The Telegraph and Cables

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Adams, Stephen B.  “Arc of Empire: The Federal Telegraph Company, the U.S. Navy, and the Beginnings of Silicon Valley.” Business History Review 91: 2 (2017): 329-359.

Andrews, Melodie.  “What the Girls Can Do: The Debate Over the Employment of Women in the Early American Telegraph Industry.”  Essays in Economic and Business History 8 (1990): 109-120.

Arceneaux, Noah.  “News on the Air: The New York Herald, Newspapers, and Wireless Telegraphy, 1899-1917.  American Journalism 30:2 (Spring 2013): 160-181.

Arrington, Leonard.  “The Deseret Telegraph.” Journal of Economic History 11 (1951): 117-139.

Bates, Alice.  “The History of the Telegraph in California.” Annual Publication of the Historical Society of Southern California 9 (1914): 181-187.

Blondheim, Menahem. News Over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844-1897. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994.

Bork, Ulf Jonas.  “Foreign Correspondence in the Early Telegraphic era: The Herald, the Tribune, and the 1848 Revolutions.” American Journalism 40:4 (Fall 2023): 447-467.

Briggs, Charles F.  The Story of the Telegraph, and a History of the Great Atlantic Cable.  New York: Rudd and Carleton, 1858.

Britton, John A.  Cables, Crises, and the Press: The Geopolitics of the New International Information System in the Americas, 1866-1903.  Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013.

Brooker-Gross, Susan R.  “Nineteenth Century News Definitions and Wire Service Usage.”  Journalism Quarterly 60 (Spring 1983): 25.

Calhoun, Gloria. “Why Wire Mattered: Building U.S. Networked Infrastructures, 1845-1910.” Technology and Culture62: 1 (2021): 156-184.

Carey, Craig. “Breaking the News: Telegraphy and Yellow Journalism in the Spanish-American War.”  American Periodicals 26:2 (2016): 130-148.

Carey, James W.  Communication As Culture: Essays on Media and Society.  Chapter 8 “Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph.”  Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989.

Chandler, Robert J.  “The California News-Telegraph Monopoly, 1860-1870.” Southern California Quarterly 58:4 (Winter 1976): 459-484.

Coe, Lewis.  The Telegraph: A History of Morse’s Invention and Its Predecessors.  Jefferson, NC: McFarland Press, 1993.

Cowen, Ruth Schwartz.  A Social History of American Technology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

DuBoff, Richard D.  “The Rise of Communications Regulation: The Telegraph Industry, 1845-1860.”  Journal of Communications 34 (Summer 1984): 52-66.

Du Boff, Richard B.  “The Telegraph in Nineteenth-Century America: Technology and Monopoly.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 26:4 (October 1984): 571-586.

Downey, Gregory J.  Telegraph Messenger Boys: Labor, Communication, and Technology 1850-1950.  New York: Routledge, 2002.

DuBoff, Richard B.  “The Rise of Communications Regulation: The Telegraph Industry, 1844-1880.”  Journal of Communication 34:3 (Summer 1984): 52-66.

Ely, Richard T.  “Should the Government Control the Telegraph?”  Arena (December 1895): 49-53.

Field, Henry M.  The Story of the Atlantic Telegraph.  New York: Scribner’s, 1892.

File, Patrick C.  Bad News Travels Fast: The Telegraph, Libel, and Press Freedom in the Progressive Era.  Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2019.

Gabler, Edwin.  The American Telegrapher: A Social History, 1860-1900.  New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988.

Giddings, T.H.  “Rushing the Transatlantic News in the 1830s and 1840s.” New York Historical Society Quarterly 42 (January 1958): 47-59.

Gordon, John Steele.  Thread Across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable.  New York: Walker & Co., 2002.

Headrick, Daniel R.  The Invisible Weapon: Telecommunications and International Politics 1851-1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Hearn, Chester G.  Circuits in the Sea: The Men, the Ships, and the Atlantic Cable.  Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004.

Hampf, M. Michaela, and Simone Mueller-Pohl, eds.  Global Communication Electric: Business, News, and Politics in the World of Telegraphy.  Frankfurt: Campus, 2014.

Hochfelder, David Paul.  “Taming the Lighting: American Telegraphy as a Revolutionary Technology, 1832-1860.”  PhD dissertation, Case Western Reserve University, 1999.

Hochfelder, David. “Constructing an Industrial Divide: Western Union, AT&T, and the Federal Government, 1876-1971.” Business History Review 76:4 (2002): 706-732.

Hochfelder, David.  The Telegraph in America, 1832-1920.   Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012.

Honsowetz, Aaron Michael. “The 1866 Post Roads Act: Federal Preemption and Deregulation of the United States Telegraph Industry.” PhD dissertation, George Mason University, 2015.

Jepsen, Thomas C.  “The Telegraph Comes to Colorado: A New Technology and Its Consequences.”  Essays and Monographs in Colorado History 7:3 (1987): 1-26.

Jepsen, Thomas.  “A New Business in the World: The Telegraph, Privacy, and the US Constitution in the Nineteenth Century.”  Technology and Culture 59:1 (January 2018): 95-125.

Jepson, Thomas C. My Sisters Telegraphic: Women in the Telegraph Office, 1846-1950. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000.

Kathke, Torsten.  Wires That Bind: Nation, Region, and Technology in the Southwestern United States, 1854-1920.  Transcript Verlag, 2017.

Kielbowicz, Richard B.  “The Telegraph, Bandwidth, and the News Story.” Information & Culture 57:3 (2022): 307-331.

Kilmer, Paulette D. “A Wake-up Call for Zombies: The Telegraph as Wayward Spark.” American Journalism 17, no. 4 (2000): 93–94.

Lyons, Jeffrey K.  “The Pacific Cable, Hawai’i, and Global Communication.”  Hawaiian Journal of History 39 (2005): 35–52.

Mueller, Simone M.  Wiring the World: The Social and Cultural Creation of Global Telegraph Networks.  New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.

Nahlbach, Alex.  “Poisoned at the Source?  Telegraphic News Services and Big Business in the Nineteenth Century.”  Business History Review 77 (Winter 2003): 577-610.

Nickles, David Paul.  Under the Wire: How the Telegraph Changed Diplomacy.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Nonnenmacker, Thomas.  “State Promotion and Regulation of the Telegraph Industry, 1845-1860.”  Journal of Economic History 61 (March 2001): 19-36.

Parsons, Frank.  The Telegraph Monopoly.  Philadelphia: C.F. Taylor, 1899.

Phalen, William J.  How the Telegraph Changed the World.  Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014.

Plum, William Rattle.  The Military Telegraph During the Civil War in the United States.  2 vols.  New York: Arno, 1974.  reprint edition.

Risley, Ford. “Newspapers and Timeliness: The Impact of the Telegraph and the Internet.” American Journalism 17, no. 4 (2000): 97–103.

Russell, Edmund. “Capitalism Matters: How Financial and Technological Innovations Shaped U.S. Telegraphs, 1845-1860.” Technology and Culture 63:1 (January 2022): 31-60.

Russell, Edmund, and Lauren Winkler.  “Animating History: Digitally Mapping the United States Telegraph System.” Technology and Culture 64:4 (October 2023): 1211-1225.

Scharlott, Bradford W.  “The Influence of the Telegraph on Wisconsin Newspaper Growth.”  Journalism Quarterly 66 (Autumn 1989): 710-715.

Scharlott, Bradford W., and Mary Carmen Cupito. “Proto-Broadcasting in Cincinnati, 1847–1875: The Flow of Telegraph News to Merchants and the Press.”  Ohio Valley History 7 (Spring 2007): 32–46.

Schreiner, George Abel. Cables and Wireless, and Their Role in the Foreign Relations of the United States. Boston: Stratford, 1924.

Schwoch, James.  Wired Into Nature: The Telegraph and the North American Frontier.  Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018.

Segrave, Kerry.  Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance in America, 1862–1920. Jefferson: McFarland, 2014. 

Staiti, Paul J.  Samuel F.B. Morse.  New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Standage, Tom.  The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s Online Pioneers.  New York: Walker & Co., 1998.

Thompson, Robert Luther.  Wiring a Continent:  The History of the Telegraph Industry in the United States.  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947.

Vail, Alfred, and J. Cummings Vail.  Eyewitness to Early American Telgraphy.  New York: Arno Press, 1974.  (reprint of 1845 and 1914 publications)

Wenzlhuemer, Roland.  Connecting the Nineteenth-Century World: The Telegraph and Globalization.  New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Wenzlhuemer, Roland.  “The Telegraph and the Control of Material Movements: A Micro-Study About the Detachment of Communication from Transport.” Technology and Culture 58:3 (July 2017): 625-649.

Wheeler, Tom.  Mr. Lincoln’s T-Mails: The Untold Story of How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War.  New York: Harper Collins, 2006.

Wolff, Joshua D.  Western Union and the Creation of the American Corporate Order, 1845-1893.  New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Zorrow, William Frank. “Jeptha H. Wade in California: Beginning the Transcontinental Telegraph.” California Historical Society Quarterly 29:4 (December 1950): 345-356.

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