Reviewed by Phillip H. Round | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, LXV.4

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the WMQ online. About 650 words from this article are provided below; about 811 words remain.

If you are a individual subscriber to the William and Mary Quarterly, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a subscriber to the William and Mary Quarterly, you can:: • subscribe here.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the William and Mary Quarterly (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the William and Mary Quarterly.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

Reviewed by Phillip H. Round | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, LXV.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870. By Trish Loughran. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. 563 pages. $46.50 (cloth), $24.50 (paper).
Reviewed by Phillip H. Round, University of Iowa
Substantial both in length (444 pages plus notes) and in historical scope (covering the tumultuous period between the American Revolution and Reconstruction), The Republic in Print is biggest in its ambitious reconceptualization of American federalism and its later nationalist formations. Trish Loughran intends nothing less than to "dismantl[e] the text-based model of U.S. nation-building on which the field of early American studies depends" (xix). To fill the void, she proposes an approach focused on print culture as actual material practice. Loughran is especially keen on "defining the nation (and the nation-state) in the most materialist way possible" (xix), emphasizing the actual—rather than theorized—institutions through which information, argument, and identity flowed in the early Republic. Taking on both Benedict Anderson's "imagined communities" and Michael Warner's "republic of letters," Loughran offers a new conceptual subject of study, the "virtual nation" (24).¹ In the early national and antebellum periods, Loughran argues, the "United States" existed only as a rhetorical fiction, one that took advantage of the new country's geographic/spatial dislocations to regulate the physical coming together of its citizens and thereby reduce their role in governance to mere spectatorship. Later, in the 1830s and 1840s, when the infrastructure of print and mass culture began to catch up with what Loughran calls the "fantasy" (4) of union, sectionalism paradoxically arose to shatter the federalist dream.	1
For Loughran, a materialist approach to the apparent paradox of disunion—that it occurred at precisely the moment when the American infrastructure was finally sufficient to make national unification possible—effectively bridges the gaps she uncovers in both Warner's and Anderson's paradigms. Neither paradigm, she points out, explains the actual circulation histories of preeminent national texts such as Common Sense (1776) and the Federalist (1787–88). In the first two sections of the book, she uncovers how haphazard journeys on incomplete post roads through spotty delivery systems deposited texts such as these into the hands of manipulative local officials who doled them out based on prerevolutionary customary practices of preferment that militated against the very republican ideals the tracts were attempting to serve. Loughran demonstrates how Thomas Paine greatly inflated the print numbers for Common Sense and how he was unable to navigate his text through the colonies' multiple cultures of the book. When subjected to a materialist method, the Federalist also appears as a very different sort of text from the one that appears in the received print culture theory. Published serially in New York, the individual numbers of the Federalist were, Loughran shows, extremely local in focus, directed toward blunting the force of powerful governor DeWitt Clinton's Anti-Federalist stance rather than persuading a protonational audience at large. The Republic in Print displays how newspapers serializing the Federalist essays rarely made it to constituencies in other colonies intact. Printers rarely printed whole essays; local officials circulated them only to a select few. When it finally appeared as a book, the Federalist was a dismal failure. Its printer, Archibald McLean, lost his shirt, and the book was never widely republished in the early national period.	2
In detailing how such canonical "nation-founding" books were actually produced, circulated, and consumed, The Republic in Print offers plausible evidence of an early Republic without the infrastructural wherewithal to mount national public relations campaigns of any sort, much less ones that resulted in rebellion against the metropolitan center and, later, the establishment of a federal union. The emphasis in Loughran's title thus falls emphatically upon print, for it was only in print that the Republic was posited and then ratified. But being "in print" in 1776 and 1787 was, as Loughran amply demonstrates, an extremely dodgy affair.	. . .

There are about 811 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.