Communication Technology in History
This page lists citations for work on numerous media technologies, including printing presses and paper as well as electronic and digital media.
Abbate, Janet. Inventing the Internet. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000.
Acland, Charles R., ed. Residual Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007
American Journalism. Vol. 17, No. 4 (Fall 2000): 1-161. Special Issue on Technology in Journalism and Mass Communication History.
Anderson, Steve F. Technologies of History: Visual Media and the Eccentricity of the Past. Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2011.
Arguimbau, Ellen. “From Party Lines and Barbed Wire: A History of Telephones in Montana.” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 63 (Autumn 2013): 34–45.
Bagdikian, Ben. The Information Machines. New York: Harper and Row, 1971.
Beauchamp, Christopher. Invented By Law: Alexander Graham Bell and the Patent That Changed America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015.
Berlin, Leslie. The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Bliven, Bruce, Jr., The Wonderful Writing Machine. New York: Random House, 1954. (typewriter)
Boczkowski, Pablo J. Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005. (covers pre-Internet computer delivery)
Boyd, William. The Slain Wood: Papermaking and its Environmental Consequences in the American South. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015.
Braun, Ernest and Stuart MacDonald. Revolution in Miniature: The History and Impact of Semiconductor Electronics. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1978.
Brooks, John. Telephone: The First Hundred Years. New York: Harper and Row, 1976.
Bruce, Robert V. Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude. Boston: Little Brown, 1973.
Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think.” Atlantic Monthly (July 1945): 101-108.
Campbell-Kelly, Martin, and William Aspray. Computer: A History of the Information Machine. New York: Basic Books, 1996.
Campbell-Kelly, Martin, and Daniel D. Garcia Swartz. From Mainframes to Smartphones: A History of the International Computer Industry. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015.
Carey, James W. “Journalism and Technology.” American Journalism 17, no. 4 (2000): 129–135.
Carey, James W. “Technology As a Totem for Culture.” American Journalism 7, no. 4 (1990): 242–51.
Carlson, Bernard. “Entrepreneurship in the Early Development of the Telephone.” Business and Economic History 23 (Winter 1994): 161-192.
Chandler, Alfred D, Jr. Inventing the Electronic Century: The Epic Story of the Consumer Electronics and Computer Science Industries. New York: Free Press, 2001.
Cheng, John. Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.
Coopersmith, Jonathan. The Rise and Fall of the Fax Machine. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015.
Corn, Joseph J. Imagining Tomorrow: History, Technology, and the American Future. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986.
Corn, Joseph J. User Unfriendly: Consumer Struggles with Personal Technologies, from Clocks and Sewing Machines to Cars and Computers. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011.
Cortada, James. Before the Computer: IBM, NCR, Burroughs, and Remington Rand and the Industry They Created, 1865-1956. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Cortada, James W. The Computer in the United States: From the Laboratory to the Market, 1930 1960. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1993.
Cortada, James W. The Digital Hand, Volume 2: How Computers Changed the Work of American Financial, Telecommunications, Media, and Entertainment Industries. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Cortada, James W., “Shaping Information History as an Intellectual Discipline,” Information and Culture: A Journal of History, 47 (no. 2, 2012), 119–44.
Cortada, James W. “How New Technologies Spread: Lessons from Computing Technologies.” Technology and Culture 54 (April 2013) 229–261.
Cowen, Ruth Schwartz. A Social History of American Technology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Cutcliffe, Stephen H. and Terry S. Reynolds, eds. Technology and American History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.*
Delbourgo, James. “A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders:” Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006.
Docter, Sharon Diane. “The First Amendment and the Shaping of Communication Technology.” Phd dissertation, University of Southern California, 1997.
Dooley, Patricia. The Technology of Journalism: Cultural Agents, Cultural Icons. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007.
Downey, Gregory J. Telegraph Messenger Boys: Labor, Technology, and Geography, 1850-1950. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Driscoll, Kevin. The Modem World: A Prehistory of Social Media. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022.
Edwards, Paul N. The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996.
Ellis, Lewis Ethan. Newsprint: Producers, Publishers, Political Pressures. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1960.
Endres, Kathleen. “The ‘Ballyhoo’ of New Communication Technology.” American Journalism 17, no. 4 (2000): 73–74.
Ensmenger, Nathan L. The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010.
Evans, Richard F. “Shocking Improvements: Electricity in the American Household at the Turn of the Century.” Nineteenth Century 20 (Spring 2000): 29-34.
Fisher, Claude S. America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
Forester, Tom, ed. The Information Technology Revolution. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985.
Gabel, David. “Competition in a Network Industry: The Telephone Industry, 1894-1910.” Journal of Economic History 54:3 (September 1994): 543-572.
Galloway, Jonathan F. The Politics and Technology of Satellite Communication. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1972.
Garnet, Robert W. The Telephone Enterprise. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.
Gertner, Jon. The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation. New York: Penguin, 2012.
Green, Venus. “Goodbye Central: Automation and the Decline of ‘Personal Service’ in the Bell System, 1878-1926.” Technology and Culture 36 (October 1985): 912-949.
Gitelman, Lisa, and Geoffrey B. Pingree. New Media, 1740–1915. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003.
Gitelman, Lisa. Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006.
Glaser, Leah S. Electrifying the Rural American West: Stories of Power, People, and Place. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009.
Goldstine, Herman H. The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973.
Goodman, Emily. “A Tale of Two Networks: The Bell Telephone System and the Meaning of ‘Information,’ 1947-1968.” Information and Culture 54:3 (2019): 281-310.
Graham, Margaret B.W. The Business of Research: RCA and the Videodisc. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Greenberg, Joshua M. From Betamax to Blockbuster: Video Stores and the Invention of Movies on Video. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010.
Haigh, Thomas, and Paul E. Ceruzzi. A New History of Modern Computing. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2021.
Headrick, Daniel R. When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700-1850. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Heide, Lars. Punched-Card Systems and the Early Information Explosion, 1880-1945. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
Hillard, Michael G. Shredding Paper: The Rise and Fall of Maine’s Mighty Paper Industry. Ithaca: ILR Press, 2021.
Hiltz, Starr Roxanne, and Murray Turoff. The Network Nation: Human Communication via Computer. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1978.
Hobart, Michael E., and Zachary S. Schiffman. Information Ages: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.
Holzman, Gerard, and Bjorn Pehrson. Early History of Data Networks. Los Alamitos, Cal.: IEEE Press, 1995.
Hudson, Heather E. Communication Satellites: Their Development and Impact. New York: Free Press, 1990.
Huurdeman, Anton. The Worldwide History of Telecommunications. New York: Wiley IEEE, 2003.
Ifrah, Georges. The Universal History of Computer. New York: Wiley, 2002.
Innis, Harold. Empire and Communication. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950.
Innis, Harold. The Bias of Communication. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951.
Innis, Harold. Changing Concepts of Time. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1952.
Isaacson, Walter. The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. New York: Simon & Shuster, 2014.
John, Richard B., ed. “Computers and Communication Networks.” Business History Review 75 (Spring 2001). Special issue.
Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983.
Kielbowicz, Richard B. “AT&T’s Antigovernment Lesson-Drawing in the Political Economy of Networks, 1905-1920.” History of Political Economy 41:4 (Winter 2009): 673-708.
Kraut, Robert, Malcolm Brynin, and Sara Kiesler, eds. Computers, Phones, and the Internet: Domesticating Information Technology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Lardner, James. Fast Forward: Hollywood, the Japanese, and the Onslaught of the VCR. New York: Norton, 1987.
Lebow, Irwin. Information Highways and Byways: From the Telegraph to the 21st Century. New York: IEEE Press, 1995.
Lecuyer, Christophe. Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth of High Tech, 1930-1970. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006.
Lécuyer, Christophe, and David C. Brock. Makers of the Microchip: A Documentary History of Fairchild Semiconductor. Cambridge: mit Press, 2010.
Lipartito, Kenneth. The Bell System and Regional Business: The Telephone in the South. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.
Lipartito, Kenneth. “System Building at the Margin: The Problem of Public Choice in the Telephone Industry.” Journal of Economic History 49 (June 1989): 232-336.
Lipartito, Kenneth. “When Women Were Switches: Technology, Work, and Gender in the Telephone Industry, 1890-1920.” American Historical Review 99 (October 1994): 1075-1111.
Lubar, Steven. Infoculture: The Smithsonian Book of Information Age Inventions. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1993.
MacDougall, Robert Duncan. “The People’s Telephone: The Politics of Technology in the United States and Canada, 1876-1926.” PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2004.
MacDougall, Robert. “The Wire Devils: Pulp Thrillers, the Telephone, and Action at a Distance in the Wiring of a Nation.” American Quarterly 58 (September 2006): 715–741.
MacDougall, Robert. The People’s Network: The Political Economy of the Telephone in the Gilded Age. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.
Makala, Jeffrey M. Publishing Plates: Stereotyping and Electrotyping in Nineteenth-Century US Print Culture. State College: Penn State University Press, 2023.
Malin, Brenton J. Feeling Mediated: A History of Media Technology and Emotion in America. New York: NYU Press, 2014.
Mari, Will. A Short History of Disruptive Journalism Technologies, 1960-1990. New York: Routledge, 2019.
Marlow, Eugene, and Eugene Secunda. Shifting Time and Space: The Story of Videotape. Westport: Praeger, 1991.
Martin, Michele. “Hello Central?” Gender, Technology, and Culture in the Formation of Telephone Systems. Toronto: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991.
Martin, Shannon E., and Kathleen A. Hansen. Newspapers of Record in a Digital Age: From Hot Type to Hot Link. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998.
Marvin, Carolyn. When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Martinez, Larry. Communication Satellites: Power Politics in Space. Dedham, Mass.: Artech House, 1985.
Marx, Leo. Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964.
McDonald, Christopher Felix. “Building the Information Society: A History of Computing as a Mass Medium.” PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 2011.
Millard, Andre. Edison and the Business of Innovation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.
Mindich, David T. Z., ed. “The Buzz: Technology in Journalism and Mass Communication History.” American Journalism 17 (Fall 2000): Special issue.
Moran, James. Printing Presses: History and Development from the 15th Century to Modern Times. London: Faber and Faber, 1973.
Mowery, David C., and Nathan Rosenberg. Paths of Innovation: Technological Change in the 20th Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Nebker, Frederik. Dawn of the Electric Age: Electrical Technologies and the Shaping of the Modern World. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2008.
Noble, David F. America By Design: Science, Technology, and The Rise of Corporate Capitalism. New York: Knopf, 1977.
Norberg, Arthur. Transforming Computer Technology: Information Processing for the Pentagon, 1962-1986. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
Nye, David E. Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990.
O’Malley, Michale. Keeping Watch: A History of American Time. New York: Viking, 1990.
Otis, Laura. Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century. Ann Arbor: University Of Michigan Press, 2011
Park, David W., Jankowski, Nicholas W., & Jones, Steve, Eds. The Long History of New Media: Technology, Historiography, and Contextualizing Newness. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2011.
Patnode, Randall. “‘What These People Need Is Radio’: New Technology, the Press, and Otherness in 1920s America.” Technology and Culture 44 (April 2003), 285–305.
Patten, Dave. Newspapers and New Media. White Plains: Knowledge Industries Publications, 1986.
Petersen, Jennifer. How Machines Came to Speak: Media Technologies and Freedom of Speech. Durham: Duke University Press, 2022.
Ploman, Edward W. Space, Earth and Communication. Westport, Conn.: Quorum Books, 1984.
Poehner, Lester L., Jr. “The Future’s Not What it Used to Be: The Decline of Technological Enthusiasm in America.” PhD dissertation, Iowa State University, 1999.
Popp, Richard. “Machine-Age Communication: Media, Transportation, and Contact in the Interwar United States.” Technology and Culture 52 (July 2011): 459–844.
Poster, Mark. Information Please: Culture and Politics in the Age of Digital Machines. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.
Purcell, Carroll W. The Machine in America: A Social History of Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.
Purcell, Carroll W. Technology in Postwar America: A History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
Rabinovitz, Lauren, and Abraham Geil. Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.
Rakow, Lana. Gender on the Line: Women, the Telephone, and Community Life. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992.
Rankin, Joy Lisi. A People’s History of Computing in the United States. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018.
Reich, Leonard S. The Making of American Industrial Research: Science and Business at G.E. and Bell, 1876-1926. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Riordan, Michael, and Lilian Hoddeson. Crystal Fire: The Invention of the Transistor and the Birth of the Information Age. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998.
Risley, Ford. “Newspapers and Timeliness: The Impact of the Telegraph and the Internet.” American Journalism 17, no. 4 (2000): 97–103.
Rochlin, Gene I. Trapped in the Net: The Unintended Consequences of Computerization. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Scott, D. Travers. “Intimacy Threats and Intersubjective Users: Telephone Training Films, 1927–1962.” American Quarterly 63 (September 2011): 487–507.
Shurkin, Joel. Engines of the Mind: The Evolution of the Computer from Mainframes to Microprocessors. New York: Norton, 1996.
Silverman, Kenneth. Lightning Man: The Accursed Life of Samuel B. Morse. New York: Knopf, 2003.
Simon, Linda. Dark Light: Electricity and Anxiety from the Telegraph to the X-Ray. Orlando: Harcourt, 2004.
Steinberg, Sigfrid H. Five Hundred Years of Printing. Oak Knoll Press, 1996.
Sterling, Christopher H., ed. Electronic Media: A Guide to Trends in Broadcasting and Newer Technologies, 1920-1983. New York: Praeger, 1984.
Sterling, Christopher H., and George Shiers, eds. History of Communications Technology: An Annotated Bibliography. Washington DC: Scarecrow Press, 2000.
Sterling, Christopher H., Phyllis W. Bernt, and Martin Weiss. Shaping American Telecommunications: A History of Technology, Policy, and Economics. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2006.
Sturken, Marita, Douglas Thomas, and Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach, eds. Technological Visions: The Hopes and Fears that Shape New Technologies. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004.
Swedin, Eric G., and David L. Ferro. Computers: The Life Story of a Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.
Taylor, Timothy D., Mark Katz, and Tony Grajeda, eds. Music, Sound, and Technology in America: A Documentary History of Early Phonograph, Cinema, and Radio. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.
Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Valente, A. J. Rag Paper Manufacture in the United States, 1801–1900: A History, with Directories of Mills and Owners. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2010.
Wasserman, Neil H. From Invention to Innovation: Long Distance Telephone Transmission at the Turn of the Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.
Westwick, Peter J. The National Labs: Science in an American System, 1947-1974. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Whitehouse, George E. Understanding the New Technology of the Mass Media. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1986.
Wurlitzer, Steve J. “The Social Construction of Technological Change: American Mass Media and the Advent of Electrical Sound Technology.” PhD dissertation, University of Iowa, 2001.
Wurtzler, Steve J. Electric Sounds: Technological Change and the Rise of Corporate Mass Media. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
Yates, JoAnne. Control Through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.
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