Media History Digital Library

22/09/2025

"UW–Madison’s Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research preserves priceless materials from the entertainment industry.”

The University of Wisconsin-Madison recently published and excellent profile of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research (WCFTR) in an article which highlights the center's past, recent successes, challenges, and ongoing fundraising efforts as we adapt to federal funding cuts.

UW-Madison and the WCFTR are the MHDL's institutional home, and we are grateful for their support of our ongoing mission to digitize and preserve the histories of film, broadcasting, and recorded sound.

UW–Madison’s Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research preserves priceless materials from the entertainment industry.

06/08/2025

We are aware of issues that users are experiencing when attempting to access many Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research websites. We are investigating the root cause and will provide further updates as we learn more. We apologize for the inconvenience.

As an interim workaround, you can view our scanned materials directly on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/mediahistory

Full-text search is not available through the Internet Archive, but you can still browse and download materials this way.

17/07/2025

This week over 200 scholars, teachers, archivists, and creators will be participating in the inaugural Hollywood Conference. Whether you're attending the conference or just following along via social media, check out this list of online resources that WCFTR Director Eric Hoyt has compiled for studying Hollywood's rich and storied history.

An extraordinary gathering is taking place this week at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. Over 200 scholars, teachers, archivists, and creators will be participating in the inaugural Hollywood Conference. An ambitious …

05/05/2025

A huge thank you to The People's Archive at DC Public Library for digitizing the complete runs of "TeleVISIONS" (1975-81) and "Community Video Report" (1973-74) — both of which are now available to search and browse in the Media History Digital Library!

TeleVISIONS was a early trade magazine for the emerging videotape, cable television and satellite broadcasting industries published by the Washington Community Video Center, an Adams Morgan-based collective focused on using the emerging technologies of videotape and cable television to democratize media access.

View issues here: https://mediahist.org/features/publications-volumes.php?id=TeleVISIONS

08/01/2025

Read about the intercontinental exchange of cinema ideas and information in Global Movie Magazine Networks (University of California Press), a new collection of essays edited by Eric Hoyt and Kelley Conway. Vital resources for the study of film history and culture, movie magazines are frequently cited as sources, but rarely centered as objects of study. The essays in this collection reveal the hybridity, heterogeneity, and connectivity of movie magazines and the important role they play in the intercontinental exchange of information and ideas about cinema.

A free ebook version of this title is available online through Luminos.

Scholarship is a powerful tool for changing how people think, plan, and govern. By giving voice to bright minds and bold ideas, we seek to foster understanding and drive progressive change.

21/10/2024

We're happy to learn the that Internet Archive is now partially back online, with content available in a read-only state. This means that all page scans should now once again be viewable at https://mediahist.org and searchable at https://lantern.mediahist.org

The MHDL uses the Internet Archive to store high-quality versions of our scanned materials, which enables us to share them widely and freely. You can read more about their ongoing work to perform maintenance and upgrade systems on the Internet Archive Blog:

https://blog.archive.org/2024/10/21/internet-archive-services-update-2024-10-21/

Internet Archive Services Update: 2024-10-21 Posted on October 21, 2024 by Chris Freeland In recovering from recent cyberattacks on October 8, the Internet Archive has resumed the Wayback Machine (starting October 13) and Archive-It (October 17), and as of today (October 21), has begun offering prov...

10/10/2024

Good morning, MHDL users -

The Internet Archive website is offline, again, due to ongoing DDoS attacks. Unfortunately, this will once again make all page scans unavailable on https://mediahist.org and https://lantern.mediahist.org

You can check The Internet Archive's Twitter page for more up-to-date information on their server status: https://twitter.com/internetarchive

Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library offering millions of free books, movies & audio files, plus billions of saved web pages in the .

09/10/2024

UPDATE:

The Internet Archive website is now back online, and their team is currently assessing the extent of damage/compromised systems. See https://x.com/brewster_kahle/status/1844183111514603812 for more info.

Page scans are once again available on our sites, and should remain visible. There's no evidence of any compromised data or private information from mediahist.org servers and applications -- though if you have an archive.org account, you should update your passwords there.

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The Internet Archive is offline due to numerous attacks in the past days.

As a result, all page scans are currently unavailable on lantern.mediahist.org and mediahist.org.

We apologize for any inconvenience, and will provide updates as soon as we are able.

02/10/2024

What are you doing for lunch this Friday?

Join Professor Eric Hoyt for a discussion on "Hollywood Pressbooks and the Vectors of Publicity".

Lunch is provided. Seats are limited and registration is required. To join, email [email protected].

From the 1910s through the 1980s, Hollywood studios promoted their productions through the creation and dissemination of pressbooks—bound pamphlets containing publicity materials, advertising layouts, accessories for sale, and ballyhoo ideas.

In this talk, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research and Media History Digital Library Director Eric Hoyt will share his team’s work in digitizing pressbooks and utilizing computational methods, including plagiarism detection algorithms, to assess the extent that publicity text and promotional images from the pressbooks reached their intended destinations—U.S. newspapers and magazines.

UW-Madison English
UW-Madison Department of History
UW-Madison College of Letters & Science
University of Wisconsin-Madison
UW-Madison Department of Communication Arts
UW-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication
Madison Theatre Guild
UW-Madison Graduate School
UW-Madison Art Department
UW-Madison Department of Art History

18/09/2024

Check out the The Velvet Light Trap CFP on Continuity and Change in Media Representation. They’re interested in diverse archival and historiographic debates in film and television representation, including from global to local scales. Submissions welcome from reception, industry, as well as production histories:

CFP: Continuity and Change in Media Representation The Velvet Light Trap, Issue 96 (to be published Fall 2025) Special Issue Theme Representation matters has become a popular idiom conveying the transformative power of media representation to reframe cultural narratives and material conditions...

26/07/2024

We can't help but wonder if the lengthy title is part of the reason that this 1965 film from 20th Century Fox was quickly forgotten...

Decide for yourself after you flip through the promotional pressbook for THOSE MAGNIFICENT MEN IN THEIR FLYING MACHINES OR HOW I FLEW FROM LONDON TO PARIS IN 25 HOURS AND 11 MINUTES

10/06/2024

We're thrilled to announce that the MHDL collection of Canada's Film Press is now fully online and available to browse!

https://mediahist.org/collections/canada/

We're indebted to Paul Moore and Jessica Whitehead, whose ongoing support and tireless work to digitize and prepare materials has made this collection possible. Thank you so much!

Be sure to also check out the collection overview essay written by Paul Moore, Jessica Whitehead, and Louis Pelletier. It serves as a fantastic introduction to the collection and provides thorough context for each publication's history, as well as their complicated relationship to Hollywood (which always treated Canada as part of the American *domestic* market).

Read the essay and browse the collection at: https://mediahist.org/collections/canada/