For decades, media historians have heard of Harold Innis’s unpublished manuscript exploring the history of communications—but very few have had an opportunity to see it. In this volume, editors and Innis scholars William J. Buxton, Michael R. Cheney, and Paul Heyer make widely accessible, for the first time, three core chapters from the legendary Innis manuscript.Here, Innis (1894-1952) examines the development of paper and printing from antiquity in Asia through to 16th century Eu...

In 1952, a terminally ill Harold Innis asked his closest intellectual confidant, Tom Easterbrook, to teach his signature course on communications on his behalf. With Innis’s premature death, the course turned out to be both Innis’s final course and the first course on Innis.Alongside Edward Comor’s detailed Introduction, Easterbrook’s previously unknown lectures clarify aspects of Innisian scholarship that have been obscured, neglected, or forgotten. These include Easterbr...

Wilbur Schramm and Noam Chomsky Meet Harold Innis is an original, critical, in-depth analysis of the media and communication thought of Canada’s most highly acclaimed scholar, Harold Adams Innis. Even in Canada, however, Innis’s writings until now have been only partially cited and interpreted: Innis is usually stereotyped as being merely an economic historian fixated on previous civilizations, whereas in fact he was an astute analyst whose main concerns were with present problems and futu...

Harold Innis is widely understood as the proponent of the "Laurentian school" of historiography, which mapped Canadian development along an East-West axis. Harold Innis and the North turns the axis North-South by examining Innis's intense and abiding interest in the North, and providing new perspectives on this seminal figure in Canadian political economy and communication studies.This collection reveals that Innis's advocacy of the North was closely bound up with his visi...

Best known for his writings on economic history and communications, Harold Innis also produced a body of biographical work that paid particular attention to cultural memory and how it is enriched by the study of neglected historical figures. In this compelling volume, William Buxton addresses Innis's engagement with the legacy of the fur trader and adventurer Peter Pond. Harold Innis on Peter Pond comprises eight texts by Innis, including his 1930 biography of Pond as well as his writings ...

Offering fresh insight into the early life of Harold Adams Innis (1894-1952), this volume makes available a number of previously unpublished writings from the renowned Canadian economic historian and media scholar.Part I, Innis’s autobiographical memoir, chronicles his farm-based family background, early education, military service during World War I, and the beginnings of what would become a distinguished academic career. Part II features a selection of correspondence during his m...

This anthology of hard-to-find primary documents provides a solid overview of the foundations of American media studies. Focusing on mass communication and society and how this research fits into larger patterns of social thought, this valuable collection features key texts covering the media studies traditions of the Chicago school, the effects tradition, the critical theory of the Frankfurt school, and mass society theory. Where possible, articles are reproduced in their entirety to pres...

This classic book, Harold Innis's last, returns to print with a new introduction by James Carey. An elaboration of Innis's earlier theories, Changing Concepts of Time looks at then-new technological changes in communication and considers the different ways in which space and time are perceived. Innis explores military implications of the U.S. constitution, freedom of the press, communication monopolies, culture, and press support of presidential candidates, among other interesting and dive...

At the time of its publication in 1930, The Fur Trade in Canada challenged and inspired scholars, historians, and economists. Now, almost seventy years later, Harold Innis's fundamental reinterpretation of Canadian history continues to exert a magnetic influence.Innis has long been regarded as one of Canada's foremost historians, and in The Fur Trade in Canada he presents several histories in one: social history through the clash between colonial and aboriginal cultures; e...

Political Economy in the Modern State is Harold Innis’s transitional and, in some respects, his most transformative book. Completed in 1946, it is a collection of fifteen chapters plus a remarkable Preface selected and crafted to address four main themes: the problem of power and peace in the post-War era; the ascent of specialized and mechanized forms of knowledge involving, most particularly, the media, the state, and the academy; the crisis facing civilization and, more general...

One of the most influential books ever published in Canada, Harold A. Innis's The Bias of Communication has played a major part in reshaping our understanding of history, communication, and media theory. First published in 1951, this masterful collection of essays explores the relationship between a society's communication media and that community's ability to maintain control over its development. Innis considers political and economic forces in the context of social change and t...

Originally published in 1950, Harold A. Innis’s Empire and Communications is considered to be one of the classic works in media studies, yet its origins have received little attention. Ambitious in its scope, the book spans five millennia, tracing a path of development around the globe from 2900 BCE to the twentieth century and revealing the cyclical interplay between communications and power structures across space and time.In this new edition, William J. Buxton pays clos...