“The Revolutionary Evolution of the Media”: The Birth of the Modern – Paul S. Maxwell

With apologies to Paul Johnson, who wrote a superb and long book of that title chronicling the startling breakthroughs at the dawn of the Industrial Age, the 18th Century brought significant changes to the media everywhere. Nothing much happened in media during the 1600s in a technological sense. As before, singers sang from song sheets. Plays were performed from printed scripts. Pamphlets and bulletins were printed and distributed as before. Newsletters proliferated. But in other, equally important aspects of media, two key organizational structures sprouted within the growing publishing business. The first involved the growing importance of postal systems as national and regional systems cooperated more. The second was regular periodical publishing.