The role of emerging media is often central in stories of presidential campaigns, from Herbert Hoover's embrace of radio to broadcast his speeches and John F. Kennedy's success in the first televised debate to the contemporary adoption of social media by Barack Obama and Donald Trump. The presidency has always adapted to (and been shaped by) emerging media. Studies of U.S. media history have the potential to capture the changing norms of presidential rhetoric. To that end, Mel Laracey's new book provides an important antecedent to modern presidential media use with its account of Thomas Jefferson's reliance on print media to influence public opinion. Just as Brian Ott and Greg Dickinson studied Trump's “Twitter Presidency,” Laracey argues that Jefferson created a “Newspaper Presidency.”1 This book expands Laracey's earlier work by focusing on Jefferson's creation of the National Intelligencer, a partisan Washington D.C. newspaper that allowed Jefferson to make direct appeals to the American public via what was essentially “the state-controlled media of its time” (1–2).Laracey's argument is twofold. First, he claims that the Intelligencer served as a “presidential newspaper,” a medium that allowed Jefferson to make direct appeals to the public in a way that challenges Jeffrey K. Tulis's concept of the rhetorical presidency. Second, Laracey uses his exhaustive reading of the newspaper's contents to show how Jefferson used public appeals not just to sway public opinion in favor of his own election, but to also define his political ideals and convince the American public to adopt them. The latter point offers an opportunity for rhetoricians beyond the focus on political and media history; the implications point to a consideration of public opinion, national identity, and the articulation of ideology through news media. Laracey reveals how the Intelligencer allowed Jefferson to avoid direct engagement in partisan politics, in line with a Constitutional view of the presidency, while still shaping public opinion, as in Tulis's rhetorical presidency (2).The book moves chronologically through Jefferson's presidency. Chapter two outlines the creation of the Intelligencer and establishes Jefferson's influence on and strategic use of the newspaper. This supports Laracey's claim that both the public and Jefferson's Federalist rivals read the paper as an extension of Jefferson's rhetoric and political platform. Chapters three and four examine coverage of the 1800 election and the aftermath of Jefferson's victory, which he claimed both for himself and for Republicanism. Chapter five collects the Intelligencer's defenses of Jefferson's appointments and removals of federal officers, unpacking a Jeffersonian vision of executive power that reflects Vanessa Beasley's work on the “unitary executive.”2 Chapters six and seven turn their focus to the judiciary, specifically how the Intelligencer covered the Marbury v. Madison case and the impeachment of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase. These chapters trace the changing Republican understanding of “judicial review’” and correct what Laracey views as omissions in the existing historical accounts of Jefferson's role in the impeachment. The concluding chapters analyze news coverage of the Louisiana Purchase and the 1804 presidential election.One of Laracey's primary contributions is a critique/expansion of Tulis's The Rhetorical Presidency.3 In Tulis's story of the presidency as an institution, Woodrow Wilson oversaw an early twentieth-century shift in presidential communication in which presidents began to appeal directly to the people to establish support for their policies and pressure Congress. Tulis worried that this new “rhetorical presidency” threatened the traditional Constitutional model that had dominated the eighteenth century. As many rhetoricians have done, Laracey complicates Tulis's timeline. Reiterating the thesis of his first book, Presidents and the People: The Partisan Story of Going Public, Laracey argues that “presidentially sponsored newspapers . . . were widely understood to be speaking on behalf of a president's administration,” allowing presidents to “engage in a form of mass political communication” (3).4 Through various examples of Jefferson's Federalist opponents recognizing the Intelligencer as carrying Jefferson's messages (sometimes, quite literally through the use of editorials that Laracey claims Jefferson published under a pseudonym), Laracey positions the newspaper as a site of presidential rhetoric. Of particular interest to rhetoricians is the argument that, in addressing the public, Jefferson went beyond garnering political support and into the realm of political definition. While the book's first goal is to provide a detailed history that responds to Tulis, it also considers “how the treatment of various topics in the Intelligencer can expand scholarly understanding of the strategies and goals of Jefferson and his allies as they confronted those issues” (15–16).With this aspect of Informing a Nation, Laracey establishes generative grounds for analyzing how Jefferson used a newspaper to address public opinion and, by extension, attempted to persuade “the people” into embracing Republican ideals. While a rhetorician might want to extend many of Laracey's arguments into a larger conceptualization of how early nineteenth-century presidents understood the role of public opinion, this is the most promising part of the book for scholars of presidential rhetoric, and it is best exemplified by the third and fourth chapters. These chapters go beyond campaigning to show that Jefferson was not just making the case for his own presidency, but for his vision of a nation. In other words, he was articulating a set of values and ideals that we might understand as Jeffersonian Republicanism.Public opinion mattered to Jefferson, Laracey argues, because his Republican ideals positioned him as representing the will of the people. In turn, Jefferson's democratic theory called for a “body politic” of an “informed citizenry” (6). Consequently, the people required information to make decisions, and the Intelligencer served that function by “presenting to the American public the information, ranging from the factual to the constitutional and even philosophical, that Jefferson and his allies thought would facilitate responsible popular control of the government, a bedrock principle of Jeffersonian Republicanism” (39). As Samuel Harrison Smith (the newspaper's editor) said, the Intelligencer would publish both “unperverted facts” and “correct political ideas,” the correct ideas in this case being Republican ideas (8). As Laracey summarizes, “Issue by issue, the Intelligencer was constructing for its readers a communal understanding of what being a Jeffersonian Republican meant,” culminating in what the Intelligencer portrayed as a victory of Republicanism over Federalism in Jefferson's 1804 re-election (185, 192). In this sense, Laracey pushes the public opinion framework into a borderline rhetorical history about Jefferson's vision for the young nation and its ideals. This history traces the development of Republicanism as a discourse and analyzes Jefferson's emerging rhetoric of nationhood as he argued for his own interpretation of what the U.S. presidency should be.Still, the book is first and foremost a political history, and to that end, many of the contributions are of most interest to those directly engaged in either Jefferson's presidency or the political debates of the day, such as the interplay between Jefferson and the early development of the U.S. Supreme Court. Laracey makes several corrections to the historical record, especially regarding the impeachment of Samuel Chase. While traditional histories described Chase as remaining mostly silent until the trial, Laracey uncovers an editorial by Chase that the Intelligencer published in April of 1804 in which he directly attacked Jefferson. Laracey also uses continuing coverage of the trial to critique narratives that Jefferson eventually lost interest in the impeachment, showing that it was a Republican priority even after the final verdict in Chase's favor. Likewise, the fourth chapter further contextualizes Jefferson's decision to give his Annual Message to Congress in writing, referencing a series of editorials that portrayed the move as a strategic decision to reflect Republican values and not, as Tulis suggested, a decision based on Jefferson's Constitutional understandings of the presidency (90–93).At just under two hundred pages, Informing A Nation is a well-written, briskly paced look at Jefferson's newspaper presidency, though its main argument and historical emphasis create a few limits. Given his framing as a critique of Tulis, Laracey occasionally overstates the connection between Jefferson and the Intelligencer. When the authorship of a pseudonymous editorial is less defensible as Jefferson's work or does not reflect Jefferson's opinions as clearly, Laracey asserts that Jefferson would have agreed with a given editorial even if he did not write or sanction it, stretching the analytical framework of the book. There are some parts of this analysis that might have been better served by understanding the Intelligencer and its writers as having their own agency and conceptualizing the newspaper not only as Jefferson's mouthpiece but as an interlocutor regarding Republicanism. The aim to correct the historical record also presents a few structural trade-offs. For example, while the Louisiana Purchase is a sensible inclusion in terms of historical significance, the eighth chapter detailing the Intelligencer's coverage of it offers less analytical insight than the book's middle chapters.Though scholars invested in expanding the historical records of Jefferson's presidency or the development of American newspapers make up its immediate audience, Informing A Nation offers interdisciplinary contributions. Scholars of presidential rhetoric, especially those studying the Early American Republic, will find a valuable analysis of Jefferson's political discourse and a well-chronicled example of presidential rhetoric in the nineteenth century. Those in media studies or political communication willing to engage in historically-oriented work will be more drawn to Laracey's emphasis on the development of a partisan newspaper system in the United States and the challenges he poses to Tulis's account of the rhetorical presidency. Overall, Informing A Nation is a concise but comprehensive analysis of both an understudied element of the Jefferson presidency and the origins of partisan news media.