Revolutionary Networks

For all of the ink and paper spent on the history of ink and paper during the American Revolutionary era, the men and women behind printed material have remained obscure except for a few prominent figures such as Benjamin Franklin and Mathew Carey. Joseph M. Adelman has now done for the Revolutionary period between the 1760s and the 1780s what Jeffrey L. Pasley does for the early national period of the 1790s—expand our vision of the press to encompass the economic, social, and political networks of those who produced it. Adelman argues that “printers played a crucial role in the formation and shaping of political rhetoric during the American Revolution” (3). More than examine the revolutionary actions of printers, however, Adelman places them at the center of intricate networks that allowed them an outsized influence on the ideas and rhetoric that fueled revolution. He focuses more on the process of collecting, arranging, printing, and distributing news than on the content and consumption of the news.Revolutionary Networks seamlessly blends social and intellectual history to explain how ideas developed and how they spread during the Revolution. Printers inhabited an important vertex in a system of information networks that bound colonial and Atlantic societies during the eighteenth century, and they used those networks to acquire and then distribute ideas that they consciously filtered into their pages. Printers not only controlled the news and information that saw light in print, but they also tried to control ideological narratives about how the community—local or national—should view printers and their presses. Adelman traces how those narratives changed over time. During the colonial period, printers cast themselves as apolitical artisans who circulated unbiased news to avoid liability for sedition or libel. They argued for a free and open press—free from restraint and open to the public as a forum. As war erupted, communities began to divide printers between patriot and loyalist, bifurcating presses along political lines.The final portion of the book makes an especially rich intervention at the intersection of intellectual and social history. With the end of the war, printers searched for relevance in the new nation and drew on past ideas of a free and open press that would enlighten public discourse in the republic and protect against government abuse. Rather than passive actors in early national debates about the free press, printers actively helped shape the ideological contours that were eventually enshrined in the First Amendment. In Adelman's story of the First Amendment, James Madison and his fellow politicians make only a brief entrance, outshone by printers who used their information and distribution networks to contest for its ideals for a decade before its ratification.Adelman enfolds loyalist printers and their networks into his narrative, showing that they accounted for approximately 40 percent of the print trade during the imperial crisis. He expertly examines how they balanced their own ideologies with the economic necessity to cater to a readership that became increasingly pro-independence by reprinting revolutionary news and tracts in the spirit of an unbiased communicator of news. But loyalists had tended to construct networks with government agencies and officials rather than with fellow printers, and they found it difficult to reach and sway popular opinion in the heat of revolution. That research answers the perplexing question of why loyalist printers comprised such a high percentage of the trade and still failed to compete effectively for influence on public opinion during the 1760s and 1770s.Although Adelman suggests that “printers developed connections with their comrades in other towns in colonies along the Atlantic seacoast and the Caribbean,” the book loses sight of the South, the British Caribbean, and Canada for long stretches (3). Even as the book examines the 1780s when print culture intensified in the United States and many printers argued for a national ethos, Adelman rarely visits the South. The South, the Caribbean, and Canada did not enjoy the robust printing infrastructure of the Middle colonies and New England during the colonial or early national periods, but Adelman seems to have relinquished an opportunity to envelope those areas more fully into the historiography of early American print culture. The reader acquires a strong sense of the networked world of the New England–mid-Atlantic corridor but misses, except for a few glimpses, how those networks operated in the regions beyond or how those regions contributed to Northeastern printer networks.Revolutionary Networks adds an important dimension to our knowledge about printers, the press, and early American networks. Instructors will find the book beneficial for a variety of courses about early America. Analyzing a time when only the most elite printers preserved their correspondence and personal papers, Adelman creatively reconstructs printer networks based on evidence within the material they printed, along with a handful of manuscript collections. By combining network theory, print culture, social history, and intellectual history, Adelman has produced a piece of scholarship that transcends the history of the press and pushes scholars to think about well-trod material in innovative ways

Aesthetics · Art · Ideology · Literature · Media studies · Narrative · Period (music) · Political science · Politics · Printing press · Rhetoric · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law