Author David Henkin

David Henkin is a Professor of History at UC Berkley. He received his PhD from Berkley and his B.A. from Yale. According to his website at UC Berkley his research interests are: America since 1607: 19th Century, urban, cultural. There is less information about Professor Henkin on the public web than there is about the other authors I’ve researched, but there are plenty of scholarly reviews of his works.

His publications include The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America, 2006 and City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York, 1998. City Reading focuses on written words in public spaces in antebellum New York which includes fliers, signs and other types of written text. His publications were well reviewed in the scholarly literature, including a review by Wayne Weigand (who we recently read an article from) that described the book as “well-written and thoroughly researched”.

The courses he teaches include “Life Writing and Nineteenth-Century America”, “The Age of the City, 1825-1933”, “Nineteenth-Century America” and “Antebellum America: The Advent of Mass Society”.

He writes and teaches as a historian and he leans towards information about culture and communication. This is an interesting combination for this particular topic because we are talking about the future of print. However, it is important to understand the history and how things got to where they are today. I also like that he considers other types of print besides the obvious books and newspapers. We’ve already discussed in class how important these other types of print are, and it was nice to read an article that discussed the importance of other types of print such as mail and money.

Sources:

History of education quarterly [0018-2680] Wiegand yr:2001 vol:41 iss:2 pg:278 -280

http://history.berkeley.edu/people/david-henkin