For decades, media historians have heard of Harold Innis’s unpublished manuscript exploring the history of communications—but very few have had an opportunity to see it.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and help readers navigate Innis’s observations by summarizing the heavily detailed factual material that peppered the unpublished manuscript.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.

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.

The Handbook of Communication History addresses central ideas, social practices, and media of communication as they have developed across time, cultures, and world geographical regions. It attends to both the varieties of communication in world history and the historical investigation of those forms in communication and media studies. The Handbook editors view communication as encompassing patterns, processes, and performances of social interaction, symbolic production, material exchange, institutional formation, social praxis, and discourse. As such, the history of communication cuts across social, cultural, intellectual, political, technological, institutional, and economic history. The volume examines the history of communication history; the history of ideas of communication; the history of communication media; and the history of the field of communication. Readers will explore the history of the object under consideration (relevant practices, media, and ideas), review its manifestations in different regions and cultures (comparative dimensions), and orient toward current thinking and historical research on the topic (current state of the field). As a whole, the volume gathers disparate strands of communication history into one volume, offering an accessible and panoramic view of the development of communication over time and geographical places, and providing a catalyst to further work in communication history.

The International History of Communication Study maps the growth of media and communication studies around the world. Drawing out transnational flows of ideas, institutions, publications, and people, it offers the most comprehensive picture to date of the global history of communication research and education. This volume reaches into national and regional areas that have not received much attention in the scholarship until now, including Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East alongside Europe and North America. It also covers communication study outside of academic settings: in international organizations like UNESCO, and among commercial and civic groups. It moves beyond the traditional canon to cover work by forgotten figures, including women scholars in the field and those outside of the United States and Europe, and it situates them all within the broader geopolitical, institutional, and intellectual landscapes that have shaped communication study globally. Intended for scholars and graduate students in communication, media studies, and journalism, this volume pushes the history of communication study in new directions by taking an aggressively international and comparative perspective on the historiography of the field. Methodologically and conceptually, the volume breaks new ground in bringing comparative, transnational, and global frames to bear, and puts under the spotlight what has heretofore only lingered in the penumbra of the history of communication study.

When and how do communication and history impact each other? How do disciplinary perspectives affect what we know? Explorations in Communication and History addresses the link between what we know and how we know it by tracking the intersection of communication and history. Asking how each discipline has enhanced and hindered our understanding of the other, the book considers what happens to what we know when disciplines engage. Through a critical collection of essays written by top scholars in the field, the book addresses the engagement of communication and history as it applies to the study of technology, audiences and journalism. A comprehensive introduction by Barbie Zelizer contextualises these debates and makes a case for the importance of disciplinary engagement for teaching as well as research in media and cultural studies and each section has a brief introduction to contextualise the essays and highlight the issues they raise, making this an invaluable collection for students and scholars alike.

Maintains that communication is not merely the transmission of information; reminding the reader of the link between the words "communication" and "community". This title questions the American tradition of focusing only on mass communication's function as a means of social and political control.

Updated in a new 6th edition, Communication in History reveals how media has been influential in both maintaining social order and as powerful agents of change. With revised new readings, this anthology continues to be, as one reviewer wrote, "the only book in the sea of History of Mass Communication books that introduces readers to a more expansive, intellectually enlivening study of the relationship between human history and communication history". From print to the Internet, this book encompasses a wide-range of topics, that introduces readers to a more expansive, intellectually enlivening study of the relationship between human history and communication history.

Comprehensive history of communication from antiquity to the present, comprised of essential texts of communication scholarship contextualized and supported by original material. Core or supplementary text for courses in Communication History, Media History, or Introduction to Communication courses in departments of Communication, Media, History, and Cultural Studies. New materials to this edition link communication to larger historical contexts, and increase the book's coverage of digital media, social issues, and non-Western contexts. New case studies explore the Black Press, the impact of photography on journalism, gender and civil rights discourses in the media, and the effects of algorithmic data on modern social media platforms.

This volume collects Innis' published and unpublished essays on economic history, from 1929 to 1952, thereby charting the development of the arguments and ideas found in his books The Fur Trade in Canada and The Cod Fisheries.

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.