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In most discussions of Harold Innis' work on communications, his contributions have been treated as those of a general media theorist. His analyses of particular media are commonly viewed simply as instances of his broader account of how space- and time-binding media serve to bias societies and civilizations. This paper argues that Innis' generalizations about media derived, in fact, from his examination of how a particular cluster of media -- namely, printing and publishing, with particular reference to newspapers -- was linked to the onset of modernity. These concerns were evident in his magisterial unpublished manuscript, History of Communication. Drawing on its periodization and overarching themes, this paper examines Innis' account of the newspaper industry as it developed between the American Revolution and the mid-point of the twentieth century. The historical trajectory that Innis traces, it is argued, reveals the specific concerns about printing and modernity that underpinned his general reflections about time- and space-binding communications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Harold A. Innis's contributions to media theory and economic history are well recognized, his attention to Canada's North has received less notice. This paper brings together and analyzes Innis's most sustained engagement with the North: his sixteen-year project of reviewing more than 150 books about the region for the Canadian Historical Review. By examining Innis's North as a mediated text, the paper traces how his reviews were informed by concerns with enacting space and binding time. The paper discusses how Innis used his reviews to compile information about a largely unknown area, map its natural-resource potential, and commemorate its colourful and sometimes-turbulent past. Innis contributed to a construction of the region as a last frontier whose conquest could unite Canadians in common purpose and identity. Innis's reviews provided a platform for him to criticize the federal government s policies on the region, but his contributions to our understanding of the region largely failed to reflect the complexities of an already occupied, already changing North. Nevertheless, his discussions of political and economic development in the North anticipated current discussions of how Canada's northern tier is undergoing transformation through the exploitation of resources and climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On June 18, 1948, the trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation approved an appropriation of $25,000 for use by the officers for the Social Sciences in the development of opportunities in the general area of Moral Issues in the Economic Order. This funding was to enable the officers to invite memoranda from thoughtful students and men of affairs who, it is believed, may have significant ideas to contribute to the Foundation as to directions in which work in this area may be most profitably prosecuted. One of the thoughtful students who was evidently invited to submit a memorandum was Harold Adams Innis, professor of political economy at the University of Toronto, he had established himself as the Rockefeller Foundation's most trusted advisor on matters pertaining to the social sciences in Canada. Innis duly submitted a letter to his friend Joseph Willits, in which he requested support for a small discussion group which has been set up in response to a suggestion from Pendleton Herring, president of the American Social Science Research Council of an interest in the problem of value.

While Harold Innis' address at le Collége de France in 1951 has recently begun to draw some attention, the circumstances surrounding Innis' brief appearance in France remain obscure, and the meaning and significance of the address have yet to be explored in any detail. This article seeks to provide context to Innis' talk by examining his long-standing "French inflection." It also examines the address itself, not only in terms of its themes and concerns, but also as a performative bid to find common ground with others (including the Annales School) who were challenging emergent monopolies of knowledge about the history of civilization. The presentation provides a point of entry into a final phase of Innis' intellectual life that has been overlooked, namely, his efforts to generate a community of like-minded interlocutors who were opposed to particular currents of thought that had become ascendant in the post-war period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]