Ken Owen, Michael Hattem, Roy Rogers, and Jonathan Wilson explore “print culture” in early America, including its increasing role throughout the period from colonial society and the imperial resistance to the American Revolution and the early republic.

TOPIC

Print played an important role in early American culture almost from the start. Its importance grew throughout the eighteenth century as the number of printers, printed matter, and readers also increased. Print facilitated political and religious debates but it also played a crucial role in the burgeoning colonial and Atlantic economies by transmitting commercially valuable information and providing advertising outlets for domestic merchants and shopkeepers. “Print culture” is a term that encompasses not only printed matter as texts but includes the people involved in the production, distribution, and reception of print and the networks they created to facilitate those processes. By thinking of the people, networks, and processes involved in creating, circulating, and consuming printed matter, the concept of “print culture” allows us to see the connections and importance of print to individuals, groups, communities, and, most importantly, to early American society as a whole.

QUESTIONS

• What is “print culture?”
• What role did print play in colonial society?
• What forms of print were available in the eighteenth century?
• How important was print, especially newspapers, in colonial resistance to the British empire?
• How did print contribute to the war?
• How did print culture change in the early republic?

GUEST PANELIST

Jonathan Wilson received his PhD in History from Syracuse University. His dissertation on focused on articulations of national identity in early-republican and antebellum New York City through the so-called Knickerbocker circle and the writers of Freedom’s Journal.

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FURTHER READING

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Bond, Gordon. James Parker: A Printer on the Eve of Revolution. Union: Garden State Legacy, 2010.

Botein, Stephen. “‘Meer Mechanics’ and an Open Press: the Business and Political Strategies of Colonial American Printers.” Perspectives in American History 9 (1975): 126–225.

Brooke, John L. “To Be ‘Read by the Whole People’: Press, Party, and Public Sphere in the United States, 1789-1840.” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 110, no. 1 (2000): 41–118.

Brown, Richard D. Knowledge Is Power: the Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700-1865. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Clark, Charles E. The Public Prints: the Newspaper in Anglo-American Culture, 1665-1740. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Copeland, David A. Debating the Issues in Colonial Newspapers: Primary Documents on Events of the Period. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2000.

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