Contemporary media history is a rapidly growing field that extends far beyond traditional studies of technology or institutions such as radio, film, and television. This volume expands the scope further still to analyze ephemeral, mundane phenomena long overlooked by media historiography. In eight original essays, the volume demonstrates the strengths of a broad concept of the media. The first part centers on media systems and media events, with studies of spiritist séances, Gallup polls, the mediated persona of Kaiser Wilhelm II, and the burial of a Swedish elder statesman in 1915. The second part focuses on media materialities and infrastructure such as art replicas, ring binders, tourist guidebooks, and media technology in the IKEA home. Aimed at students and academics alike, Expanding Media Histories offers new empirical research, which engages critically with key concepts in media history today.

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction. Expanding media, expanding histories
• I Media cultures and events
  • 1. A non-hegemonic media event
    • The funeral of the former Swedish prime minister Karl Staaff in 1915
  • 2. Spiritist social media
    • Seeing-practices, participation, and alternative realities
  • 3. The transnational media-political system of the fin de siècle
    • Kaiser Wilhelm II as a locus of the converging logics of expanding communications
  • 4. Mediating society
    • Gallup polls as a statistical attraction in the Swedish press, 1941–1948
• II Media materialities and infrastructures
  • 5. Holes of significance
    • The ring binder as an ordering device
  • 6. Media matters in the IKEA home
    • Catalogues and choreographies, 1951–2021
  • 7. Midlife media history
    • Turen går til and tourist guidebooks in the era of mass travel
  • 8. Image circulation and copying practices
    • Painting and print in seventeenth-century Antwerp
• Images
• About the authors