Telecommunications networks are vast, intricate, hugely costly systems for exchanging messages and information—within cities and across continents. From the Post Office and the telegraph to today's internet, these networks have sown domestic division while also acting as sources of international power.

In Crossed Wires, Dan Schiller, who has conducted archival research on United States telecommunications for more than forty years, recovers the extraordinary social history of the major network systems of the United States. Drawing on arrays of archival documents and secondary sources, Schiller reveals that this history has been shaped by sharp social and political conflict and is embedded in the larger history of an expansionary United States political economy. Schiller argues that networks have enabled United States imperialism through a recurrent "American system" of cross-border communications.

This authoritative and comprehensive revisionist history of United States telecommunications argues that not technology but a dominative—and contested—political economy drove the evolution of this critical industry.