printing-press
3 free lessons tagged printing-press across History. Each one is a short sequence of focused steps with narration and a five-question quiz at the end — take them in any order, no signup required.
Measuring the Printing Revolution: What the Economic Evidence Shows
For decades economists found no trace of the printing press in growth statistics. Learn how city-level data and distance from Mainz were used to estimate print's effect on city growth and on the spread of Protestantism, what competition between printers did, and where these estimates can go wrong.
What Print Changed: The Reformation, Science and the Fixity Debate
Elizabeth Eisenstein argued that print was an agent of change in religion and science; Adrian Johns argued its reliability had to be built. See how Luther used the press, what print did for shared scientific texts, and which claims historians treat as settled and which remain contested.
Gutenberg's Press: The Technology, the Business and the Spread
What Gutenberg actually invented, why printing was a capital-hungry business from day one, and how the press spread from Mainz to about two hundred European cities within fifty years while the real price of books fell by roughly two-thirds.