Robert MacDougall. The People's Network: The Political Economy of the Telephone in the Gilded Age.

In an increasingly interdependent world, the expansion of transportation and communication networks to cover more territory and connect more people often seems natural and inevitable. As Robert MacDougall reminds us in this insightful comparative history of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century telephone networks in the United States and Canada, however, the introduction of technologies of reach such as the railroad, telegraph, and telephone has frequently been more contentious and contingent than is commonly perceived. Questions regarding access to and authority over telephone networks produced fierce commercial, political, and cultural battles in both countries. In the United States, they also generated the independent telephony movement, a viable alternative to the dominance of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) and its predecessor, American Bell. One of MacDougall's objectives is to uncover the dramatic but forgotten early history of the North American telephone networks. The drama of those early years has been neglected, he argues, because AT&T has written or commissioned much of the published history of the telephone. Even independent scholars have relied heavily on the records in the AT&T archives. There is also a tendency in the history of technology to treat the most recent device or system as the most logical one and ignore the choices made along the way and possible alternative outcomes. Consequently, the history of the telephone has focused on the gradual expansion of AT&T's high quality network across the nation. MacDougall has scoured trade journals, the records of AT&T's early rivals, and municipal archives to shed light on the independent movement and its “vision of ‘a telephone for the people’” (p. 4). The independents favored decentralized, locally owned and locally oriented telephone networks that offered less expensive but lower quality service to a broader swath of the population.

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