UPCOMING Events
“Eat the Messenger:
Carrier pigeons, Stock markets, & The modern Information economY”
April 16th; details TBA
Katie Hornstein (Department of Art History, Dartmouth) explores the presence of carrier pigeons in histories of early nineteenth-century media, focusing on the role they played in relaying information in two key sectors of the early industrial economy: the stock market and newspapers. The ability of carrier pigeons to transmit information quickly and over great distances made them key players in the emergence of financial journalism and the growth of Europe’s fledgling financial markets. Professor Hornstein introduces the participation and representation of animals into the otherwise anthropocentric histories of finance and media studies, demonstrating how carrier pigeons collapsed the distance between carrying the news, becoming the news, and ending up as someone’s dinner.
