“[An] immensely entertaining book. . . . McKinney vividly re-creates the city’s no-holds-barred newspaper culture.” — Chicago Tribune

“Shifting smoothly from the life of one Medill, Patterson or McCormick to another, in the end she achieves a clear and comprehensive family biography, with all its complex interconnections.” — New York Times Book Review

“A solid account of this family.” — Washington Post

“Megan McKinney has written a knock-out dynastic history about the world of journalism. In The Magnificent Medills we learn how a single family forever changed Chicago and America. It’s impossible to understand today’s modern media world without reading this brilliant book. Highly recommended!” — Douglas Brinkley, author of The Quiet World

“Megan McKinney’s wonderfully researched, thoroughly engrossing, The Magnificent Medills, reveals Chicago’s McCormick-Patterson family in all its dazzling brilliance and delicious eccentricity.” — David Garrard Lowe, author of Lost Chicago

“Compulsively readable. . . . With its backdrop of wealth and power, The Magnificent Medills reads almost like a rich historical novel. It just happens to be true.” — BookPage

“An intensely personal look at the Medill family. . . . Meticulously researched and detailed.” — Washington Independent Review of Books

“Chicago historian McKinney provides the first comprehensive chronicle of the Medill newspaper dynasty. . . . Deftly tell[ing] the tale of one of America’s first families of business.” — Philanthropy Magazine Review

“Ink, booze and eccentricity flow through a newspaper dynasty’s veins in this lively, gossipy clan bio. . . . Like her subjects, McKinney blends canny fact-finding, well-paced narrative and colorful detail into a compulsively readable confection.” — Publishers Weekly

“It is their brilliance in publishing newspapers when newspapers really mattered, combined with lives full of fault lines, that truly fascinates. . . . A solid account of the life and times of a family that was indeed magnficent.” — Kirkus Reviews

“This portrait of a storied newspaper dynasty packs a powerful punch. . . . Not only a compulsively readable collective biography but also an overview of the rapid evolution of the American newspaper industry during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.” — Booklist

Propaganda