Description

Telecommunications networks are vast intricate hugely costly systems for exchanging messages and informationwithin cities and across continents From the Post Office and the telegraph to todays internet these networks have sown domestic division while also acting as sources of international power

In Crossed Wires Dan Schiller who has conducted archival research on United States telecommunications for more than forty years recovers the extraordinary social history of the major network systems of the United States Drawing on arrays of archival documents and secondary sources Schiller reveals that this history has been shaped by sharp social and political conflict and is embedded in the larger history of an expansionary United States political economy Schiller argues that networks have enabled United States imperialism through a recurrent American system of crossborder communications

This authoritative and comprehensive revisionist history of United States telecommunications argues that not technology but a dominativeand contestedpolitical economy drove the evolution of this critical industry