Thread by @PubliusorPerish

It's four days until the publication date for #MisinformationNation!

Today's thread is about the biggest anxiety I have about the book.

Probably not a great idea to tweet about this just before it comes out, but you know how it is when you've had a half beer on a Friday evening

I think I’m slightly heretical among some print historians because I’m really skeptical about how many people actually read print sources in early America—especially newspapers.

People who study the American Revolution often insist that people imbibed their big ideas about republicanism, liberty, etc from newspaper essays. They often describe newspapers as a particularly democratic medium, available to everyone.

If you ask me, these ideas about print and newspapers in particular are at the core of some of the most powerful and resilient myths about the American Revolution.

But I dunno. I had a PMHB essay published recently that analyzed the list of subscribers for the PA Journal alongside contemporary tax lists. It's pretty clear that the people who subscribed to newspapers in Philadelphia were very, very wealthy compared to the city as a whole.

But the usual claim is that people in revolutionary America got their news in taverns and from public readings of the newspapers. You've probably heard this. It's all over books about the American Revolution.

But there’s not as much direct evidence of that as you might think. And many of the venues for public plural reading, such as taverns that advertised having newspapers, were already elite venues.

I’ve also written about carrier addresses, in an essay that’s due out soon in 18th-century studies. These are poems largely about newspapers’ distributors and subscribers. And they focus on how fabulously elite the subscribers were compared to the scummy laborers delivering them.

(I really like this essay and I'm excited to share it)

So overall, we don’t have a very rich archive of newspaper readership in early America. But what we do have makes me pretty suspicious of the idea that newspapers were available to a meaningfully broad segment of the population.

Why does this make me anxious? Because my book is about news and politics in the American Revolution. And so the most frequently cited sources are newspapers. So based on my own research findings, I have to ask: am I telling a story that’s just about elites?

Maybe. If people criticize the book for this, I won’t object, because that’s a fair reading of these sources. But I think something else, something much more interesting was happening.

And the best way to explain is by comparing early newspapers with twitter.

Twitter is a relatively small social network: 238 million monthly users is nothing compared to Facebook, instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat, TikTok, WeChat, etc.

But it is disproportionately a space defined by certain kinds of elites: celebrities, journalists, politicians, etc.

Twitter has an agenda-setting capability that those other social media networks don’t really have. That’s one reason why some people want to be on Twitter. It’s also a reason a certain billionaire is trying to buy Twitter.

So what does this have to do with 18th-century newspapers? Well, I think there’s something similar going on there. It’s important to understand who read newspapers, but we underestimate their impact if we think of it simply in terms of readership.

So how did newspapers affect people who didn’t read them? By organizing, mediating, and, crucially, raising questions about the news that they printed. By the 1770s, American newspapers were doing a lot of interpretive work!

If you were a parson in a fairly remote New Hampshire town in 1795, you might subscribe to a newspaper from Portsmouth or Boston, but you might be one of your only neighbors who regularly read a newspaper. Sure, you might sometimes share it with your neighbors.

But you’d also summarize and share the news you read. You would engage in agenda-setting conversations with your neighbors. People would know you as a news source.

Newspapers were a mechanism for *organizing* news, especially complicated, detailed news, in a wider media ecosystem that included rumors, letters, broadsides, tavern talk, etc.

At least for foreign news, which my book focuses on, newspapers were “upstream” of other media.

So that's my thinking. I'm hopeful that my book, and the articles, will provoke more conversation about how the news media functioned in revolutionary America.

I think it has *huge* implications for how we understand the birth of the United States.