Crossing Border Wires

Nineteenth-century U.S. telegraphers created literatures that debated new social roles in the virtual realm for various political minorities. Such U.S. telegraphers as Mattie Kuhn and Abraham Burstein develop autobiographies and fictions of poor working telegraphers who successfully use telegraphic networks to empower themselves and others like them to seek higher wages, stronger communities, and better lives. In literatures written by telegraphers, knowledge of telegraphic social networks wins everything from eight-hour work days for single mothers to reunions with long-lost family members in the lives of telegraphers whom corporate or government elites conspire to disempower.