The Tyranny of Printers

by Pasley, Jeffrey L.

• ISBN13: 9780813921778
• ISBN10: 0813921775
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-02-01
• Publisher: Univ of Virginia Pr

Summary

Although frequently attacked for their partisanship and undue political influence, the American media of today are objective and relatively ineffectual compared to their counterparts of two hundred years ago. From the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century, newspapers were the republic's central political institutions, working components of the party system rather than commentators on it. The Tyranny of Printers narrates the rise of this newspaper-based politics, in which editors became the chief party spokesmen and newspaper offices often served as local party headquarters. Beginning when Thomas Jefferson enlisted a Philadelphia editor to carry out his battle with Alexander Hamilton for the soul of the new republic (and got caught trying to cover it up), the centrality of newspapers in political life gained momentum after Jefferson's victory in 1800, which was widely credited to a superior network of papers. Jeffrey L. Pasley tells the rich story of this political culture and its culmination in Jacksonian democracy, enlivening his narrative with accounts of the colorful but often tragic careers of individual editors.

Author Biography

Jeffrey L. Pasley, a former staff writer for the New Republic, is Associate Professor of History, University of Missouri-Columbia

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xi
A Note on Conventions and Methods	p. xvii
The Newspaper-Based Political System of the Nineteenth-Century United States	p. 1
The Printing Trade in Early American Politics	p. 24
The Two National Gazettes and the Beginnings of Newspaper Politics	p. 48
Benjamin Franklin Bache and the Price of Partisanship	p. 79
The Background and Failure of the Sedition Act	p. 105
Charles Holt's Generation: From Commercial Printers to Political Professionals	p. 132
The Expansion of the Republican Newspaper Network, 1798-1800	p. 153
A Presence in the Public Sphere: William Duane and the Triumph of Newspaper Politics	p. 176
The New Conventional Wisdom: Consolidating and Expanding a Newspaper-Based Political System	p. 196
The Federalists Strike Back	p. 229
Improving on the Sedition Act: Press Freedom and Political Culture after 1800	p. 258
The "Tyranny of Printers" in Jeffersonian Philadelphia	p. 285
Ordinary Editors and Everyday Politics: How the System Worked	p. 320
Newspaper Editors and the Reconstruction of Party Politics	p. 348
Charts on the Growth of the American Press	p. 401
The Sedition Act and the Expansion of the Republican Press	p. 407
Notes	p. 411
Selected Bibliography	p. 467
Index	p. 499
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