Richard R. John

Photo/Piotr Redlinski

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 two monographs: "Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse" (1995) and "Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications" (2010). For more information, download his vitae.

In December of 2010, John debated law Professor Tim Wu at a Journalism School-sponsored forum on "Big Media: Pro and Con," which aired on C-SPAN2's Book TV. John also appeared on Book TV and before an audience at the New America Foundation to discuss his monograph "Network Nation," which won the first Ralph Gomory Book Prize from the Business History Conference and was the 2010 Best Book in Journalism and Mass Communication History, an award bestowed by the History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. His book was also the subject of a recent interview conducted by the editors of the online magazine Ubiquity.

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 is a former 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.

Recent work by Prof. Richard R. John (PDFs)

• Editor, The American Postal Network, 1792 - 1914, 4 vols.
• "Robber Barons Redux: Antimonopoly Reconsidered." Enterprise and Society 13 (March 2012): 1-38.
• "Business Historians and the Challenge of Innovation," Business History Review 85 (Spring 2011): 185-201.
• "The Political Economy of Postal Reform in the Victorian Age," Smithsonian Contributions to History and Technology, 55, (2010): 3-12.
• "Expanding the Realm of Communications." In An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, edited by Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley, pp. 211-220. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
• "History of Universal Service and the Postal Monopoly," School of Public Policy, George Mason University, posted December 2008 (Appendix D).
• "Telecommunications," Enterprise and Society, 9 (September 2008): 507-520.
• "Ruling Passions: Political Economy in Nineteenth-Century America," Journal of Policy History, 18:1 (2006): 1-20.
• "Patent Politics: Intellectual Property, the Railroad Industry, and the Problem of Monopoly," (with Steven W. Usselman), Journal of Policy History, 18:1 (2006): 96-125.
• "Private Enterprise, Public Good? Communications Deregulation as a National Political Issue, 1839-1851." In Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic, edited by Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher, pp. 328-354. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Other work by Prof. Richard R. John (PDFs)

• "Turner, Beard, Chandler: Progressive Historians," Business History Review, 82 (Summer 2008): 227-240.
• "Affairs of Office: The Executive Departments, the Election of 1828, and the Making of the Democratic Party." In The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History, edited by Meg Jacobs, William Novak, and Julian Zelizer, pp. 50-84. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.
• "The Illusion of the Ordinary: John Lewis Krimmel’s Village Tavern and the Democratization of Public Life in the Early Republic" [with Thomas C. Leonard], Pennsylvania History, 65 (Winter 1998): 87-96.
• "The Lost World of Bartleby the Ex-Officeholder: Variations on a Venerable Literary Form," New England Quarterly, 70 (December 1997): 631-641.
• "Governmental Institutions as Agents of Change: Rethinking American Political Development in the Early Republic, 1787-1835," Studies in American Political Development, 11 (Fall 1997): 347-380.
• "Elaborations, Revisions, Dissents: Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.’s., The Visible Hand after Twenty Years," Business History Review, 71 (Summer 1997): 151-200.