Intellectual History, Social History, Cultural History… and Our History

This essay explores the links among intellectual history, social history and cultural history. It suggests that the recent turn in American historiography to cultural history is vitally important for communication studies because communication has now been thrust to center stage in virtually every subfield of history. But it warns that communication historians should not rashly and heedlessly jump into cultural history before an adequate foundation has been laid in the economic and institutional social history of mass media.