Description
Book SynopsisFundamentally reshapes our understanding of the causes of the American Revolution and the pivotal role foreign news and misinformation played in driving colonists to revolt. Runner-up of the Journal of The American Revolution Book of the Year Award by the Journal of The American RevolutionFake news is not new. Just like millions of Americans today, the revolutionaries of the eighteenth century worried that they were entering a post-truth era. Their fears, however, were not fixated on social media or clickbait, but rather on peoples' increasing reliance on reading news gathered from foreign newspapers. In Misinformation Nation, Jordan E. Taylor reveals how foreign news defined the boundaries of American politics and ultimately drove colonists to revolt against Britain and create a new nation. News was the lifeblood of early American politics, but newspaper printers had few reliable sources to report on events from abroad. Accounts of battles and beheadings, as well as declarations a
Trade ReviewTaylor's erudite and engaging debut vividly demonstrates the challenges of transmitting information in the early modern age.
—Barbara Spindel,
Christian Science MonitorJordan E. Taylor's book
Misinformation Nation: Foreign News and the Politics of Truth in Revolutionary America tackles this topic in a masterful way, examining the nature of news and the factors that affected it, from the advent of revolution through the rise of federalism.
—Don N. Hagist,
Journal of the American RevolutionA must-read intervention in the historiography of the American Revolution, a newspaper-driven perspective on paranoia, propaganda, and the emergence of a national identity.
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Contingent MagazineMisinformation Nation makes us grapple with an entirely new dimension of the Revolution and early republic, while providing an engaging narrative with clear similarities to present struggles.
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H-Early AmericaThroughout this thought-provoking and engaging book, Taylor examines how people got information, what they did with it, and why the circulation of more information often led to polarized, volatile, and even revolutionary politics.
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Society for U.S. Intellectual HistoryTable of ContentsAcknowledgements
Introduction. "Any Thing But the Age of Reason"
Chapter 1. Foreign Advices and False Friends: The Mediation Revolution in British America
Chapter 2. Taxation with Misrepresentation: Fears of Deception in the Anglo-American Imperial Crisis
Chapter 3. The Lying Gazettes: News from London in Revolutionary Politics
Chapter 4. An Ocean of News: Independence, Commerce, and Atlantic Information Exchange
Chapter 5. The Genius of Information: Scripting an Age of Revolutions
Chapter 6. The American Constellation: Dreams of a Continental Revolution
Chapter 7. Bentalou's Wager: The French Revolution and the Birth of American Partisanship
Chapter 8. Unmaking the Revolutionary Caribbean: Race, Commerce, and Communication in the Early Republic
Chapter 9. The Fruits of Revolution: False News and the Eclipse of the Federalists
Epilogue. Tanguy's Faithful Mirror
Appendix. A Note on Data Sources
Notes
