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Current Issue Article Abstracts Winter 2010 Vol. 8.1 • • • • • • • • Reading and Radicalization: Print, Politics, and the American Revolution Eric Slauter While pre-revolutionary politicians worried about radicalized colonial readers, post-revolutionary historians often treated reading and printing as effects rather than as causes of the American Revolution. This essay reconsiders relations of print to politics by focusing on political reprinting and by examining the production and consumption of a cheap pamphlet of Locke's Second Treatise issued by Boston printers in 1773. Rather than asking if books make revolutions (or which books), scholars should balance the best-selling pamphlets against the worst, should consider the role of pre-revolutionary tracts during and after Independence, and should attend more closely to the marketing of revolution. The Revolution in Popular Publications: The Almanac and New England Primer, 1750-1800 Patrick Spero This article explores the almanac and The New England Primer, two of the most popular publications in the British Atlantic World, during the era of the American Revolution. The article looks first at the print history of the almanac to show how almanacs were shaped by local print traditions and conditions and then demonstrates how location affected the politicization of the almanac's content in Philadelphia and Boston during the American Revolution. The article ends with an examination of The New England Primer with a particular focus on changes to its content in the early republic. The print histories of these two publications reveal the fragmented nature of the British Atlantic world of print, and how this fragmentation continued to inform print in the new nation. Between Script and Specie: Cadwallader Colden's Printing Method and the Production of Permanent, Correct Knowledge John Dixon Around 1740, the New York statesman and scholar, Cadwallader Colden, designed a new method to print long-lasting, accurate books. This essay recreates Colden's invention and his more general effort at reforming the book trade in the historical context of eighteenth-century concerns about paper currency and the construction of false value. By also examining why Colden's plan failed to convince trans-atlantic publishers such as Benjamin Franklin and William Strahan, this article stresses the contingent and contested nature of print in the mid-eighteenth century. "[Those with] Great Abilities Have Not Always the Best Information": How Franklin's Transatlantic Book-Trade And Scientific Networks Interacted, ca. 1730-1757 Nick Wrightson This article establishes the importance of overlapping modes of reputation-making in Benjamin Franklin's mutually reinforcing careers as naturalist and printer (ca.1730-57). It re-evaluates the key trans-atlantic relationships upon which Franklin relied, and demonstrates the interdependence of Franklin's objectives and those of his colleagues in determining their shared social progress. Finally, it explores the changing perceptions of British Atlantic society within the communities in which Franklin participated. In doing so it illustrates how the experience of belonging to particular Anglo-American social networks directly shaped members' attitudes towards nation and empire. Defining the Right Side of Virtue: Crowd Narratives, the Newspaper, and the Lee-Mercer Dispute in Rhetorical Perspective Alexander B. Haskell This essay uses a minor controversy that played out in the pages of the Virginia Gazettes between 1766 and 1767 to explore the way in which the newspaper complicated an age-old question in Anglo-American monarchical-republican politics: Which was more important in attesting to (even determining) the virtue of gentleman politicians, the approbation of fellow gentlemen, or that of the people at large? At this early moment in the newspaper's history, the question could remain testily unresolved. But the very fact that the newspaper helped open up the question made this medium a distinctly complicated arena for competing politicians. The Printer and the "Peasant": Franklin and Pierre-André Gargaz, Two Philosophers in Search of Peace Ellen R. Cohn While Franklin was beginning negotiations for a peace treaty with Great Britain in the spring of 1782, he was visited by Pierre-André Gargaz, a poor ex-convict who was seeking a publisher for his plan to secure perpetual peace in Europe. Franklin had the treatise printed on his private press. This paper documents the enduring relationship between these two "philosophes," analyzes the evolution of Gargaz's ideas and suggests Franklin's influence, discusses the establishment and function of Franklin's press at Passy, and demonstrates how this pamphlet ushered in a new phase of Franklin's role as an independent printer under the ancien régime. Liberation Technology: Black Printed Protest in the Age of Franklin Richard S. Newman Although many scholars still view the nineteenth century as the decisive moment in the development of black print culture, I argue that the eighteenth century witnessed the first major shift in African American literary stylings. Formerly spoken of and for by white masters, politicians, and ministers, early black writers utilized a variety of printed forms— from poetry to pamphlets — to claim their own voices in an emerging trans-Atlantic public sphere. Indeed, by connecting literary emancipation of black voices to the broader aims of abolitionism, early black writers made print media an integral part of racial reform movements well beyond the Age of Franklin. |
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