Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Communication and Community 1
PART 1: COMMUNITIES OF PRODUCTION
1. Teleology and News: The Religious Roots of American
Journalism, 1630-1730 31
2. The Authority of Truth: Religion and the
John Peter Zenger Case 65
3. Newspapers and American Nationhood, 1776-1826 80
4. Tocqueville, Garrison, and the Perfection of Journalism 92
5. The Public Community: The Urbanization of Journalism
in Chicago 108
6. The Business Values of American Newspapers:
The Nineteenth-Century Watershed 133
7. The Paradox of Municipal Reform in the Late
Nineteenth Century 152
PART 2: COMMUNITIES OF RECEPTION
8. A Republican Literature: A Study of Magazine Readers and
Reading in Late Eighteenth-Century New York 175
9. Readership as Citizenship in Late Eighteenth-Century
Philadelphia 199
10. Working-Class Readers: Family, Community, and Reading in
Late Nineteenth-Century America 225
11. Reading the Newspaper: Strategies and Politics of Reader
Response, Chicago, 1912-17 246
12. Readers Love to Argue about the News-But Not
in Newspapers 278
Afterword: Newspapers, Readers, and Communities Today 285
Index 289