The Page of Revolutions: Information Politics and Atlantic Networks in Revolutionary North America, 1765-1800

• Main Author: Taylor, Jordan E
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01.01.2019
• Subjects: Communication; World History
• ISBN: 9780438886445; 0438886445

During the late eighteenth century, North Americans in the United States, Canada, and Louisiana carefully observed the revolutionary events unfolding in France, Ireland, Poland, St. Domingue, the Netherlands, and elsewhere. The Atlantic information networks that conveyed this news into North America were deeply unstable. Changing commercial, political, and diplomatic conditions played an important role in shaping the kinds of news that North Americans could access. Moreover, within the continent, much of this news became deeply entangled with overlapping layers of local, national, and imperial politics. As a result, North Americans’ vantage onto the Age of Revolutions depended on a range of factors that they, as well as subsequent historians, were scarcely aware of. This dissertation argues that these contingent information flows shaped, and were shaped by, the revolutionary politics of North America. Through this lens, it re-examines several key topics in the political history of early North America, including the Anglo-American crisis of the 1760s and 1770s, the impact of the French Revolution on the continent, and the repressive governmental policies that spread through the continent in the mid-to-late 1790s. In reconsidering these long-studied issues, it argues that the Age of Revolutions should be understood not merely in terms of lofty arguments about republicanism and monarchy or liberty and tyranny, but also in terms of observers’ often-mundane contests over news and the basic facts of reality. As this dissertation shows, information politics was central to the history of revolutionary North America.