A rule of thumb about clubs and committees suggests that the secretary is actually the most important officer because they record the actions of the organization. In the same way, the scribes of modern society, the newspapers shape how events and are remembered. Newspapers document what people are thinking, their priorities, and their assumptions, or at least, what a journalist thought about these. Comparing news accounts from more than one period, with the advantage of historical distance and historical perspective permits the reader to spot differences. For this discussion, the two periods to be examined are January 8 of 1992 the same date in 1942, In the case of these two time periods of the early 1990s and the early 1940s, the most dramatic difference that colored the news was the war brewing in Europe. However, there was a myriad of other differences as well. January 1942 was before the civil rights movement, as well as before the women’s movement. These and other changes are reflected in a variety of places in the newspaper. Demonstrating the profound changes that have occurred in race relations, consider the article titled “Whites in Hawaii Arm for Defense in Fear of Japanese Residents” 1 . This report highlights anti-Japanese suspicion and bigotry a year after Pearl Harbor when many of the 150,000 Japanese staffed the ROTC and the Territorial Guard. White Hawaiians feared their Japanese neighbors could “rip off” their armbands, and open fire 2 . The authorities quoted in the article acknowledged that they could not put every citizen of Japanese ancestry into a concentration camp, but this option is reported as being under serious consideration. 3 Hindsight indicates that this was actually done in many places, an outcome that would seem shocking if not for the response of many to 9/11. Finally, in an almost throwaway sentence, the correspondent mentions the various ethnic and racial identities that inhabit the island. He mentions the Philippines, Chinese, and Koreans by numbers of the population. The writer lumps Portuguese, Spaniards, and Puerto Ricans together. Then he mentions the 1000 “Negroes” living on the island. 4 Several features of this section of the article are notable. The combining of the Portuguese, Spaniard, and Puerto Ricans would be considered carelessly insensitive today, although people disagree on how best to describe people whose ancestry is from a former colony of Spain or Portugal, versus those emigrating directly from Spain. Of course, residents of Puerto Rico consider themselves Americans. The use of the term “negroes” would be widely considered inappropriate and ignorant today. A similar use of this now-offensive term appears in an announcement of an art and craft exhibition of works by African American artists, referring to them as “Negro” artists. 5 The article notes that the exhibitors come from Karamu House of Cleveland 6 , which the article describes as ‘discovering and training the abilities” of African Americans since 1915. 7 This sounds quite modern, but the pairing of craftwork and the fine arts suggests a different set of expectations for African Americans than for artists of other races. The committee