Newspaper Confessions: A History of Advice Columns in a Pre-Internet Age

What can century-old advice columns tell us about the Internet today? This book reveals the little-known history of advice columns in American newspapers and the virtual communities they created among their readers.

Imagine a community of people who had never met writing into a media outlet, day after day, to reveal intimate details about their lives, anxieties, and hopes. The original "virtual communities" were born not on the Internet in chat rooms but a century earlier in one of America's...