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This essay explores the links among intellectual history, social history and cultural history. It suggests that the recent turn in American historiography to cultural history is vitally important for communication studies because communication has now been thrust to center stage in virtually every subfield of history. But it warns that communication historians should not rashly and heedlessly jump into cultural history before an adequate foundation has been laid in the economic and institutional social history of mass media.

This article argues that a genuine social history of reading in the nineteenth century requires more direct attention to audiences in addition to the traditional attention to producers and product. It suggests that historians of literacy have been more creative than mass media historians in using individual-level historical data (such as censuses, deeds, wills, government surveys) to study past reading behavior. One type of individual-level data that may be of use to mass communication historians is the series of family cost-of-living surveys conducted by state and federal bureaus of labor statistics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These studies of working-class family budgets, some of which were published in nonaggregated form, include detailed information on family structure, income, and expenditures, including expenditures on newspapers and books. Through an analysis of a sample of cotton textile worker budgets from an 1889-1890 federal survey, this study found that expenditures for newspapers and books were associated in interesting ways with family income patterns, region of residence, and ethnicity. The study also found some evidence that reading among working-class families may have been related to the changing nature of community life in the new industrial society of late nineteenth-century America.