This chapter argues that the articulation of agricultural and media practice through “broadcasting” indicates more than an archaic, metaphorical equivalence between the spreading of seeds and the spreading of messages. More generally, it asserts that the application of “broadcasting” from 18th-Century English debates about farming technologies to early 20th-Century American debates about the nature of media systems in modern societies charts the emergence of new ideas about the role of communication media and the nature and constitution of publics in the context of accelerating capitalism and consumerism.
To explore this formative development, this chapter investigates expressions regarding broadcasting from the contexts of agriculture to the early days of mass media, recovers the incorporation of the first usage into the second, describes the implicit, conventional frameworks of understanding that made its incorporation meaningful, and interprets the significance of such frameworks for democratic communication.  Such a purpose rests on the claim that expressions not only reflect commonly held beliefs, but actively produce them, ourselves, and our societies. In addition, it proposes that such a process—linked as it is to rationales for political decisions and actions of all kinds and at all levels—is an exercise of power. 
“Unearthing broadcasting” refers not only to the expansion of broadcasting over time from agriculture to media industries. It underscores the extent to which broadcasting, despite its modern sheen, is a residual medium based in and continually resuscitated from hundreds of years of accumulated materials, practices, and ideas, yet done so in continually emergent conditions. The recognition of its residual status also underscores the necessity of historical recovery as a means of understanding media and society.  “Unearthing broadcasting” also encapsulates the primary argument to be made here, that the trajectory of “broadcasting” can be understood as a complex, historical process of mystification and naturalization—the transmogrification of a human muscle-powered activity into a non-human, invisible force of nature. Evangelical, fundamentalist Christian social activism during the 19th Century forged the initial articulation of “broadcasting” with media in the context of vanguard, mass politics. In the context of technological innovation, the rationalization of the state, and the beginning of a consumer society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, “broadcasting” emerged not only as a means of harnessing an electromagnetic property for centralized delivery of information and entertainment to the general public but, as will be seen, in some inflections as the physical energy flow itself that takes place throughout the natural world. After describing this gradual articulation, the chapter reflects on the implications of this heritage for “broadcasting” as a form of democratic communication.