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This chapter explores the last thirty years of revolutionary historiography. The vast literature on the subject can be divided into three approaches: first, the Atlantic interpretations, by which is meant studies of the ‘big picture’ — the internal and external workings of the British Empire: secondly, the New Social History and its efforts to locate the origins of the American Revolution in colonial structures and processes; thirdly, the heated historiographical debate over the ideological interpretation which emphasizes the role of the republican tradition. Categorizing historians under one approach or another is a matter of emphasis. Most of the historians described consider the Revolution's imperialism, and its socio-economic and ideological contexts. Scholars such as Jack P. Greene, Edmund S. Morgan, and Bernard Bailyn have made significant contributions to all three approaches. This chapter challenges exclusive monocausal interpretations of the Revolution, and suggests that the event is best explained by effective integration of all three approaches. These approaches of modern historiography seek to explain how and why seemingly manageable political and constitutional disagreements between the colonists and the British government shattered the Empire.

In the formative years of the Internet, researchers collaboratively connected computing systems with a goal of sharing research and computing resources. The model process with which they created the Internet and its forefather, the ARPANET, was echoed in early social media platforms, where creative computer scientists, artists, writers, musicians educators explored the promise of computer-based platforms to bring together communities of interest in what would be called “cyberspace.” With a focus on the arts and humanities, this introduction traces the development of social media affordances in applications such as email, mailing lists, BBSs, the Community Memory, PLATO, Usenet, mail art, telematic art, and video communication. The author outlines the early social media platforms documented in each chapter in this book and summarizes how the book's epilogues both explore differences between early and contemporary social media and look to the future of the arts in social media.

The making of consumer capitalism was informed by transnational transfers and transatlantic exchanges in ways that have been largely overlooked by historians. A surprising number of mid 20th-century consumer experts were European immigrants and émigré refugees. They excelled in areas such as market research and advertising psychology as well as in industrial and graphic design. In different capacities, these experts helped to engineer the midcentury consumer´s republic by developing new marketing tools that fundamentally informed the dynamic expansion of American consumer capitalism. As corporate and government advisors, furthermore, they acted as transatlantic mediators after the war, facilitating postwar transfers in marketing knowledge and commercial practices back to Europe. This introduction contextualizes their story within the historiographies on mass consumption and business history as well as within research on elite migration and transnational knowledge transfers. In a mid centrury era of high modernity and social engineering, these émigré experts played crucial roles as transatlantic cultural intermediaries of consumer capitalism.

Chapter Two places the Otago gold rushes within the Tasman World by considering the links between Otago and Victoria during the gold rushes. It discusses the impacts of the contraction and industrialisation of the Victorian goldfields on facilitating migration to Otago. It further analyses the two-way traffic of people, information and commodities that wedded the Otago and Victorian goldfields into a single economic and social trans-Tasman community. Gold seekers also transplanted social networks in Otago, where they dug and drank alongside Victorian mates. Meanwhile, the Otago and Victorian press competed for itinerant gold seekers. Despite the attempts of the Otago newspapers, few had any attachment to Otago and their experiences in Otago were a temporary sojourn rather than permanent settlement.

The early days of social media saw tremendous optimism about the transformations that connecting people via networked computers would bring. This chapter, the book’s epilogue, analyses the nostalgia that permeates the preceding chapters, in which the pioneers of the field write with nostalgia for creative freedom, the pre-commercial internet and the hopeful time when people believed that computing would change humanity for the better. The world of dial-up modems and floppy disks and ASCII bulletin board systems seems very long ago. But the ideals of that time, in spite of their naiveté, indeed because of it, are very valuable. Untainted by cynicism or corrupted by practicalities, they remind us of what the social net ought to be; they remind of the direction to head in, even if we will not quite get there. By inculcating ideals into mythic origin stories, nostalgia weaves them into a culture: we create the past that we want to live up to.

Humanist is an online, international seminar on digital humanities that was set up in 1987 by Willard McCarty. Since its inception, it has taken the form of an electronic mailing list and, within the context of the history of computing in the humanities, can be viewed as a proto-social media platform. Newer and slicker social media and crowd-driven platforms may have come (and, in some cases, gone) but Humanist has endured. Indeed, it arguably remains digital humanities’ most vital locus of questioning, imagining and reflecting on and about itself and its many interdisciplinary intersections. In this paper, the author discusses conversations conducted via Humanist in its inaugural year in order to identify and analyze references to disciplinary identity. After focusing on the contradictions that emerge, she reflects on what they might reveal about longer-term dynamics of Digital Humanities’ disciplinary formation and emphasizes the value of Humanist archives in such research.

This essay constructively examines and analyses research in German Maritime History since 1970. Each analysis is divided into specific topics, with work and research adhering to that topic receiving critical response. Topics include Marine Art and Industrial Archaeology; Inland Navigation; Social History; Fishing and Writing; Ports; Shipbuilding; Shipping Companies; Emigration; Shipping and Trade with Various Regions; and Works of General References and Syntheses.

In the early Internet, art history crossed the path of media history and both disciplines conveyed characteristics of each other. Net (based) art did not regain the utopian potential of art, but its social, aesthetic and conceptual approach referenced the future role of digital communication. This chapter documents and examines the role of the art network THE THING in early digital communication and art practice and how it anticipated the future potential to communicate, distribute, and produce. Including the theory and practice that informed the founding of THE THING, as well as an interview with THE THING founder, Wolfgang Staehle, and a concluding timeline of THE THING's history, this chapter also emphasizes how THE THING was both playful and far ahead of its time.

Community Memory was the first public-access social media system, opening without advance notice on August 8, 1973 in Berkeley, California. Designed and programmed by members of a nonprofit company established to bring the power of computers to the counterculture, it ran on a mainframe computer and was well received by those who tried it. This chapter discusses the history of the project, contributions of some of its members, and ways in which it succeeded and ultimately failed to sustain itself. Pre-dating the personal computer, it was designed to provide terminals that nucleated neighborhood information-exchange points. Community Memory spun out from its parent organization, Resource One, Inc. to form its own nonprofit -- The Community Memory Project -- in 1977. The design underwent three generations, culminating in a network of text-based browsers running on basic IBM PCs accessing a Unix server. It was never connected to the Internet, and closed in 1992.

This essay revisits the online defense that took place in LinguaMOO in July 1995, tying it to theories and current practice of social media. In doing so, it situates MOOs in a historical, cultural context as an early form of participatory media related to social media environments prevalent today and establishes that popular social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, are not new but, rather, are part of an evolution of technologies that foster the human impetus to connect with one another across any mode of communication.

This chapter explores the significance of the steamship as a vehicle of change and modernisation in Britain between 1812 and 1840. It builds on the previous chapter’s analysis of the nationwide diffusion of the steamship, then defines the features of modernity that the steamship exhibited - such as large scale production; specialisation; and wider market access. It then explores how these advances impacted society through the widespread recognition of modern technology; wider appreciation of the importance of time; advance of personal mobility; new forms of finance and operations; and the role of technology in the changing function of the British government. It concludes that the steamship played a vital role in British innovation, though ultimately was one factor of many in the widespread and rapidly increasing modernisation of the country.

The use of digital computers to facilitate social interaction has not eclipsed the uses for which they were invented, but it often seems that way. That use requires an ability to network computers to one another, a capability that took several decades after the computer's invention to be realized. The Internet, which emerged out of military-sponsored research done in the 1970s, enabled the creation of sophisticated forms of social interaction. But the personal computer phenomenon was evolving in a parallel universe, with little communication between the two camps. This chapter argues that important first steps toward social media were taken in the arena of the personal computer, which also emerged in the 1970s, but from a different direction. Using devices to connect PCs to the telephone network, and developing so-called “bulletin board” software, personal computer enthusiasts created a framework on which the current Internet-based social world resides.

In the early 1970s, two decades before the World Wide Web came on the scene, the PLATO system pioneered online discussion forums and message boards, email, chat rooms, instant messaging, remote screen sharing, and multiplayer games, leading to the spontaneous emergence of the world's first online community. David R. Woolley, one of the creators of PLATO's social media features, describes this vibrant but unplanned community, and chronicles the development of the software that unexpectedly gave rise to it on a system that was intended primarily for computer-based education.

Initiated by Carl Loeffler, Director of the San Francisco artspace La Mamelle/Art Com, who had been working on artists' telecommunications projects since the 1977 Send/Receive Project, Art Com Electronic Network (ACEN) was implemented on The WELL by artist Fred Truck in the Spring of 1986. Loeffler's vision was to create an online environment for contemporary art that included electronic publication of art journals; an art-centered conferencing system; and interactive publication of computer-mediated artworks and electronic literature. How Loeffler and Truck began a collaboration that resulted in an historic social media platform; how ACEN brought artists online; published text art and electronic literature, including John Cage‘s First Meeting of the Satie Society and Judy Malloy's Uncle Roger; and mounted a travelling exhibition of artists software, is detailed in this interview with Fred Truck -- with the participation of Anna Couey, who began editing Art Com Magazine online in 1990.

This essay presents the first essay that Berube published based on the research that culminated in his award-winning book, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II. Here, Berube draws on oral histories, correspondence, and other documentary evidence to reconstruct the experience of gay men and lesbians during World War II. Written in the tradition of the New Social History of the 1960s and 1970s, the essay relates the experience of ordinary Americans rather than the rich, famous, and powerful. Berube makes the argument that World War II was “a turning point” in gay and lesbian history and that it “lay the groundwork for gay life as we know it” by helping to build the urban communities of the postwar decades.