“Hochman, a scholar of American studies, chronicles how electronic surveillance became ‘normalized’ in the U.S. Although we once recognized that wiretapping was a ‘dirty business,’ as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes put it in 1928, we now . . . accept it as ‘a mundane fact of American life,’ spurred by routine crime-control measures and the policing of people of color. . . . For Hochman, the history of wiretapping ultimately feeds into the larger racial tragedy of mass incarceration and overcriminalization.” —Jeannie Suk Gersen, The New Yorker

"[S]mart, entertaining, and occasionally alarming. . . . a powerful prehistory of today’s private sector and government surveillance regimes." —Andrew Lanham, The New Republic

”[This] thoughtful, searching history reminds us that the practice of wiretapping was steeped from the start in lawlessness. . . . The Listeners does a wonderful job evoking a world shaped by intense distaste for surveillance, even if the sharp emotions that once energized the battle now seem lost to history.” —Grayson Clary, The Washington Post

”[A] fascinating look at the battle between surveillance and privacy in the United States over the past 150 years and the paranoia regarding electronic surveillance that provided the ballast for the genre narratives that dramatized this conflict” —Harrison Blackman, Los Angeles Review of Books

”[Hochman] routinely deploys an impressive erudition and dexterity in following the laws, legal opinions, policy papers, reviews, opinion pieces, and academic literature that shaped or were shaped by practices or attitudes towards surveillance. . . . We might follow him in doing the difficult work of becoming informed, vigilant, and principled about the long creep of surveillance into our lives; and by picking up the threads left for us by privacy and civil liberties activists over the century-and-a-half period chronicled by The Listeners." —Jordan Penney, PopMatters

“[A] fascinating new study of wiretapping. . . . The Listeners is at once a learned, carefully notated academic study, while also serving as the kind of cultural criticism that forces us to consider our own part in the steady erosion of privacy that ultimately challenges some of our most deeply held notions.” —Crimereads

“The Listeners is written in a style that satisfies in literary terms and as entertainment. . . . [A] thought-provoking book by a talented historian.” —Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, Journal of American History

”Hochman concerns himself with the type of surveillance that stretches its tendrils into ordinary people’s lives. . . . [and] has a strong eye for amusing, illustrative characters.” —Lora Kelley, The Nation

"For anyone looking for a prehistory of the ambivalent and paradoxical aspects of American thought around digital surveillance, this is your book.” —Rebecca Onion, History Today

”Since 9/11, wiretapping in the United States has largely been viewed as the preserve of the ‘national security state.’ In The Listeners, Brian Hochman suggests a revisionist reading, in which wiretapping is diffused throughout US society, from ‘private ears’ snooping on cheating spouses to corporations fishing for dirt on rivals and police eavesdropping on poor Black communities.” —Stephen Phillips, Times Literary Supplement

”[A] fascinating history. . . . This is an essential and immersive look at ‘what happens when we sideline privacy concerns in the interest of profit motives and police imperatives.'” —Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)

”A thorough history of wiretapping as it moved from a criminal act to a legitimate tool of law enforcement.” —Kirkus Reviews

”The moral of The Listeners’s 150-year history is what Hochman calls the devastating ‘banality of electronic surveillance in America.’ Espionage was and remains dependent on technologies so central to everyday life they appear mundane―and it has always hinged on the work of ordinary people who, for better or worse, often consider their labor anything but extraordinary.” —Sophia Goodfriend, Boston Review

”Listen carefully to this absorbing history of wiretapping and you’ll hear the tones of today’s surveillance society, a century and a half in the making. Brian Hochman’s splendid book reveals how a once-new technology embedded itself in American life, found novel uses, and shaped areas ranging from police tactics to privacy rights–illuminating in the process the consequences and costs of a networked world.” –Sarah E. Igo, author of The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in America

“Fast-paced, compulsively readable, artfully researched, and historically astute, The Listeners reminds us that Americans once cared about privacy–and that we should too.” –Richard R. John, author of Networked Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications

“Hochman’s comprehensive and compelling narrative illustrates how the ‘dirty business’ of wiretapping has become a common and iconic feature of American life.” –Cyrus Farivar, author of Habeas Data: Privacy vs. the Rise of Surveillance Tech

“Brian Hochman’s deeply researched, eminently readable, and intensely timely book excavates the history of electronic surveillance from the telegraph to the planetary infrastructures and corporations that have become inextricable from everyday life. Along the way, he shows how widespread resistance to wiretapping may provide a guide to addressing some of the most urgent questions about the implications of living in a fully connected world.” –Trevor Paglen, author of Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World

“The Listeners: A History of Wiretapping in the United States weaves different kinds of history together in a single, compelling story about the rise of electronic surveillance, police secrecy, and technology. It’s a story about how electronic surveillance has become ordinary and acceptable: how the technology and the uses for the technology developed; then, how ordinary citizens understood and experienced the technology over time.” –Claire Potter, author of Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy

How ethnographic encounters shaped audiovisual media in late nineteenth and early twentieth century America.
Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology (University of Minnesota Press, 2014)

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writers and anthropologists believed that the world’s primitive races were on the brink of extinction. They also believed that films, photographs, and phonographic recordings—modern media in their technological infancy—could capture lasting relics of primitive life before it vanished into obscurity.

In Savage Preservation, Brian Hochman shows how widespread interest in recording vanishing races and disappearing cultures influenced audiovisual innovation, experimentation, and use in the United States. Drawing extensively on seldom-seen archival sources—from phonetic alphabets and sign language drawings to wax cylinder recordings and early color photographs—Hochman uncovers the parallel histories of ethnography and technology in the turn-of-the-century period. Brimming with nuanced critical insights and unexpected historical connections, Savage Preservation offers a new model for thinking about race and media in the American context—and a fresh take on a period of accelerated technological change that closely resembles our own.