Prof. Bill Kovarik, Ph.D. Scholarship and papers in history of the environment and the news media

ETHANOL and ETHYL LEADED GASOLINE

• Ethyl & Ethanol: The fight over the fuel of the future
  
  
• The Ethyl Controversy, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Maryland, 1993.
  
  
• Agenda Setting in the 1924 - 1926 Public Health Controversy over  Ethyl (Leaded) Gasoline, AEJMC, 1994. One of the nations first controversies over public exposure to dangerous chemicals. The American oil industry, uncomfortable with even the mildest criticism, blamed the media for its own problems.
  
  
• Charles F. Kettering and the 1921 Discovery of Tetraethyl Lead In the Context of Technological Alternatives Society of Automotive Engineer, 1994. In effect, the oil industry falsely claimed in Public Health Service hearings that there were no alternatives to leaded gasoline. These falsehoods were later acknowledcged in legal documents, including private histories of the Ethyl Corp. and court documents in an anti-trust case. In fact, paving the way for alternatives (such as ethanol) was the "original special motive" for leaded gasoline.
  
  
• Henry Ford, Charles Kettering and the Fuel of the Future takes an urgent modern theme -- that of finding renewable energy sources -- and asks an historical question. What was known about alternatives and why were they discarded? The paper was published by the Society of Automotive Historians in 1998.
  
  
• Chemcases: Fuels and Society, NSF Funded chemistry education project, Kennesaw State University, 2001. The fuels section is one of several concerning scientific issues in modern culture.
  
  
• ETHYL The 1920s Environmental Conflict Over Leaded Gasoline and Alternative Fuels, Paper to the American Society for Environmental History Annual Conference March 26-30, 2003 Providence, R.I.
  
  
• Ethyl leaded gasoline:  How a classic occupational disease became an international public health disaster,” International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health, October 2005
  
  
• Looking South: The world ethanol industry is booming – thanks to the Brazilian example, Com Ciência Ambiental (Sao Paulo, Brazil), winter 2007.
  
  
• Ethanol’s first century: Blending programs in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America, paper to the 30th International Symposium on Alcohol Fuel, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, November 2006.
  
  
• Environmental history and Nebraska’s legacy of renewable fuels (Back to the Fuel of the Future),” Nebraska State Historical Society, invited presentation, fall 2006. 
  
  
• Back to the Fuel of the Future,  Life Sciences Symposium, University of Missouri, March, 2007.
  
  
• Special Motives: Automotive Inventors and Alternative Fuels in the 1920s Paper to the Society for the History of Technology, Oct. 19, 2007
  
  
• Biofuels: History and public debate, University of Maryland School of Public Policy, April 11, 2008

HISTORY OF SCIENCE AND THE MASS MEDIA

• A Survey of Central American News Media Hardware, Intercommunication and Development needs: Paper presented to the Eighth Annual Conference on Intercultural and International Communication, Miami, Fla. Feb. 22, 1991. These are the results of a study by the International Center for Foreign Journalists concerning media technology needs in Central America.
  Dr. North and the Kansas City Milk War, Public Health Advocacy Collides with Main Street Respectability, Paper to The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications (AEJMC) 1989. This is about a New York physician and public health expert who used yellow journalism tactics to force pasteurization on the milk industry of Kansas city in the 1920s.
  
• The editor who tried to stop the Civil War: Hezekiah Niles and the New South describes the efforts of one Baltimore editor to reconcile opposing views in the 1820 - 1833 period. He clearly foresaw civil war and proposed a course of economic development for the South which was, perhaps not surprisingly, adopted after the war by Southern progressives, including Atlanta editor Henry Grady. The paper was published in American Journalism in 1992 and has been slightly updated since then.
  
• Mother of the Forest concerns a gigant ic redwood tree near what is now Yosemite Park, and how its destruction in 1853 outraged Horace Greeley, editor of the Tribune, and led to the cre ation of the national park system. This is a chapter from Mass Media and Environmental Conflict with Mark Neuzil .
  
• The Radium Girls is the story of six dying women who sued a dial-painting factory for knowingly exposing them to dealy radium in the 1920s. It is also the story of how Walter Lippmann of the New York World helped th em. This is also a chapter from Mass Media and Environmental Conflict with Mark Neuzil .
  
• Environmental History Timeline helps remind us of the traditions of reform and the roots of conservation. This was originally a guide for our use when Mark Neuzil and I wrote Mass Media and Environmental Conflict in 1996. Since then it has taken on a life of its own on the web.
  
• The confluence of newspapers and the environment in the early 20th century Looking at the news coverage of selected public health and conservation issues in the 1899 - 1932 period, we see a striking bipolar distribution, indicating a revival of Progressive era concerns late in the 1920s and the ubiquity of environmental controversy. This is a paper from the 1998 conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications.
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• Green Crusaders and the News Media: Exploring the Lost History of Environmental Conflict Before Silent Spring Presentation to the Communication Studies Seminar Series Virginia Tech September 25, 1998
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• Web Design for the Mass Media (Boston: AB Longman, 2001). This book is part history, part demonstration and part "how-to" on web page development for mass media organizations.
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• Library of the Future (powerpoint) Aug. 5, 2005 SELU conservancy
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• Niles Weekly Register Encyclopedia of Journalism History, 2006

• History of Science News
  • Interoduction
  • Scripps and the SIO
  • Walter Lippmann, Car Van Anda and the Ethyl Controversy