# Richard R. John

Richard Rodda John, Jr. (born 1959) is an American historian who specializes in the history of business, technology, communications, and the state. He is a professor of history and communications at Columbia University.

## Life and career

John was born in Lexington, Massachusetts in 1959. His father, Richard R. John, Sr., was the distinguished director of the U.S. Department of Transportation's Volpe Center from 1989 to 2004. He attended Lexington High School and went on to Harvard University where between 1981 and 1989, he earned a B.A. in social studies (magna cum laude), an M.A. in history, and a Ph.D. in the history of American civilization. He wrote his dissertation under the joint direction of Alfred D. Chandler Jr. and David Herbert Donald.

### Academic posts

After serving as a teaching fellow in history, history and literature, and social studies at Harvard, John held a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the College of William and Mary. He joined the history faculty at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1991, where he taught until 2009. He is a professor of history and communications at Columbia University, where he advises graduate students in the Columbia Journalism's School's Ph. D. program in communications. He regularly teaches a required course — History Essentials — in the journalism school's M.S. program. He is a core member of Columbia's history faculty, where he advises Ph. D. students in history. He also teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in the history of capitalism, the history of communications, social theory (including Contemporary Civilization), and American studies. Between 1983 and 1987, John served as managing and consulting editor of the Business History Review. He has been a fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago and the Smithsonian Institution's Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D. C. He was the founder and coordinator of the Newberry Library Seminar on Technology, Politics, and Culture, which ran from 1998 to 2007. In 2001 and 2011, he served as a visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. In 2002, he was awarded the Harold F. Williamson Prize for a scholar at mid-career who has made "significant contributions to the field of business history," by the Business History Conference, an international professional society dedicated to the study of institutional history, which elected John its president for 2010-2011. Among the institutions that have sponsored his research are the College of William and Mary, the American Antiquarian Society, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, which awarded him a faculty fellowship in 2008. In 2019 he was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship for his research on the American antimonopoly tradition.

### Publications

Network Nation won the Ralph Gomory Book Prize from the Business History Conference in 2011 and the 2011 Best Book Prize from the American Educators in Journalism and Mass Communications (AEJMC) History Division. According to political scientist Christopher Parsons, in John's Network Nation (2010), the historian "has carefully poured through original source documents and so can offer insights into the actual machinations of politicians, investors, municipal aldermen, and communications companies’ CEOs and engineers to weave a comprehensive account of the telegraph and telephone industries." David E. Nye called it "a richly detailed and readable book that fills an important gap in the history of communication networks."

### Influence

Since assuming his post at Columbia University, John has been known for publicly challenging vogue political economic theses on the basis of the historical record, including Tim Wu's proclamations about media consolidation and disruption and mainstream media stirrings about Mitt Romney and the role of plutocrats in American politics. He is critical of proposals to privatize the post office, and supports postal banking.