A deep and timely account of how American newspapers were produced and distributed on paper. Winner of the Best Book in Canadian Business History by the Canadian Business History Association Popular assessments of printed newspapers have become so grim that some have taken to calling them “dead tree media” as a way of invoking the medium’s imminent demise. There is a literal truth hidden in this dismissive expression: printed newspapers really are material goods made from trees. And, throughout the twentieth century, the overwhelming majority of trees cut down in the service of printing newspapers in the United States came from Canada. In Dead Tree Media, Michael Stamm reveals the international history of the commodity chains connecting Canadian trees and US readers. Drawing on newly available corporate documents and research in archives across North America, Stamm offers a sophisticated rethinking of the material history of the printed newspaper. Tracing its industrial production from the forest to the newsstand, he provides an account of the obscure and often hidden labor involved in this manufacturing process by showing how it was driven by not only publishers and journalists but also lumberjacks, paper mill workers, policymakers, chemists, and urban and regional planners. Stamm describes the 1911 shift in tariff policy that gave US publishers duty-free access to Canadian newsprint, providing a tremendous boost to Canadian paper manufacturers and a significant subsidy to American newspaper publishers. He also explains how Canada attracted massive American foreign investment in paper mills around the same time that US publishers were able to gain greater access to Canada’s vast spruce forests. Focusing particularly on the Chicago Tribune, Stamm provides a new history of the rise and fall of both the mass circulation printed newspaper and the particular kind of corporation in the newspaper business that had shaped many aspects of the cultural, political, and even physical landscape of North America. For those seeking to understand the travails of the contemporary newspaper business, Dead Tree Media is essential reading.

Burning Bodies interrogates the ideas that the authors of historical and theological texts in the medieval West associated with the burning alive of Christian heretics. Michael Barbezat traces these instances from the eleventh century until the advent of the internal crusades of the thirteenth century, depicting the exclusionary fires of hell and judicial execution, the purifying fire of post-mortem purgation, and the unifying fire of God's love that medieval authors used to describe processes of social inclusion and exclusion. Burning Bodies analyses how the accounts of burning heretics alive referenced, affirmed, and elaborated upon wider discourses of community and eschatology. Descriptions of burning supposed heretics alive were profoundly related to ideas of a redemptive Christian community based upon a divine, unifying love, and medieval understandings of what these burnings could have meant to contemporaries cannot be fully appreciated outside of this discourse of communal love. For them, human communities were bodies on fire. Medieval theologians and academics often described the corporate identity of the Christian world as a body joined together by the love of God. This love was like a fire, melting individuals together into one whole. Those who did not spiritually burn with God's love were destined to burn literally in the fires of Hell or Purgatory, and the fires of execution were often described as an earthly extension of these fires. Through this analysis, Barbezat demonstrates how presentations of heresy, and to some extent actual responses to perceived heretics, were shaped by long-standing images of biblical commentary and exegesis. He finds that this imagery is more than a literary curiosity; it is, in fact, a formative historical agent.

Indexes the Times, Sunday times and magazine, Times literary supplement, Times educational supplement, Times educational supplement Scotland, and the Times higher education supplement.