Richard R. John

Richard R. John

Richard R. John is a historian of communications who specializes in the political economy of communications in the United States. His publications include many essays, two edited books, and one monograph, "Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse" (1995). A second monograph, "Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications," is forthcoming from Harvard in 2010.

John has been a fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago and the Smithsonian Institution's Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D. C., and has served as a visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. Among the institutions that have sponsored his research are the College of William and Mary, the American Antiquarian Society, and the National Endowment of the Humanities, which awarded him a faculty fellowship in 2008. "Spreading the News" received several national awards, including the Allan Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians and the Herman E. Krooss Prize from the Business History Conference. John has recently been elected the incoming president of the Business History Conference, an international professional society dedicated to the study of institutional history.

Between 1981 and 1989, John earned a B.A. in social studies (magna cum laude), a M.A. in history and a Ph.D. in the history of American civilization, all from Harvard University.