| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Fanatics and Fire-Eaters: Newspapers and the Coming of the Civil War. By Lorman A. Ratner and Dwight L. Teeter Jr. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. xvi, 138 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-252-02787-6.)
The triangular relationship of politics, media, and public opinion is increasingly recognized as a key to the unfolding of political history. It is also notoriously enigmatic. In Fanatics and Fire-Eaters, two accomplished scholars, the political historian Lorman A. Ratner and the communications scholar Dwight L. Teeter Jr., transcend the relative insularity of political studies and some parochial tendencies in journalism history. They join forces to address the nexus of politics, journalism, and public sentiment in the final escalation of the sectional conflict to Civil War.	1
This welcome and all too rare combination of disciplinary expertise holds the promise of showing, in the words of the book's dust jacket, "how the media of the mid-nineteenth century played a role in determining both the perception and the course of the events." Moving inward from the dust jacket, readers of this engaging and beautifully written book may find that it does not squarely pursue that kind of mandate. They get, instead, a cogent analysis of editorial opinion on the final landmarks on the road to disunion, a bird's-eye view of the communicative habitat of those editorials—the press of the mid-nineteenth century—and occasional stimulating thoughts on the possible interrelationship of press dynamics, editorial writing, public response, and political action.	. . .

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