| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Language and Political Meaning in Revolutionary America. By John Howe. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004. xiv, 281 pp. $39.95, ISBN 1-55849-422-7.)

John Howe argues that contests over language were key to the transformation of American politics in the revolutionary era. "Disagreements over the essential character of political language" divided imperialists from colonists before 1776, and language controversies thereafter proved "fundamental to the emergence of a democratic (albeit white male) politics" (p. 5). Ratification of the federal Constitution—the climax of Howe's story—ushered in "a new political language ... eminently suited to the rhetorical needs of America's expanding empire in the years immediately ahead" (pp. 6, 225). Though the broad outlines of this story are by now familiar to students of print culture and literary history, Howe's synthesis is lucid and illuminating. His most original work focuses on the problems and practice of authorship at a time when politics pivoted on texts and their interpretation and when vulgar "scribblers" challenged the literate elite's discursive monopoly.

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