Description
Book SynopsisA lively portrait of Horace Greeley, one of the nineteenth century's most fascinating public figures. The founder and editor of the New-York Tribune, Horace Greeley was the most significantand polarizingAmerican journalist of the nineteenth century. To the farmers and tradesmen of the rural North, the Tribune was akin to holy writ. To just about everyone elseDemocrats, southerners, and a good many Whig and Republican political alliesGreeley was a shape-shifting menace: an abolitionist fanatic; a disappointing conservative; a terrible liar; a power-hungry megalomaniac. In Horace Greeley, James M. Lundberg revisits this long-misunderstood figure, known mostly for his wild inconsistencies and irrepressible political ambitions. Charting Greeley's rise and eventual fall, Lundberg mines an extensive newspaper archive to place Greeley and his Tribune at the center of the struggle to realize an elusive American national consensus in a tumultuous age. Emerging from the jangling culture and
Trade ReviewIn "Horace Greeley: Print, Politics, and the Failure of American Nationhood," James M. Lundberg, a history professor at Notre Dame, traces Greeley's struggles with the vicissitudes of U.S. history during his lifetime, from the anguish induced by James Polk's Mexican War to the tensions of Reconstruction. It's a compact volume, well crafted and filled with insight, designed to illuminate such events through Greeley's thinking—and employ history, in turn, to probe the Greeley legacy.
—Robert W. Merry,
Wall Street JournalThrough Greeley, Lundberg paints a rich picture of an American political economy coming to grips with its internal contradictions. Lundberg's history provides us with key insights into the ways in which the emergent conditions of American nationhood were both compelled and repelled by a media landscape unsure of its place in the construction and maintenance of American political discourse.
—Justin Harbour,
LSE Review of BooksTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction. Print and Legends
Chapter 1. Oracle
Chapter 2. The Nation in the Balance
Chapter 3. Making the Yankee Nation
Chapter 4. Horace Greeley's American Conflict
Chapter 5. The Most American of Americans
Epilogue. A Union Printer
Notes
Index
