History is everywhere in the media. Television viewers can spend every evening watching a different historian expound upon Empire, Witchcraft, the Civil War or Royal Mistresses; or go to the cinema and watch reconstructions of the Second World War, American Civil War or Imperial China. Even current affairs reporting on television, radio or in newspapers implicitly or explicitly includes historical explanations. This book examines the boom in history, in television and film, newspapers and radio and the constraints and opportunities it offers. Leading historians and high profile broadcasters, such as Melvyn Bragg, Simon Schama, Tristram Hunt, Ian Kershaw and David Puttnam, draw on their personal experiences to explore the problems and highlights of representing history in the media.

Traces the history of broadcasting and the infludence developments in broadcasting have had over our social, cultural and economic practices. Examining the broadcasting traditions of the UK and USA, 'The Television History Book' make connections between events and tendencies that both unite and differentiate these national broadcasting traditions.

Hands on Media History explores the whole range of hands on media history techniques for the first time, offering both practical guides and general perspectives. It covers both analogue and digital media; film, television, video, gaming, photography and recorded sound. Understanding media means understanding the technologies involved. The hands on history approach can open our minds to new perceptions of how media technologies work and how we work with them. Essays in this collection explore the difficult questions of reconstruction and historical memory, and the issues of equipment degradation and loss. Hands on Media History is concerned with both the professional and the amateur, the producers and the users, providing a new perspective on one of the modern era’s most urgent questions: what is the relationship between people and the technologies they use every day? Engaging and enlightening, this collection is a key reference for students and scholars of media studies, digital humanities, and for those interested in models of museum and research practice.

In Always Already New, Lisa Gitelman explores the newness of new media while she asks what it means to do media history. Using the examples of early recorded sound and digital networks, Gitelman challenges readers to think about the ways that media work as the simultaneous subjects and instruments of historical inquiry. Presenting original case studies of Edison's first phonographs and the Pentagon's first distributed digital network, the ARPANET, Gitelman points suggestively toward similarities that underlie the cultural definition of records (phonographic and not) at the end of the nineteenth century and the definition of documents (digital and not) at the end of the twentieth. As a result, Always Already New speaks to present concerns about the humanities as much as to the emergent field of new media studies. Records and documents are kernels of humanistic thought, after all—part of and party to the cultural impulse to preserve and interpret. Gitelman's argument suggests inventive contexts for "humanities computing" while also offering a new perspective on such traditional humanities disciplines as literary history. Making extensive use of archival sources, Gitelman describes the ways in which recorded sound and digitally networked text each emerged as local anomalies that were yet deeply embedded within the reigning logic of public life and public memory. In the end Gitelman turns to the World Wide Web and asks how the history of the Web is already being told, how the Web might also resist history, and how using the Web might be producing the conditions of its own historicity.

Since media is omnipresent in our lives, it is crucial to understand the complex means and dimensions of media in history, and how we have arrived at the current digital culture. Media in History addresses the increasing multidisciplinary need to comprehend the meanings and significances of media development through a variety of different approaches. Providing a concise, accessible and analytical synthesis of the history of communications, from the evolution of language to the growth of social media, this book also stresses the importance of understanding wider social and cultural contexts. Although technological innovations have created and shaped media, Kortti examines how politics and the economy are central to the development of communication. Media in History will benefit undergraduate and graduate history and media studies students who want to understand the complex structures of media as a historical continuum and to reflect on their own experiences with that development.

Explores British media history as a series of competing narratives. This collection identifies and contrasts the various interrelationships between media histories, and also encourages dialogue between different historical, political, and theoretical perspectives, including: liberalism; feminism; populism; nationalism; and, libertarianism.