Masters of the Word: How Media Shaped History

In his new book, William J. Bernstein, the celebrated author of A Splendid Exchange, chronicles the history of media, starting with the origin of writing thousands of years ago in Mesopotamia. The revolutionary tool gave rise to the world’s ancient empires. And when Phoenician traders took their alphabet to Greece, literacy’s first boom led to the birth of drama and democracy.

But it’s not just new communication technologies that have changed the world—it’s access to them. Vernacular bibles ...