Search

The history of the media may be analyzed in rather different ways. The present article first presents approaches customarily used by media and communication sciences in the past and goes on to discuss novel approaches to media history and recent findings of the historical sciences. The authors favor placing less emphasis on the contents of selected media and their individual development and more on how the media fit into social history, since almost every topic, at least as far as the modern age is concerned, has aspects relevant to media history. Only rarely, however, have these aspects been analyzed in political, cultural or social history, research into historical gender relations, the history of towns or cities or the history of transnational relations. Possible results of this latter approach are listed predominantly for developments since the late nineteenth century in the German environment, for which there are much more studies than there are for Eastern Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]