"Analyzing the strategic maneuvers of today's great information powers -- Apple, Google, and an eerily resurgent AT&T -- Wu uncovers a time-honored pattern in which invention begets industry and industry begets empire. He shows how a battle royal for the Internets's future is brewing, and this is one war we dare not tune out."--Publisher's description.

An illustrated history of communications and media, discussing body language and gestures, writing, postal systems, the press, radio and television, propaganda, the computer revolution, and many other topics.

Looks at the 1892 murder of seventeen-year-old Freda Ward by her lover Alice Mitchell, examining their love affair and how the court and the nation reacted to their tragic same-sex relationship with greater shock than the crime itself.

Does violence in movies, on television and in comic strips and cartoons rot our children's brains and make zombies-or worse, criminals-of adults at the fringes? In this cogent, well-researched book, American pop-culture expert Harold Schechter argues that exactly the opposite is true: a basic human need is given an outlet through violent images in popular media. Moving from an exploration of early broadsheet engravings showing torture and the atrocities...