John Adamson at Literary Review:
In a prescient essay published in 2000, the Princeton historian Robert Darnton – one of the grandees of the historical profession – proposed a new kind of history, one prompted as much by recent developments in Silicon Valley as anything gleaned in the archives. He called for ‘a general attack on the problem of how societies made sense of events and transmitted information about them, something that might be called the history of communication’. This, he argued, had to be much larger than just a history of newspapers. It had to encompass how information spread by word of mouth, the places where people convened to trade it and the multiple professions engaged in its dispersal.
In the ensuing quarter-century, a select historical band has taken up this challenge – notably Andrew Pettegree in The Invention of News (2014), which focused on print and its circulation in early modern Europe. Darnton himself, in his most recent book, The Revolutionary Temper (2023), charted news networks in France in the four decades before the Revolution, and extended the analysis of what constituted ‘news’ beyond the confines of print to include manuscript letters and the multifarious forms of oral transmission: coffee-house gossip, news bulletins bawled out on street corners by pedlars and hurdy-gurdy players, the conversations at Paris’s established hubs of news exchange in the gardens of the Luxembourg and the Palais-Royal.
more here.
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