In the broadest sense, I have devoted my career to studying the rhetoric of the “new” in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century, especially in the periodical press. Using a wide range of digitized texts and archival sources, I examine how historically oppressed groups “rebranded” themselves in their struggle for full civil rights. My most recent work specializes on the New Negro, the first and longest lasting media campaign in American history that worked to combat the brutality of anti-Black propaganda in American history.