Richard R John
Biographic Data
| ID | 953972 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Richard R John |
| GIVEN NAMES | Richard R |
| FAMILY NAME | John |
| SIGNATURE | JOHN R R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Columbia University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 78 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 149 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 77 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Crossed Wires: The Conflicted History of U.S. Telecommunications, from the Post Office to the Internet. By Dan Schiller
Manufacturing Catastrophe: Massachusetts and the Making of Global Capitalism, 1813 to the Present
Reimagining Business: Virtue, Spirituality, Wisdom
How might business leadership be reimagined to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century?Historians often parry questions of this kind.Geoffrey Jones, to his great credit, has not.To ensure an ethically just and environmentally sustainable future, Jones believes, it is imperative that business leaders change course.In Deeply Responsible, Jones's most ambitious book to date, a master historian draws on his vast knowledge of the history of bu…
Debating New Media: Rewriting Communications History
Many historians, journalists, and media mavens have traced the genealogy of Victorian communications networks backward, beginning with radio after World War I and continuing with personal computing in the 1980s and ending with the internet today. This impulse has accelerated with the rise of electronic commerce, social media, and virtual reality. This essay proposes a different agenda. Drawing on recent historical writing on mythmaking, materiali…
Political contestation and the Second Great Divergence
This essay considers Piketty's characterization of U.S. economic development in Capital and Ideology in the decades between 1860 and 1900, a period that historians have begun to call the “Second Great Divergence.” It contends that Piketty's characterization of this period rests on outdated assumptions about the relationship between economic development and political contestation, and that Piketty's neglect of historical writing on this topic rais…
After Managerial Capitalism
Corporations maximize shareholder returns—or so goes the conventional wisdom. It was not always so. In the middle decades of the last century, lawmakers, business leaders, and journalists agreed that the nation's largest and most powerful corporations had obligations to a raft of stakeholders that included (in addition to shareholders) employees, customers, and the localities in which they had set up shop. Some historians have labeled this consen…
Out of Stock: The Warehouse in the History of Capitalism
Out of Stock charts the history of the warehouse as a “spatial form” in the United States from the colonial era to 1989 (20). Although not quite the book that its title promises, it is full of interesting insights that will reward patient readers: Perth Amboy, New Jersey, was a major slave mart in the eighteenth century; the New York Crystal Palace of 1852 was a bonded warehouse for foreign importers; and Chicago is by some estimates the third-la…
When Techno-Diplomacy Failed: Walter S. Rogers, the Universal Electrical Communications Union, and the Limitations of the International Telegraph Union as a Global Actor in the 1920s
3 When Techno-Diplomacy Failed: Walter S. Rogers, the Universal Electrical Communications Union, and the Limitations of the International Telegraph Union as a Global Actor in the 1920s was published in History of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) on page 55.
Freedom of expression in the digital age: A historian’s perspective
This essay surveys the history of freedom of expression from classical antiquity to the present. It contends that a principled defense of free expression dates to the seventeenth century, when it was championed by the political theorist John Locke. Free expression for Locke was closely linked with religious toleration, a relationship that has led in our own day to a principled defense of pluralism as a civic ideal. For the past several hundred ye…
Circuits of Victory’: How the First World War shaped the political economy of the telephone in the United States and France
This essay contends that the US Signal Corps’ wartime network had major consequences for the postwar development of the political economy of the telephone in the United States, France, and Europe. Our approach is transnational. In contrast to previous scholarship, which is mostly top-down, nation-centric, and preoccupied with the internal configuration of telephone networks that are typically studied inside the walls of discrete national containe…
Corporations, Democracy, and the Historian
What is the relationship between the corporation and American democracy? This provocative and timely question informs the ten essays that Naomi R. Lamoreaux and William J. Novak have assembled in a tightly edited volume that has attracted a good deal of attention from specialists in the history of U.S. public policy. In an age in which the political influence of big business has once again thrust itself onto the political agenda, this collection …
Martin Collins. A Telephone for the World: Iridium, Motorola, and the Making of a Global Age
Martin Collins’s A Telephone for the World: Iridium, Motorola, and the Making of a Global Age is a tale of two projects. The first is the rise and fall of Iridium, an audacious business venture, publicly launched in 1990 by electronics giant Motorola, to provide high-end customers with satellite-based telephone service anywhere in the world. Iridium proposed not only to transmit telephone signals between satellites and the earth, but also to crea…
Brahmin Capitalism: Frontiers of Wealth and Populism in America's First Gilded Age
Noam Maggor's Brahmin Capitalism is a distinguished contribution to a small but growing library of revisionist monographs on U.S. financial history that probes the prehistory of the 2008 financial crisis. Maggor's theme is the “understated” entrepreneurialism of a small yet influential cohort of late nineteenth-century investors—a purposeful group that included Charles Francis Adams, Jr., Thomas Jefferson Coolidge, Henry Lee Higginson, Henry A. W…
Across the Oceans: Development of Overseas Business Information Transmission, 1815-1875
Preface Business Perspectives in the History of Communications Measurement of the Speed of Communications: Methods And Sources Overseas Mail And Speed of Communications Before 1815 North Atlantic The West Indies And South America East India And Australasia Conclusion General Index Ship Index
Kevin Butterfield. The Making of Tocqueville’s America: Law and Association in the Early United States
The proliferation of membership-based associations in the U.S. during the early republic has long intrigued historians, sociologists, and political theorists. In The Making of Tocqueville’s America: Law and Association in the Early United States, Kevin Butterfield builds on the work of William J. Novak, Christopher Tomlins, Albrecht Koschnik, and Johann N. Neem to explore the role of the law as a “paradigmatic discourse” (63) that helped to “defi…
Cables, Crises, and the Press: The Geopolitics of the New International Information System in the Americas, 1866-1903 by John A. Britton
Reviewed by: Cables, Crises, and the Press: The Geopolitics of the New International Information System in the Americas, 1866–1903 by John A. Britton Richard R. John (bio) Cables, Crises, and the Press: The Geopolitics of the New International Information System in the Americas, 1866–1903. By John A. Britton. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2014. Pp. xiv+473. $60. Historical writing on the landline telegraph and undersea cable has in…
Villa Albani
Postal Systems
Making News: The Political Economy of Journalism in Britain and America from the Glorious Revolution to the Internet
Projecting Power Overseas: U.S. Postal Policy and International Standard-Setting at the 1863 Paris Postal Conference
In May 1863, representatives from the fifteen countries that generated 95 percent of the world’s correspondence met in Paris to devise a set of common standards for international postal communications. The impetus for this meeting, which would become known as the Paris Postal Conference, originated not in France, nor in Great Britain, nor even in Prussia. Rather, it was the brainchild of a little-known U.S. postal administrator-turned-lawmaker, J…
Prophet of Perspective: Thomas K. McCraw
Thomas K. McCraw is justly admired as a consummate prose stylist, a talented editor, a perceptive historian of the United States, and an inspiring teacher whose mastery of the biographical form led to a string of elegantly written prize-winning publications that are widely read and often taught. The publication one month before McCraw's death in November 2012 of his last book, The Founders and Finance , provides the occasion for this essay, which…
The computer boys take over: Computers, programmers, and the politics of technical expertise
The computer boys take over: computers, programmers, and the politics of technical expertise." Business History, 56(5), pp. 846–847
Communications Networks in the U nited S tates: From Chappe to Marconi
The history of communications in the United States is a relatively uncultivated field. Generalizations abound yet conceptual frameworks are few. This essay contends that the history of the country's dominant communications networks can be understood as a chapter in the history of government–business relations, or what contemporaries would have called political economy. In the long nineteenth century that began in 1788 and ended in 1914, the three…
Robber Barons Redux: Antimonopoly Reconsidered
The antimonopoly critique of big business that flourished in the United States during the 1880s is a neglected chapter in the history of American reform. In this essay, a revised version of Richard R. John's 2011 Business History Conference presidential address, John shows how this critique found expression in a gallery of influential cartoons that ran in the New York City–based satirical magazines Puck and Judge . Among the topics that the carto…
Business Historians and the Challenge of Innovation
A review of The Challenge of Remaining Innovative: Insights from Twentieth-Century American Business. Edited by Sally H. Clarke, Naomi R. Lamoreaux, and Steven W. Usselman. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009
Elaborations, Revisions, Dissents: Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.'s, The Visible Hand after Twenty Years
Two decades have passed since the publication of The Visible Hand , Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.'s, magisterial account of the rise of the modern business enterprise in the United States. Although Chandlers pathbreaking work has been widely hailed as a landmark in business history, only rarely has anyone considered systematically its influence on the large body of historical scholarship on related topics. This essay is intended to help fill this gap. …
Spreading the news: The American postal system from Franklin to Morse
Governmental Institutions as Agents of Change: Rethinking American Political Development in the Early Republic, 1787–1835
During the past few years, a new generation of historians have turned their attention to the influence of law, public policy, and public administration in American life in the period between 1787 and 1835. The purpose of this essay is to highlight the contributions of these scholars in the hope that such an inquiry can further the ongoing interdisciplinary dialogue on American political development between historians, political scientists, and hi…
Taking Sabbatarianism Seriously: The Postal System, the Sabbath, and the Transformation of American Political Culture
practice they deemed offensive to God.According to Lyman Beecher, one of the most influential evangelical preachers of his day, the issue was "perhaps the most important that ever was, or ever will be submitted for national consideration."'The protest was unprecedented.Never before had the federal government interfered so directly with the rhythms of everyday life
Ruling Passions: Political Economy in Nineteenth-Century America
In recent years, the Journal of Policy History has emerged as a major venue for scholarship on American policy history in the period after 1900. Indeed, it is for this reason that it is often praised as the leading outlet for scholarship on American political history in the world. Only occasionally, however, has it featured essays on the early republic, the Civil War, or the post-Civil War era. And when it has, the essays have often focused on pa…
Farewell to the “Party Period”: Political Economy in Nineteenth-Century America
Historians of the United States have long contended that the study of governmental institutions, including the history of public policy, is no longer central to the teaching and writing of American history. Some lament this development; others hail it as a sign that other worthy topics are finally getting the attention they deserve. Yet is it true? The recent outpouring of scholarship on the relationship between the state and the market, or what …
Turner, Beard, Chandler: Progressive Historians
For almost half a century, Alfred D. Chandler Jr. has enjoyed an enviable reputation as the most influential business historian in the world. Chandlerian business history is a mainstay of the "new" institutionalism that John Higham discerned over four decades ago in a justly admired survey of American historical writing; in addition, it has long been a cornerstone of the "organizational synthesis" that Louis Galambos championed in three widely di…
Projecting Power Overseas: U.S. Postal Policy and International Standard-Setting at the 1863 Paris Postal Conference
In May 1863, representatives from the fifteen countries that generated 95 percent of the world’s correspondence met in Paris to devise a set of common standards for international postal communications. The impetus for this meeting, which would become known as the Paris Postal Conference, originated not in France, nor in Great Britain, nor even in Prussia. Rather, it was the brainchild of a little-known U.S. postal administrator-turned-lawmaker, J…
Business Historians and the Challenge of Innovation
A review of The Challenge of Remaining Innovative: Insights from Twentieth-Century American Business. Edited by Sally H. Clarke, Naomi R. Lamoreaux, and Steven W. Usselman. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009
Rendezvous with Information? Computers and Communications Networks in the United States
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the 'Save PDF' action button
Debating New Media: Rewriting Communications History
Many historians, journalists, and media mavens have traced the genealogy of Victorian communications networks backward, beginning with radio after World War I and continuing with personal computing in the 1980s and ending with the internet today. This impulse has accelerated with the rise of electronic commerce, social media, and virtual reality. This essay proposes a different agenda. Drawing on recent historical writing on mythmaking, materiali…
Telecommunications
The half-century following the Civil War witnessed an epochal transformation in American telecommunications. In the 1870s, the telegraph network became a spawning ground for a remarkable spate of inventions that included the phonograph and the telephone, and around 1900 the telephone network became the first electrical communications medium that network providers intended to be accessible to the entire population. This transformation was a center…
Bringing Political Economy Back in
Like so many of the fields that have flourished in history departments in recent years, business history has an uneasy relationship with political history. When business history first emerged in the United States as a separate field in the 1920s, its founders stressed the importance of lavishing on business records the same reverence that political historians accorded the personal papers of lawmakers. Only in this way, business historians assumed…
Prophet of Perspective: Thomas K. McCraw
Thomas K. McCraw is justly admired as a consummate prose stylist, a talented editor, a perceptive historian of the United States, and an inspiring teacher whose mastery of the biographical form led to a string of elegantly written prize-winning publications that are widely read and often taught. The publication one month before McCraw's death in November 2012 of his last book, The Founders and Finance , provides the occasion for this essay, which…
Robber Barons Redux: Antimonopoly Reconsidered
The antimonopoly critique of big business that flourished in the United States during the 1880s is a neglected chapter in the history of American reform. In this essay, a revised version of Richard R. John's 2011 Business History Conference presidential address, John shows how this critique found expression in a gallery of influential cartoons that ran in the New York City–based satirical magazines Puck and Judge . Among the topics that the carto…
Rethinking the Early American State
Patent Politics: Intellectual Property, the Railroad Industry, and the Problem of Monopoly
As winter descended on Washington in December 1878, the Forty-fifth Congress gathered for what promised to be a hectic third and final session. Emotions ran high. In this era, Congress habitually reserved much of its business for these brief, intense “lame duck” sessions that fell between the election of legislators in November and the adjournment of Congress the following March. Compounding the usual sense of urgency was the startling result of …
Le débat sur la télégraphie publique aux Etats-Unis
Whereas in Europe the public authorities were quick to take control of the telegraph, in the U.S. it remained private for a long time. Convinced that the reasons were political rather than economic or cultural, the author examines the long debate (1866-1910) between lobbyists from Western Union - which had the de facto monopoly in this domain and rich businessmen for its customers - and a small group of reformers struggling for free access to the…
Wall Street: A History
Journal Article Wall Street: A History. By Charles R. Geisst. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. xii, 404 pp. $30.00, ISBN 0-19-511512-0.) Get access Richard R. John Richard R. John University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 85, Issue 3, December 1998, Pages 1107–1108, https://doi.org/10.2307/2567301 Published: 01 December…
Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society
Series Editor's Introduction Acknowledgements Introduction PART I: COMMUNICATION AS CULTURE A cultural approach to communication Mass communication and cultural studies Reconceiving 'mass' and 'media' Overcoming resistance to cultural studies PART II: TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE The mythos of the electronic revolution with John J Quirk Space, time and communications: a tribute to Harold Innis The history of the future with John J Quirk Technology and …
The Selling of the Constitutional Convention: A History of News Coverage
United States
Sharps Rifles and Spanish Mules: The San Antonio-El Paso Mail, 1851-1881
Out of Control The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society . James R. Beniger
Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century
Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century by David Cressy, and: English Atlantic 1675-1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community by I…
682 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE It need hardly be said that the inspired ideas of Humboldt and others could not have been realized without the highly skilled instrument makers in England, Germany, and New York. In fact, since the instruments were so highly specialized, there was a close interaction between the scientists and the makers, producing a miniature science-based industry. The special instruments involved include the magnetometer…
Taking Sabbatarianism Seriously: The Postal System, the Sabbath, and the Transformation of American Political Culture
practice they deemed offensive to God.According to Lyman Beecher, one of the most influential evangelical preachers of his day, the issue was "perhaps the most important that ever was, or ever will be submitted for national consideration."'The protest was unprecedented.Never before had the federal government interfered so directly with the rhythms of everyday life
Remembering Mcluhan
Europe
The Selling of the Constitutional Convention: A History of News Coverage
Ingenious Yankees: The Rise of the American System of Manufactures in the Private Sector
Journal Article Ingenious Yankees: The Rise of the American System of Manufactures in the Private Sector. By Donald R. Hoke. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. xiv + 345 pp. $40.00.) Get access Richard R. John Richard R. John College of William and Mary Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 78, Issue 1, June 1991, Pages 312–313, https://doi.org/10.2307/2078141 Publish…
Footloose in Jacksonian America: Robert W. Scott and His Agrarian World
Journal Article Footloose in Jacksonian America: Robert W. Scott and His Agrarian World. By Thomas D. Clark. (Frankfort: Kentucky Historical Society, 1989. x + 250 pp. $29.95.) Get access Richard R. John Richard R. John University of Illinois, Chicago Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 78, Issue 2, September 1991, Page 659, https://doi.org/10.2307/2079577 Published: 01 Sept…
Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700-1865
Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700-1865 by Richard D. Brown
technology and culture Book Reviews 617 building certainly would have made a more interesting Public Broad casting System television series. Jane Morley Ms. Morley is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700—1865. By Richard D. Brown. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Pp. xii + 372; illustrations, no…
News in the Mail: The Press, Post Office, and Public Information, 1700-1860s
Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society
Series Editor's Introduction Acknowledgements Introduction PART I: COMMUNICATION AS CULTURE A cultural approach to communication Mass communication and cultural studies Reconceiving 'mass' and 'media' Overcoming resistance to cultural studies PART II: TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE The mythos of the electronic revolution with John J Quirk Space, time and communications: a tribute to Harold Innis The history of the future with John J Quirk Technology and …
Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society by James W. Carey
200 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE tion. David K. Vaughan explores the automobile in Americanjuvenile series fiction from 1900 to 1940 and finds a sense of adventure and discovery of the landscape that mirrored automobile touring. James E. Paster looks for evidence of typology and symbolism in snapshots of middle-class Americans and their automobiles. Part 3, “Building Types,” contains former SCA president Jan Jennings’s groundbreaking study…
The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846
The Market Revolution offers a sweeping, comprehensive overview of the Jacksonian period in a synthesis of political, social, economic, and cultural history. This book examines the tensions between democracy and capitalism that arose during this period after the war of 1812 and the massive transformation of American society that followed in its wake
From Revivals to Removal: Jeremiah Evarts, the Cherokee Nation, and the Search for the Soul of America
A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public
Journal Article A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public. By Ronald J. Zboray. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. xxii, 326 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-19-507582-X.) Get access Richard R. John Richard R. John University of Illinois, Chicago, Illinois Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 80, Issue 4, March 1994, Page 1466, https://doi.org…
The Imagined Community
Paul Revere's Ride
Postmasters and Postoffices of the United States, 1782-1811
The Lost World of Bartleby, the Ex-Officeholder: Variations on a Venerable Literary Form
FOR over a generation, literary critics and cultural historians have pondered the enigmatic relationship between Bartleby, the proud yet emotionally troubled copyist in Herman Melville's haunting short story "Bartleby the Scrivener" (1853), and his employer, a genial yet uncomprehending Wall Street lawyer who did a "snug business" in the mortgages, bonds, and legal titles of the well-to-do.'Much of the mystery surrounding this relationship stems …
Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse
Governmental Institutions as Agents of Change: Rethinking American Political Development in the Early Republic, 1787–1835
During the past few years, a new generation of historians have turned their attention to the influence of law, public policy, and public administration in American life in the period between 1787 and 1835. The purpose of this essay is to highlight the contributions of these scholars in the hope that such an inquiry can further the ongoing interdisciplinary dialogue on American political development between historians, political scientists, and hi…
Political science (48 works) · Law (34 works) · History (33 works) · Sociology (33 works) · Politics (27 works) · Law (24 works) · History (20 works) · American History and Culture (19 works) · Computer Science (18 works) · American Constitutional Law and Politics (17 works)