His name may not be as well known as that of his colleague and spiritual descendent, Marshall McLuhan, but Harold Innis's (1894-1952) influence on contemporary critical media and communication studies has been no less profound. This concise look at Innis's life and contributions to the communication field charts his beginnings in political economy to his later work in critical media studies and communications history, synthesizing his key publications and clearly showing their ongoing resonance for the field today. The book also includes an appendix by William J. Buxton on the 'History of Communications' manuscript and one by J. David Black on the contributions of Mary Quayle Innis.

A collection of original essays that moves beyond the prevalent view of Harold Innis as a technological determinist, Harold Innis in the New Century brings his innovative ideas to bear upon a variety of contemporary issues, such as postmodernism, liberalism, gender, and cultural policy.

Harold Innis is widely understood as the proponent of the "Laurentian school" of historiography, which mapped Canadian development along an East-West axis. Harold Innis and the North turns the axis North-South by examining Innis's intense and abiding interest in the North, and providing new perspectives on this seminal figure in Canadian political economy and communication studies. This collection reveals that Innis's advocacy of the North was closely bound up with his vision of northern Canada as the site of a second industrial revolution based on mining, hydro-electric power, pulp and paper, and enabled by new forms of transportation. Long preoccupied with Canada's coming of age as a balanced and integrated industrial nation-state, Innis grappled with the same issues about the North in the Canadian nation that we are dealing with today. Chapters explore the breadth of Innis's northern activities, including his early studies of the fur trade, his biography of eighteenth-century explorer and cartographer Peter Pond, his review essays on the North for the Canadian Historical Review, his leadership of the Rockefeller-sponsored Arctic Survey, and his trip to the Soviet Union. Harold Innis and the North crafts a new narrative about the nature and scope of Innis's intellectual project and provides a unique appreciation of his multi-faceted professional identity. Contributors include Sergei Arkhipov (North-Ossetian State University and NGO Vladikavkaz Institute of Economics) Jeffrey Brison (Queens), George Colpitts (Calgary), Matthew Evenden (UBC), Barry Gough (Churchill College, Cambridge and Kings College, London), Paul Heyer (Wilfrid Laurier), Jim Mochoruk (North Dakota), Liza Piper (Alberta), Shirley Roburn (Concordia), Peter van Wyck (Concordia), Jeff Webb (Memorial).

Best known for his writings on economic history and communications, Harold Innis also produced a body of biographical work that paid particular attention to cultural memory and how it is enriched by the study of neglected historical figures. In this compelling volume, William Buxton addresses Innis's engagement with the legacy of the fur trader and adventurer Peter Pond. Harold Innis on Peter Pond comprises eight texts by Innis, including his 1930 biography of Pond as well as his writings on the explorer's myriad activities. The book also features a collection of eight letters exchanged between Innis and Florence Cannon, a descendent of Pond with a strong interest in her ancestor's life and times, and an unpublished 1932 article on Pond's 1773–75 activities as a fur trader on the upper Mississippi, written by Innis's former student R. Harvey Fleming. Situating Innis's writings on Pond in relation to his broader body of biographical work, Buxton interprets what these texts tell us about Innis's intellectual practice, historiography, and the writing of biography. The book explores how Innis's perspectives shifted with changing intellectual and political circumstances and shows that his advocacy of Pond as an unrecognized "father of confederation" challenged conventional views of Canadian nation-building. A critical edition of previously overlooked biographical texts, Harold Innis on Peter Pond traces what these writings disclose about the biographer's character and values even as they discuss their subject.

Wilbur Schramm and Noam Chomsky Meet Harold Innis is an original, critical, in-depth analysis of the media and communication thought of Canada’s most highly acclaimed scholar, Harold Adams Innis. Even in Canada, however, Innis’s writings until now have been only partially cited and interpreted: Innis is usually stereotyped as being merely an economic historian fixated on previous civilizations, whereas in fact he was an astute analyst whose main concerns were with present problems and future trajectories. In the United States, meanwhile, Innis’s media and communication writings have been quite neglected and even denigrated. Drawing on Innis’s less frequently cited work, including his long neglected Political Economy in the Modern State, Robert Babe opens up Innis’s media scholarship as a whole,unfolding it in startling critical, yet ultimately appreciative ways. By comparing Innis’s media scholarship with Wilbur Schramm's and Noam Chomsky's, moreover, Babe tests the claims, positions, and modes of analysis not only of Innis, but also of the other two celebrated scholars as well, casting new light on their works and allowing the reader to imagine what sort of discourses might have been possible had the three been in conversation together. Wilbur Schramm and Noam Chomsky Meet Harold Innis provides comparative insight into foundational media scholarship in the United States and Canada, and explores in some detail the relevance of Innis for twenty-first century digitized society.

For decades, media historians have heard of Harold Innis’s unpublished manuscript exploring the history of communications—but very few have had an opportunity to see it. In this volume, editors and Innis scholars William J. Buxton, Michael R. Cheney, and Paul Heyer make widely accessible, for the first time, three core chapters from the legendary Innis manuscript. Here, Innis (1894-1952) examines the development of paper and printing from antiquity in Asia through to 16th century Europe. He demonstrates how the paper/printing nexus intersected with a broad range of other phenomena, including administrative structures, geopolitics, militarism, public opinion, aesthetics, cultural diffusion, religion, education, reception, production processes, technology, labor relations, and commerce, as well as the lives of visionary figures. Buxton, Cheney, and Heyer knit the chapters into a cohesive narrative and help readers navigate Innis’s observations by summarizing the heavily detailed factual material that peppered the unpublished manuscript. They provide further context for Innis’s arguments by adding annotations, references, and pertinent citations to his other writings. The end result is both a testament to Innis’s status as a canonical figure in the study of communication and a surprisingly relevant contribution to how we might think about the current sea change in all aspects of social, cultural, political, and economic life stemming from the global shift to digital communication.

Offering fresh insight into the early life of Harold Adams Innis (1894-1952), this volume makes available a number of previously unpublished writings from the renowned Canadian economic historian and media scholar. Part I, Innis’s autobiographical memoir, chronicles his farm-based family background, early education, military service during World War I, and the beginnings of what would become a distinguished academic career. Part II features a selection of correspondence during his military service, revealing both the pain and perceptions derived from that experience, and other war-related writings. It also includes “The Returned Soldier,” a detailed piece of research and a compassionate plea to recognize how the aftermath of the Great War would affect those who served as well as the individuals and institutions on the home front. Years before the term “post-traumatic stress disorder” was coined, Innis was acutely aware of the condition and suggested ways in which it might be treated. Other war-related items included are Innis’s first published article (dealing with the economics of the solider) and a draft speech composed in the fall of 1918. All original materials have been extensively annotated to provide context for the contemporary reader and researcher.

Excerpts from criticism of the works of novelists, poets, playwrights, and other creative writers, 1900-1960.

"The celebration of network cultures as open, decentralized, and horizontal all too easily overshadows their political dimensions. Organized Networks sets out to destroy these myths by tracking the antagonisms that lurk within Internet governance debates, the exploitation of labor in creative industries, and the aesthetics of global finance capital. Cutting across the fields of media theory, political philosophy and cultural critique, Ned Rossiter diagnoses some of the key problematics facing network cultures today."--BOOK JACKET.

Designed to accompany the two-volume History of the Canadian Peoples and the one-volume synthesis, Canada: A National History. This book can also supplement any survey of Canadian history text or serve as a stand-alone text. Nation and Society: Readings in Post-Confederation Canadian History offers students a sample of some of the best recent scholarship on the history of Canada since Confederation. The readings are grouped in a combination of time periods and themes that are commonly used in studies of the post-Confederation period: "Inventing Canada, 1867-1914"; "Economy and Society in the Industrial Age, 1867-1918"; "Transitional Years: Canada 1919-1945"; "Reinventing Canada, 1945-1975"; and "Post-Modern Canada."