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TEXTING A NATION?

Review products

LoughranTrish, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U S. Nation Building, 1770–1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007)
SlauterEric, The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2011

DAVID S. SHIELDS
DAVID S. SHIELDS*
Affiliation:
Departments of English and History, University of South Carolina Email: [email protected]
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Extract

Since its publication in 2007, Trish Loughran's The Republic in Print has earned a reputation as a trenchant critique of the vision of the pre-1876 United States as a state whose national integrity depended upon the dissemination of print. Commentators fixed particularly on its argument that the early republic never manifested that degree of integration of internal improvements, roads, print technology, and local interests to materialize the Federalist vision of nationhood. In some circles it was hailed as a salutary counter to historians who embrace Benedict Anderson's account of the national imaginary—a virtual nationhood irradiating citizens’ imaginations through reading newspapers and novels that impute national being. Loughran marshaled evidence that no newspaper, certainly no novel, and not even that most legendarily popular imprint, Thomas Paine's Common Sense, enjoyed sufficiently broad distribution to invoke even a coherent fantasy of national identity. In print-culture studies she has emerged as the most vocal chronicler of the fragmented republic. She has earned the respect of those political historians who have pondered the incapacity of public-sphere historiography to account for the republic's drift into the contending sections of the 1830s and the warring states of the 1860s.

Type
Review Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , August 2011 , pp. 435 - 445
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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