grandmother visited relatives in York County, PA. The “County” section of the September 6, 1944 Gazette and Daily included a segment “Brief News, Notes of Stewartstown,” which included the following paragraph:

Mrs. Arthur H. Carver and grandson, Kit Miniclier, Oak Park, ill., have returned home after spending several weeks here with Mrs. John H. Kurtz, Dr. and Mrs. Evans M. Free and other relatives and friends in this section.⁸

Twenty-four years later, on April 3, 1968, the same newspaper reported that Lois Carver Miniclier, Kit’s mother, was “fatally injured” in a car crash. Surviving her were her husband and three children, including Christopher, who was in Kenya for the Associated Press.⁹ I had collected the titles of the articles Miniclier had written during that year, but this new article put those in a new context. There was an emotional punch hidden in the puzzle of evidence that only revealed itself once I put the databases in conversation with each other.

A note on searching

With databases at our fingertips, it’s easy to get bogged down in the weeds of newspaper articles, passenger lists and duplicate records. Taking a step back can be helpful: big-picture stuff, things that wouldn’t be in an archive but are still primary sources for a biography. To get a sense of what was “out there” on the Internet, I asked Professor Google, and found a few more items of note, including an interview with Miniclier’s daughter and a 2020 death notice for his wife, Olga, whose photographs appear in the 1979 Dickinson magazine article about China.

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[1] Department of State to Embassy New Delhi, Telegram 255731, September 28, 1979, 1979STATE255731, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1973-79/Electronic Telegrams, RG 59: General Records of the Department of State, National Archives (accessed April 3, 2023). [AAD]

[2] “Without Due Process Can There Be Unity?,” Dickinsonian, 23 March, 1956.

[3] Associated Press File Drawers of National, International, News Feature Name/Subject Cards, 1937–1985, Microfilm, 1114-1154, Associated Press Corporate Archives, New York, NY. [Ancestry.com]

[4] C. C. (Kit) Miniclier, “No Fortune Cookies Here,” The Dickinson College Magazine 56, no. 2 (May 1979): 2.

[5] “Christopher Carver Miniclier,” Microcosm (1957): 67.

[6] “Miniclier heads 1956 ‘Dickinsonian,'” Dickinsonian, 13 January, 1956.

[7] Mermaid Players, Our Town program, 1 December, 1954, Mermaid Players, 1954-1955, Archives and Special Collections, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA.

[8] “Brief News, Notes of Stewartstown,” The Gazette and Daily (York, PA), September 6, 1944, Newspapers.com.

[9] “Former Resident Of Stewartstown Killed in Crash,” The Gazette and Daily (York, PA), April 3, 1968, Newspapers.com.

Bibliography

Alesbury, Elizabeth. “What’s in a Name? Giving the PA Counterpart a Global Connection.” PAEA, August 25, 2015. Accessed April 3, 2023. https://paeaonline.org/resources/public-resources/paea-news/giving-the-pa-counterpart-a-global-connection.

Associated Press File Drawers of National, International, News Feature Name/Subject Cards, 1937–1985. Microfilm, 1114-1154. Associated Press Corporate Archives, New York, NY. [Ancestry.com]

Department of State to Embassy New Delhi, Telegram 255731, September 28, 1979. 1979STATE255731, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1973-79/Electronic Telegrams, RG 59: General Records of the Department of State, National Archives (accessed April 3, 2023). [AAD]

Fairfax High School. “Fair Facts.” Fair Fac Sampler. Fairfax, VA: 1952. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/farefacsampler1952fair/page/92/mode/2up. Accessed on April 3, 2023.

Mermaid Players. Our Town program, 1 December, 1954. 1954-1955, Mermaid Players, Archives and Special Collections, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA.

Microcosm (1957).

Miniclier, C. C. “No Fortune Cookies Here.” The Dickinson College Magazine 56, no. 2 (May 1979): 2-4.

“Olga Johanna Miniclier.” Starks Funeral Parlor. Accessed April 3, 2023. http://www.starksfuneral.com/obituary/2389-v0nipvhxys.

Photograph of Christopher Carver Miniclier, 1957. Photograph Archives, Students, Archives and Special Collections, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA.

“Brief News, Notes of Stewartstown.” The Gazette and Daily (York, PA), September 6, 1944. Newspapers.com.

“Miniclier heads 1956 ‘Dickinsonian.'” Dickinsonian, 13 January, 1956.

“Without Due Process Can There Be Unity?” Dickinsonian, 23 March, 1956.

“Former Resident Of Stewartstown Killed in Crash.” The Gazette and Daily (York, PA), April 3, 1968. Newspapers.com.