Media History books

Top Ten

1. Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, The Race Beat:  The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation,  Random House, 2006
2. Dorris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism,  Simon & Schuster, 2013.
3. Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion,  1922 — One of the great original books about politics, the press, and the public.
4. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, (New York: Harper Colophone, 1961)
5. Louis L. Snyder and Richard B. Morris, A Treasury of Great Reporting, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962) —  Includes Dickens, Defoe, Hemmingway, William Howard Russell, and many others.
6. Daniel Czitrom, Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan, (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1983)
7. George Seldes, Witness to a Century, (New York: Ballentine Books, 1987)
8. Brooke Kroeger, Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist (Three Rivers Press, 1995)
9. Robert X. Cringley, Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date, (New York: Harper Papersbacks, 1996)
10. Walter Isaacson, The Innovators (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014).

PUBLIC DOMAIN MEDIA HISTORIES on the web

• The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William L. Shirer, 1960. “It is quite remarkable how little those of us who were stationed in Germany during the Nazi time, journalists and diplomats, really knew of what was going on behind the facade of the Third Reich. A totalitarian dictatorship, by its very nature, works in great secrecy and knows how to preserve that secrecy from the prying eyes of outsiders…. The fateful decisions secretly made, the intrigues, the treachery, the motives and the aberrations which led up to them, the parts played by the principal actors behind the scenes, the extent of the terror they exercised and their technique of organizing it – all this and much more remained largely hidden from us until the secret German papers turned up.”
• Southern Horrors, by Ida B. Wells, 1892. The story of lynch mobs in Memphis by an African American journalist.
• The Great American Fraud, by Samuel Hopkins Adams, 1907 — Muckraking report on fraudulent advertising and narcotics originally published in Colliers.
• Ten Days Inside a Madhouse by Nelly Bly, 1890, originally published in Joseph Pulitzer’s World newspaper.
• Around the World in 72 Days, by Nelly Bly, 1890, about her solo trip by train and steamship, beating the fictional record in the Jules Verne novel Around the World in 80 Days.
• Alexis de Tocqueville,  Democracy in America, 1835. Of special note is Chapter 11 on Liberty of the Press in America.
• Commission on Freedom of the Press (Hutchins Commission) : A General Report on Mass Communication: Newspapers, Radio, Motion Pictures, Magazines, and Books, University of Chicago, 1947.  –A landmark statement about social responsibility and the media.
• Journalism in the United States,  a history by Frederic Hudson, 1873.
• Public Opinion, by Walter Lippmann, 1922
• Samuel F.B. Morse, Letters and Journals, 1912
• A History of Advertising,  By Henry Sampson, 1875
• Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe, 1722 (There is debate over whether this is journalism or a novel).
• The Trial of Peter Zenger,  Vincent Buranelli, ed, from the 1734 trial.    
• Forty Thousand Miles over Land and Water, by Ethel Vincent, an 1886  travelogue from London to the US, Australia, India and Egypt.
• American Notes by Charles Dickens, is a travelogue from 1842 with observations about the uncouth manners and disgusting slave system of the time.
• Adventures with a Genius, by Alleyne Ireland — A 1920 book about the last years of Joseph Pulitzer, written by his private secretary.
• Over the front in an Aeroplane, by Ralph Pulitzer — 1915 book about news coverage in WWI.
• Editorials from the Hearst newspapers,  Arthur Brisbane, ed,  — a collection of the light-hearted and mundane from the early 1900s.
• How I filmed the war (WWI) by Geoffrey Malins, 1920.
• Books by Richard Harding Davis,  Rudyard Kipling,  Mark Twain,

Available in libraries

Publishing and journalism (Chs 1 – 3)

• Witness to a Century by George Seldes; Ballentine, 1987 — A favorite book by a first-rate reporter who covered nearly all of the 20th century.
• The Powers that Be, by David Halberstam; Knopf, 1979 — A personal and social history of newspaper publishers, focusing mostly on the Washington Post, L.A. Times and New York Times.
• The Race Beat by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff; Random House, 2006 — Excellent and long-awaited book about how the media covered Civil Rights. Also in this category:  The Changing South of Gene Patterson, Edited by Roy Peter Clark and Raymond Arsenault, Univ. of Florida Press, 2002.
• The Life and Death of the Press Barons, by Piers Brendon (New York: Atheneum, 1983)– An up-close and very personal account of the lives of newspaper publishers that deserves to be better known.
• The Last Editor, by Jim Bellows; Andrews-McNeil, 2002
• Newspapermen, by Ruth Dudley Edwards, Seeker & Warburg, 2003 — Terrific book about the glory days of London’s fleet street publishing industry during the 1930s – 60s period.
• The Good Times, by Russell Baker; Penguin 1989 — A favorite and colorful book about working at the Baltimore Sun when it was still a great newspaper.
• A Good Life, by Ben Bradlee, Simon & Schuster, 1995 – A great memoir by the editor of the Washignton Post during the Watergate scandal.
• The Chief, by David Nassaw. Houghton Mifflin, 2000 — Definitive   biography of William Randolph Hearst. Nassaw made a major contribution to the great documentary “The Battle Over Citizen Kane,” also highly recommended.
• Louis L. Snyder and Richard B. Morris, A Treasury of Great Reporting, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962) — The best compilation of great reporting printed to date.  Includes Dickens, DeFoe, Hemmingway, William Howard Russell, and many others.

Photography and film  (Chs 4 – 5)

• Tino Balio, “United Artists: the company that changed the film industry,” (Madison, WI.:  University of Wisconsin Press, 1987)
• James Curtis, Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth: FSA Photography Reconsidered, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991)
• Gisele Freund, Photography and Society, (Boston, Godine, 1980)
• A. Sharf, Art and Photography,  (London, Penguin Press, 1968)
• VD Coke, The Painter and the Photograph, ( Albuquerque, N.M.: University of New Mexico press, 1972)

Advertising and public relations (Ch 6)

• Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, (New York: Harper Colophone, 1961)
• Ray Hiebert, Courtier To the Crowd: The Story of Ivy Lee and the Development of Public Relations, (Sioux City: Iowa State University Press, 1966)
• Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business,  (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998)
• Alec Waugh, The Lipton Story, (New York: Doubleday, 1950)

Broadcasting and electronics  (Chs 7 – 9)

• Eric Barnouw, The Image Empire: A History of Broadcasting in the United States, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, , 1970)
• A Reporters Life, by Walter Cronkite; Knopf, 1997 — A warm and human book about a great broadcasting icon.
• Ithiel de Sola Pool, Technologies of Freedom, (Boston: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1984)
• Bernard Timberg, Television Talk, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002)

Computing and Networks  (Chs 10 – 12)

• Tim Berners-Lee with Mark Fischetti, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web, (New York: Harper, , 1999)
• Robert X. Cringley, Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date, (New York: Harper Papersbacks, 1996)
• Vannevar Bush, Modern Arms and Free Men: A Discussion of the Role of Science in Preserving Democracy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1949).
• Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. (New York: Farrar, Straux and Giroux, 2006)
• Shel Israel, Twitterville (New York: Penguin, 2009).
• Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity (London: Penguin, 2005).  Also see his TED 2007 talk: “Larry Lessig on laws that choke creativity”
• John Markoff, What the Doormouse said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer, (New York: Viking 2005)
• M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal (New York: Viking Penguin, 2001).
• Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006)