My dissertation explores the output of the colonial American printing press in its formative years, noting a transformation over time that opened doors to wider participation in public affairs. During its first half century, the press was used solely as an outlet for official pronouncements and proclamations that were designed to be passively read and accepted by the people. Beginning in the late 1680s, new presses in rival jurisdictions, religious controversies, and political revolutions provided a new context for authors and printers, who began issuing a greater variety of documents in previously suppressed genres. As authority splintered, multiple perspectives on religious and political matters appeared in dialogue with one another via controversial pamphlets, asking readers to serve as arbiters and participants in shaping public opinion. Such links between communications, public opinion and the rise of democratic institutions are critical to the emergence of the public sphere, a phenomenon once exclusively discussed in the context of the late eighteenth century in Revolutionary Europe and America. Recent scholarship on early-modern England, however, has discovered links between press expansion and religious and political controversies dating back to the sixteenth century. This dissertation takes the excellent models developed in these English studies and uses them to analyze colonial American printing in a new way. By significantly modifying the current understanding of the timing and nature of the rise of the American public sphere, I argue that it was less a mere outgrowth of the American Revolution and more of an integral part of its complex origins.
This project is significant in several ways. It first allows for a more nuanced understanding of American printing, colonial political development, and the connections between them. It also provides crucial contextual information for better understanding the trans-Atlantic foundations of American traditions of freedom of the press and speech. These fundamental liberties are also linked to the development and protection of democratic culture, a topic of ongoing interest across disciplines in domestic and international perspectives.