| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4 | The History Cooperative

David Paul Nord. Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America. (Religion in America Series.) New York: Oxford University Press. 2004. Pp. viii, 212. $35.00.
In a series of articles published in the last ten years, David Paul Nord has expanded an idea he first articulated in 1984 about the evangelical origins of mass media in the United States. He has now assembled his reflections and research in a short, clearly argued book that is a valuable contribution to the study of print media and an illustration of how much scholars owe to the "History of the Book in America" project sponsored by the American Antiquarian Society.	1
Nord begins his narrative in the early republic with the formation in New England of a large number of Bible, tract, missionary, and Sunday School societies. The Society for Propagating the Gospel led the way in committing these associations to the free distribution of books, Bibles to be sure but also spelling books, psalters, and a variety of devotional and moral pamphlets. Many of these not-for-profit benevolent societies were in fact among the first corporations in America granted state charters to accumulate, manage, and perpetuate capital. They were very much in the vanguard of America's emergent market economy. That market, however, according to Nord, never quite subverted their purposes, which included the dissemination of values critical of the materialism associated with profit-oriented capitalism.	. . .

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