America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 / Edition 1

by Claude S. Fischer

Overview

The telephone looms large in our lives, as ever present in modern societies as cars and television. Claude Fischer presents the first social history of this vital but little-studied technology—how we encountered, tested, and ultimately embraced it with enthusiasm. Using telephone ads, oral histories, telephone industry correspondence, and statistical data, Fischer's work is a colorful exploration of how, when, and why Americans started communicating in this radically new manner.

Studying three California communities, Fischer uncovers how the telephone became integrated into the private worlds and community activities of average Americans in the first decades of this century. Women were especially avid in their use, a phenomenon which the industry first vigorously discouraged and then later wholeheartedly promoted. Again and again Fischer finds that the telephone supported a wide-ranging network of social relations and played a crucial role in community life, especially for women, from organizing children's relationships and church activities to alleviating the loneliness and boredom of rural life.

Deftly written and meticulously researched, America Calling adds an important new chapter to the social history of our nation and illuminates a fundamental aspect of cultural modernism that is integral to contemporary life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520086470
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	03/22/1994
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	424
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Claude S. Fischer is Professor of the Graduate School in Sociology, and the author of To Dwell among Friends: Personal Networks in Town and City (1982) and The Urban Experience (1984).

Table of Contents

List of Figures
List of Tables
Preface

CHAPTER I
Technology and Modern Life

CHAPTER 2
The Telephone in America

CHAPTER 3
Educating the Public

CHAPTER 4
The Telephone Spreads: National Patterns

CHAPTER 5
The Telephone Spreads: Local Patterns

CHAPTER 6
Becoming Commonplace

CHAPTER 7
Local Attachment, I89D-I940

CHAPTER 8
Personal Calls, Personal Meanings

CHAPTER 9
Conclusion

APPENDIX A
Bibliographic Essay

APPENDIX B
Statistical Analyses of Telephone and Automobile Distribution

APPENDIX C
Telephone Subscription among Iowa Farmers, 1924

APPENDIX D
Summary of Expenditure Studies by Household Income
or Occupation

APPENDIX E
The 1918-1919 Cost of Living Study

APPENDIX F
Who Had the Telephone When?

APPENDIX G
Analysis of Advertisement Data

APPENDIX H
Statistical Analyses for Chapter 7

Notes
Bibliography
Index
Photograph section follows page 153

Editorial Reviews

". . . a significant contribution to the historical and sociological understanding of technology and modernity." 

Journal of Interdisciplinary History

"[American Calling] is to be highly recommended for its pioneering approach to the social history of a technology and for its many revisionist conclusions about over-worked concepts like modernity and the decline of community." 

Journal of Social History

"Although it is impossible to reconstruct with complete accuracy how technologies were used and perceived decades ago, America Calling gives us a convincing picture of how a particular technology became part of everyday life." 

Technology and Culture

"Professor Fischer's inquisitiveness is refreshing. Many of the methods in this path-breaking book (carefully documented in the text and in seven statistical appendices) are applicable to other social histories of technology; much more could be said about the facility with which he handles his subject's complexities, or about the useful contrasts he draws between the telephone and other space-transcending technologies." 

Journal of Economic History

"The book is a treat. Fischer should be the industrywide standard; fortunately, it's a very high standard that he has set." 

Contemporary Sociology

"Delightful. . . . A thought-provoking, often entertaining book that makes it impossible to take the telephone for granted."

Milwaukee Journal

"Fischer's discussion of historiographic methods, insights into communication technology, and the use of positivistic and post–positivistic research can be an excellent model for technology education researchers. . . . America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 is an excellent work of historical research that can offer important STS insights for technology education."

Journal of Industrial Teacher Education

". . . this innovative study advances our understanding of the social role of technology and is a significant contribution to the debate over the modernization process." 

Journal of American History

"[An] insightful and thorough study. . ."

Business History Review

"Fischer's discussion of historiographic methods, insights into communication technology, and the use of positivistic and post–positivistic research can be an excellent model for technology education researchers. . . . America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 is an excellent work of historical research that can offer important STS insights for technology education."

null Journal of Industrial Teacher Education

A warning to those who see technology as having clear and far-reaching consequences in American life: Don't use the telephone as an obvious example. From a user-centered view of technological dispersion, the author argues convincingly that the telephone reinforced social and cultural patterns rather than changed them. Most wealthy and middle-class Americans (and many farmers) adopted the new technology to their own ends prior to World War II--ends not necessarily anticipated or welcomed by industry leaders or technology forecasters. Well researched, with an excellent bibliography and fascinating endnotes, Fischer's study is likely to be a required purchase for comprehensive collections in sociology, business, and the history of technology. It is accessible, however, to a wider audience because of its readability.-- Ellen McDermott, NYNEX Corp. Lib., White Plains, N.Y.

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