Essential to our panel orientation is the need to think broadly and in interdisciplinary ways to attend to cross-pollinations amongst political operators and people groups. That is, to attend to the specific configurations developed as ideological positions are taken up through specific coalitions of actors, while also taking care not to presume, prima facie, that media practices are specific to actors on the left or the right. Instead, this panel models an approach that foregrounds finer-grain detail in order to interpret creative appropriations, recombinations, and inventions that are progressive, liberal, and conservative. To argue otherwise is to reduce media and its efficacy down to one of its most ossified forms.

Religious and political innovators in the US have long been adopters of different media technologies and dissemination practices, yet the command of media is a constant surprise, appearing as a shock in the public consciousness in moments of electoral politics or as heights of fringe conspiracy. Why does the ordinariness of these innovations never seem to stick? And what is it about American media that allows it to seemingly disappear into the background? Panelists will take on this question and others explicitly through case study and archival exploration in order to highlight the on-the-ground connections and relationships between mobilization, dissemination, and organization in the recent past.

Panelists take their investigative cues from the all consuming present in order to illustrate how various forms of media and communication technology have shaped the horizons of social actors and political movements through coalition building since the 1970s. Presentations range from battles over classroom curricula to the suburban mailbox to the proverbial podcast . American historians, as well as media studies scholars, explore how constituencies form through direct mail campaigns, how school choice can be classical, and how left and right populisms can ultimately be reconciled in the public sphere. Politics traditionally understood cannot attend to such a set of contested conditions effectively because so much of our subject’s terrain is cultural in nature and content. As such, political influence is understood less as something purely institutional, and more a product of intent, experimentation, and amalgamation.

In short, the proposed panel foregrounds coalitional forms of organizing and activism in order to shed light on the ways in which social actors in the recent past have imagined their respective political worlds.