This volume reveals the complicated ways in which British and American media have influenced each other over the past two centuries. In doing so, it adds an important transatlantic dimension to media scholarship, while demonstrating the crucial and varied ways in which media have helped build an Anglo-American 'special relationship'.

Historians recognize the cultural centrality of the newspaper press in Britain, yet very little has been published regarding competing conceptions of the press and its proper role in British society. In Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850-1950, Mark Hampton surveys a diversity of sources--Parliamentary speeches and commissions, books, pamphlets, periodicals and select private correspondence--in order to identify how governmental elites, the educated public, professional journalists, and industry moguls characterized the political and cultural function of the press. Hampton demonstrates that...