Harold Adams Innis

Harold Adams Innis died a quarter century ago. At the time of his death in 1952 he was Canada's pre-eminent scholar in the field of the social sciences. His reputation was based on his monumental contributions to Canadian economic history and the role of the means of communication in shaping history. As so often happens, his ideas were not greatly followed up, except by Marshall McLuhan, for some years after his death, but there is no growing recognition among Canada's scholars of the depth of his perceptions and the fruitfulness of his thought for understanding of Canada's and of world history. A close friend of Innis at the University of Toronto was Donald G. Creighton, who wrote this memoir of his life in the summer of 1953. To this paperback edition of that work, Professor Creighton has added a new introduction on its origins in the university conditions of its time. A personal tribute, the book is written in Creighton's distinctive and elegant style; it is a skilful biography which will serve well to introduce the career, character, and thought of Harold Adams Innis to a new audience. Donald Creighton himself is recognized as one of the outstanding scholars of his time. Like Innis, he has reinterpreted Canadian history in his many books and this finely crafted memoir reveals the gifts of both the biographer and his subject.

The many published volumes of the writings of Harold Adams Innis testify to his extraordinary grasp of the ordering principles of human history. The notes that he left at the time of his death provide a new and revealing profile of the inner workings of this restless and relentless mind. Innis maintained, added to, and corrected, in the last seven years of his life, a single system of cross-referenced notes, which came to be called the Idea File. Before his death in 1952 he collected these notes into a single numbered collation. In this edition the material has been arranged in chronological order to give a sense of the development of Innis's ideas and concerns. Innis's interests were many and varied, and this collection of some 1500 notes covers an encyclopedic range of topics. The different lines of Innis's investigations converge, however, in his interest in basic political and cultural issues and in his fundamental concern for the preservation of individual freedom and creativity. At heart Innis was a moralist whose hatred of oppressive social institutions led him to examine them from many angles. It is a fascinating odyssey. Every reader will be refreshed and enriched by sharing Innis's life-long intellectual adventure.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Empire and Communications" by Harold Adams Innis. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

This classic book, Harold A. Innis's last, returns to print with a new introduction by James W. Carey. An elaboration of Innis's earlier theories, Changing Concepts of Time looks at then-new technological changes in communication and considers the different ways in which space and time are perceived. Innis explores military implications of the U.S. Constitution, freedom of the press, communication monopolies, culture, and press support of presidential candidates, among other interesting and diverse topics.

First published in 1951, this masterful collection of essays explores the relationship between a society's communication media and that community's ability to maintain control over its development.

A classic work of Canadian historical scholarship, first published in 1930. In his new introduction, A.J. Ray states that this book is argueably the most definitive economic history and geography of Canada ever produced.

While never formally recognized as a school of thought in its time, the work of a number of University of Toronto scholars over several decades – most notably Harold Adams Innis and Marshall McLuhan – formulated a number of original attempts to conceptualize communication as a phenomenon, and launched radical and innovative conjectures about its consequences. This landmark collection of essays re-assesses the existence, and re-evaluates the contribution, of the so-called Toronto School of Communication. While the theories of Innis and McLuhan are notoriously resistant to neat encapsulation, some general themes have emerged in scholarly attempts to situate them within the discipline of communications studies that they helped to define. Three such themes – focus on the effects and consequences of communications, emphasis on communications as a process rather than as structure, and a sharp focus on the technology of communication, or the ‘medium’ – are the most fundamental in characterizing the unique perspective of the Toronto School. This collection not only represents a crucial step in defining the ‘Toronto School,’ it also provides close analysis of the ideas of its individual members.

Harold Innis is widely understood as the proponent of the "Laurentian school" of historiography, which mapped Canadian development along an East-West axis. Harold Innis and the North turns the axis North-South by examining Innis's intense and abiding interest in the North, and providing new perspectives on this seminal figure in Canadian political economy and communication studies. This collection reveals that Innis's advocacy of the North was closely bound up with his vision of northern Canada as the site of a second industrial revolution based on mining, hydro-electric power, pulp and paper, and enabled by new forms of transportation. Long preoccupied with Canada's coming of age as a balanced and integrated industrial nation-state, Innis grappled with the same issues about the North in the Canadian nation that we are dealing with today. Chapters explore the breadth of Innis's northern activities, including his early studies of the fur trade, his biography of eighteenth-century explorer and cartographer Peter Pond, his review essays on the North for the Canadian Historical Review, his leadership of the Rockefeller-sponsored Arctic Survey, and his trip to the Soviet Union. Harold Innis and the North crafts a new narrative about the nature and scope of Innis's intellectual project and provides a unique appreciation of his multi-faceted professional identity. Contributors include Sergei Arkhipov (North-Ossetian State University and NGO Vladikavkaz Institute of Economics) Jeffrey Brison (Queens), George Colpitts (Calgary), Matthew Evenden (UBC), Barry Gough (Churchill College, Cambridge and Kings College, London), Paul Heyer (Wilfrid Laurier), Jim Mochoruk (North Dakota), Liza Piper (Alberta), Shirley Roburn (Concordia), Peter van Wyck (Concordia), Jeff Webb (Memorial).