A Nation Transformed By Information: How It Has Shaped The United States from Colonial Times to The Present

Phrases like "Information Age" and "Information Highway" have caught on in a big way in recent years. But a close look at history reveals that the U.S., along with other parts of the world, has been on the information superhighway for much longer than that. As early as the late 1600s, write Chandler (HBS Professor Emeritus) and Cortada in the introduction to this book, "North Americans embraced information as a critical building block of their social, economic, and political world, and invested in the development and massive deployment of the infrastructures and technologies that made it possible for all the 'hype' about the Information Age that we read today." The editors and their colleagues (including historians, management professors, a consultant and a sociologist) trace this history from early settlement through the industrial revolution and into the age of the personal computer and the Internet. They examine such developments as the postal and highways systems, broadsides and newspapers, the telegraph and telephone, motion pictures and television, and others, and how changes in technology and information flow have shaped and reshaped American business, society and culture.