Trish Loughran. The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770-1870. New York; Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2007.
CATEGORIES: Cultural and Social History, Early U.S. History, Print Culture, 18th and 19th Century U.S. history, Publishing History, Press and Politics, Book Industries, Book Trade, and Reading, American Studies.
PLACE: United States
TIME PERIOD: 1770-1870, especially 1770-1800 and 1830-1850.
SUMMARY: Trish Loughran interrogates the much-loved belief that the identity of an Andersonian American “imagined community” was formed in the late-eighteenth century. Because print distribution was localized and fragmented rather than simultaneous and national, no national vision of America was shared in print or public space. This is contra most historians, including Breen. She argues that Paine’s “Common Sense” and “The Federalist Papers” were not actually widely circulated. Rather, locally printed and read materials were.
The Revolution and the ratification of the Constitution actually depended on this fragmented public sphere and print network. If one existed, Loughran posits, it would have better resisted a Federal state.
By the 1830s, when the national infrastructures came to be and print became nationally distributed, the nation fractured rather than rallying together in imagined community. Regionalism and local loyalties that were forced into public national discourse ignited the Civil War.
Loughran uses material culture studies to examine various cultural items as she traces the movement from the theory of a nation-state, the Constitution, to the actual institutions of nation-state. Using the campaigns of the national abolitionist organization, the American Anti-Slavery Society’s (AASS), she argues that mass distribution of print revealed how deeply region the young nation was, which acted to split the US apart.