The birth of American press: Historical experience and development problems

The article reviews the origin of American press as an essential idea in genesis of the state power. The author demonstrates a strong correlation between domestic policy and evolutionary changes in local press, also analyzes the key events in chronicle order: printing the first paper “Publick Occurrences”, the Trial of Zenger, consequences of the Stamp Act and the acting of “Sons of Liberty”. The conclusion is made that American press is one of the most influential moments in organizing the national democratic liberation movement over the British Empire, which could not stop or assume control of expansion in the number of printing offices. The article states that the most important factor which leads colonies to unite is the fight against the Stamp Act. It is gone through in attempts to regulate the press and overcome the budget deficit, generated by The Seven Years’ War. As a result American press becomes the main attribute in the American Revolution.

“Never to Be Forgotten”

This chapter explores the clergy’s doctrine of political resistance expressed during the Stamp Act crisis of 1765. The clergy’s justifications of political resistance as the Revolutionary-era troubles began emerged against the backdrop of clerical arguments for resistance articulated after the overthrow of Governor Edmund Andros in 1689. The memory of Andros, his tyrannical reign over New England, and the clergy’s resistance to him were evoked by the clergy during the Revolutionary era. This act of pre-Revolutionary resistance provides important context for understanding how the clergy themselves thought about the moral legitimacy of resisting one’s political authorities in the Revolutionary period. Colonial resistance to oppressive British agents was not a new or novel idea.

In Search of Common Happiness

This chapter investigates how, in the absence of a shared discourse of Loyalism, Britons in the Atlantic were confronted with a crisis of identity in the late 1760s and early 1770s. Britons were reared in a shared political culture that regularly framed political controversies as a struggle between popish tyranny and Protestant liberty. This was certainly true during celebrations of the repeal of the unpopular Stamp Act, which many perceived as detrimental to the political and economic well-being of their empire. But by 1773, the inhabitants of New York City, Glasgow, Kingston, and Halifax had begun to pursue different and often competing paths in the ongoing crisis, which demonstrated the tenuous nature of popular British loyalty in the latter half of the eighteenth century. In the absence of a common shared enemy, these same subjects reverted to far more local and conflicting understandings of Britishness, which were defined most crucially by events that directly concerned their communities.

Liberty Triumphant

This chapter examines the Stamp Act Crisis, which features prominently in the history of the American Revolution. It raised important questions about ideas of consent and representation, and ultimately the very sovereignty of Parliament in Britain's Atlantic colonies — questions that grew in significance over the following decade. Additionally, the loosely formed methods of resistance adopted by colonists, which included calls for boycotts, violent rioting, and the use of the press to spread ideas and create unity, played a decisive role in colonial opposition to imperial policies in the years to come. For some, the dispute also led to a crisis of identity. The arbitrary actions of Parliament began to cast doubt on the very meaning of British loyalty in the American colonies, which some colonists were ultimately able to resolve only by declaring their independence. For many historians, popular opposition to the Stamp Act was the opening act in a political debate that ultimately ended in rebellion.

The Stamp Act and Legal and Economic Institutions

The chapter evaluates the Stamp Act and the contrasting visions of the colonial economy and its institutions advanced by the Stamp Act supporters in England and the Stamp Act opponents in the colonies. It focuses on the first colony, Virginia, as an example of events taking place throughout the colonies. The chapter begins by describing how colonial legislatures assumed authority over establishing the level of fees imposed by the county-level institutions. Moving to the Stamp Act crisis, it then examines how colonial protestors found the Stamp Act taxes offensive because, in addition to usurping colonial legislatures' power over taxation, they targeted official legal documents in the course of services offered by colonial institutions, like land transfers, mortgages, and court procedures. The opposition to the Stamp Act was, in part, rooted in a profound hostility to raising the fees and costs of the institutional infrastructure that was foundational to the day-to-day workings of the colonial economy. The legislative reforms of the founding era reveal that a lasting legacy of the colonial era was an opposition to using institutional services as a source of government revenue.