Paine Detected in Mississippi: Slavery, Print Culture, and the Threat of Deism in the Early Republic

2021 ◽  
Vol 78 (2) ◽  
pp. 313
Author(s):  
Perry
Keyword(s):  
Print Culture ◽  
Early Republic

TEXTING A NATION?

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 435-445
Author(s):  
DAVID S. SHIELDS
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Early Republic ◽  
Broad Distribution ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Warring States ◽  
The Federalist ◽  
National Imaginary ◽  
The Republic

Since its publication in 2007, Trish Loughran's The Republic in Print has earned a reputation as a trenchant critique of the vision of the pre-1876 United States as a state whose national integrity depended upon the dissemination of print. Commentators fixed particularly on its argument that the early republic never manifested that degree of integration of internal improvements, roads, print technology, and local interests to materialize the Federalist vision of nationhood. In some circles it was hailed as a salutary counter to historians who embrace Benedict Anderson's account of the national imaginary—a virtual nationhood irradiating citizens’ imaginations through reading newspapers and novels that impute national being. Loughran marshaled evidence that no newspaper, certainly no novel, and not even that most legendarily popular imprint, Thomas Paine's Common Sense, enjoyed sufficiently broad distribution to invoke even a coherent fantasy of national identity. In print-culture studies she has emerged as the most vocal chronicler of the fragmented republic. She has earned the respect of those political historians who have pondered the incapacity of public-sphere historiography to account for the republic's drift into the contending sections of the 1830s and the warring states of the 1860s.

Disaster Nation

2019 ◽  
pp. 133-165
Author(s):  
Cynthia A. Kierner
Keyword(s):  
New Hampshire ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Early Republic ◽  
The Other ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
American National Identity ◽  
The One ◽  
National Significance

Americans experienced changes in both the quality and quantity of disasters in the post-revolutionary era. On the one hand, they were increasingly vulnerable to new categories of calamities, as fires and epidemics proliferated in the growing cities of the early republic. On the other hand, they inhabited a print-saturated environment in which such episodes were widely reported and sometimes assumed national significance. Focusing primarily on Philadelphia's yellow fever epidemic in 1793 and fires in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Richmond, Virginia, this chapter addresses two related themes: how U.S. leaders envisioned the role of the state in disaster relief and how disaster stories contributed to the creation of an American national identity. It shows that by publicizing private philanthropic efforts that arose in response to disasters, print culture encouraged readers to see themselves as virtuous and charitable, even as their government rejected the British model of state-sponsored humanitarian aid, and that by chronicling the suffering of individuals, increasingly sensational accounts encouraged readers to see disasters as personal tragedies rather than public problems.

Alexander Hamilton and the Early Republic in Edwardian Imperial Thought

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick M. Kirkwood
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Africa ◽  
Early Republic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Alexander Hamilton ◽  
George Washington ◽  
American Federation ◽  
Treaty Of Versailles ◽  
The Federalist ◽  
The Federalist Papers

In the first decade of the twentieth century, a rising generation of British colonial administrators profoundly altered British usage of American history in imperial debates. In the process, they influenced both South African history and wider British imperial thought. Prior usage of the Revolution and Early Republic in such debates focused on the United States as a cautionary tale, warning against future ‘lost colonies’. Aided by the publication of F. S. Oliver's Alexander Hamilton (1906), administrators in South Africa used the figures of Hamilton and George Washington, the Federalist Papers, and the drafting of the Constitution as an Anglo-exceptionalist model of (modern) self-government. In doing so they applied the lessons of the Early Republic to South Africa, thereby contributing to the formation of the Union of 1910. They then brought their reconception of the United States, and their belief in the need for ‘imperial federation’, back to the metropole. There they fostered growing diplomatic ties with the US while recasting British political history in-light-of the example of American federation. This process of inter-imperial exchange culminated shortly after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles when the Boer Generals Botha and Smuts were publicly presented as Washington and Hamilton reborn.

Mass Production: Impossible London’s Criminal Subjects

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ted Geier
Keyword(s):  
Print Culture ◽  
Mass Production ◽  
History Of ◽  
Mass Events

Considers mass readership and the ‘tastes’ it produces. Maps the history of criminals and execution spectacles, particularly as addressed by the London ‘public’ voices of Defoe and Dickens. Connects these mass events to the new mass print culture and circulation forms, such as the penny dreadfuls and their Newgate novel precursor. This shows the development of the public’s ‘taste for blood’, anxieties at an encroaching nonhumanity, and an infatuation with the inhuman from Jack Sheppard to Sweeney Todd and Dracula.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document