Book ID: CBB756772954

Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763–1789 (2019)

unapi

Adelman, Joseph M. (Author)


Johns Hopkins University Press


Publication Date: 2019
Physical Details: 274
Language: English

An engrossing and powerful story about the influence of printers, who used their commercial and political connections to directly shape Revolutionary political ideology and mass mobilization.Honorable Mention, St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize, Bibliographical Society of AmericaDuring the American Revolution, printed material, including newspapers, pamphlets, almanacs, and broadsides, played a crucial role as a forum for public debate. In Revolutionary Networks, Joseph M. Adelman argues that printers—artisans who mingled with the elite but labored in a manual trade—used their commercial and political connections to directly shape Revolutionary political ideology and mass mobilization. Going into the printing offices of colonial America to explore how these documents were produced, Adelman shows how printers balanced their own political beliefs and interests alongside the commercial interests of their businesses, the customs of the printing trade, and the prevailing mood of their communities. Adelman describes how these laborers repackaged oral and manuscript compositions into printed works through which political news and opinion circulated. Drawing on a database of 756 printers active during the Revolutionary era, along with a rich collection of archival and printed sources, Adelman surveys printers' editorial strategies. Moving chronologically through the era of the American Revolution and to the war's aftermath, he details the development of the networks of printers and explains how they contributed to the process of creating first a revolution and then the new nation.By underscoring the important and intertwined roles of commercial and political interests in the development of Revolutionary rhetoric, this book essentially reframes our understanding of the American Revolution. Printers, Adelman argues, played a major role as mediators who determined what rhetoric to amplify and where to circulate it. Offering a unique perspective on the American Revolution and early American print culture, Revolutionary Networks reveals how these men and women managed political upheaval through a commercial lens.

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Reviewed By

Review Steven Carl Smith (Autumn 2020) Review of "Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763–1789". Business History Review (pp. 660-664). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB756772954/

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Authors & Contributors
Tapti Roy
Orr, Leah
Wersan, Kate
Richard H. Brown
Ben Epstein
Wehrman, Andrew
Concepts
Printing industry
Great Britain, colonies
Printing
Technology and politics
Periodicals; serials
Publishers and publishing
Time Periods
18th century
19th century
17th century
20th century, early
16th century
Modern
Places
United States
Great Britain
North America
India
Philadelphia, PA
Utrecht (Netherlands)
Institutions
Royal Society of London
British East India Company
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