*Note that an extensive article literature, not listed below, appears in Cinema Journal and Film History.
Abel, Richard. The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900–1910. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Abel, Richard and Rick Altman, ed. The Sounds of Early Cinema. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2001.
_____, ed. Silent Film. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996.
Altman, Rick. Silent Film Sound. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
Anderson, Robert Jack. "The Motion Picture Patents Company." Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin—Madison, 1983.
Auerbach, Jonathan. Body Shots: Early Cinema's Incarnations. University of California Press, 2007.
Balio, Tino, ed. The American Film Industry. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.
Bowser, Eileen. The Transformation of Cinema, 1907–1915. New York: Scribner, 1990.
Braun, Marta, Charlie Keil, Rob King, Paul Moore, and Louis Pelletier, eds. Beyond the Screen: Institutions, Networks and Publics of Early Cinema. New Barnet, Herts, U.K: John Libbey, 2012.
Brownlow, Kevin. Behind the Mask of Innocence: Sex, Violence, Prejudice, Crime: Films of Social Conscience in the Silent Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
Brown, Richard. "A New Look at Old History—the Kinetoscope: Fraud and Market Development in Britain in 1895." Early Popular Visual Culture 10 (2012): 407–39.
Brown, Richard, and Barry Anthony. The Kinetoscope: A British History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017.
Carlson, W. Bernard. "Artifacts and Frames of Meaning: Thomas A. Edison, His Managers, and the Cultural Construction of Motion Pictures." In Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, eds., Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992, pp. 175–98.
Carlson, W. Bernard, and Michael E. Gorman. "Understanding Invention as a Cognitive Process: The Case of Thomas Edison and Early Motion Pictures, 1888–91." Social Studies of Science 20 (1990): 387–430.
Christie, Ian. Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema. University of Chicago Press, 2019.
Coffman, Elizabeth. “Women in Motion: Loie Fuller and the ‘Interpenetration’ of Art and Science.” Camera Obscura 17:1 (2002): 1–104.
Dahlquist, Marina and Joel Frykholm. The Institutionalization of Educational Cinema: North America and Europe in the 1910s and 1920s. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2019.
Decherney, Peter. Hollywood's Copyright Wars: From Edison to the Internet. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.
Fischer, Paul. The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures: A True Tale of Obsession, Murder, and the Movies. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022.
Frykholm, Joel. George Kleine and American Cinema: The Movie Business and Film Culture in the Silent Era. London: British Film Institute, 2019.
Gaines, Jane M. Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries? University of Illinois Press, 2018.
Gaudio, Michael. “Dancing for the Kinetograph: The Lakota Ghost Dance and the Silence of Early Cinema.” In Sound, Image, Silence: Art and the Aural Imagination in the Atlantic World. University of Minnesota Press, 2019, chap. 5.
Gaudreault, André, ed. American Cinema 1890–1909: Themes and Variations. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2009.
Gaudreault, André, Nicolas Dulac, and Santiago Hidalgo. eds. A Companion to Early Cinema. John Wiley & Sons, 2012.
Grieveson, Lee and Peter Kramer. The Silent Cinema Reader. London: Routledge, 2004.
Hendricks, Gordon. The Edison Motion Picture Myth. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961.
Jacobson, Brian R. Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence of Cinematic Space. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.
_____. "The Black Maria: Film Studio, Film Technology. History and Technology 27:2 (2011): 233–241.
Keil, Charlie. Early American Cinema in Transition: Story, Style, and Filmmaking, 1907–1913. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001.
Keil, Charlie, and Sheey Stamp, eds. American Cinema's Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
Kessler, Frank, and Nanna Verhoeff. Networks of Entertainment: Early Film Distribution 1895–1915. New Barnet, Herts: John Libbey, 2007.
Lipton, Lenny. The Cinema in Flux: The Evolution of Motion Picture Technology from the Magic Lantern to the Digital Era. New York: Springer, 2020.
Mathews, Nancy Mowll. Moving Pictures: American Art and Early Film, 1880–1910. Manchester, Vt: Hudson Hills Press, 2005.
Musser, Charles. Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
_____. Edison Motion Pictures, 1890–1900: An Annotated Filmography. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997.
_____. The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
_____. High-Class Moving Pictures: Lyman H. Howe and the Forgotten Era ofTraveling Exhibition, 1880–1920. Princeton, N.J.; Princeton University Press, 1991.
_____. Thomas A. Edison and His Kinetographic Motion Pictures. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press for the Friends of Edison National Historic Site, 1995.
Orgeron, Devin, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Streible, Dan, eds. Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States. Oxford University Press, 2012.
Phillips, Ray. Edison’s Kinetoscope and Its Films: A History to 1896. Flicks Books, 1997.
Ramsaye, Terry. A Million and One Nights: A History of the Motion Picture. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1954.
Robinson, David. From Peep Show to Palace: The Birth of American Film. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
Spehr, Paul C. The Man Who Made Movies: W. K. L. Dickson. New Barnet, Herts., U.K.: John Libbey, 2008.
Strauven, Wanda, ed. The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006.
Streible, Dan Fight Pictures: A History of Boxing and Early Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.
