Early US Research Articles

Frontier Country: The Politics of War in Early Pennsylvania by Patrick Spero

Reviewed by: Frontier Country: The Politics of War in Early Pennsylvania by Patrick Spero Keri Holt (bio) Frontier Country: The Politics of War in Early Pennsylvania patrick spero Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016 343 pp. Frontier Country: The Politics of War in Early Pennsylvania takes a fraught term and redefines and contextualizes it in ways that illuminate its importance as the British American colonies transformed into an independent nation. The frontier, Patrick Spero writes, "was a politically potent word in the eighteenth century," and, using the colony of Pennsylvania as [End Page 262] a case study, Frontier Country examines how the complexities of "governing frontiers was … essential to the success or failure of colonial projects" (7, 8). By carefully reexamining this term and the role it played in American political discourse, print and popular culture, and day-to-day lived experience during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Spero offers significant arguments about the causes of the American Revolution and the influence of the frontier on early US nationalism, as well as the need to carefully historicize the terms we use to study the political and cultural dynamics of early America. For Spero, recognizing the importance of the frontier in colonial American and early national politics requires fundamentally reorienting and reinterpreting the term frontier itself. Conventionally, frontier has been understood as a spatial term marking the border or limit of a sovereign space. Although the location of a frontier can change, particularly in the context of national expansion, we typically assume frontiers to be sparsely populated spaces defined by activities of settlement and development located at the (relatively distant) boundaries of a state or nation. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, the term frontier marked a much more situational and transitory space defined not so much by set borders but by feelings of fear and uncertainty. During this period, writes Spero, "[f]rontiers formed—people and places became a frontier—when people felt a specific type of fear: invasion" (115). Although colonial borders were more susceptible to invasion than other spaces, the term frontier did not necessarily mark a clear boundary line but, instead, operated as a plural term that could mark multiple locations anywhere within a colony, depending on perceived threats. As a result, during the colonial period, frontiers were understood not so much as a location but as a particular kind of experience. "For those colonists who lived in fear of invasion, a frontier was more than a geopolitical abstraction that drove policy decisions. It was a personal experience that shaped their actions and beliefs," writes Spero (114). By examining this "traumatic process of becoming a frontier," this book offers a new lens for examining the causes of the Revolution and the changing expectations that the colonists had for their government over the course of the eighteenth century. In the end, argues Spero, "[t]he failure of the British Empire to provide for frontiers—indeed, its apparent turn against such zones and their inhabitants—became a central argument for independence" (222). [End Page 263] To make this argument, Spero offers an extensive analysis of the plural and shifting dimensions of frontiers in colonial Pennsylvania, focusing specifically on the experiences of people living on these frontiers and the growing distance between their experiences and the expectations and actions of the British Empire and the Pennsylvania colonial government. Pennsylvania experienced a much greater variety of frontier experiences than other colonies, particularly regarding its efforts to manage and defend these varied locales, and these diverse frontier experiences and policies were well documented in letters, newspaper articles, court cases, government proceedings, Quaker records, pamphlets, broadsides, and formal histories written throughout the colonial period. Spero provides a thorough and impressive assessment of these texts and contexts, assembling them into an engaging narrative history that traces Pennsylvania's transformation from a pacifist colony that was antithetical to the concept of frontiers to one whose government was increasingly preoccupied with frontier management. The politics of Pennsylvania's frontier management were exceedingly complicated and contradictory, and Spero does a masterful job explaining the varied and changing perceptions of invasion in colonial Pennsylvania, as well as the competing responses from the colonial governor, the Assembly...

A Hundred Years of Fake News

A Hundred Years of Fake News Rebecca Hill (bio) Divided We Stand: The Battle over Women's Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics. By Marjorie Spruill. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017. viii + 437 pp. $33.00 (cloth). $19.00 (paper). $23.10 (e-book). Nut Country: Right Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy. By Edward H. Miller. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. 256 pp. $25.00 (cloth). $18.00 (paper). $18.00 (e-book). Peak Oil: Apocalyptic Environmentalism and Libertarian Political Culture. By Matthew Schneider-Mayerson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. xi + 267 pp. $85.00 (cloth). $27.50 (paper). $10.00 (e-book). Weapons of Democracy: Propaganda, Progressivism, and American Public Opinion. By Jonathan Auerbach. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. xi + 220 pp. $49.95 (cloth). $49.95 (e-book). It is not uncommon these days to hear someone ask, in anguished punctuation to a news story, and as if the question may never be answered: "What is going onnn?" While pundits have explained the outcome of the 2016 election in various ways, the two most prominent explanations, each carrying different implications for strategic responses, have to do with a basic question of whether the election represented the genuine will of a significant portion of the electorate or whether an insidious propaganda effort by a foreign power can explain why the president of the United States is now the man Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor described as a "racist, sexist megalomaniac."1 Four new books about the history of American politics and media offer insights relevant to both sides of this argument. Ranging chronologically from the early twentieth century's Committee on Public Information to 1960s and 1970s conspiracytheory fueled mobilizations against the civil rights movement and women's liberation, to websites and message boards dedicated to discussing and preparing for an imminent apocalypse, this collection of books provides a historical perspective on what many of us are experiencing as an unprecedented attack [End Page 301] on reality itself. Lucidly written, informative, and often entertaining, they each map a constellation of ideas across the writing and actions of relatively small groups of activists and opinion makers to make larger claims about American political culture. In Weapons of Democracy: Propaganda, Progressivism, and American Public Opinion, Jonathan Auerbach analyzes writings of early twentieth-century Progressive US political leaders and public intellectuals about the nature of publicity and persuasion in democratic government. Edward Miller's Nut Country: Right Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy describes the dialectical relationship between moderate conservatives and ultra-right conspiracy theorists in the Dallas Republican Party in the years leading up to the Kennedy assassination. Also set partly in Texas, Marjorie Spruill's Divided We Stand: The Battle over Women's Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics describes a year of dramatic conflict between second-wave feminist activists and their opponents, placing a cadre of ultraconservative women ideologues at the heart of the story of the birth of the New Right. Departing from party politicking to explore a virtual community on the left, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson's Peak Oil: Apocalyptic Environmentalism and Libertarian Political Culture guides us through the media landscape of the present day, with a detailed analysis of the Left's version of doomsday preppers, "peakists" who prepare individually to survive the anticipated fall of modern civilization. In a variety of ways, all four works come back to the question, once again relevant to our own time, that the inability to know exactly what is going on? has presented a perpetual sense of crisis for democracy. Auerbach opens with Walter Lippmann, famous for his concern about the threat of commercially circulated news to the practice of democracy. In his extended reading of Lippmann's work in the fourth chapter, Auerbach notes that this early critic of mass media was not simply an elitest but deeply concerned about the difficulty of getting accurate information in a mass society. Lippmann wrote, for instance in the Phantom Public, a comment foreshadowing today's common news-reader complaint: "I cannot find time to do what is expected of me in the theory of democracy; that is, to know...

From Lynch Mobs to the Deportation State

This article explores the relationship between mob violence, immigration control, and the early twentieth-century US deportation regime. Scholars examining the decline of lynch violence in the South typically see modern criminal justice as a new incarnation of white, heteropatriarchal violence. But they have left the deportation apparatus, a conjoined element of a US carceral assemblage, unexamined. This article argues that modern border policing’s ostensibly bloodless removal absorbed anti-immigrant mob violence within its carceral-eliminatory system. As with the diminution of the Southern, anti-black lynch mob, invocations of legality in deportation proved better suited to the biopolitics of liberal capitalist modernity. Nevertheless, the deportation regime, bolstered by an extensive federal infrastructure, still targeted migrants of color, took aim against political radicals, and policed heteropatriarchy in its production of settler-colonial citizenship via the spatial elimination of so-called undesirable aliens.

Grounds of Engagement: Apartheid-Era African American and South African WritingBeing Apart: Theoretical and Existential Resistance in Africana Literature

Grounds of Engagement: Apartheid-Era African American and South African WritingBeing Apart: Theoretical and Existential Resistance in Africana Literature

“A form of life in which art is not art”: “Life in the Iron Mills” and the Artist as Worker in the Nineteenth-Century United States

AbstractThis essay examines early nineteenth-century US literature that fought for increased compensation and copyright protection for authors. Instead of dismissing this literature as a form of complaint, as many scholars do, I take writers’ concerns seriously, but I also look at the difficulty even professional writers faced in mounting any kind of case for themselves as paid creative personnel. Even when writers made a rational argument to explain why they should be paid more, they tended to undermine themselves, invariably intimating that writers as a group were better off impoverished. These difficulties, I argue, arose not just from the systems of industrial publishing but also from the systems of political value instituted by art in what Jacques Rancière calls the “aesthetic regime.” I pursue this hypothesis by examining contemporary texts that argue for authors’ rights alongside Rebecca Harding Davis’s tale of tragic artistic labor, “Life in the Iron Mills.”

1960년대 초중반 미·일 베스트셀러 전쟁문학의 수용과 월경하는 전쟁기억, 재난·휴머니즘과 전쟁책임: 노먼 메일러 『나자와 사자』와 고미카와 준페이 『인간의 조건』

1960년대 초중반 미·일 베스트셀러 전쟁문학의 수용과 월경하는 전쟁기억, 재난·휴머니즘과 전쟁책임: 노먼 메일러 『나자와 사자』와 고미카와 준페이 『인간의 조건』

Topography-Guided Ablations: Early US Experience and Utility Across the Refractive Landscape

This paper evaluated topography-guided excimer ablations and recent US experience of this technology. Personal clinical experience, initial approval of the technique, and its application to a potential extended spectrum of clinical conditions was reviewed. Topography-guided ablation can precisely treat corneas with variable topographic indices and attempt to neutralize irregularities by combining myopic and hyperopic ablation profiles. The T-CAT Phase III study demonstrated the safety and efficacy of this technique, which earned FDA approval in 2013. Current literature has reinforced its efficacy and explored off-label investigations, such as its use to improve visual results in abnormal corneas (e.g., keratoconus, post-LASIK ectasia). Topography-guided ablation provides increased quality of vision without necessitating excess tissue removal in otherwise normal, keratoconic, ectatic, or post-corneal transplant eyes. In the future, we will likely see a combination of treatment strategies, enabling ophthalmologists to treat the entire refractive surface and refine these already remarkable results.

Imitation and society: How Boasian anthropology reassembled the social

A growing body of research defends the contemporary relevance of 19th-century sociologist Gabriel Tarde’s theory of the social. Bruno Latour, in particular, reads Tarde’s emphasis on imitation, innovation, and opposition as a relationist alternative to Emile Durkheim’s ostensible determinism. Scholars aligned with Latour’s reconstruction have maintained that sociology and anthropology decisively abandoned Tarde’s social epistemology in favor of a Durkheimian emphasis on collective consciousness. However, such research has paid little attention to the impact of Tarde’s ideas on the early US anthropological tradition institutionalized by Franz Boas. This essay reconstructs the pervasive influence of Tarde on Boas and the early Boasian anthropologists. I maintain that Boasian engagements with the French sociologist’s work normalized Tardian imitation as a key element of early theorizations of cultural process. In so doing, I suggest that efforts to ‘reassemble the social’ (e.g. Latour, 2005) effectively reha...

Hamada Shōji, Kitaōji Rosanjin, and the Reception of Japanese Pottery in the Early Cold War United States

A series of events and individuals in the 1950s and early 1960s sparked American interest in Japanese pottery and production described as primitive, timeless, and Zen. Of particular prominence were Americans’ encounters with the ceramics and presentations of Hamada Shōji and Kitaōji Rosanjin. This essay explores the multiple modalities of primitivism and Orientalism inherent in the American reception of their pottery in light of early Cold War cultural diplomacy and US–Japan relations. Chronicling the American reception of Japanese pottery in this era reveals how a variety of ideas and agents on both sides of the Pacific affected shifts of American sentiment towards Japan.

Working on the Railroad: Public Accounting Talent in the United States-The Case of Haskins & Sells (Now Deloitte)

Nineteenth century US railroads were the first ‘big businesses’ and had profound influence on society. This paper addresses one source of talent for the early US public accounting profession—railroads. Following the end of the US Civil War (1861–65), industrial expansion was a revolutionary experience, with large trusts appearing in the wake of the railroad's maturing influence on the development of a vast continental economy. Accounting practice also was impacted by railroads. For example, the development of annual reports, income measurement, the standardization of reporting by regulators, developing fixed and variable cost, and throughput concepts for capital intensive business—all were related to the railroads. This paper focuses on a significant link between the emerging public accounting profession and the railroads by examining how an early major US public accounting firm relied upon accounting skill developed within railroads as an important source of talent. Arguably, talent is the most important resource of a professional firm. While it is a commonly held view that the immigration of UK accountants in the late nineteenth century was the source of public accounting talent, this paper provides evidence of a competing explanation—the sourcing of talent from a firm (Haskins & Sells) that continues to the present day as Deloitte. Key leadership and personnel of that time gained their experience while working on the domestic railroads.

An Epoch of Child Spectators in Early US Theatre

Although histories of early US theatres are remarkably silent on the matter of child spectators, I establish their presence in urban playhouses based on the memoirs of thirty-five, primarily middle- and upper-class, white persons who first witnessed performances between the ages of seven and sixteen from 1749 to 1849. My examination of popular musical spectacles adapted from nursery stories and advertisements of half-price tickets for children under age ten or twelve explain how child spectators entered men’s cultural domain of theatre by experiencing the same repertoire as adults and subsequently drove theatre managers and critics to recognize, accommodate, and consequently differentiate their aesthetic tastes by the 1820s. Despite lingering anti-theatrical prejudices, this epoch of child spectators reveals how and why managers eventually instituted “family circle” seating in 1847 by instructing and amusing generations of young citizens.

Getting the Word Out: Academic Libraries as Scholarly Publishers. Edited by Maria Bonn and Mike Furlough. Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries, 2015. Pp. xi+275. $50.00 (paper). ISBN 978-0-83898-697-4.

<i>Getting the Word Out: Academic Libraries as Scholarly Publishers</i>. Edited by Maria Bonn and Mike Furlough. Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries, 2015. Pp. xi+275. $50.00 (paper). ISBN 978-0-83898-697-4.

The Hillary doctrine: sex and American foreign policy

Following the defeat of Hillary Rodham Clinton in the 2016 United States presidential election, does The Hillary doctrine have any political purchase? The answer is an affirmative in light of the authors' contention that this foreign policy doctrine is not solely about Clinton, its most fervent champion, but about the growing—albeit patchy—attention in US policy circles to ‘the proposition that the empowerment of women and girls is a stabilizing force for peace in the world, and should thus be a cornerstone of American foreign policy’ (p. 4). The fine-grained account of the evolution and implementation of this doctrine, particularly in parts one and three of the volume, suggests that while individual proponents and detractors are crucial, advancements made in terms of specific policy mechanisms and the establishment of offices would be difficult to dismantle in the immediate future. From the outset, Valerie M. Hudson and Patricia Leidl address the expected critique of the doctrine being a manifestation of ‘imperial feminism’: women in the global North protecting women in the global South from local threats. They recognize that this foreign policy approach tends to be interventionist and non-pacifist, characterizing it possibly as a ‘feminist hawk’ position. Reflecting on the potentially harmful effects of such a doctrine on women, as in the case of Iraq, and mindful of the fallout of earlier US support to the Afghan mujahideen, the authors propose the ‘Steinem test’ (named after the American feminist Gloria Steinem): ‘in a conflict where one side aspires to create (or has created) a worse situation for women than the other side, the United States should not back that side’ (p. 328; emphasis in original text).

Seriality and Susanna Rowson's &lt;em&gt;Sincerity&lt;/em&gt;

Seriality and Susanna Rowson's Sincerity Karen A. Weyler What makes a work teachable? How do we prepare students to read early American authors and genres when virtually everything we will teach in such a course will be unfamiliar to them? Sheridan Blau, in The Literature Workshop, argues that one of the secrets to engaging teaching is providing enough context so that students can comprehend a work, without offering so much that we substitute lecture for student engagement and discovery. He uses the example of Randall Jarrell's "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner." With direct knowledge of World War II receding into the distant past, this splendid poem hovers on the edge of legibility for many students; absent knowledge that men operating machine guns were confined to the claustrophobic spaces of a ball turret for the duration of an airplane flight, students produce wildly creative but ultimately frustrating misinterpretations of "wet fur" and "black flak" (qtd. in Blau 191).1 With this question of context in mind, how can we prepare students to read early serial fiction? And perhaps even more to the point, why would we want to teach serial fiction, when there are perfectly good reprint editions of early American novels that provide, in a single volume, the kind of textual infrastructure to which our students are accustomed: a unified, coherent text; footnotes; chronologies; author biographies; critical responses; and the like. In reading serial fiction, we give up these conveniences and create conditions that encourage students to teach themselves and to apply knowledge they have acquired in other contexts. Susanna Rowson's 1803–4 novel Sincerity dramatically and memorably animates the persistent inequalities faced by women and poor people in Anglo-American culture and the physical, social, and mental costs of living up to unattainable early-nineteenth-century feminine ideals. Moreover, teaching Sincerity as a text-in-parts encourages students to engage in metacognitive thinking about their reading experiences: it encourages them to think beyond the plot and reflect on reading as a process. Our class discussions thus oscillated between two central issues: interpreting how parts of Sincerity were embedded within multiple contexts, and interpreting how temporalities of reading shape interpretation. In this essay I will first explore why the novel-as-material-book has held a privileged status in American literary studies and what we might gain by moving beyond that model; then I will discuss how [End Page 162] teaching Sincerity with an emphasis on seriality facilitated student engagement in primary research and encouraged them to bring their own experiences as consumers of serial works to bear upon an early American literary text. privileging the book Scholars of British literature have historically been more attentive than scholars of American literature to the serial publication of long fiction, particularly with respect to Charles Dickens's work in magazines and standalone serials and to the triple-decker novels that were so popular among private subscription-based circulating libraries. By contrast, the serial novel receiving the greatest attention in nineteenth-century US literature is Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, even though that text is more likely to be discussed as a unified novel than as a serial. Fiction in serial format formed an essential component of post-Revolutionary magazine culture. As Jared Gardner has pointed out, the two most prolific novelists of the early republic, Susanna Rowson and Charles Brockden Brown, ended their careers writing not standalone novels but periodical pieces, as did Isaiah Thomas and Judith Sargent Murray (140–41). The largely anonymous, more responsive, and more democratic form of the magazine clearly appealed to writers as well as readers. Why, then, has early US serial fiction—specifically early-nineteenth-century magazine fiction—received markedly less attention than its British counterparts? This critical lacuna has been created partly by technological factors and by the reciprocal relationship between teaching and literary scholarship in the field of American literature. For most of the twentieth century, early American sentimental fiction—and it is fair to assert that while sentimentality is not the only mode in early American fiction, it predominates—was dismissed as sub-literary. The rise of feminist criticism, reader-response criticism, New Historicism, and...

Diplomacy in Black and White: John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Their Atlantic World Alliance by Ronald Angelo Johnson

Reviewed by: Diplomacy in Black and White: John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Their Atlantic World Alliance by Ronald Angelo Johnson Philippe Girard (bio) Diplomacy in Black and White: John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Their Atlantic World Alliance RONALD ANGELO JOHNSON Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014 241pp. US historians of the colonial and Revolutionary eras have realized the need to eschew parochial celebrations of American exceptionalism and to situate historical developments within a wider (the buzzword is “Atlantic”) context. More specifically, US debates on race and slavery in the 1790s were directly inspired by the events of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). In his classic From Rebellion to Revolution (1979), Eugene Genovese used [End Page 793] that revolution as the pivotal moment when slave resistance in the Americas transitioned from narrowly focused uprisings aimed at escaping the plantation world to full-fledged revolts that challenged the very notion of human bondage. Early America may have been a “city upon a hill,” but it did not develop in isolation from neighboring towns. A field that lends itself particularly well to cross-national approaches is foreign policy, especially since the early US Republic was not yet a hegemon and it had to contend with the demands of its partners. Scholarly interest in the diplomatic relations between the United States and Haiti (known before 1804 as French Saint-Domingue) goes back to the 1930s, following a nineteen-year US occupation of Haiti. Early works included Charles Tansill’s The United States and Santo Domingo (1938), Ludwell Montague’s Haiti and the United States, 1714–1938 (1940), Rayford W. Logan’s Diplomatic Relations of the United States with Haiti (1941), and Alexander De-Conde’s The Quasi-War (1966). These authors embraced the traditional approach dominant at the time, both in style and substance: readers were treated to a series of diplomatic dispatches written by great men eager to defend national security interests for the greater good of the country. The culture wars inherited from the 1960s did not leave the field untouched. As part of a larger reassessment of the Founding Fathers and their involvement in plantation slavery, revisionists denounced their policies toward the Haitian Revolution. According to Tim Matthewson’s A Pro-slavery Foreign Policy: Haitian-American Relations during the Early Republic (2003) and Gary Wills’s “Negro President”: Jefferson and the Slave Power (2003), US policymakers were motivated at best by their financial interests and at worst by their racist impulses. Those two factors overlapped when it came to one key issue, slavery, and they underpinned the knee-jerk opposition of Virginian planters like Thomas Jefferson to the Haitian Revolution. As often with historiographical developments, the pendulum has now swung back. The most outspoken member of this postrevisionist school is Arthur Scherr, whose long and argumentative Thomas Jefferson’s Haitian Policy: Myths and Realities (2011) took no prisoners as it strove to rescue Jefferson’s unjustly maligned reputation. Gordon S. Brown embraced a more nuanced and convincing approach in his Toussaint’s Clause: The Founding Fathers and the Haitian Revolution (2005), which took into account the legitimate questions raised by the revisionists while underlining the manifold priorities of US policymakers torn between their eagerness to [End Page 794] foster close relations with Haiti for commercial purposes and their desire to contain its slave revolt for national security and racial reasons. Into this crowded field steps Ronald Angelo Johnson, an associate professor of history at Texas State University in San Marcos and the author of Diplomacy in Black and White: John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Their Atlantic World Alliance. Like Brown, Johnson may be labeled a moderate postrevisionist. He champions President John Adams and his secretary of state, Timothy Pickering, whom he largely portrays as well-intentioned statesmen. Under their leadership, “the United States financed a fight for universal emancipation and independence for people of color” (4). Johnson is not blind to the inability of these men to fully escape the racism prevalent in their time, but he emphasizes their willingness to engage their Haitian partners almost as equals, which stood in sharp contrast with Jefferson’s later attitude. Johnson would not have added much to Brown’s own work if he...

Episodic Poetics: Politics and Literary Form after the ConstitutionGothic Subjects: The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 1790–1861The Life and Undeath of Autonomy in American Literature

Episodic Poetics: Politics and Literary Form after the ConstitutionGothic Subjects: The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 1790–1861The Life and Undeath of Autonomy in American Literature

From Arrigunaga to Yoknapatawpha: Ramiro Pinilla and William Faulkner

From Arrigunaga to Yoknapatawpha: Ramiro Pinilla and William Faulkner

Who wrote the rules for the Trans-Pacific Partnership?

Twelve governments recently signed the much-anticipated Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), sparking heated debate about its merits. As a primary motivation for this first “mega-regional” agreement, US President Barack Obama argues that the TPP is a way for the USA, and not China or someone else, to write the global trade rules of the future. This begs some important questions, namely which country or countries really did write most of the TPP and thus whose agenda for 21st century trade might it advance? To answer these questions, we compare the recently-released text of the TPP to the language in the 74 previous trade agreements that TPP members signed since 1995. Our text-as-data analyses reveal that the contents of the TPP are taken disproportionately from earlier US trade agreements. The ten preferential trade agreements (PTAs) that most closely match the TPP are all US PTAs. Moreover, the contents of controversial chapters, such as the one on investment, are drawn even more heavily from past US treaty language. Our study and findings apply power-based accounts of international institutions to a landmark new agreement, and portray a more active, template-based process of international diffusion.

To “Alarm the Publick Mind”: A Reexamination of Pamphlets and Newspapers in Philadelphia and the Early Republic

ABSTRACT This article compares the role of political pamphlets and newspapers in the early US republic, especially whether pamphlets were intended to appeal to a closed circle of political insiders while the target audience of newspapers was average citizens, a topic seldom discussed by journalism historians for the federal period. Pamphlets, lower priced compared to newspapers (whose publishers generally required a year's subscription in advance), were more within the income range of average citizens. As a case study, pamphleteering activities of US senator John Taylor of Caroline, a Philadelphia resident during early the 1790s, are discussed, as well as those of Benjamin Franklin Bache, Thomas Paine, William L. Smith, William Cobbett, Benjamin Russell, and others involved in the period's print culture. Emphasizing Philadelphia-based publications, and after comparing prices of pamphlets and books with the cost of a one-year subscription to newspapers during the 1790s, the author concludes that political writers viewed pamphlets as a way to reach a wide audience, not merely a restricted cohort of the wealthy or those in positions of political power.

Nineteenth-century White Physical Activity, Calories and Life Expectancy: Nutrition, Sanitation or Medical Intervention?

Using data from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century US prisons, this study estimates the basal metabolic rates (BMRs) and calories required to sustain physical dimensions for Americans of European descent. Throughout the nineteenth century, white BMRs and calories declined across their respective distributions, and much of the decrease coincides with economic development. White life expectancy increased at the same time that nutrition decreased, indicating that the most important source of increased life expectancy was not improved nutrition. Physically active farmers had greater BMRs and received more calories per day than workers in other occupations. White diets, nutrition and calories varied by residence, and whites in the rural Deep South consumed the most calories per day, while Northeastern urban whites consumed the least. JEL: I10, I15, I32, N31