Protest on the Page: Essays on Print and the Culture of Dissent since 1865James L.Baughman, JenniferRatner‐Rosenhagen, and James P.Danky, Editors. Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 2015.

Abstract

Protest on the Page: Essays on Print and the Culture of Dissent since 1865 James L. Baughman, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, and James P. Danky, Editors. Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 2015.This collection of essays, drawn from a conference in 2012 at the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture, spans around a century of print in the United States. The scholarship on the history of print is voluminous, and no one collection could hope to encompass the entire field. This collection carves out a niche for itself by turning to the margins and examining the ways that different types of printed material contributed to and shaped a variety of protest movements, especially those that have been forgotten. While the essays span a broad range of print media, the emphasis is on the press, especially on subversive discourses and forgotten papers. In the Preface, James P. Danky argues that print, originally valued for its speed in the dissemination of dissent, is still valuable, noting that Today, the digital makes a mockery of any notion of speed in other media, whether used for protest or not; but print remains essential for many protests in the United States and globally. In both cases, when ideas are formalized on the page, they possess a power that the purely auditory does (x). James L. Baughman echoes this sentiment in his Introduction in which he rebuts Alexis de Tocqueville's argument that the American press was ineffective and apolitical, filled with nothing but advertisements and anecdotes. For Baughman, the medium of print and the rhetoric of protest are inevitably necessary to each other.The collection is arranged thematically and roughly chronologically into three sections. The first, Revolt and Reaction, broadly addresses the theme of rebellion beginning with Adam Thomas's discussion of Southern reactions to Reconstruction and to carpetbaggers, making clear that protests are not always progressive or radical. In an interesting departure from the rest of the collection's emphasis on words, Andrew Hoyt's essay looks at Carlo Abate's newspaper woodcuts and his attempts to assert his artistic subjectivity against mechanism as part of the political discourse of anarchism. Other essays include Nicolas Kanellos's study of a trove of Spanish language anarchist and protest papers, revealing a political and ethnic community, and Trevor Joy Sangrey's paper making the connection between communism and Black Nationalism through communist pamphlets. …