History of the Mass Media in the United States

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Blanchard, Margaret A. History of the Mass Media in the United States. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn,1998. 752 pp. $125.

One might worry about the timing of Margaret Blanchard's mammoth new encyclopedia, History of the Mass Media in the United States. More and more, printed encyclopedias gather dust in the shadow of the Internet, the surrogate encyclopedia for a growing number of researchers. But this edited volume plays John Henry to the Internet's steam drill: unlike the Web, which contains much that is unreliable, Blanchard has put together the definitive encyclopedia of U.S. media history.

The strength of the book lies in the selection of the authors. For this, the book …