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Robert MacDougall

Robert MacDougall

The Albert B. Corey Prize

2016

Robert MacDougallThe People’s Network: The Political Economy of the Telephone in the Gilded Age. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.
MacDougall deploys comparative and transnational theoretical frames to trace the struggle between local telephone operators and the Bell system that eventually (but not inevitably) came to dominate telecommunications in both Canada and the US. The author’s great achievement is to connect business history, technology history and the history of state expansion and regulatory power, while also connecting readers to the wonder of a technology that changed the meaning of time, space and scale.(awarded at the CHA Annual Meeting, University of Calgary)