Unit 1 / The History of the Book: A Long-Zoom Perspective
The making of print culture, from movable type to ebooks
The printed book, for our purposes, is born around the year 1450 with the development of movable type and the Gutenberg printing press. The form factor of the book itself does not really change much from 1450 to the present day. Books are a remarkably resilient technology. The technologies around book-making, on the other hand, go through several transformations during the five centuries of time covered in this unit. We will see how book making is transformed from a small-scale hand craft to a mass media phenomenon.
You will be working on one major project all the way through Unit 1. This project will be a case study, focused on a particular event, person, or technology that is important in some way to the history of print culture. You will have a wide range of topics to choose from, and you will research, draft, and revise your case study in steps over the course of the unit.
By the end of the unit, you should be able to describe the broad outlines of book history from 1450 to the present, note some key names and events in that history, and you will have completed a detailed case study focused on a specific person or event that applies some of the key ideas of the course to tell your own story about the making of print culture.
You will be working on one major project all the way through Unit 1. This project will be a case study, focused on a particular event, person, or technology that is important in some way to the history of print culture. You will have a wide range of topics to choose from, and you will research, draft, and revise your case study in steps over the course of the unit.
- Key concepts: technology, commerce, culture, the long zoom
- Focus: the book as cultural artifact, the making of print culture
- Writing goals: developing good research questions, writing a case study, using scholarly sources
By the end of the unit, you should be able to describe the broad outlines of book history from 1450 to the present, note some key names and events in that history, and you will have completed a detailed case study focused on a specific person or event that applies some of the key ideas of the course to tell your own story about the making of print culture.