2025 Reviews

Review of Crossed Wires: The Conflicted History of U.S. Telecommunications, from the Post Office to the Internet

John, Richard R.

Crossed Wires: The Conflicted History of U.S. Telecommunications, from the Post Office to the Internet
By Dan Schiller
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. 832 pp. $55.00).

How should we write the history of communications? In Crossed Wires, Dan Schiller provides us with one answer to this question. In a sprawling, often perceptive, sometimes confounding, yet almost always stimulating synthesis of the published literature in the field that he supplements with occasional forays into a few of the relevant archival collections, Schiller documents the key role of government agencies, network providers, network users, and labor unions in the construction, regulation, and maintenance of the information infrastructure in the United States from the eighteenth century to the present.