Politicking and Emergent Media

US Presidential Elections of the 1890s

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by Charles Musser

Type

Studies

Subject

History of Cinema

Keywords

history of cinema, United States, politics, early cinema

Publishing date

2016

Publisher

University of California Press

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 288 pages
6 x 9 inches (15 x 23 cm)

ISBN

978-0-520-29273-4

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Book Presentation:
Presidential campaigns of the twenty-first century were not the first to mobilize an array of new media forms in efforts to gain electoral victory. In Politicking and Emergent Media, distinguished historian Charles Musser looks at four US presidential campaigns during the long 1890s (1888–1900) as Republicans and Democrats deployed a variety of media forms to promote their candidates and platforms. New York—the crucial swing state as well as the home of Wall Street, Tammany Hall, and prominent media industries—became the site of intense struggle as candidates argued over trade issues, currency standards, and a new overseas empire. If the city’s leading daily newspapers were mostly Democratic as the decade began, Republicans eagerly exploited alternative media opportunities. Using the stereopticon (a modernized magic lantern), they developed the first campaign documentaries. Soon they were exploiting motion pictures, the phonograph, and telephone in surprising and often successful ways. Brimming with rich historical details, Musser’s remarkable tale reveals the political forces driving the emergence of modern media.

About the Author:
Charles Musser is Professor of American Studies and Film and Media Studies at Yale University. He is the author of The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 and producer of the documentary Errol Morris: A Lightning Sketch.

Press Reviews:
"Informative... straight-forward, impressively researched, and full of original insight." — Bookforum

"Charles Musser shows how screens first entered American politics. Whether they are true politics junkies or frothing critics of America’s quadrennial horse race, readers will be tickled by the resemblances between presidential campaigns then and now. This is media history of the finest kind, rendered by one of our most accomplished scholars of early cinema."—Lisa Gitelman, New York University, author of Paper Knowledge

"Politicking and Emergent Media is an extraordinary work of historical scholarship, political analysis, and media archaeology. Informed, but not inhibited, by the impact of the Internet and social media on shaping contemporary presidential campaign narratives, Musser not only discovers in the campaigns of the 1890s the active presence of an unexpectedly diverse mediascape comprising illustrated lecture, phonograph, cinema, telegraph, and telephone, but finds already fully in place the disruptive, dispersive, and realigning force of media technologies so typical of American democracy.”—Thomas Elsaesser, author of Film History as Media Archaeology

"In this witty, often amusing, and deeply erudite book, Charles Musser succeeds in denaturalizing breathless contemporary discourse about the newness of emergent technology. It turns out that technology has been newly emerging over the past three centuries, and the performance of politics has long been deeply transformed as a result.”—Jeffery Alexander, author of The Performance of Politics: Obama's Victory and the Democratic Struggle for Power

See the publisher website: University of California Press