Communication in The Americas and their Influence - Pre-european Communication, New World Civilizations, Colonial America, The Penny Press, Yellow Journalism
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The Americas were first settled from Asia by successive waves of migrants who crossed the Bering Sea from Siberia to Alaska during the last Ice Age using a land bridge, the frozen sea, and possibly open boats. Estimates as to when this began range from twenty thousand to one hundred thousand years ago. By 8000 B.C.E. settlements had reached the southern tip of South America. The new arrivals came as hunter-gatherers, but over the millennia many adopted agriculture and a few groups built civilizations comparable to what had developed earlier in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Indus Valley.
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Anthropological research suggests a rich and historically deep tradition of oral communication among early Amerindian people in which linguistic diversity appears to have been considerable. Even within the usually accepted language groupings of North America—Eskimo-Aleut; Athabascan, or Na-Dene; Algonquian-Wakashan; Aztec-Tanoan; Hokan-Siouan; Penutian; and Arawakan—many dialects exi…
It was once believed that to have civilization—a political state with a centralized government, ruling bureaucracy, complex division of labor, agricultural surplus, and monumental public works—writing had to be in use. The Americas have yielded a major exception to this rule: the empire of the Incas. Centered in Peru, this extended in a north-south direction from Ecuador to Chile, an…
Whether the quest was for riches, as in the Spanish incursion into the New World, or for a life free from the constraints of the homeland, which motivated the settlement of most of Anglophone North America, religion played an important role. When the Spanish decided to follow plunder with colonization, taming the indigenous peoples through religious conversion became an imperative. In 1539, less t…
In the 1830s American newspapers began their emergence as a true mass medium—one that disseminates the same information to large numbers of people. In the colonies or early republic a successful newspaper attracted only a few thousand readers at most. After the revolution, advertising helped finance newspapers, and many, if not most, had the word Advertiser in their title. Circulation was d…
Penny papers dominated news reporting until the end of the nineteenth century, when they were outdone at their own game by the journalistic innovations of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. Beginning in midcentury, though, there were alternative visions of what a newspaper should be. The most notable such experiment was Henry Raymond's New York Times, sometimes referred to as an e…
In addition to religious publications, a major type of book emerging from the colonial press was the almanac. Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac (1732), blending self-help advice with humor, became a best-seller. Book production was centered at first in Boston and Cambridge, but by the early eighteenth century Philadelphia (where Franklin was based) became a major player. Cen…
Amory, Hugh, and David D. Hall, eds. The History of the Book in America. Vol. 1: The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Ascher, Marcia, and Robert Ascher. Code of the Quipu: A Study in Media, Mathematics, and Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981. Carey, James W. Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. Boston: Unwin Hyma…
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