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America in 1920: An Information Microhistory

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Understanding Information History

Part of the book series: SpringerBriefs in History of Computing ((BRIEFSHC))

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Abstract

This chapter presents a microhistory of America in the year 1920 from an information perspective. Topics include an overview of America in 1920 from a traditional historical perspective, four examples of how traditional accounts of events from 1920 might be retold in a different way when giving information issues greater consideration, ways in which an information history perspective might offer greater historical attention to new technologies and to information institutions, how various academic disciplines have treated the concept of information, and how an information-oriented account of this history differs from a traditional historical account.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Spanish flu, Wikiquote. Accessed 25 May 2023.

  2. 2.

    Agatha Christie, The Murder on the Links (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1923).

  3. 3.

    There is a large body of literature about America in the decade of the 1920s, or about the period between the two world wars. See, for example, Kathleen Drowne, The 1920s (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2004); David Kyvig, Daily Life in the United States, 1920–1940 (Chicago: Ivan Dee, rev. 2004); Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper, American Culture and Society in the 1920s (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995); Nathan Miller, The 1920s and the Making of Modern America (New York: Scribner, 2003); Susan Currell, American Culture in the 1920s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009); Robert Goldberg, Ku Klux Kulture: America and the Klan in the 1920s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017); John Braeman, Robert Bremner, and David Brody, Change and Continuity in Twentieth-Century America: The 1920’s (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968); and Lucy Moore, Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties (London: Atlantic Books, 2009).

  4. 4.

    While we are summarizing the traditional account of 1920 America in this section, it does not mean that this account has been unchanging. The first historical accounts of this period focused on political themes, then later added economic and literary themes, and then even later a new focus on private life, technology, and social norms. What we are calling “traditional” here is what one would find in today’s historical research on this period.

  5. 5.

    H. G. Wells, The War that will End Wars (1914; reprint Bristol: H. G. Wells Library, Read & Co., 2016).

  6. 6.

    See Michael D. Bordo and John Landon-Lane, Exits from Recessions: The US Experience 1920–2007, National Bureau of Economic Research (2010); James Grant, The Forgotten Depression, 1921: The Crash that Cured Itself (2014); Daniel Leab, ed., Encyclopedia of American Recessions and Depressions (Stuttgart: Holtzbrinck, 2014); Christopher Shaw, ‘We Must Deflate’: The Crime of 1920 Revisited, Enterprise and Society 17, 3 (2016), pp. 618–650.

  7. 7.

    On the history of the Spanish flu, see G. Kolata, Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and and the Search for the Virus that Caused It (New York: Atria, 1999); A. W. Crosby, America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918 (2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); H. Phillips and D. Killingray, eds., The Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918: New Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2003); J. M. Barry, The Great Influenza (New York: Penguin, 2004); Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: the Spanish Flu of 1918 and how it changed the world (New York: Public Affairs, 2018); K. C. Davis, More Deadly than War: The Hidden History of the Spanish Flu and the First World War (New York: Henry Holt, 2018); Guy Beiner, ed., Pandemic Re-Awakenings: The Forgotten and Unforgotten ‘Spanish’ Flu of 1918–1919 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). On the Spanish flu in 1920, see Jess McHugh, The 1918 Flu Did Not End in 1918. Here’s What its Third Year Can Teach Us, The Washington Post, 6 February 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/02/06/1918-flu-fourth-wave/. Accessed 20 May 2022.

  8. 8.

    Duff McDonald, The Making of McKinsey: A Brief History of Management Consulting in America, https://longreads.com/2013/10/23/the-making-of-mckinsey-a-brief-history-of-management/. Accessed 25 May 2022. Excerpted from D. McDonald, The Firm (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013).

  9. 9.

    See, for example, T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood (North Yorkshire, England: Methuen, 1920); F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920); Sinclair Lewis, Main Street (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace, and Howe, 1920); Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwym Mauberley (London: Ovid Press, 1920); and Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (New York: Appleton, 1920). This point is discussed further later in this paper. An interesting artifact of the time is an etiquette book for flappers, which has been republished almost a century later: Alice Leone-Moats, No Nice Girl Swears: Notes on High Society, Social Graces, and Keeping Your Wits from a Jazz-Age Debutante (New York: Apollo Publishers, 2020).

  10. 10.

    Because of political battles with the Republicans, who had taken control of Congress in 1918, the United States never ratified the treaty that created the League of Nations.

  11. 11.

    On Woodrow Wilson, see, among many other books and articles: Ray Stannard Baker, Woodrow Wilson: Life and Letters (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940); Arthur Walworth, Woodrow Wilson: American Prophet (original 1958; 3rd ed. Norwalk, CT: Easton Press, 1978) and Woodrow Wilson: World Prophet (original 1958; 3rd ed. Norwalk, CT: Easton Press, 1978); Arthur S. Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era (New York: Harper Torch, 1963); John Milton Cooper, Jr., The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1983) and Woodrow Wilson: A Biography (New York: Vintage, 2009); Kendrick Clements, Woodrow Wilson, World Statesman (original 1987; Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2003); August Hecksher, Woodrow Wilson: A Biography (New York: Scribner, 1991); A. Scott Berg, Wilson (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2013); Patricia O’Toole, The Moralist: Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018); and Thomas Knock, To End All Wars (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).

  12. 12.

    Regarding Harding’s presidency, see Samuel Hopkins Adams, The Incredible Era: The Life and Times of Warren Gamaliel Harding (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1939); Randolph C. Downes, The Rise of Warren Gamaliel Harding (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1970); Robert K. Murray, The Harding Era (Newtown, CT: American Political Biography Press, 2000); John W. Dean, Warren Harding (New York: Times Books, 2004); and Ryan S. Walters, The Jazz Age President (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2022).

  13. 13.

    See Wall Street Bombing 1920, FBI, https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/wall-street-bombing-1920. Accessed 17 May 2022; Charles H. McCormick, Hopeless Cases: The Hunt for the Red Scare Terrorist Bombers (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2005).

  14. 14.

    See Erin Blakemore, Why the Great Steel Strike of 1919 was One of Labor’s Biggest Failures, History, https://www.history.com/news/steel-strike-of-1919-defeat. Accessed 17 May 2022; David Brody, Labor in Crisis: the Steel Strike of 1919 (1965).

  15. 15.

    See Edward D. Beechert, Working in Hawaii: A Labor History (Manoa, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 1985).

  16. 16.

    Edward T. Devine, The Denver Tramway Strike of 1920 (original 1921; London: Forgotten Books, 2018); John Paul Enyeart, The Quest for “Just and Pure Law”: Rocky Mountain Workers and American Social Democracy, 1870–1924 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). The US government increased its surveillance capabilities in 1898 when faced with Filipino resistance to its occupation of the Philippines. Ralph Van Deman, who took command of these intelligence operations in the Philippines in 1901, applied this experience during the First World War, when President Wilson directed him to create the US Army’s Military Intelligence Division (MID) in 1917. After the war ended, the MID worked together with the FBI to gather intelligence about labor activists and others involved in the strikes of 1920. See A. W. McCoy, Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009).

  17. 17.

    There is an enormous literature on the Sacco-Vanzetti trial, as well as plays, films, paintings, and even music. Some examples of the more thoughtful writings include Felix Frankfurter, The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti, The Atlantic, March 1927, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1927/03/the-case-of-sacco-and-vanzetti/306625/. Accessed 17 May 2022; Brian Jackson, The Black Flag (London: Routledge Kegan and Paul 1981); Paul Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); and Moshik Temkin, The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair: America on Trial (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

  18. 18.

    There is limited scholarship on this event, but lots of press coverage. The Wikipedia article entitled Lynching of Irving and Herman Arthus provides pointers to this news coverage. Also see David Lynn Chapman, Lynching in Texas, MA thesis, Texas Tech University, 1973, https://ttu-ir.tdl.org/bitstream/handle/2346/15566/31295000657113.pdf. Accessed 17 May 2022.

  19. 19.

    See Duluth Lynchings, Minnesota Historical Society, n.d., https://www.mnhs.org/duluthlynchings/lynchings. Accessed 17 May 2022; Michael Fedo, The Lynchings in Duluth (Minneapolis: Minnesota Historical Society, 2000).

  20. 20.

    See, for example, David M. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987); Richard Baudouin, The Ku Klux Klan: A History of Racism & Violence (Montgomery, AL: Southern Poverty Law Center, 1997); Wyn Craig Wade, The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); and Linda Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition (New York: W.W. Norton, 2017).

  21. 21.

    At the point of ratification of the 18th Amendment, some states had passed various types of laws prohibiting certain kinds of alcohol in certain places, but it was a checkerboard of regulations.

  22. 22.

    See, for example, David Roos, How Prohibition Put the ‘Organized’ into Organized Crime, History, updated 9 March 2021, https://www.history.com/news/prohibition-organized-crime-al-capone. Accessed 23 May 2022; Prohibition Profits Transformed the Mob, Prohibition: an Interactive History, https://prohibition.themobmuseum.org/the-history/the-rise-of-organized-crime/the-mob-during-prohibition/. Accessed 23 May 2022; Stephen R. Fox, Blood and Power: Organized Crime in Twentieth-Century America (New York: William Morrow, 1989); and Mike Dash, The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder, and the Birth of the American Mafia (New York: Random House, 2009).

  23. 23.

    Some of the other important literature published in 1920 included: Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwym Mauberley (long poem, original 1920; available from Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/23538. Accessed 20 July 2023; Edward Bok, The Americanization of Edward Bok (original 1920; Mattituck, NY: Amereon, 2020); Carl Sandburg, Smoke and Steel (original, 1920; reprint, Edinburgh: Legare Street Press, 2020; and writer for the masses Zane Grey, The Man of the Forest (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1920).

  24. 24.

    This list given in this paragraph draws heavily upon, but is not identical to, the list given on pp. x-xi in Susan Currell, American Culture in the 1920s (Edinburgh University Press, 2009).

  25. 25.

    This discussion of farming draws heavily on the account of James Cortada in his book, All the Facts: A History of Information in the United States Since 1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Cortada has given permission to draw heavily on his account here.

  26. 26.

    See Chelsea Green Publishing, A Short History of Agricultural Seed, n.d., https://www.chelseagreen.com/2021/a-short-history-of-agricultural-seed/. Accessed 18 May 2022.

  27. 27.

    See, for example, the list in Timeline of Ag Equipment Firsts, Farm Equipment, 23 September 2009, https://www.farm-equipment.com/articles/4269-timeline-of-ag-equipment-firsts. Accessed 18 May 2022.

  28. 28.

    The focus in this subsection is on understanding the role of information in events of 1920 America. There are important issues about the positive and negative consequences of information and information technology, but these are beyond the scope here. To learn more about these important issues, consider the literatures on information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D), ethics and values in science and technology, and science and technology studies.

  29. 29.

    Becky Little, As the 1918 Flu Emerged, Cover-Up and Denial Helped It Spread, History, 26 May 2020, https://www.history.com/news/1918-pandemic-spanish-flu-censorship. Accessed 20 May 2022. Also see Samantha N. Edwards, Understanding the Present Through the Past: A Comparison of Spanish News Coverage of the 1918 Flu and COVID-19 Pandemics, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 99 (1) (2022) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/10776990211061762. Accessed 20 May 2022.

  30. 30.

    See Spanish Flu and the First Amendment, First Amendment Museum, n.d., https://firstamendmentmuseum.org/learn/spanish-flu-and-the-first-amendment/. Accessed 20 May 2022.

  31. 31.

    Arthur Bullard, as quoted in Robert Kessler, Outbreak: Lies and Misinformation, EcoHealth Alliance, n.d., https://www.ecohealthalliance.org/2018/05/outbreak-lies-and-misinformation. Accessed 20 May 2022.

  32. 32.

    Some additional myths about the Spanish flu are given in Richard Gunderman, Ten Myths About the 1918 Flu Pandemic, Smithsonian, updated 17 March 2020, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ten-myths-about-1918-flu-pandemic-180967810/. Accessed 20 May 2022.

  33. 33.

    Cameron Givens, Going Viral: COVID Conspiracies in Historical Perspective, Origins, n.d., https://origins.osu.edu/connecting-history/covid-influenza-conspiracies-fake-news?language_content_entity=en. Accessed 20 May 2022.

  34. 34.

    Maria Cohut, The Flu Pandemic of 1918 and Early Conspiracy Theories, Medical News Today, 29 September 2020, https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/the-flu-pandemic-of-1918-and-early-conspiracy-theories. Accessed 20 May 2022. Some of the best full-length treatments of the Spanish flu pandemic also discuss these issues: Gina Kolata, Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused It (New York: Atria, 2001); John Barry, The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History (New York: Penguin, 2005); Nancy Bristow, American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); and Alfred W. Crosby, America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Also see the special section of the American Journal of Public Health on the 1918 pandemic, which is most readily accessed by the introductory article: Wendy E. Parmet and Mark A. Rothstein, The 1918 Influenza Pandemic: Lessons Learned and Not—Introduction to the Special Section, American Journal of Public Health, 108 (11) (November 2018), pp. 1435–1436, available online at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6187781/. Accessed 20 May 2022.

  35. 35.

    Reuters staff, False Claim: The 1918 Influenza Pandemic was Caused by Vaccines, 1 April 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-vaccines-caused-1918-influe/false-claim-the-1918-influenza-pandemic-was-caused-by-vaccines-idUSKBN21J6X2. Accessed 20 May 2022.

  36. 36.

    Chauncey Devega, Fake News, Conspiracy Theories, and a Deadly Gobal Pandemic—and that was in 1918, Salon, 8 May 2021, https://www.salon.com/2021/05/08/fake-news-conspiracy-theories-and-a-deadly-global-pandemic--and-that-was-in-1918/. Accessed 20 May 2022.

  37. 37.

    The following article describes nostrums provided around the world to cure the 1918 flu, but it is hard to know which ones were commonly tried in the United States: Philippa Martyr, People Dropped Whiskey Into their Noses to Treat Spanish Flu, The Conversation, 19 September 2021, https://theconversation.com/people-dropped-whisky-into-their-noses-to-treat-spanish-flu-heres-what-else-they-took-that-would-raise-eyebrows-today-167525. Accessed 20 May 2022.

  38. 38.

    Suyin Haynes, ‘You Must Wash Properly.’ Newspaper Ads From the 1918 Flu Pandemic Show Some Things Never Change, Time, 27 March 2020, https://time.com/5810695/spanish-flu-pandemic-coronavirus-ads/. Accessed 20 May 2022. Becky Little, ‘Mask Slackers’ and ‘Deadly’ Spit: The 1918 Flu Campaigns to Shame People Into Following New Rules, https://www.history.com/news/1918-pandemic-public-health-campaigns. Accessed 21 June 2022. Advertisements from Britain at the time added: do not take public transportation, get a walk in the fresh air every day, avoid other people, and don’t get overly tired. (Coronavirus: How They Tried to Curb Spanish Flu Pandemic in 1918, BBC News, 10 May 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-52564371. Accessed 20 May 2022.

  39. 39.

    Hannah Mawdsley, Fake News and the Flu, Wellcome Collection, 18 September 2019, https://wellcomecollection.org/articles/XXIeHhEAACYAIdKz. Accessed 20 May 2022.

  40. 40.

    Fake News and the 1918 Flu, https://www.newsy.com/stories/fake-news-and-the-1918-flu/. Accessed 20 May 2022.

  41. 41.

    This account is again taken mostly from Cortada’s All the Facts—with Cortada’s permission.

  42. 42.

    This is the review on the Amazon Books web site, as of 18 May 2022, for John Maxwell Hamilton, Manipulating the Masses: Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of American Propaganda (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2020). Hamilton’s book provides a detailed examination of this government organization. Also see George Creel, How We Advertised America, reprinted with Charlotte M. Yonge listed as author (London: Forgotten Books, 2012). Another good source is Arthur Ponsonby, Falsehood in Wartime (1940 original, facsimile reproduction, Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2010). The federal government had created a Bureau of Investigation in 1908 (renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935 and under the direction of the famous J. Edgar Hoover from 1924 to 1972). In 1920, the government created a separate Bureau of Prohibition, which in the 1930s was merged into the FBI.

  43. 43.

    On the 1920 presidential campaign, see John A. Morello, Selling the President, 1920: Albert D. Lasker, Advertising, and the Election of Warren G. Harding (Stuttgart: Holtzbrinck, 2001); Wesley Marvin Bagby, The Road to Normalcy: The Presidential Campaign and Election of 1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968); and David Pietrusza, 1920: The Year of the Six Presidents (New York: Basic Books, 2008).

    The analysis of information has become a principal topic of study by political communication scholars, who have traditionally come from the academic discipline of communication or mass media studies. There are indistinct lines between information studies, communication studies, and media studies, and it is useful for information historians to draw upon methods and results of these closely related fields as they engage in their research.

  44. 44.

    See lupatchi 1927, Let’s All Raise a… Brick? Wine-making During Prohibition, A Smile and a Gun (A Blog About Chicago in the Roaring Twenties), 30 January 2015, https://smileandgun.wordpress.com/2015/01/30/lets-all-raise-a-brick-wine-making-during-prohibition/. Accessed 23 May 2022; Eric Burns, Spirits of America: A Social History of Alcohol (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010).

  45. 45.

    There is an immense literature about prohibition and its effects on various participants. The following sample suggests the range of scholarship: Kathleen Morgan Drowne, Spirits of Defiance: National Prohibition and Jazz Age Literature, 1920–1933 (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2000); Frank Alduino, The Damnedest Town This Side of Hell: Tampa 1920–29 (Part I), Scholar Commons, University of South Florida, 1990, https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/154480419.pdf. Accessed 23 May 2022; Hans Andersson, Illegal Entrepreneurs: A Comparative Study of the Liquor Trade in Stockholm and New Orleans, 1920–1940, Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention 3, 2 (2003), 114–134; J. C. Burnham, New Perspectives on the Prohibition “Experiment” of the 1920’s, Journal of Social History 2, 1 (1968), 51–68; S. J. Mennell, Prohibition: A Sociological Vew, Journal of American Studies 3,2 (1969), 159–175; T. M. Coffey, The Long Thirst: Prohibition in America, 1920–1933 (New York: Norton, 1975); and W. J. Rorabaugh, Prohibition: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

  46. 46.

    Encyclopedia Britannica, “Modernity,” https://www.britannica.com/topic/modernity. Accessed 26 April 2023.

  47. 47.

    See, for example, Claude Fischer, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992).

  48. 48.

    Susan J. Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899–1922 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); Susan J. Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Eric Barnouw, A Tower in Babel (A History of Broadcasting in the United States to 1933, Vol. 1) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966); Alfred Balk, The Rise of Radio, from Marconi through the Golden Age (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2005); Anthony Rudel, Hello, Everybody!: The Dawn of American Radio (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008).

  49. 49.

    Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother (New York: Basic Books, 1983); Jonathan Rees, Refrigeration Nation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013; Carroll Gantz, The Vacuum Cleaner: A History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012); and Peter Scott, ‘Forced Selling’, Domesticity, and the Diffusion of Washing Machines in Interwar America, Journal of Social History 54, 2 (Winter 2020), 546–568.

  50. 50.

    Some of the most useful historical literature on the automobile in America for the purpose of this article includes James J. Flink, The Automobile Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988); John Heitmann, The Automobile and American Life (2nd ed., Jefferson, NC: MacFarland, 2018); Michael Berger, The Automobile in American History and Culture (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001); Joel Eastman, Styling vs. Safety: The American Automobile Industry and the Development of Automotive Safety (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984); Ronald Kline and Trevor Pinch, Users as Agents of Technological Change, Technology and Culture 37, 4 (1996), 763–795; Richard Coopey, The Automobile Industry, 1896–1920, Business History 34, 2 (1982); Kevin L. Borg, Auto Mechanics: Technology and Expertise in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2007); Michael L. Berger, The Social Impact of the Automobile on Rural America, 1893–1929, D. Ed. thesis, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1972; Akerman, James R. “Private journeys on public maps: A look at inscribed road maps.“ Cartographic Perspectives 35 (2000): 27–47; Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel, After Innovation, Turn to Maintenance, Technology and Culture 59, 1 (2018): 1–25; Larry Printz, here the First Automotive Road Maps Came From, Hagerty, 16 January 2019, https://www.hagerty.com/media/automotive-history/first-automotive-roadmaps/. Accessed 24 May 2022; and C. A. Welsh, Patents and Competition in the Automobile Industry, Law and Contemporary Problems, https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2349&context=lcp. Accessed 24 May 2022; Richard Tedlow, The Struggle for Dominance in the Automobile Market: The Early Years of Ford and General Motors, Business and Economic History 17 (1988), 49–62; Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016); and National Museum of American History, Automobile Safety, https://americanhistory.si.edu/america-on-the-move/essays/automobile-safety. Accessed 21 June 2022.

  51. 51.

    Robert Tate, Remembering the Early Days of Driver’s Education, Motorcities, 17 April 2017, https://www.motorcities.org/story-of-the-week/2017/remembering-the-early-days-of-driver-s-education. Accessed 24 May 2022.

  52. 52.

    George Rugg, Road Trip! Long-distance Driving in 1920, Rare Books and Special Collecions, University of Notre Dame. https://sites.nd.edu/rbsc/road-trip-long-distance-driving-in-1920/. Accessed 21 June 2022.

  53. 53.

    Motor Magazine, How to Drive a Car: A Fascinating Insight into Driving in the 1920s and 30s (Amberly Publishing, 2014); Here’s What You Needed to Know to Drive a Car Back in the 1920s, reprinted and adapted from H. Clifford Brokaw, West Side YMCA Automobile School, New York, The Ogden Standard-Examiner 22 October 1922, https://clickamericana.com/topics/culture-and-lifestyle/cars-trucks/how-to-drive-a-car-back-in-the-1920s. Accessed 21 June 2022.

  54. 54.

    Leasing became commonplace after 1919, when the General Motors Acceptance Corporation was created to help purchasers finance their automobiles. By the end of the 1920s, the majority of radios, sewing machines, washing machines, purchases, about refrigerators, and vacuum cleaners, as well as automobiles were purchased on credit. (Blackford and Kerr, op. cit.).

  55. 55.

    Other information sources connected to the automobile came later. For example, the road atlas came in 1926 (Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth) and the independent review of automobiles with Consumer Reports, started in 1936 (Aspray, 100 Years of Car Buying).

  56. 56.

    See, for example, Cortada, All the Facts; Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother (New York: Basic Books, 1983); and Danielle Dreilinger, The Secret History of Home Economics (New York: W.W. Norton, 2021).

  57. 57.

    For the statistics cited here, see Gordon (2016), p. 175.

  58. 58.

    On the history of American newspapers, see David Paul Nord, Communities of Journalism: A History of American Newspapers and their Readers (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Emery, Michael, Edwin Emery, and Nancy L. Roberts, Press and America: An Interpretive History of the Mass Media (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 9th ed., 1999); and, Richard L. Kaplan, Politics and the American Press: The Rise of Objectivity, 1865–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). On the history of American media more generally, see Sloan, W. David, James G. Stovall, and James D. Startt. The Media in America: A History, 4th ed. (Hammond, IN: Publishing Horizons, 1999); and Starr, Paul. The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (New York: Basic Books, 2005).

  59. 59.

    Carl F. Kaestle, A History of the Book in America: Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

  60. 60.

    On the history of magazines in America, see Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, Vol. 5, 1905–1930 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1968); Theodore Peterson, Magazines in 20th Century (2nd ed., Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1964); and John Tebbel and Mary Ellen Zuckerman. The Magazine in America, 1741–1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).

  61. 61.

    There is a substantial literature on the history of American book publishing and readership. See, for example, Carl F. Kaestle, A History of the Book in America: Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); John Tebbel, Between Covers: The Rise and Transformation of Book Publishing in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Megan Benton, ‘Too Many Books’: Book Ownership and Cultural Identity in the 1920s, American Quarterly 49, 2 (June 1997), 268–297; and Asadoorian, Maro N., “Where did all these books come from? The Publishing Industry and American Intellectual Life” (2007). Honors Theses. Paper 282. https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/honorstheses/282. On literacy history in America, see Carl Kaestle et al., Literacy in the United States: Readers and Reading Since 1880 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).

  62. 62.

    For an overview of public libraries, see University of Michigan Libraries, Public Libraries in the United States of America; Their History, Condition, and Management (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Libraries, 2005); Wayne Wiegand, Part of our Lives: A People’s History of the American Public Library (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Christine Pawley and Louise Robbins, eds., Libraries and the Reading Public in Twentieth Century America (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013); and M. Connor and L. Plocharczky, “The History of Libraries and Literacy in the United States,” Libraries and Reading (Bingley, England: Emerald Publishing Limited, 2020), pp. 7–28.

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    Libraries, Modern. The Encyclopedia Americana, 1920, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Encyclopedia_Americana_(1920)/Libraries,_Modern. Accessed 27 May 2022.

  64. 64.

    For a contemporary view of public libraries in the 1920s, see Public Libraries in the United States of America: Their History, Condition, and Management: Special Report, Volume 1 (Charleston, SC: Nabu Press, 2010 reprint of 1923 report).

  65. 65.

    See Carnegie Libraries: The Future Made Bright, National Park Service, Teaching with Historic Places Program, https://www.nps.gov/articles/carnegie-libraries-the-future-made-bright-teaching-with-historic-places.htm. Accessed 27 May 2022; Theodore Jones, Carnegie Libraries Across America (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 1997).

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    For the history of American public education, see Wayne Urban, Jennings Waggoner Jr., and Milton Gaither, American Education: A History (6th ed., London: Routledge, 2019); L. Dean Webb, The History of American Education (Pearson, 2005); John Pullam and James Van Patten, History and Social Foundations of American Education (10th ed, New York: Pearson, 2012); David Boers, History of American Education Primer (Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2007); and Gerald L. Gutek, An Historical Introduction to American Education (3rd ed., Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2012).

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    Center on Education Policy, History and Evolution of Public Education in the US, Graduate School of Education & Human Development, George Washington University, n.d., https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED606970.pdf. Accessed 2 June 2022.

  68. 68.

    US Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1975, as quoted in Cortada, All the Facts.

  69. 69.

    For more on the advance of vocational education, see David Carleton, The Smith-Hughes Act, Landmark Congressional Laws on Education (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002), pp. 63–76; and Dreilinger, Danielle, The Secret History of Home Economics. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2021).

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    On the history of American higher education, see Christopher Lucas, American Higher Education: A History (2nd ed., New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University: A History (Lexington, MA: Plunkett Lake Press, 2021); and John R. Thelin, A History of American Higher Education (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2011). Some of the books on the history of American public education cited above also contain information about higher education. For an interesting contemporary reflection on the college curriculum, by a noted American historian, see Arthur M. Schlesinger, The History Situation in Colleges and Universities, 1919–1920, The Historical Outlook, 11, 3, 108, https://www.proquest.com/openview/ce73ee09bf6bf88c5da30ffe54dc5e9b/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=1818448. Accessed 2 June 2022.

  71. 71.

    This data comes from the Census bureau, as cited in Cortada, All the Facts.

  72. 72.

    The standard work on the history of advertising in America is Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); also see Thomas K. McCraw, American Business Since 1920: How It Worked (2nd ed, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008); James R. Beniger, Revolution in Control of Mass Consumption, Chap. 8 in The Control Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); Roland Marchand, The Golden Age of Advertising, American Heritage, https://www.americanheritage.com/golden-age-advertising#2; and James Norris, Advertising and the transformation of American society, 1865–1920. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990).

    We might also have written about the rise of corporate public relations, which were also in place by 1920; but to save space, we resisted. Some useful sources on this topic include Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Cayce Myers, Public Relations History (London: Routledge, 2021); and Scott M. Cutlip, Public Relations History: From the 17th to the 20th Century (London: Routledge, 1995).

  73. 73.

    See William M. O’Barr, A Brief History of Advertising in America, Advertising & Society Review 6, 3 (2005), https://muse.jhu.edu/article/193868. Accessed 3 June 2022; also James W. Cortada and William Aspray, Fake News Nation (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), Chap. 7.

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    Lears, T. J. Jackson. “The Rise of American Advertising.” The Wilson Quarterly (1976–) 7, no. 5 (1983): 156–67. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40257575. Accessed 3 June 2022.

  75. 75.

    Walter Dill Scott, Psychology of Advertising (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1908).

  76. 76.

    It is rumored that one of Watson’s advertisements created the practice of coffee breaks, but this may be apocryphal. See Who Invented the Coffee Break?, Coffee for Less blog, 18 December 2017, https://www.coffeeforless.com/blogs/coffee-for-less-blog/who-invented-the-coffee-break. Accessed 3 June 2022; Need a Coffee Break?, 734 Coffee: The Face of Sudan, 7 August 2018. Accessed 3 June 2022.

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    An online extract from Mansel Blackford and K. Austin Kerr, Business Enterprise in American Society (3rd ed., Boston: Cengage Learning, 1993), https://faculty.atu.edu/cbrucker/engl5383/Marketing.htm. Accessed 3 June 2022.

  78. 78.

    On Lasker, see Jeffrey Cruikshank and Arthur Schultz, The Man Who Sold America (Brighton, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2010); and Alissa Hamilton, Squeezed: What You Don’t Know About Orange Juice (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).

  79. 79.

    Cortada, All the Facts.

  80. 80.

    Federal involvement in agricultural research goes back even further to the 1820s. See R. J. Griesbach, 150 Years of Research at the United States Department of Agriculture: Plant Introduction and Breeding. (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, 2013).

  81. 81.

    See Role and Development of Public Agricultural Research, Chap. 3 in An Assessment of the U.S. Food and Agricultural Research System, https://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk3/1981/8106/810605.PDF.

  82. 82.

    The founding dates of industrial laboratories can be confusing since a company may have already had a major in-house research effort prior to creating an official laboratory. For example, AT&T’s research efforts were organized in 1912, but the Bell Labs were not created until 1925. On these research laboratories, see, for example, Cortada, All the Facts; Mowery, David C. “The Development of Industrial Research in U.S. Manufacturing.” The American Economic Review 80, no. 2 (1990): 345–49. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2006598; D. Hounshell and J.K. Smith, Science and Corporate Strategy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and L.S. Reich, The Making of American Industrial Research (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

  83. 83.

    See https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/laboratories. Between 1910 and 1920, 16 independent research institutes, mostly in medicine, were formed with foundation funds. See Kohler, Robert E. “Science, Foundations, and American Universities in the 1920s.” Osiris 3 (1987): 135–64. http://www.jstor.org/stable/301757.

  84. 84.

    See Geiger, Roger, To Advance Knowledge: The Growth of American Research Universities, 1900–1940 (London: Taylor and Francis, 2017).

  85. 85.

    It was apparently more palatable at the time for foundations to provide fellowships than to create research institutes. Between 1908 and 1919 (in chronological order), the following foundations established graduate or postdoc fellowship programs: American Association of University Women, American Scandinavian Foundation, Mellon Institute, Commonwealth Fund, American Field Service, and NRC-Rockefeller Foundation (medicine, physical science).

    There were nevertheless additional independent research institutions formed with foundation funds in 1920 and throughout the following decade, e.g., the Phipps Institute, the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, the Foods Research Institute, and the Brookings Institute (Kohler, op.cit.).

  86. 86.

    Rubee Dano, The Science of Destruction: How WWI Drove Development in Science and Technology, Lateral, 3 August 2105, http://www.lateralmag.com/articles/issue-1/how-wwi-drove-development-in-science-and-technology. Accessed 21 June 2022.

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    See Technological and Scientific Progress During the First World War, Apocalypse: 10 Lives, https://www.reseau-canope.fr/apocalypse-10destins/en/theme-based-files/technological-and-scientific-progress-during-the-first-world-war.html. Accessed 2 June 2022.

  88. 88.

    National Academy of Sciences, Academy History, http://www.nasonline.org/about-nas/history/. Accessed 3 June 2022.

  89. 89.

    The best-known account of this change is Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1993).

  90. 90.

    See Lamoreaux, N., The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895–1904 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).

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    On the history of management consulting, see especially Christopher D. McKenna, The Origins of Modern Management Consulting, Business and Economic History 24, 1, Fall 1995 (Business History Conference), https://thebhc.org/sites/default/files/beh/BEHprint/v024n1/p0051-p0058.pdf; and Thomas McCraw, American Business, 1920–2000: How It Worked (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2000). But also see Paul Millerd, A Brief History of Strategy Consulting: 100 Years from Frederick Taylor to the “Next New Normal,” StrategyU, n.d., https://strategyu.co/strategy-consulting-history/. Accessed 25 May 2022; Duff McDonald, The Making of McKinsey: A Brief History of Management Consulting in America, https://longreads.com/2013/10/23/the-making-of-mckinsey-a-brief-history-of-management/. Accessed 25 May 2022. Excerpted from McDonald, The Firm (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013); Jovana Poznan, The History of Consulting, 12 February 2018, https://medium.com/brainsfeed/the-history-of-consulting-fdc73d5a10a0. Accessed 25 May 2022; The 8 Defining States in Management Consulting, https://consulting.wiki/the-8-defining-stages-in-the-history-of-consulting/. Accessed 25 May 2022; and American Consulting History, Zippia, https://www.zippia.com/american-consulting-careers-353869/history/. Accessed 25 May 2022.

  92. 92.

    Frederick Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1911), as quoted in Paul Millerd, A Brief History of Strategy Consulting: 100 Years from Frederick Taylor to the “Next New Normal,” StrategyU, n.d., https://strategyu.co/strategy-consulting-history/. Accessed 25 May 2022. On the history of Taylor and scientific management, see Hugh G. J. Aitken, Scientific Management in Action: Taylorism at Watertown Arsenal, 1908–1915 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). Other visionaries who contributed at the time to scientific management included Harrington Emerson, Henry Gantt, and Frank and Ernestine Gilbreth.

  93. 93.

    Martin Campbell-Kelly, Large-scale data processing in the Prudential, 1850–1930, Accounting, Business & Financial History, 2:2 (1992), 117–140.

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    JoAnne Yates, Structuring the Information Age: Life Insurance and Technology in the Twentieth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); James W. Cortada, Before the Computer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993; Lars Heide, Punched-Card Systems and the Early Information Explosion, 1880–1945 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).

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    For relevant timelines, see 1900–1924: A History of America’s Banks and the ABA, American Bankers Association, https://www.aba.com/about-us/our-story/aba-history/1900-1924; and Historical Timeline: 1900–1919, FDIC, https://www.fdic.gov/about/history/timeline/1900-1919.html; Historical Timeline, National Credit Union Administration, https://www.ncua.gov/about-ncua/historical-timeline. Also see Richard S. Grossman, US Banking History, Civil War to World War II, Economic History Association, https://eh.net/encyclopedia/us-banking-history-civil-war-to-world-war-ii/; Ellis Tallman and Eugene N. White, Why Was There No Banking Panic in 1920–21, 20 December 2019, 14976_paper_F5KzBh4S.pdf; R. Daniel Wadhani, The Institutional Foundations of Personal Finance: Innovation in U.S. Savings Banks, 1880s–1920s, Business History Review 85 (Autumn 2011): 499–528; Robert L. Clark, Lee A. Craig, and Jack W. Wilson, A History of Public Sector Pensions in the United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Dora L. Costa, The Evolution of Retirement: An American Economic History, 1880–1990 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998; partial reprint, https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c6108/c6108.pdf. All accessed 6 June 2022. One notable event of 1920 was passage of the Smith-Fess Act (Vocational Rehabilitation Act), which provided a disability and retirement (at age 65) fund for federal civil servants; and Gordon (2016), Chap. 9.

  96. 96.

    Sharon Ann Murphy, Life Insurance in the United States through World War 1, n.d., Economic History Association, https://eh.net/encyclopedia/life-insurance-in-the-united-states-through-world-war-i/. Accessed 6 June 2022.

  97. 97.

    Thomas DeBerge, Thrift in a Time of War and Influenza: American Mutual Life Insurance Companies, 1917–1920, Zeitschrift fur Unternehmensgeschichte 65, 2 (2020), 311–316; Ronald L. Numbers, Almost persuaded. American physicians and compulsory health insurance, 1912–1920. Henry E Sigerist Suppl Bull Hist Med. 1978;(1):1–158; Lester King, Almost persuaded. American physicians and compulsory health insurance, 1912–1920, Journal of the American Medical Association, 1978;240(15):1649.

  98. 98.

    Odin W. Anderson, Health Insurance in the United States 1910–1920, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Volume V, Issue Autumn, Autumn 1950, Pages 363–396.

  99. 99.

    J. C. Herbert Emery, “Un-American” or Unnecessary? America’s Rejection of Compulsory Government Health Insurance before 1930, https://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Workshops-Seminars/Economic-History/emery-051026.pdf. Accessed 6 June 2022.

  100. 100.

    Michael Morrisey, Health Insurance (2nd ed., Health Administration Press, 2013), Ch. 1; A Brief History of Private Insurance in the United States, 18 March 2022, Risk Strategies, https://www.ahpcare.com/a-brief-history-of-private-insurance-in-the-united-states/. Accessed 6 June 2022; Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson, Accidents of History Created U.S. Health System, All Things Considered, National Public Radio, 22 October 2009, https://www.npr.org/2009/10/22/114045132/accidents-of-history-created-u-s-health-system. Accessed 6 June 2022.

  101. 101.

    Andrew Beattie, The History of insurance in America, updated 27 January 2022, Investopedia, https://www.investopedia.com/articles/financial-theory/08/american-insurance.asp. Accessed 6 June 2022.

  102. 102.

    Swiss Re, A History of U Insurance, https://www.swissre.com/dam/jcr:36ebe594-097d-4d4d-b3a7-2cbb8d856e85/150Y_Markt_Broschuere_USA_EN_Inhalt.pdf. Accessed 6 June 2022.

  103. 103.

    See Olivier Zunz, Making America Corporate, 1870–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

  104. 104.

    On the development of the office equipment industry, see Martin Campbell-Kelly et al., Computer (3rd ed., Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2014), Chap. 2; James W. Cortada, Before the Computer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Lars Heide, Punched-Card Systems and the Early Information Explosion, 1880–1945 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); JoAnne Yates, The Control Revolution: The Rise of System in American Management (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); JoAnne Yates, Structuring the Information Age: Life Insurance and Technology in the Twentieth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); and James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), Chap. 9.

  105. 105.

    James W. Cortada, Before the Computer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 87–88.

  106. 106.

    Mary Miley’s Roaring Twenties, https://marymiley.wordpress.com/2011/01/15/how-to-make-a-phone-call-in-the-roaring-twenties/. Accessed 7 June 2022.

  107. 107.

    Gordon (2016), p. 185.

  108. 108.

    Phone History: All About Party Lines, Numberbarn, 19 April 2018, https://www.numberbarn.com/blog/phone-history-party-lines/; Greg Daugherty, The Rise and Fall of Telephone Operators, History, 2 August 2021, https://www.history.com/news/rise-fall-telephone-switchboard-operators. Both accessed 7 June 2022.

  109. 109.

    Percentage of Housing Units with Telephones in the United States, 1920 to 2008, Statista, https://www.statista.com/statistics/189959/housing-units-with-telephones-in-the-united-states-since-1920/. Accessed 7 June 2022; also see Fischer (1994).

  110. 110.

    Gordon (2016), p. 183.

  111. 111.

    On the history of film in America, see Gordon (2016); Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, Film History: An Introduction (3rd ed., New York: McGraw Hill, 2009).

  112. 112.

    Cortada, Birth of Modern Facts.

  113. 113.

    Cortada does not provide an extended discussion of the epistemological or ontological issues related to “disciplining information,” and this chapter only suggests the issues and does not fully analyze them. Is disciplining information like a lion tamer disciplining a large cat to prepare it to perform in a circus? Information must be acquired, maintained, taught to behave in certain ways and not in other ways that advance the trainer’s goals—all like the poor, subjected lion. In artificial intelligence research, it is not the data that is trained but rather the computer that is acting upon the data, to discover certain patterns inherent in the data set. By speaking of disciplining information in the way that Cortada does, it is implicit that the actor carrying out the discipline is the academic who belongs to a particular academic community, e.g., of sociologists, and who is following the practices that have explicitly or implicitly been established by the sociologists to evaluate whether a piece of data is information and what kinds of treatment to subject it to.

  114. 114.

    Paul Otlet, Traité de documentation. (Brussels: Palais Mondial, 1934). Otlet’s original works are most easily available in W. Boyd Rayward, Otlet, Paul. International Organization and Dissemination of Knowledge: Selected Essays. (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1990). The Collected Works of A.M. Turing (Amsterdam: North Holland) are available in four volumes: Darrel Ince, ed., Mechanical Intelligence (1992); P. T. Saunders, ed., Morphogenesis (1992); J. L. Britton, ed., Pure Mathematics (1992); and R. O. Gandy and C.E. M. Yates, eds., Mathematical Logic (2001).

  115. 115.

    One could arguably add to this list. For example, modern statistical analysis was actively under development, but most of the advance was occurring in the United Kingdom, not in the United States, under the leadership of Karl Pearson, William Sealy Gosset, and Ronald Fisher. Operations research had begun in the United States during the First World War in the Air Force under the name “operational analysis” and to some degree in the interwar years by the Harvard physicist Percy Bridgman, but it did not really take off until the Second World War.

  116. 116.

    On the history of these two punched-card tabular firms, see especially Lars Heide, Punched-Card Systems and the Early Information Explosion, 1880–1945 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); and James Cortada, Before the Computer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). On the uses of these systems, see P. A. Kidwell, “American Scientists and Calculating Machines—From Novelty to Commonplace,” in Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 12, no. 1, (Jan–March 1990), pp. 31–40; and G. W. Baehne, Practical Applications of the Punched Card Method in Colleges and Universities (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935).

  117. 117.

    On Bush, see G. Pascal Zachary, Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush: Engineer of the American Century (New York: Free Press, 1997). On Ford, see A. Ben Clymer, The Mechanical Analog Computers of Hannibal Ford and William Newell, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 15, 2 (1993), 19–34.

  118. 118.

    On the history of numerical analysis, see H. H. Goldstine, A History of Numerical Analysis from the 15th Through the 19th Century (New York: Springer, 1977); H. H. Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972); C. Brezenski and L. Wuytack, eds., Numerical Analysis: Historical Developments in the 20th Century (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2001); and Michele Benzi, Key Moments in the History of Numerical Analysis, http://history.siam.org/%5C/pdf/nahist_Benzi.pdf. Accessed 28 April 2023. Two textbooks that indicate the state of research in numerical analysis in 1920 reasonably well are E. T. Whittaker and G. Robinson, The Calculus of Observations. A Treatise on Numerical Mathematics (London: Blackie and Son, 1924); and J. B. Scarborough, Numerical Mathematical Analysis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1930).

  119. 119.

    See Wayne A. Wiegand, Irrepressible Reformer: A Biography of Melvin Dewey (Chicago: American Library Association, 1996); The ‘Amherst Method’: The Origins of the Dewey Decimal Classification Scheme, Libraries & Culture 33, 2 (Spring 1998), 175–194. The paper that most people believe started it all was Turing, On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society s2–42, 1 (1937), 230–265.

  120. 120.

    See Francis L. Miksa, Charles Ammi Cutter: Library Systematizer (Littleton, CO: Libraries Unlimited, 1977).

  121. 121.

    On this history, see Alex Wright, Cataloguing the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Also see W. Boyd Rayward, ed., European Modernism and the Information Society (London: Routledge, 2008); Rayward, Information Beyond Borders: International Cultural and Intellectual Exchange in the Belle Epoque (London: Routledge, 2014); Rayward, The Origins of Information Science and the International Institute of Bibliography/International Federation for Information and Documentation (FID), Journal of the American Society for Information Science 48,4 (1997), 289–300; Colin B. Burke, Information and Intrigue: From Index Cards to Dewy Decimals to Alger Hiss (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014); James Cortada, Birth of Modern Facts (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023); and Michael Buckland, Paul Otlet: Pioneer of Information Management, https://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/otlet.html. Accessed 26 April 2023.

  122. 122.

    Claude E. Shannon, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, Bell System Technical Journal, 27, 3 (July 1948), 379–423. On the history surrounding Shannon’s work on information theory, see Ronald R. Kline, The Cybernetics Moment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, University, Press, 2015).

  123. 123.

    Hartley, R.V.L., Transmission of Information, Bell System Technical Journal 7, 3, pp. 535–563, (July 1928).

  124. 124.

    Nyquist, Harry (1924). Certain Factors affecting telegraph speed, Bell System Technical Journal 3 (2): 324–346; Nyquist, H. (1928-07-01). Thermal Agitation of Electric Charge in Conductors. Physical Review. American Physical Society (APS). 32 (1): 110–113.

  125. 125.

    We intended to use the most recent edition available readily available to us—and sometimes did. In other cases, we did not use the latest edition but one that was a few years old. We do not believe this procedure compromises our findings because the content from edition to edition only changes modestly. The textbook publishers have a business model than “updates” their standard textbooks every year or two, even when there is little change. One of the textbooks we examined was in its 17th edition!

  126. 126.

    Thus, we included any topic that came up in background in our discussion, so some of the events we counted occurred prior to or after 1920, not only in 1920. As we checked these AP textbooks for coverage, we examined the chapters covering a decade before and after 1920, not only the textbook pages covering 1920.

  127. 127.

    Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper, reissue 2017); Joseph L. Locke and Ben Wright, eds., The American Yawp: A Massively Collaborative Open U.S. History, vol. 2: Since 1877 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019); George Brown Tindall and David Shi, America: A Narrative History (New York: Norton, 6th ed., 2004); Alan Brinkley, The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People (New York: McGraw Hill, 8th ed., 2008); James Oakes et al., Of the People: A History of the United States, Vol II: Since 1865 (Oxford: Oxford, 2nd ed., 2013).

  128. 128.

    Remember that we wrote the standard account using well-known monographs and research papers, not textbooks, as our sources.

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Aspray, W. (2024). America in 1920: An Information Microhistory. In: Understanding Information History. SpringerBriefs in History of Computing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44134-9_1

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