| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Columbia History of American Television. By Gary R. Edgerton. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. xviii, 493 pp. $37.50, ISBN 978-0-231-12164-4.)

Television is a sprawling medium, difficult to characterize historically in a single volume. As an object of study, it is endlessly promiscuous; its complicated modes of production, webs of ownership, regulatory frameworks, and diverse textual forms are matched only by the range of cultural practices that surround its reception. Humanities-based television scholarship trying to make sense of that complexity over the past two decades has been powerfully influenced by cultural studies approaches to history that privilege contextual specificity over broad narrative accounts of the development of national television institutions. While the history of U.S. television is partly the story of the role of an oligopolistic industry in the formation of a collective national community, a closer look reveals cultures of reception and production whose relationship to the larger whole is idiosyncratic or contradictory. The more time we spend in the archive, the more our generalizations fail; television defies easy narrativization.

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