Crossed Wires
Crossed Wires

Author: Dan Schiller

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023-02-17

Total Pages: 833

ISBN-13: 0197639259

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A sweeping, revisionist historical analysis of telecommunications networks, from the dawn of the republic to the 21st century. Telecommunications networks are vast, intricate, hugely costly systems for exchanging messages and information-within cities and across continents. From the Post Office and the telegraph to today's internet, these networks have sown domestic division while also acting as sources of international power. In Crossed Wires, Dan Schiller, who has conducted archival research on US telecommunications for more than forty years, recovers the extraordinary social history of the major network systems of the United States. Drawing on arrays of archival documents and secondary sources, Schiller reveals that this history has been shaped by sharp social and political conflict and is embedded in the larger history of an expansionary US political economy. Schiller argues that networks have enabled US imperialism through a a recurrent "American system" of cross-border communications. Three other key findings wind through the book. First, business users of networks--more than carriers, and certainly more than residential users--have repeatedly determined how telecommunications systems have developed. Second, despite their current importance for virtually every sphere of social life, networks have been consecrated above all to aiding the circulation of commodities. Finally, although the preferences of executives and officials have broadly determined outcomes, these elites have repeatedly had to contend against the ideas and organizations of workers, social movement activists, and other reformers. This authoritative and comprehensive revisionist history of US telecommunications argues that not technology but a dominative--and contested--political economy drove the evolution of this critical industry.

The Train and the Telegraph
The Train and the Telegraph

Author: Benjamin Sidney Michael Schwantes

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

Published: 2019-08-06

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 1421429748

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A challenge to the long-held notion of close ties between the railroad and telegraph industries of the nineteenth century. To many people in the nineteenth century, the railroad and the telegraph were powerful, transformative forces, ones that seemed to work closely together to shape the economy, society, and politics of the United States. However, the perception—both popular and scholarly—of the intrinsic connections between these two institutions has largely obscured a far more complex and contested relationship, one that created profound divisions between entrepreneurial telegraph promoters and warier railroad managers. In The Train and the Telegraph, Benjamin Sidney Michael Schwantes argues that uncertainty, mutual suspicion, and cautious experimentation more aptly describe how railroad officials and telegraph entrepreneurs hesitantly established a business and technical relationship. The two industries, Schwantes reveals, were drawn together gradually through external factors such as war, state and federal safety regulations, and financial necessity, rather than because of any perception that the two industries were naturally related or beneficial to each other. Complicating the existing scholarship by demonstrating that the railroad and telegraph in the United States were uneasy partners at best—and more often outright antagonists—throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, The Train and the Telegraph will appeal to scholars of communication, transportation, and American business history and political economy, as well as to enthusiasts of the nineteenth-century American railroad industry.