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The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770-1870
The Republic in Print Print Culture in the Age of US Nation Building 17701870 Author:Trish Loughran In the beginning, everything was (as John Locke said) America, but where did America begin? In many histories of American nationalism, the United States begins in print--with the production, dissemination, and consumption of major printed texts like Common Sense, the Declaration of Independence, newspaper debates over ratification, and the Const... more »itution itself. Print is thus thought to play a central role in the emergence of American nationalism, as Americans become Americans through acts of reading that connect them to other like-minded nationals. In The Republic in Print, however, Trish Loughran overturns this master narrative of American origins and offers a radically different history of the early republic and its nineteenth century aftermath. Combining a materialist history of American nation building with an intellectual history of American federalism, Loughran challenges the idea that print culture created a sense of national connection among different parts of the early American union and instead describes the early republic as a series of local and regional reading publics with distinct political and geographical identities. Drawing on a range of literary, historical, and archival materials (from essays, pamphlets, novels, and plays, to engravings, paintings, statues, laws, and maps), The Republic in Print provides a refreshingly original cultural history of the American nation-state over the course of its first century.« less