When Private Talk Goes Public

1. Introduction
Kathleen A. Feeley, Jennifer Frost

2. “They make one very handsome Mirkin amongst them”: Gossip and Church Politics in Mid-Seventeenth-Century Virginia
Christine Eisel

3. “The Time When There Was So Much Talk of the Witchcraft in This Country”: Gossip and the Essex County Witchcraft Crisis of 1692
Mary Beth Norton

4. Governed by Gossip: The Personal Letters and Public Purpose of Philip Ludwell in Early-Eighteenth-Century Virginia
Virginia Price

5. The Infamous Anne Royall: Jacksonian Gossip, Scribbler, and Scold
Nancy Isenberg

6. “Gadding,” “Gainsaying,” and Negotiating Gossip in the Antebellum Black Press
Erica L. Ball

7. Gossip Law
Samantha Barbas

8. Diplomacy and Gossip: Information Gathering in the US Foreign Service, 1900–1940
Molly M. Wood

9. “As Told By Helen Ferguson”: Hollywood Publicity, Gender, and the Public Sphere
Mary Desjardins

10. Gossip in the Women’s Pages: Legitimizing the Work of Female Journalists in the 1950s and 1960s
Kimberly Wilmot Voss

11. The Smearing of Joe McCarthy: The Lavender Scare, Gossip, and Cold War Politics
Andrea Friedman

12. Gossip Goes Mainstream: People Magazine, the National Enquirer, and the Rise of Personality Journalism
Anne Helen Petersen

13. Is Charles Trippy Famous? Twenty-First-Century Celebrity Gossip on Internet Killed Television
Tim Seiber

Keywords: Social Sciences, Journalism, Cultural History, History of the Americas, Sociology, general, Social History, US History