ABSTRACT
This chapter defines what is meant by history and historiography, discusses the distinctive features of media histories, and explains the uses and limitations of media as history. It produces a timeline to represent the chronology of media development and understands archival history. Even when media history extends its purview, it tends to relate wholly upon the plane of the media industries themselves and is, again, inward-looking and gives us little insight into the relationship of the media and wider social contexts. Although all media historians rely on existing histories, they use them as only one of their sources of information about the past. Some larger organisations have made consistent efforts to collect together these records of the past, and some have even organised them to make searching easier. These archives of the historical material are invaluable to the media historian.
