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This volume aims to bring a number of conversations about communication in history into conversation with one another. At its most ambitious, it seeks to inject new, cross-national historical awareness into the discipline of communication writ large—including those of its fields that have traditionally focused only on contemporary matters. More specifically, it sets out to provide a platform for further development of an emergent interdisciplinary field,“communication history,” and a kind of collective-performative argument for intellectually centering that field within the discipline of communication itself. The Handbook of Communication History aspires to be useful to both students and established researchers, and to both historical specialists and those with more general curiosity about the history of communication and historical approaches to understanding it.

The question immediately arises as to what we mean by …