In this illustrated lecture, Professor Richard R. John will survey the long history of the engagement of American policymakers, reformers, and entrepreneurs with global communications.

In this illustrated lecture, Professor Richard R. John will survey the long history of the engagement of American policymakers, reformers, and entrepreneurs with global communications. Among the topics he will consider what will be the role of the United States in the creation of global communications networks – mail, telecommunications, broadcast, and digital – the constraints on U. S. expansion, and the mythologies that have come to surround the idea of an interconnected world. John’s lecture is based on his own research on the history of communications networks from the eighteenth century the present.

Richard R. John is a historian who specializes in the history of business, technology, communications, and American political development. He teaches and advises graduate students in Columbia’s Ph.D. program in communications, and is member of the core faculty of the Columbia history department, where he teaches courses on the history of capitalism and the history of communications. His publications include many essays, two edited books, and two monographs: Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (1995) and Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (2010).