| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

"The Tyranny of Printers": Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic. By Jeffrey L. Pasley. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001. xx, 517 pp. $37.50, ISBN 0-8139-2030-2.)

Jeffrey L. Pasley argues that newspapers and their editors were at the very heart of the American party systems of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Indeed, he claims that by the 1820s the newspaper press had become "the political system's central institution, not simply a forum or atmosphere in which politics took place." This is a rather grand claim, but, as Pasley carefully dissects the development of partisan politics in the 1790s and its subsequent flourishing in the nineteenth century, he convincingly explains how these politicians and their newspapers "combined to create a hitherto unrecognized institution, the newspaper-based party." 1

Many historians have described how the newspapers conveyed political information and partisanship. Pasley moves newspaper politics from periphery to center, demonstrating that they were not simply conduits but actual generators of partisan politics. Pasley clearly explains how newspaper editors and what he terms "newspaper politics" came to dominance by the early nineteenth century. To do so, he goes over some well-trodden ground concerning the Federalists and Republicans and how men of both parties made use of the newspapers to further their political agendas. . . .

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