Popular Media and the American Revolution

Shaping Collective Memory

Janice Hume

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136269417
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

The American Revolution—an event that gave America its first real "story" as an independent nation, distinct from native and colonial origins—continues to live on in the public's memory, celebrated each year on July 4 with fireworks and other patriotic displays. But to identify as an American is to connect to a larger national narrative, one that begins in revolution. In Popular Media and the American Revolution, journalism historian Janice Hume examines the ways that generations of Americans have remembered and embraced the Revolution through magazines, newspapers, and digital media.

Overall, Popular Media and the American Revolution demonstrates how the story and characters of the Revolution have been adjusted, adapted, and co-opted by popular media over the years, fostering a cultural identity whose founding narrative was sculpted, ultimately, in revolution. Examining press and popular media coverage of the war, wartime anniversaries, and the Founding Fathers (particularly, "uber-American hero" George Washington), Hume provides insights into the way that journalism can and has shaped a culture's evolving, collective memory of its past.

Dr. Janice Hume is a professor and head of the Department of Journalism in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia. She is author of Obituaries in American Culture (University Press of Mississippi, 2000) and co-author of Journalism in a Culture of Grief (Routledge, 2008).

1
Building the American Story

The Revolution gave America its first real “story” as an independent nation, distinct from native and colonial origins. It is a weighty narrative, one that has resonated for more than two centuries. The telling of it began almost as soon as the war ended, as Americans sought to remember the heroes, villains, and events of those “times that tried men’s souls.” The new Americans both desired and needed a history. After all, nations are held together by memories of a shared past, not just through laws and geography. In the country’s formative years, exciting and inspirational Revolutionary War stories were passed down orally in families and communities, and preserved in letters and journals, but they were also printed and distributed via newspapers, magazines, and books.

The symbiotic relationship between “journalism” and “history” has been instrumental in the evolution of the popular story of America’s genesis. Newspapers and magazines pre-dated the founding of the nation, so of course they existed long before more formal histories of the Revolution were researched and written. Thus the press was involved in writing “the first draft of history” during the war years, as the cliché goes, but also in writing at least some of the subsequent drafts. History and biography were important components of early newspapers and magazines, which often focused on Revolutionary figures. Did the press have lasting impact on the way the war was remembered? This chapter examines how American historians through 1899 included newspapers and magazines as sources in their books.

That there were any early American histories at all is a testament to the tenacity and nationalist tendencies of scholars of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.¹ Publishing a book-length history was expensive and rarely profitable, and while copyright protections were included in the U.S. Constitution, in reality they were difficult to enforce. There were no international protections. As a result, even the best authors struggled. For example, Arthur H. Shaffer noted in 1975 that David Ramsay’s critically acclaimed The History of the Revolution of South Carolina, printed in 1785, lost more than $1,500.² Yet despite such significant barriers, historians of the era produced a notable collection. “A generation of American historians agreed on a basic approach to the American past, differing only in emphasis and the routes they chose … Together these historians laid the basis of a national history,” Shaffer noted.³

By the mid 1800s, changes in transportation and communication eased the historian’s difficulties somewhat. New postal regulations allowed books to be mailed at lower rates, aiding in distribution and profit, and a number of public repositories of primary documents made historical research easier, more systematic, and more “authentic.”⁴ George Callcott wrote in 1959 that historians’ interest in the American past began in earnest in the 1830s, and by the 1860s, “every one of the original states, and many of the new western ones, possessed long and thorough volumes of their past.”⁵ Yet, he noted, in the early 1800s printers and journalists were also among those who produced “able histories, and their historical works were usually exciting narratives.”⁶ Philadelphia was a center of both book and magazine publishing at the dawn of the nineteenth century, and from its presses came book-length biographies of Revolutionary War participants, as well as many sketches and portraits published in magazines like Port Folio, which “had the most ambitious series of articles and illustrations of Revolutionary heroes,” according to Christopher Harris in 2000.⁷

While ownership of expensive books was out of reach for many Americans, circulating libraries allowed more people to borrow them. Cathy Davidson wrote in 1987 that 266 social libraries were founded from 1791 to 1800, making a total of 376 in America. A small town might have one library, while larger cities often boasted several. “The libraries … helped to solve a major problem in the early national period in that they made books both accessible and affordable to a rapidly growing and largely new class of readers,” she wrote.⁸ In his 1989 study of the diffusion of information in early America, Richard Brown noted that as more library associations sprang up by 1820, newspapers “multiplied at a geometric rate.”⁹ They, too, were accessible to more people than those who could afford to buy them. They were “kept on hand in many public gathering places, especially taverns, coffeehouses, and hotels, where they were often read aloud or in groups,” according to Jeffrey Pasley.¹⁰

Indeed, the same improvements in transportation and communication that eased the way for historians were among many social, political, and cultural factors bolstering newspapers and magazines, which became more and more abundant as the decades passed. Alexis de Tocqueville observed in 1832 the healthy appetite early Americans had for newspapers, and the importance of this reading habit for the health of the nation. He wrote: “The newspaper brought [Americans] together, and the newspaper is still necessary to keep them united.”¹¹ David Nord and Michael Schudson have written eloquently about the importance of newspapers in American community building historically,¹² and Pasley has pointed out the critical role newspapers played in the building of political parties and of new or growing American towns. He wrote: “A printer’s very presence could lead to local acclaim, because the possession of a press (especially one that published a newspaper) was considered an essential prerequisite to a town becoming a significant place.”¹³

Of course journalism was different then. As Schudson reminded: “I tiptoe around the term ‘news’ to describe what appeared in colonial and early national papers for the good reason that this category was not the sum and substance, not even the primary purpose, of those journals.”¹⁴ This, of course, does not diminish the importance of such publications. And they did contain some newsy content. In 1997, David Copeland’s comprehensive look at colonial newspapers revealed “topics as varied as religion and slaves, crime and comets, obituaries and animals, disease and weather, Native Americans and medicine, sensationalism and agriculture, to name a few.”¹⁵ Prior to the Revolution, many printers banded together to argue for independence and to protest the Stamp Act of 1765, among other British actions, in their publications. Newspapers became morale boosters during the war years and also provided reports about the fighting, with varying degrees of accuracy.

Yet there would be no “reporters” and no “news” in the modern sense for another half century. Newspapers printed letters, information clipped from other papers, and government documents. They were, in large part, “a miscellany of fact and fancy about strangers far from home,” but by the mid decades of the nineteenth century, they became an “intimate part of citizenship and politics,” Schudson noted.¹⁶ Newspapers in the national period “profoundly shaped American political development” as the lynchpins of political parties, Pasley argued.¹⁷ In her 1989 study of journalistic standards, Hazel Dicken-Garcia described the evolution of news content in the nineteenth century as “idea centered” in the early decades; “event centered” at mid-century; and “by the 1890s, an amalgam of event, idea, and history or drama.”¹⁸

Newspapers and magazines looked back at the American Revolution via historical reference and reminiscence. Sometimes the accounts were fanciful, as journalists occasionally enjoy a good story at the expense of fact. But at other times the stories were based in credible historical evidence. Jack Lule wrote in 2001 about the mythic nature of journalism, which has important implications for tradition and collective memory, and J.S. Lawrence and B. Timberg have argued that “mythic adequacy” is a critical attribute for journalistic content.¹⁹ For example, newspapers have long told stories of real heroes and villains in mythic terms. This does not mean the stories were necessarily untrue or inaccurate, but that they were told in powerful narrative forms that existed long before “news” or newspapers.

Newspapers and magazines are by nature ephemeral, and while some were stitched and bound together by readers who wanted to hold on to their content,²⁰ most were discarded. This chapter considers one way their content may have become a more permanent and accessible part of the historical record, a place for Americans to find stories of their nation’s founding.

This chapter’s guiding question was, “How did early American histories use press sources to recount the American Revolution?” Examined were histories published prior to 1899 housed in the collection of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. They were requested using the search terms United States, revolution, biography, and history, the names of each of the original thirteen colonies/states as well as through references in secondary literature including the Bibliography of American imprints to 1901.²¹ The books were scanned manually for any reference to the press in general as well as particular newspapers and magazines. Findings were supplemented by additional histories digitized and available online via Google Books and the database Early American Imprints, Series I and II, and scanned digitally using a list of search terms that was compiled based on the above research: sketch, appeared in, gazette, mercury, journal, register, papers, chronicle, review, newspapers, courier, news, magazine, and advertiser. More than sixty books were examined either manually or electronically, and while it is doubtful that this is a complete listing of the histories published during the time period, the sample is robust enough to begin providing a reliable picture of how these historians made use of press sources.

Historians writing in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did make use of press sources in a variety of ways, from simple acknowled...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: Revolution, Journalism, and American Identity
• 1 Building the American Story
• 2 “The Gathering Mists of Time”
• 3 The Nation’s First Washington
• 4 The (Not Quite) Anniversary of Independence
• 5 American Characters
• 6 “We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident”
• 7 The Electronic Revolution
• Epilogue: Who’s Your Founding Father?
• References
• Index