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1776 symbolizes a moment, both historical and mythic, of democracy in action. That year witnessed the release of a document, which Edward Bernays, the so-called father of public relations and spin, would later label as a masterstroke of propaganda. Although the Declaration of Independence relies heavily on the empiricism of self-evident truths, Bernays, who had authored the influential manifesto Propaganda in 1928, suggested that what made this iconic
document so effective was not its sober rationalism but its inspiring message that ensured its dissemination throughout the American colonies. Propaganda 1776 reframes the culture of the U.S. Revolution and early
Republic, revealing it to be rooted in a vast network of propaganda. Drawing on a wide-range of resources, Russ Castronovo considers how the dispersal and circulation--indeed, the propagation--of information and opinion across the various media of the eighteenth century helped speed the flow of revolution. This book challenges conventional wisdom about propaganda as manipulation or lies by examining how popular consent and public opinion in early America relied on the
spirited dissemination of rumor, forgery, and invective. While declarations about self-evident truths were important to liberty, the path toward American independence required above all else the spread of
unreliable intelligence that travelled at such a pace that it could be neither confirmed nor refuted. By tracking the movements of stolen documents and leaked confidential letters, this book argues that media dissemination created a vital but seldom acknowledged connection between propaganda and democracy. The spread of revolutionary material in the form of newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, letters, songs, and poems across British North America created multiple networks
that spawned new and often radical ideas about political communication. Communication itself became revolutionary in ways that revealed circulation to be propaganda's most vital content. By examining
the kinetic aspects of print culture, Propaganda 1776 shows how the mobility of letters, pamphlets, and other texts amounts to political activity par excellence. With original examinations of Ben Franklin, Mercy Otis Warren, Tom Paine, and Philip Freneau, among a crowd of other notorious propagandists, this book examines how colonial men and women popularized and spread the patriot cause across America.
1776 symbolizes a moment, both historical and mythic, of democracy in action. That year witnessed the release of a document, which Edward Bernays, the so-called father of public relations and spin, would later label as a masterstroke of propaganda. Although the Declaration of Independence relies heavily on the empiricism of self-evident truths, Bernays, who had authored the influential manifesto Propaganda in 1928, suggested that what made this iconic
document so effective was not its sober rationalism but its inspiring message that ensured its dissemination throughout the American colonies. Propaganda 1776 reframes the culture of the U.S. Revolution and early
Republic, revealing it to be rooted in a vast network of propaganda. Drawing on a wide-range of resources, Russ Castronovo considers how the dispersal and circulation--indeed, the propagation--of information and opinion across the various media of the eighteenth century helped speed the flow of revolution. This book challenges conventional wisdom about propaganda as manipulation or lies by examining how popular consent and public opinion in early America relied on the
spirited dissemination of rumor, forgery, and invective. While declarations about self-evident truths were important to liberty, the path toward American independence required above all else the spread of
unreliable intelligence that travelled at such a pace that it could be neither confirmed nor refuted. By tracking the movements of stolen documents and leaked confidential letters, this book argues that media dissemination created a vital but seldom acknowledged connection between propaganda and democracy. The spread of revolutionary material in the form of newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, letters, songs, and poems across British North America created multiple networks
that spawned new and often radical ideas about political communication. Communication itself became revolutionary in ways that revealed circulation to be propaganda's most vital content. By examining
the kinetic aspects of print culture, Propaganda 1776 shows how the mobility of letters, pamphlets, and other texts amounts to political activity par excellence. With original examinations of Ben Franklin, Mercy Otis Warren, Tom Paine, and Philip Freneau, among a crowd of other notorious propagandists, this book examines how colonial men and women popularized and spread the patriot cause across America.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: State Secrets: Ben Franklin and WikiLeaks
Chapter 2: Memes, Plagiarism, and Revolutionary Drama
Chapter 3: From East India to the Boston Tea Party: Propaganda at
the Extremes
Chapter 4: Epistolary Propaganda: Counterfeits, Stolen Letters, and
Transatlantic Revolutions
Chapter 5: Aftermath: The Poetry of the Post-Revolution
Coda
Bibliography
Russ Castronovo is Tom Paine Professor of English and Dorothy Draheim Professor of American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His previous books include Beautiful Democracy: Aesthetics and Anarchy in a Global Era; Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States; and Fathering the Nation: American Genealogies of Slavery and Freedom.
"[B]oth books have done a service to the field of early North
American studies in pushing our understandings of rumor, rhetoric,
and, yes, propagandistic communications forward. This fascinating
field, once opened, should continue to yield new insights and
prompt new methods of analysis. We owe a debt to each of these
authors for his work in this area." --Ann Marie Plane, Early
American Literature
"Burke was also a shrewd political operative, who reframed issues
and changed positions depending on the exigencies of the moment. It
is this tactical aspect of political life-the qualities that make
sports analogy often seem so apt-that comes through most clearly in
Castronovo's treatment of propaganda. This focus distinguishes his
approach from that of Chomsky, who critiques the mainstream news
media as state-sanctioned disseminators
of misinformation and propaganda froma stance of philosophical
certainty. In the political writings of the Revolutionary era,
Castronovo sees something more fluid and multifaceted at work, with
imaginative and even playful elements being central. At its best,
this book celebrates the arts of politics. --Sandra M. Gustafson,
Modern Philology
"Neo-whig historians attacked progressive historians who debunked
patriot 'propaganda' by telling us that American revolutionaries
were true believers, if ideological, and radical in ways we can
embrace without much reservation. Too often this has devolved into
another version of American exceptionalism. Russ Castronovo has
another take on their political talents: he finds a creative
resistance to power in the modes of dissemination as much as their
message.
The radicalism of the Revolution is back up for grabs in this
fascinating corrective." --David Waldstreicher, author of Runaway
America and Slavery's Constitution
"In this fresh, provocative look at the revolutionary era, Russ
Castronovo challenges our knee-jerk assumptions about propaganda
and enhances our understanding of early American politics....
Castronovo encourages a deeper appreciation for revolutionary
propaganda as a way to make sense of American democracy and its
fractures.... Castronovo's bold reconceptualization offers plenty
of tools for rethinking this crucial-and misunderstood-phenomenon."
--Journal
of American History
"Castronovo deftly-even audaciously-shuttles his way back and forth
across the last three centuries to uncover the democratic work of
propaganda operative at the nation's founding and continuing to
this day. Understanding propaganda as a lateral and volatile form
of 'communications in motion,' Castronovo especially challenges our
ideas about Revolutionary-era texts, redefining what they meant by
recovering how they moved. Propaganda 1776 will be of
great interest to scholars of U.S. literary, communications, media
and political history." --Susan Scott Parrish, author of American
Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British
Atlantic World
"Propaganda 1776 is an elegantly written, compellingly
conceptualized book. A provocative read from page to page, it makes
an original argument about the American Revolution by reviving and
revivifying the concept of propaganda." --Konstantin Dierks, author
of In My Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early
America
"In Propaganda 1776, Russ Castronovo sets forth a bold new paradigm
of early American letters--one that describes the printscape of
revolutionary era writing in vivid terms, and locates the meaning
and significance of texts in their capacity to spread and propagate
rather than in their truth content. This important book challenges
us to reconsider pieties of the Habermasian public sphere and
classical republicanism in early America and invites rich
speculation on the relation of media and democracy." --Elizabeth
Maddock Dillon, author of New World Drama: The Performative Commons
in the Atlantic World, 1649-1849
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