Colonization, until 1948Colonizing, in the New York Times headline · 1902 to 1948
A word that goes missing
Colonization, until 1948
Calling it colonization now starts an argument. It used to be the plain word, and American papers used it in their own headlines: Plan of Colonizing Palestine With Jews (1902), Jewish Colonists Advancing (1908), Jewish Colonists Redeem Palestine (1912), Palestine Natives Oppose Zionism (1921).
Every use of it by a newspaper describing the project as it happened sits before 1948. After that it turns up twice more and both are different in kind: an Arab physicist in 1957 given space to argue back, writing about "when Zionist colonization began," and a looking-back column in Sioux City reprinting an old notice about local fundraising. After that only critics and historians reach for it, and always about the past.
What returns in the 1990s is settlement, which names a smaller thing: an outpost, a problem, an obstacle to peace.
The chart for this section is drawn on the site →
Counts are from these {{N_ITEMS}} clippings, not from the whole American press. This finding has been checked against the Library of Congress’s collection of scanned American newspapers, and the result is in the section on the word for the people.