Date of Award
12-17-2019
Document Type
Thesis
Abstract
From the early days of Alaskan aviation beginning in 1923, stories about Alaskan bush pilots leapt from newspaper pages, captivating readers and selling papers. These newspaper stories, along with magazine articles and other popular culture media accounts, portrayed pilots as pioneers, cowboys and brave adventurers, and referred to Alaska in terms heavily laden with American frontier imagery, a trend that persisted in Alaska but faded elsewhere. What did newspaper reports convey about the lives and deaths of these aviators and their relationships to Alaska and the frontier? How has the portrayal of these early Alaskan pilots in ways that perpetuated frontier mythology affected attitudes toward Alaska's aviation industry? This research employs case study comparisons to approach these questions, evaluating tone and language of early news coverage about Alaska aviation from its advent in 1923 until early 1948 and exploring the origins of the modern American media's portrayal of the Alaska aviation industry. I argue that these early bush pilots captivated the American public because they lived and worked at the intersection of two frontiers: Alaska as The Last Frontier, and at the dawn of the air-age, the sky as a new frontier.
Recommended Citation
Williams, Leanna Prax, "Flying the frontier: a case study comparison of newspaper coverage of early northern plane crashes" (2019). Arctic and Northern Studies. 99.
https://ualaska.researchcommons.org/uaf_grad_arctic_northern/99
Handle
http://hdl.handle.net/11122/15083