Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The international history of communication and media studies has yet to be written. To this point, most histories have been national, with the bulk of attention devoted to North America and western Europe. These emphases are not unwarranted, for the field established itself first on either side of the North Atlantic, was disseminated outward from there, and with a few notable exceptions remains best established in those regions today. By necessity, this entry follows some of the traditional lines of analysis, but also aims to offer an overview of the interdisciplinary and transnational origins of the field, from its prehistory in the late nineteenth century through its institutionalization in the post-World War II era – when departments, doctorates, journals, and professional organizations were established in sufficient numbers to birth a separate field of communication from its several parent disciplines. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, newspapers and “communication” became objects of sustained scholarly inquiry. To be sure, there had been influential analyses of both earlier (and doctoral theses as early as 1690 [ Atwood & de Beer 2001 ]), but not before the 1880s did there begin a coordinated scholarly effort to interpret the press and related phenomena which were increasingly collected under the sign “communication.” The home discipline was political economy ... log in or subscribe to read full text