Although James Carey’s idea of journalism history has been neglected for a long time in Chinese scholarship, this paper attempts to contextualize Carey’s proposals in journalism history with his crucial texts and the historical and social backgrounds. In order to resolve the problem that journalism history is alienated from journalism education, Carey first constructed a new idea of cultural journalism history, not only influenced by the scholarship of new social history and new cultural history, but also absorbing the research methods of anthropology. Moreover, when facing the doubt and challenge, he then replaced cultural journalism history with practice journalism history, emphasizing human’s subjectivity in journalism practice and cultural essence in journalism history. However, Carey’s ideas in journalism history have two internal contradictions: on the one hand, his viewpoint is macro yet his research method is micro; on the other hand, his task focuses on resolving the problem in traditional journalism history, but his criticism could not be developed as an ideological critique, trapped in thedilemma between ideology and utopian.