A Nation Transformed By Information: How Information has Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to The Present. Alfred D. Chandler Jr. and James W. Cortada. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. How Americans invested in information and integrated information in the very formation of social, economic, and political aspects of American life.

The Invention of News: how the World Came to Know About Itself. Andrew Pettegree. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014. History of the development and use of news in ten different countries and across four centuries.

Genealogy Tools For Historians

François Weil, Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. Not only a history of how genealogy was practiced, but also and examination the role of genealogy and lineage in American life.

Genealogy and the Librarian: Perspectives on Research, Instruction, Outreach and Management. Carol Smallwood, ed. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2018. Includes chapters on how academics use genealogy for research.

Propoganda and News

“Fake News on Russia and Other Official Enemies: The New York Times, 1917-2017." Edward S. Herman. Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine 69, no. 3 (July 2017): 98-111. Examines the New York Times coverage of Russian’s role in world affairs.

"F for Fake: Propaganda! Hoaxing! Hacking! Partisanship! and Activism! in the Fake News Ecology." Ian. Reill. Journal Of American Culture 41, no. 2 (2018): 139-152. “The article focuses on the concept of fake news in the twenty-first century.”

“The Age-Old Problem of ‘Fake News.’”Jackie Mansky, Smithsonian. May 7, 2018.https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/age-old-problem-fake-news-180968945/. Accessed August 25, 2018. Nice accessible, but anecdotal overview. Will lead to other sources.

Archives and Bias

Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive. Marisa J. Fuentes. Philadelphia: PENN University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.Explores slavery and gender in the Caribbean considering how archives have been preserved and described.

Never Neutral: Libraries, Technology, and Inclusion. Chris Bourg. Blog post https://chrisbourg.wordpress.com/2015/01/28/never-neutral-libraries-technology-and-inclusion/ January 28, 2015. Clear discussion how misleading library subject headings and the organization of knowledge hamper discovery of sources and express a view. Links to other scholars.

The Hubris of Neutrality in Archives. Sam Winn. Medium. https://medium.com/on-archivy/the-hubris-of-neutrality-in-archives-8df6b523fe9f. Apr 24, 2017. On-Archivy column. Argues that archivists have too often perpetuate a status quo in description of collections. Offers ways of changing practices.

The Colonizing Gaze: Digitized Collections, Radical Communities and Paywalls (featuring Rhianna) Giordana Mecagni. Presentation at the Society of American Archivists. July 28, 2017. https://giordanamecagni.wordpress.com/2017/07/31/saa-panel-on-radical-empathy/

“Whose Knowledge? Representing Indigenous Realities in Library and Archival Collections.” David A. Hurley,Sara R. Kostelecky, and Paulita Aguilar. Collection Management. 42(3-4) 2017: 124-129.

You Are What You Eat: Preservation, Discovery, and Access in Historical Research. Alea Henley. Presentation at Front Range Early American Consortium (FREAC), 2016. Manuscript out on submission. https://aleahenle.com/presentations/freac-conference-paper/. Nice examination of historical societies collection practices and description in Early America.

Further Reading