Description
Book SynopsisOffers a history of the early republic and its antebellum aftermath. Challenging the idea that print culture created a sense of national connection among different parts of the early American union, this book reveals the early republic as a series of local and regional reading publics with distinct political and geographical identities.
Trade ReviewLoughran's logic throughout is deep, intricate, and scholarly... Good reading. American Journalism Loughran's well-written book will likely promote vigorous debate among historians of U.S. nationhood, print culture, and slavery. -- Carl Ostrowski The Journal of American History A remarkable study, both in its marshaling of archival detail and in its ambitious thesis. -- Phillip H. Round William and Mary Quarterly ...Promise[s] to be useful to literary scholars in many ways. College Literature This book is inventively dialectical, unfailingly provocative, and consistently interesting. It formulates its myraid insights with an unusually rich, incisive and occasionally playful language that is deligtful to read. -- Oz Frankel American Historical Review
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments Preface: A View from the Capitol: The Unfinished Work of US Nation Building 1. U.S. Print Culture: The Factory of Fragments Part I. The Book's Two Bodies: Print Culture and National Founding, 1776-1789 2. Disseminating Common Sense: Thomas Paine and the Scene of Revolutonary Print Culture 3. The Republic in Print: Ratification as Material Text, 1787-1788 Part II. The Nation in Fragments: Federal Representation and its Discontents, 1787-1789 4. Virtual Nation: State-Based Identity and Federalist Fantasy 5. Metrobuilding: The Production of Federalist Space Part III. The Overextended Republic: Slavery, Abolition, and National Space, 1790-1870 6. Abolitionist Nation: The Space of Organized Abolition, 1790-1840 7. Slavery on the Move: From Fugitive Slave to Virtual Citizen Conclusion: The Due Process of Nationalism
