About

Dr. James W. Cortada is a senior research fellow at the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities. He is an historian specializing in corporate history, and that, too, of all manner of information since the start of the Second Industrial Revolution of the early 1800s. He is the author of a series of books on information’s history, including Fake News Nation: The Long History of Lies and Misinformation in America (2019) co-authored with Professor William Aspray, Birth of Modern Facts (2023), and Today’s Facts: Understanding the Current Evolution of Information (2025). He also spent four decades working at IBM Corporation in sales, consulting and management.