CLASSROOM 15: AN INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING BOOK

Julia was managing editor and a co-author of Classroom 15: How the Hoover FBI Censored the Dreams of Innocent Oregon Fourth-Graders, published 2021 by Anthem Press.

Read an excerpt of Julia’s chapter here.

Julia also ran the book’s outreach, creating all promotional art and managing social media.

PROMOTIONAL REPORTING

We dug through archives and through decades for new leads and neglected government files. We strung our distinct stories into a narrative that explored what exactly happened in that rural Oregon classroom in the throes of the Red Scare. We examined how the incident might resonate now that the Iron Curtain has fallen but new walls—from figurative political tensions to a literal US border wall—have risen.

The central story is a small one: a young girl, a small classroom, a small town, and a fleeting Warholian fifteen minutes in the national spotlight. But the scope of the book is much bigger. It draws throughlines from the Cold War to our contemporary sociopolitics. And it reveals, through the close examination of one specific historical instance, the paranoia that has plagued the American ethos and snaked down from the marble halls of government to the timber mills of small towns like Roseburg. 


REVIEWS

Read more here.

JULIA’S OTHER APPEARANCES

SPECIAL SECTION

Read the special section here.

FOREWORD BY FORMER NBC NEWS ANCHOR ANN CURRY