A Short History of the Modern Media

“Until now, there has not been a teachable history of mass media. Cullen’s deftly distilled historiographies will please teachers and the well-chosen genre essays and case studies will inspire great classroom discussions.”
—Andrew Haley, The University of Southern Mississippi

“With its informative overviews and rich document studies, A Short History of the Modern Media should prove an essential work for any course on the history and meaning of modern media.”
—Louis P. Masur, Rutgers University

“An excellent introduction to the technologies, industries, cultural forms, and genres that constitute our media landscape. Cullen shows that the history of our media is in many ways the history of our sociality and our intimacies.”
—Matthew Frye Jacobson, Yale University

While forms of communication designed to reach large audiences have been around for centuries, technological advances in the modern era continue to redefine the boundaries of mass media. A Short History of the Modern Media presents a concise history of the major media of the last 150 years—from print, stage, film, and radio, to television, sound recording, and the Internet. While tracing the origin, trajectory, and current state of various forms of media, each brief chapter includes a sidebar featuring a particular genre in popular culture–such as horror, Westerns, or sitcoms– and its impact on the media it represents. Another sidebar focuses on an individual work of popular culture and its creators, from War of the Worlds to Wikipedia. Recommendations for further reading are presented for those interested in more in-depth pursuits of individual topics. Informative and highly accessible, A Short History of the Modern Media offers an invaluable synopsis of the milestones and events that have shaped the media landscape over the past century and a half.