How to Write a National History of Information: The Case of All the Facts: A History of Information in the United States since 1870

ABSTRACT

This essay describes the development of an early national history of information, All the Facts: A History of Information in the United States since 1870. The author explains the intellectual and research issues he encountered in putting together such a broad history, pointing out considerations, and the rationale for his decisions. The essay includes the discussions held by the author with editors and others in putting together this project.

KEYWORDS:

• Information history
• United States
• information ecosystems
• information infrastructures
• book editors

Notes

1. For an introduction to the issue of definitions, see Alistair Black, ‘Information History’, Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 40 (2006), 441–73; Antony Bryant, Alistair Black, Frank Land, and Jaana Porra, ‘Information Systems History: What is History? What is IS History? What IS History? ... and Why Even Bother with History?’, Journal of Information Technology, 28 (1) (March 2013) [special issue on history in IS], 575–609.

2. In addition to Library & Information History there is Information & Culture, among others.

3. Annually listed in Library & Information History.

4. For a detailed bibliographic essay on American examples, see James W. Cortada, All the Facts: A History of Information in the United States since 1870 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2016).

5. For a useful example of integrating these issues into broader historical themes, see Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), especially pp. 1–44, 710–43, 779–825.

6. Margaret Levenstein, Accounting for Growth: Information Systems and the Creation of the Large Corporation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Information Acumen: The Understanding and Use of Knowledge in Modern Business, edited by Lisa Bud-Frierman (London, England: Routledge, 1994).

7. David Weinberger, Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room is the Room (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2011).

8. James Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); The Global Flow of Information: Legal, Social, and Cultural Perspectives, edited by Ramesh Subramanian and Eddan Katz (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2011).

9. Cortada, All the Facts.

10. Toni Weller, Information History—An Introduction: Exploring an Emerging Field (Witney, Oxfordshire, England: Chandos Publishing, 2008).

11. James W. Cortada, Information and the Modern Corporation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011); Marian Adolf and Nico Stehr, Knowledge (London, England: Routledge, 2024); Peter Burke, What is the History of Knowledge? (Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 2016).

12. James W. Cortada, ‘Do We Live in the Information Age? Insights from Historiographical Methods’, Historical Methods, 40 (3) (Summer 2007), 107–16.

13. Richard J. Evans, The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815–1914 (New York, NY: Viking, 2016), pp. xvi, xvii.

14. As did historian Norman Davis, Europe: A History (New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 1998).

15. Exhibit A: my two little grandsons and their friends, whom I have witnessed interacting with the Internet, mobile technologies, and printed media.

16. A Nation Transformed by Information: How Information Has Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to the Present, edited by Alfred D. Chandler Jr. and James W. Cortada (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2000).

17. James W. Cortada, Making the Information Society: Experience, Consequences, and Possibilities (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Financial Times and Prentice Hall PTR, 2002).

18. James W. Cortada, The Digital Hand: How Computers Changed the Work of American Manufacturing, Transportation, and Retail Industries (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004); James W. Cortada, The Digital Hand: How Computers Changed the Work of American Financial, Telecommunications, Media, and Entertainment Industries (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006); The Digital Hand: How Computers Changed the Work of American Public Sector Industries (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2008).

19. James W. Cortada, The Essential Manager: How to Thrive in the Global Information Jungle (Hoboken, NJ: IEEE Press and John Wiley & Sons, 2015); however, I had started the process of analysing how people decided to use information in a predecessor companion volume, How Societies Embrace Information Technology: Lessons for Management and the Rest of Us (Hoboken, NJ: IEEE Computer Society Press and John Wiley & Sons, 2009), 129–61.

20. Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2014).

21. A thesis cogently argued recently by economist Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).

22. In fairness to him, he also provided a detailed rationale for the chronology he used in his general history of Europe, Tim Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648–1815 (New York, NY: Viking, 2007), p. xxiii.

23. Two notable and relevant exceptions for the history of information include the work of home economists and the children's 4-H clubs. On the role of home economists, see Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession, edited by Sarah Stage and Virginia B. Vincenti (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); on the 4-H clubs, see Gabriel N. Rosenberg, The 4-H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

24. Postured most successfully by Andrew Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

25. All West European governments were also extensive producers of information from the seventeenth century on, but the American government was simply much larger by the end of World War I and has remained so to the present, even out-producing the United States and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In recent years, more than publications, online datasets have become the new source of information and again, the United States government is prodigious. Data.gov, its online Internet-based source for data, information, and reports, had over 200,000 data sets as of June 2017, amounting to 10 million data resources. Established in 2009, this site is rapidly becoming the American government's primary fact publisher <https://www.data.gov/about> [accessed 8 July 2017]. This site is in the same league as those maintained by the World Bank and Google.

26. A particularly useful example is a recent addition to Oxford University Press's series on European history by Zara Steiner, The Triumph of the Dark: European International History, 1933–39 (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2011) and the earlier volume in the series by Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848 (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1994).

27. Martin Campbell-Kelly, William Aspray, Nathan Ensmenger, and Jeffrey R. Yost, Computer: A History of the Information Machine (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2014); Paul E. Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).

28. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014) and discussion of his thesis by other economists, After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality, ed. by Heather Boushey and J. Bradford DeLong (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).

29. I included in that chapter a brief history of the early years of the Internet (1970s–early 1990s) as that story was a logical extension of the American development of many earlier information technology tools.

30. I have started to publish those as blogs at the Oxford University Press's blog site: James W. Cortada, ‘Are Americans in Danger of Losing Their Internet’, 5 May 2017 <https://blog.oup.com/2017/05/americans-danger-losing-internet/> and ‘Net Neutrality and the New Information Crossroads’, 2 June 2017 <https://blog.oup.com/2017/06/net-neutrality-information-crossroads/> [accessed 16 November 2017].

31. James W. Cortada, ‘The Case for the Long Book’, Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 46 (4) (July 2015), 355–65.

32. Joseph E. Stiglitz, Selected Works of Joseph E. Stiglitz, 2 vols. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2009–13); Joseph E. Stiglitz and Bruce C. Greenwald, Creating a Learning Society (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2014).

33. My wife is guilty as charged. I saved some of my notebooks from what Americans call ‘high school’, the four years preceding university training, but they remain in my possession, as I am not convinced a university archive would welcome them.

34. For information on the conference, see <https://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=214688> and <https://www.bar.admin.ch/bar/en/home/services-publications/administrative-history/past-events/conference-ict-admin.html >[accessed 15 June 2016].

35. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2004).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James W. Cortada

Dr. Cortada is the author of several dozen books on the role and history of information and information technology. His most recent book is All the Facts: A History of Information in the United States since 1870 (Oxford University Press, 2016). He is currently writing a book on the role of information ecosystems and infrastructures.