Abstract
A new edited collection by the University of Colorado’s Peter Simonson and Lake Forest College’s David W. Park started with a 2013 two-day preconference event in London titled “New Histories of Communication Study.” It was sponsored by the International Communication Association’s Communication History Interest Group and co-sponsored by the history divisions of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) and the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR). Still, the editors tell us that only about half of The International History of Communication Study’s 23 chapters started as papers at that conference.
Almost all chapters start their stories in the 1920s or later, a reminder about how new our field is, both inside and outside the United States. The book covers UNESCO, IAMCR, seven countries in Europe, the United States and Canada, Mexico and Brazil, China, Japan, India, Sub-Saharan Africa, the “Arab World,” and Israel. Gender issues also play a notable role in the book. As the book notes, it is not exhaustive, but is the most thorough work of its kind in any language. As the co-editors’ introduction states, This collection offers genealogies of our presents, charting flows and transnational interactions mediated through institutions, individuals, networks, texts, and broader geopolitical landscapes over the past century. Transnational organizations and professional associations are key agents across a number of chapters. Mobile figures and at least hints of their social networks are actors in most chapters as well and centrally featured in several.
Given the diversity here in countries and chapters’ foci, surely every reader will be reading this book for a different reason. Any review of such a book cannot be exhaustive and will reflect the reviewer’s interests.
For this reviewer, the history of communication research in Germany is particularly thought-provoking and memorable. Previous work by other researchers has documented the early role of German academics in studying public opinion, crowd psychology, popular culture, and other areas. Thomas Wiedemann’s (University of Munich) chapter, “Practical Orientation as a Survival Strategy,” concentrates on Professor Walter Hagemann (1900-1964), who had the biggest impact on communication study post–World War II, his antecedents, and long-term influence. A research area called Zeitungswissenschaft (science of journalism) started during World War I to study journalists’ effectiveness in influencing public opinion, but it was co-opted by the Nazis, and dropped after 1945. It was “reinvented” as Publizistikwissenschaft (also meaning science of journalism), which researched all public phenomena, supposedly in a social scientific way (but usually still from a humanistic perspective), and with a “concern for practical application.” U.S. scholars have some ideas about how World War II and the Cold War shaped U.S. communication research (see, for example, Timothy Glander’s 2000 book, Origins of Mass Communications Research During the American Cold War), but do not know the German side. And Hagemann’s story is particularly intriguing, as he worked as a non-Nazi journalist (though with many difficulties and job changes) until 1944, then went into hiding, then emerged after the war to lead an academic field in shambles in West Germany. In 1961, however, he immigrated to East Germany, and died there in 1964!
The women scholars here also have rich stories. Rose Kohn Goldsen, hired in 1934 by Paul Lazarsfeld, went on to become the first female sociologist at Cornell. Martina Thiele’s (Paris-Lodron-Universitat, Austria) chapter, “Female Academics in Communication Science and the Post-War Reconstruction Generation in Austria and Germany,” fleshes out the famous name Elisabeth Noelle[-Neumann] but also introduces (for most readers) Marianne Lunzer (born July 1919), Hertha Sturm (1925-1998), and Elisabeth Lockenhoff (1929-1985). The chapter, “Crossing the Borders: Herta Herzog’s Work in Communication and Marketing Research,” by Elisabeth Klaus (University of Salzburg, Austria) and Josef Seethhaler (Austrian Academy of Sciences) tells the fascinating and inspiring story of an original, courageous, and successful researcher who is known to U.S. scholars, if at all, through Shearon A. Lowery and Melvin E. DeFleur’s 1983 book, Milestones in Mass Communication Research. (Herzog [1910-2010] retired in 1970, but reemerged after her second husband’s death in 1979, and did not retire a second time until about 1990.)
Victor Pickard’s (University of Pennsylvania) chapter on Charles Siepmann, a long-time leader in the area of public media, also is important and thought-provoking. Ira Wagman’s (Carleton University, Canada) chapter on UNESCO’s role in the history of communication study is a fine short history that too many scholars, at least in the United States, do not know, as is Michael Mayen’s (University of Munich) on IAMCR. Chunfeng Lin and John Nerone’s (University of Illinois–Urbana/Champaign) chapter, “The ‘Great Uncle of Dissemination’: Wilbur Schramm and Communication Study in China,” as well as pieces of other chapters, well illustrate transnational flows of individuals, theories, and disciplinary boundaries.
This book is a fine read overall, although some chapters are better researched and/or better written than others (page 196 features a 134-word sentence!), ranging from major new information to claims that are poorly, or not, substantiated. But this goes with the territory of all edited collections.
A more troubling observation is that some parts of some chapters sound like their authors are bragging, by commission or omission, about their own countries. Clear statements that a person, institution, or organization ever made a mistake are scarce, and the only chapter that is truly self-critical both substantively and in tone is that by Anat First (Netanya Academic College, Israel) and Hanna Adoni (Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, Israel), “The Story of the Communication Field in Israel: Nation Building, Personal Transfer, and Growth.” While chapters written by foreigners would have their own biases, be more difficult to research and surely miss various nuances, outside eyes might be more likely to write history and analysis that better balances the good, the bad, and the ugly of communication’s national history in each country.