Crossed Wires

In Crossed Wires, Dan Schiller, who has conducted archival research on US telecommunications for more than forty years, recovers the extraordinary social history of the major network systems of the United States from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. 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 US political economy. This authoritative and comprehensive revisionist history of telecommunications argues that business, economic, and regulatory concerns influenced the evolution of this industry far more than the technology.