2024-2025
HISTORICAL
PERSPECTIVES ON
MEDIA AND
COMMUNICATION
,Table of Contents
Lecture 1 - Introduction...........................................................................................................................2
Lecture 2 - Histories of Media and Communication - A Meta-Narrative Approach to
Media History..............................................................................................................................................6
Lecture 3 - Media, Communication and Politics: on Propaganda..........................................15
Lecture 4 - On Moral Panic, Media Panic, and Film Censorship..............................................24
Lecture 5 - Histories of Radio..............................................................................................................37
Lecture 6 – Nationalism........................................................................................................................53
Lecture 7 - About Stars and Celebrities...........................................................................................62
Lecture 8 - Popular Music Culture.....................................................................................................72
Lecture 9 - Presenting History - On the Genre of Historical Fiction.......................................79
Lecture 10 - The War on Porn (Guest Lecture by Leontine Hellermans).............................89
Note: (Notes for Lecture 10 are not complete because I stopped taking notes when I realized
the lecturer was repeating the same points shown on the slides. The information was very basic,
so I did not feel the need to write it down. I thought that watching the lecture the night before the
exam would be enough to remember the context.)
,Lecture 1 - Introduction
Content:
- Transformations
- Past, History and Historiography based on Sandell
- Doing Media History
1/ Historical Transformations of Media and Communication
Changes impact every one of us, just like computers changed how we students study, or pay for
a meal. So, we can say that technologies shape our daily life, as well as how we perceive and
think about the world.
Examples of Change:
1980s: Popular music
People listened to music mainly on the radio and recorded it onto cassette tapes. Cassettes
made it possible to create personalized mixtapes.
1990s: Postmodern high school films & music
A relatively optimistic period in which many people watched the same films and listened to
similar music. Music became increasingly social, a way to express identity and form
connections. Recording music was still possible, but audio quality improved with the introduction
of CDs.
2000s: Internet
The rise of the Internet provided access to a vast range of songs. No need to rely on others to
share or own specific tracks anymore.
2010s: Online Streaming
Platforms like Spotify emerged. This introduced a new question: “Should I stop buying physical
music and just pay for online streaming services?”
Technological Perspective on what these media histories mean:
Devices have transformed how people engage with music:
analogue → CD recording → playlists on streaming services.
- Past: Cassettes offered limited capacity.
- Now: Playlists on streaming platforms have virtually no limits.
Economic Perspective on what these media histories mean:
In the past music was primarily purchased as physical media.
- Transition: Illegal downloading became widespread.
- Present: Payment has shifted to subscription-based streaming services.
,Socio-Cultural Perspective on what these media histories mean:
Mixtapes have evolved, but the underlying desire remains the same: people still want to curate,
organize, and personalize their own music collections. The practice of expressing identity
through personalized music selections continues, even if the medium has changed.
2/ Some Concepts: Past, History and Historiography
- The past refers to the time that has gone by; it’s no longer the present.
- History is the narration and interpretation of the past. The present must first become the
past in order to be made visible, intelligible, and writable. Yet, there is no consensus on
how much time must pass before something becomes “historical. Historical
understanding takes time because it involves identifying processes of change. History
concerns people, nation-states, relationships between events, and broader social and
economic conditions.
- Historiography is the practice of writing history. It is a retrospective process: historians
return to sources and evidence from the past to reconstruct a coherent and convincing
narrative of what happened in the past. There is not a single way to write history;
multiple approaches and interpretations exist.
-
2.1/ History as an Academic Discipline
2.1.1/ Professionalization of the Discipline in the 19th C
Vaughan’s definition of a historian: should reflect & share the critical changes in the conditions
of a society. He wasn't the only one, at the same period of time, different universities introduced
history programs. In order for something to become a discipline, there should be a consensus
on how to do that thing. Historians in Germany started to layout principles and practices on how
to conduct history: called the ‘right’ way’ to do history.
The ‘right’ way of making history more scientific in order to be an academic. So positivist
principles shape how one should do history. German Historian Leopold von Ranke came up
with certain principles one should use. So he established modern source-based history, rather
than trusting and using authors who wrote about the past as a source we should go back to the
original documents.
Example: to study how the Roman Empire came about, don’t base yourself on what
others wrote about the establishment but look for original documents.
So,
- Rely on archival material: primary sources, official government documents not on
chronicles.
- Objectivity is important, the authenticity and reliability of material used, cross-referencing
(compare with several documents), checking citations: to check the original source.
→ to make history scientific, objective.
Common idea of what should be studied: Nation-State
In the 19th century, different nation states decided to grant access to people to the archives. So
historians gained access to interpret what happened in the past. A lot of them focused on
, administrative developments, how a country governed itself, laws, regulations, military and
diplomatic relations.
These kinds of histories were called narrative histories, focusing on certain people, and key
events. But they leave out a lot of elements, they focus on political and military elites that
createdi defined, and maintained the modern nation-state. Leading to critiques…
2.2.2. Narrative Histories Criticized During the 20th C
1) Methodological Objections
Fernand Braudel, a French historian within the French Annales School, enters the stage.
Argued, we need to look at the same past but tell a different story because narrative histories
are too focused on being histoire evenementielle. This means that they are too focused on a
single event, few key actors, chronological action; missing out information about the factors that
determine the actions of these few actors. And the idea of long duree, narrative histories focus
on a short time span, we sometimes need to look at the long term (the long duree).
2) Focus on Great Men
We get history about a few key figures, but are often elitist histories. Focusing on military,
political, economic elites. So we tend to forget that there is so much happening that we don't
see. We saw that from the 1960s onward, there was a need for social histories, histories of the
ordinary people, from below. So we saw the emergence of new fields, who wanted to tell the
histories of ordinary people. We also see the emergence of the history of media and
communication.
Example: women’s history, labour history, history of the family, history of migration.
2.2.3. Dialogues, Interactions, and Paradigm Shifts
1) Cultural Turn in History
The 1960s were focused on social and economic histories. But there was still a domain that was
ignored: cultural history. How did those people make sense of their world by looking at the
culture they created. Developed around the 1980s, look at culture to understand hşstorical
accounts and events. For example, if you look at the soap operas back then, you can learn a lot
about how they thought about gender. It’s the question of: “How does a given culture
understand, talk about its society, politics, economy?” Part of this argument is linked to the
nation-states because nation states constructed discourses and culture. There was even a
subsection that studied rituals, performances, recipes.
Example: the cookbook in the 50s named ‘Home Baking Made Easy’ looking from a
gendered lens, it focuses on only women who should be busy cooking at home and a mother
should teach to her daughter.
2) Challenges to History’s Emphasis on Empiricism
1960s onward, E.H. Carr talked about the difficulty in obtaining that objectivity. Because a
historian is a subject of that period and time, and there are norms, values, ideologies which
shape their interpretations. We don't know how objective that primary source is, it may be
infused with meaning, it may be written to shape something to have an impact. He follows a
HISTORICAL
PERSPECTIVES ON
MEDIA AND
COMMUNICATION
,Table of Contents
Lecture 1 - Introduction...........................................................................................................................2
Lecture 2 - Histories of Media and Communication - A Meta-Narrative Approach to
Media History..............................................................................................................................................6
Lecture 3 - Media, Communication and Politics: on Propaganda..........................................15
Lecture 4 - On Moral Panic, Media Panic, and Film Censorship..............................................24
Lecture 5 - Histories of Radio..............................................................................................................37
Lecture 6 – Nationalism........................................................................................................................53
Lecture 7 - About Stars and Celebrities...........................................................................................62
Lecture 8 - Popular Music Culture.....................................................................................................72
Lecture 9 - Presenting History - On the Genre of Historical Fiction.......................................79
Lecture 10 - The War on Porn (Guest Lecture by Leontine Hellermans).............................89
Note: (Notes for Lecture 10 are not complete because I stopped taking notes when I realized
the lecturer was repeating the same points shown on the slides. The information was very basic,
so I did not feel the need to write it down. I thought that watching the lecture the night before the
exam would be enough to remember the context.)
,Lecture 1 - Introduction
Content:
- Transformations
- Past, History and Historiography based on Sandell
- Doing Media History
1/ Historical Transformations of Media and Communication
Changes impact every one of us, just like computers changed how we students study, or pay for
a meal. So, we can say that technologies shape our daily life, as well as how we perceive and
think about the world.
Examples of Change:
1980s: Popular music
People listened to music mainly on the radio and recorded it onto cassette tapes. Cassettes
made it possible to create personalized mixtapes.
1990s: Postmodern high school films & music
A relatively optimistic period in which many people watched the same films and listened to
similar music. Music became increasingly social, a way to express identity and form
connections. Recording music was still possible, but audio quality improved with the introduction
of CDs.
2000s: Internet
The rise of the Internet provided access to a vast range of songs. No need to rely on others to
share or own specific tracks anymore.
2010s: Online Streaming
Platforms like Spotify emerged. This introduced a new question: “Should I stop buying physical
music and just pay for online streaming services?”
Technological Perspective on what these media histories mean:
Devices have transformed how people engage with music:
analogue → CD recording → playlists on streaming services.
- Past: Cassettes offered limited capacity.
- Now: Playlists on streaming platforms have virtually no limits.
Economic Perspective on what these media histories mean:
In the past music was primarily purchased as physical media.
- Transition: Illegal downloading became widespread.
- Present: Payment has shifted to subscription-based streaming services.
,Socio-Cultural Perspective on what these media histories mean:
Mixtapes have evolved, but the underlying desire remains the same: people still want to curate,
organize, and personalize their own music collections. The practice of expressing identity
through personalized music selections continues, even if the medium has changed.
2/ Some Concepts: Past, History and Historiography
- The past refers to the time that has gone by; it’s no longer the present.
- History is the narration and interpretation of the past. The present must first become the
past in order to be made visible, intelligible, and writable. Yet, there is no consensus on
how much time must pass before something becomes “historical. Historical
understanding takes time because it involves identifying processes of change. History
concerns people, nation-states, relationships between events, and broader social and
economic conditions.
- Historiography is the practice of writing history. It is a retrospective process: historians
return to sources and evidence from the past to reconstruct a coherent and convincing
narrative of what happened in the past. There is not a single way to write history;
multiple approaches and interpretations exist.
-
2.1/ History as an Academic Discipline
2.1.1/ Professionalization of the Discipline in the 19th C
Vaughan’s definition of a historian: should reflect & share the critical changes in the conditions
of a society. He wasn't the only one, at the same period of time, different universities introduced
history programs. In order for something to become a discipline, there should be a consensus
on how to do that thing. Historians in Germany started to layout principles and practices on how
to conduct history: called the ‘right’ way’ to do history.
The ‘right’ way of making history more scientific in order to be an academic. So positivist
principles shape how one should do history. German Historian Leopold von Ranke came up
with certain principles one should use. So he established modern source-based history, rather
than trusting and using authors who wrote about the past as a source we should go back to the
original documents.
Example: to study how the Roman Empire came about, don’t base yourself on what
others wrote about the establishment but look for original documents.
So,
- Rely on archival material: primary sources, official government documents not on
chronicles.
- Objectivity is important, the authenticity and reliability of material used, cross-referencing
(compare with several documents), checking citations: to check the original source.
→ to make history scientific, objective.
Common idea of what should be studied: Nation-State
In the 19th century, different nation states decided to grant access to people to the archives. So
historians gained access to interpret what happened in the past. A lot of them focused on
, administrative developments, how a country governed itself, laws, regulations, military and
diplomatic relations.
These kinds of histories were called narrative histories, focusing on certain people, and key
events. But they leave out a lot of elements, they focus on political and military elites that
createdi defined, and maintained the modern nation-state. Leading to critiques…
2.2.2. Narrative Histories Criticized During the 20th C
1) Methodological Objections
Fernand Braudel, a French historian within the French Annales School, enters the stage.
Argued, we need to look at the same past but tell a different story because narrative histories
are too focused on being histoire evenementielle. This means that they are too focused on a
single event, few key actors, chronological action; missing out information about the factors that
determine the actions of these few actors. And the idea of long duree, narrative histories focus
on a short time span, we sometimes need to look at the long term (the long duree).
2) Focus on Great Men
We get history about a few key figures, but are often elitist histories. Focusing on military,
political, economic elites. So we tend to forget that there is so much happening that we don't
see. We saw that from the 1960s onward, there was a need for social histories, histories of the
ordinary people, from below. So we saw the emergence of new fields, who wanted to tell the
histories of ordinary people. We also see the emergence of the history of media and
communication.
Example: women’s history, labour history, history of the family, history of migration.
2.2.3. Dialogues, Interactions, and Paradigm Shifts
1) Cultural Turn in History
The 1960s were focused on social and economic histories. But there was still a domain that was
ignored: cultural history. How did those people make sense of their world by looking at the
culture they created. Developed around the 1980s, look at culture to understand hşstorical
accounts and events. For example, if you look at the soap operas back then, you can learn a lot
about how they thought about gender. It’s the question of: “How does a given culture
understand, talk about its society, politics, economy?” Part of this argument is linked to the
nation-states because nation states constructed discourses and culture. There was even a
subsection that studied rituals, performances, recipes.
Example: the cookbook in the 50s named ‘Home Baking Made Easy’ looking from a
gendered lens, it focuses on only women who should be busy cooking at home and a mother
should teach to her daughter.
2) Challenges to History’s Emphasis on Empiricism
1960s onward, E.H. Carr talked about the difficulty in obtaining that objectivity. Because a
historian is a subject of that period and time, and there are norms, values, ideologies which
shape their interpretations. We don't know how objective that primary source is, it may be
infused with meaning, it may be written to shape something to have an impact. He follows a
