HUM 3.05 The Invention of News

News does not “happen,” it gets made—by human agents, cultural practices, material media, and networks of communication. This course charts the history of the making of news in Europe (with side glances at South America for contrastive focus), spanning from the exchange of rumors in the medieval period to the establishment of national daily papers in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. At once a media history and a survey of key medieval and early modern textual genres, it explores the rich international media environment in which spoken, sung, handwritten, and printed news interacted and shaped the core features of the newspaper as we know it today. Analyzing genres such as chronicles, sermons, Khipu messages, letters, broadsides, travel writings, and ballads, the course investigates the relationship of news to historiography, theology, administrative practices, political activism, and entertainment. Topics will include news as a prerogative of elites vs. news as a medium of the masses; questions of veracity, manipulation, and trust; the production of news and colonialism; the relationship of news to time; and the emergence and managing of public opinion.

Instructor

McGillen, P Ostrau, N

Degree Requirement Attributes

Dist:SOC; WCult:W

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