Many controversies in the sociology of religion hinge on how different schools of thought view religious denominations. Are they akin to for-profit firms that compete for adherents, groups that forge community among geographically dispersed adherents, or coordinating bodies that distribute...

We trace the social positions of the men and women who found new enterprises from the earliest years of one industry’s history to a time when the industry was well established. Sociological theory suggests two opposing hypotheses. First, pioneering entrepreneurs are socially prominent...

How has access to the public sphere been affected by the rise of mass media? We address this question by studying magazines in America from the eighteenth century, when all periodicals had small circulations, to the mid-nineteenth century, when many reached mass audiences. Specifically, we...

Sociologists have long been interested in how interactions among the diverse groups that constitute modern societies shape group mobilization efforts, including the use of group media. We advance research on this topic by analyzing the growth of magazines affiliated with religious groups in...

We study copyright law and its relationship with cultural conceptions of authorship and technicalconstraints on the economics of publishing in the US. Because American copyright law was first developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we focus on that time period. And because...