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Available From UC Press
Politicking and Emergent Media
Presidential campaigns of the twenty-first century were not the first to mobilize an array of new media forms in efforts to gain electoral victory. In Politicking and Emergent Media, distinguished historian Charles Musser looks at four US presidential campaigns during the long 1890s (1888–1900) as Republicans and Democrats deployed a variety of media forms to promote their candidates and platforms. New York—the crucial swing state as well as the home of Wall Street, Tammany Hall, and prominent media industries—became the site of intense struggle as candidates argued over trade issues, currency standards, and a new overseas empire. If the city’s leading daily newspapers were mostly Democratic as the decade began, Republicans eagerly exploited alternative media opportunities. Using the stereopticon (a modernized magic lantern), they developed the first campaign documentaries. Soon they were exploiting motion pictures, the phonograph, and telephone in surprising and often successful ways. Brimming with rich historical details, Musser’s remarkable tale reveals the political forces driving the emergence of modern media.
"Politicking and Emergent Media is an extraordinary work of historical scholarship, political analysis, and media archaeology. Informed, but not inhibited, by the impact of the Internet and social media on shaping contemporary presidential campaign narratives, Musser not only discovers in the campaigns of the 1890s the active presence of an unexpectedly diverse mediascape comprising illustrated lecture, phonograph, cinema, telegraph, and telephone, but finds already fully in place the disruptive, dispersive, and realigning force of media technologies so typical of American democracy.”—Thomas Elsaesser, author of Film History as Media Archaeology
“In this witty, often amusing, and deeply erudite book, Charles Musser succeeds in denaturalizing breathless contemporary discourse about the newness of emergent technology. It turns out that technology has been newly emerging over the past three centuries, and the performance of politics has long been deeply transformed as a result.”—Jeffery Alexander, author of The Performance of Politics: Obama's Victory and the Democratic Struggle for Power