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View on the Rise of the Public Sphere in the Early Modern Atlantic World………………………………………………………… FROM PROCLAMATION TO DIALOGUE: THE COLONIAL PRESS AND THE EMERGENCE OF AN AMERICAN PUBLIC SPHERE, 1640-1725 Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of the Ohio State University By Larry Alexander Skillin, M.A. Graduate Program in History The Ohio State University 2009 Dissertation Committee: Dr. John L. Brooke, Advisor Dr. Alan Gallay Dr. David Cressy Copyright By Larry Alexander Skillin 2009 ABSTRACT 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 ii 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. iii DEDICATION Dedicated to my parents, Don and Gladys iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation would not have been completed without the generous assistance of many individuals who gave their time and energy to help make this project a success. My colleagues among the graduate students at Ohio State were consistently a source of support, new ideas, and valued friendship and I only hope that I was able to contribute to their research as much as they did for mine. The strength and breadth of faculty expertise in early modern studies at Ohio State University made this an ideal place to train for a career in early American and Atlantic history and I thank everyone who had a hand in guiding my studies. Through seminars (and the casual group dinners that followed), classroom collaboration, and individual consultation, I was challenged and encouraged by the early American faculty, especially Randy Roth, Margaret Newell, Richard Shiels, and Saul Cornell. Dale Van Kley first introduced me to the joys and frustrations of working with Habermas and the public sphere and my professional life has never been the same. David Cressy fostered my studies in early modern British history and helped solidify key elements of my trans-Atlantic argument. Alan Gallay always had an ear to lend, different perspectives to offer, and more patience than I deserved in assisting with my prose. I want to offer special thanks to my advisor, John Brooke. He has worked so hard on my behalf since the moment we first met that I could not possibly enumerate all of the things I am grateful to him for. John’s unflagging belief in this project and my promise as a v scholar and teacher helped sustain me through the ups and downs of the research and writing process. My family also played an enormous role in helping me achieve this goal. I hope they know how much that I love them and thank them for the sacrifices they made to make this possible. To the Srsics: Bill, Barbara, Mike, Julie, Dan, Colby, Billy, and Melody thank you for welcoming me into your family and putting up with the needs of a perpetual student as an in-law. Kevin, Patti, and Becky, I suppose you know more than anyone why I may have been drawn to studying early modern arguments. Thanks for always being a source of support from all corners of the globe. Carrie and Alex, you mean the world to me and I thank you for being willing to share me with libraries, computer labs, classrooms, and this dissertation. Our lives together help to keep everything in perspective and I cannot wait to share more adventures with you. I love you both very much. Finally, to my parents, Don and Gladys, this dissertation is dedicated to you because I never would have come this far without your love and encouragement. Gracias. vi VITA 2002………………………………………B.A. History, Indiana University of Pennsylvania 2004 – present……………………………Graduate Teaching Associate, The Ohio State University 2005………………………………………M.A. History, The Ohio State University FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: History vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………....ii Dedication………………………………………………………………………………...iv Acknowledgement………………………………………………………………………...v Vita…………………………………………………………………………………........vii Chapter 1: Introduction: A Long View on the Rise of the Public Sphere in the Early Modern Atlantic World…………………………………………………………................1 Chapter 2: New England’s Print Culture of Proclamations……………………………...13 Chapter 3: The Proclamations of the 1680s: Expansion and Transformation…………...53 Chapter 4: Releasing the Dialogical Genie: Effects of the Glorious Revolution and a New Quaker Invasion……………………………………………...………………………......76 Chapter 5: Expansion of the Dialogues: Debating War, Witchcraft, and Quaker Schism…………………………………………………………………………………..117 Chapter 6: Debates of the New Century: Consolidating a Dialogical Print Culture…...175 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………....234 viii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION: A LONG VIEW ON THE RISE OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE IN THE EARLY MODERN ATLANTIC WORLD In the summer of 1688 George Keith, a Quaker missionary, arrived in Boston to deliver a challenge to the Congregational churches of New England. Ensuring that his hand-written message was “set up in the most publick place, in the Town of Boston,” he sought a face-to-face debate with the local Puritan ministers. The church leaders flatly refused, suggesting that “If he would have a Publick Audience, let him print.”1 And this is precisely what Keith did, returning to Philadelphia and publishing a two-hundred-forty page book outlining his challenges to the New England Way. Reluctantly, Cotton Mather responded to Keith’s attack in the name of the broader Puritan ministry. Over the next four years the two religious leaders exchanged blows in a series of locally printed books of attacks, rebuttals, charges and countercharges. This printed debate was carried out in a form of controversial literature driven by a dialogue-like exchange appealing to the rational understanding of the reading public. This style of dialogical pamphleteering was commonplace in metropolitan London, but had been very consciously excluded from the print culture of North America to that point. Keith’s initiative, alongside simultaneously 1 George Keith, The Presbyterian and Independent Visible Churches in New-England and Else-where, Brought to the Test, and Examined According to the Doctrine of the Holy Scriptures, in Their Doctrine, Ministry, Worship, Constitution, Government, Sacraments and Sabbath Day, and Found to be No True Church of Christ. More Particularly Directed to These in New-England, and More Generally to Those in Old-England, Scotland, Ireland, &c. With a Call and Warning From the Lord to the People of Boston and New-England, to Repent, &c. And Two Letters to the Preachers in Boston; and an Answer to the Gross Abuses, Lyes and Slanders of Increas [sic]Mather and Samuel Norton, &c. (Philadelphia: William Bradford, 1689), 205. 1 released political pamphlets related to the Glorious Revolution in America, broke the mold of previous colonial printing and brought an expanded public sphere to colonial America. This understanding of George Keith’s tumultuous early years in the colonies and the political pamphleteering accompanying the Glorious Revolution challenges the dominant conception of the American public sphere as an exclusively secular discursive space that opened only in the mid-eighteenth century. The prevailing chronology and characterization of the public sphere in early America takes many of its cues from the foundational work of Jürgen Habermas and scholars of early modern European history. Habermas argued that the bourgeois public sphere was strictly limited to rational discussions of economic and political concerns among disinterested participants and that it was first visible in the coffeehouses and voluntary associations
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