The Republic in Print

In "The Republic in Print," Trish Loughran challenges a dominant narrative about nationalism: the idea that print culture produces nations. Focusing on the years between 1770 and 1870, Loughran develops two richly detailed and provocative arguments. First she argues that it was the lack of national infrastructure (rather than a tightly connected print network) that enabled the nation to be imagined between 1776 and 1790. She then describes how the increasingly connected book market of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s worked to exacerbate regional differences in ways that contributed to secession and civil war. Drawing on a range of literary, historical, and archival materials, "The Republic in Print" is a refreshing and original cultural history of the early American nation-state.

List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsPreface: A View from the Capitol: The Unfinished Work of US Nation Building 1. U.S. Print Culture: The Factory of Fragments Part One - The Book's Two Bodies: Print Culture and National Founding, 1776-1789 2. Disseminating Common Sense: Thomas Paine and the Scene of Revolutonary Print Culture3. The Republic in Print: Ratification as Material Text, 1787-1788 Part Two: The Nation in Fragments: Federal Representation and its Discontents, 1787-1789 4. Virtual Nation: State-Based Identity and Federalist Fantasy5. Metrobuilding: The Production of Federalist Space Part Three: The Overextended Republic: Slavery, Abolition, and National Space, 1790-1870 6. Abolitionist Nation: The Space of Organized Abolition, 1790-18407. Slavery on the Move: From Fugitive Slave to Virtual Citizen Conclusion: The Due Process of Nationalism