BOOK REVIEWS The Many Legalities of Early Aneica. Edited by CHRISTOPHER L. TOMLINS and BRUCE H. MANN. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Va., 2001. ix, 4 6 6p. Genealogical charts, tables, notes, index. Cloth, $59.95; paper, $22.50.) More than three decades ago, David H. Flaherty and the University of North Carolina Press published Essays in the History of EarlyAneri can Law (1969). His work was designed to demonstrate the current state of legal history, to identify areas worthy of investigation, and to encourage legal and nonlegal historians alike to accept the challenge of looking more closely at early American law and its institutions. Flaherty's effort stimulated a variety of works offering fresh looks at law, legal institutions, and the early bar. Nonetheless, fifteen years later, Stanley N. Katz ("The Problem of a Colonial Legal History," in Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole, eds., ColonialBritish America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era, 1984) complained that colonial legal history had failed to establish a critical interpretive presence for itself. Katz maintained that, as of 1984, no legal-historical perspective had surfaced to shape a general interpretation of the early American experience. Now, nearly two decades after Katz's lament, Christopher Tomlins, Bruce Mann, and the University of North Carolina Press have issued still another threefold challenge. They ask us to consider articles on the cutting edge of the "new legal history," to deliberate on the implications of these articles for our own work and that of others, and to produce even more provocative and stimulating studies linking the law and concepts of legality to social, political, and economic developments. Tomlins, Mann, and their contributors do not limit themselves to an examination of law and legal institutions. They have a broader vision, one that encompasses both concepts and practices of legality. That is, they are concerned with what constituted legality in the minds of early Americans and how individuals set about to work out their lifestyles in terms of those concepts. By definition, legal history in this broader sense guarantees that more than formal law and legal institutions will be embraced. It permits authors to probe informal institutions and practices that often shaped early lives every bit as fundamentally as the more recognized and acknowledged ones. Unfortunately, it also tempts them to lose sight of the law and legal institutions in their preoccupation with nonlegal institutions and forces. THE PENNSYLVANIA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY Vol. CXXVI, No. 3 (July 2002) BOOK REVIEWS Like most collections of essays, the result here is uneven both in style and worth. Each reader will find his or her own most compelling essay. And, without question, there is something for everyone, organized in four sections: "Atlantic Crossings" (four essays), "Intercultural Encounters" (three essays), "Rules of Law: Legal Relations as Social Relations" (four essays), and "Rules of Law: Legal Regimes and Their Social Effects" (five essays). The editors provide useful introductions to and surmaries of each section. Sixteen contributors join Tornlins and Mann in sharing their perspectives on "the many legalities of Early America." They include James Muldoon, Mary Sarah Bilder, David Caspar, David Konig, Katherine Hermes, James Brooks, Ann Marie Plane, Christine Daniels, Linda Sturtz, John Kolp, Terri Snyder, Holly Brewer, Cornelia Hughes Dayton, William Offhtt Jr., Richard Bushman, and A. G. Roeber. The brevity of this review precludes describing or assessing each article, but within the scope of the book one finds treatments of the full plurality and complexity of early American society. Topics include English and Spanish as well as Native American societies. They include men and women, free and unfree, adults and children, rich and poor. They also move beyond older legal history by confronting many of the most popular issues of current historiography-family, gender, race, ethnicity, patriarchy, and depen- dence. In their desire to exhibit the newest legal studies, to demonstrate the relevance of these essays to others working in the field of early history, and to stimulate scholarly thought on legal history in fresh terms, Tomlins, Mann, and their con- tributors succeed. They illustrate how the ideas of legality can be employed to explore the many ways in which the peoples of early America arranged their lives and determined their relationships with each other. The majority of essays stress accommodation and practicality in the formations of early "legalities." Still, if the new legal history is more all-encompassing, more sophisticated, and more nuanced-- and shown not to be the exclusive purview of lawyers and legal historians-it is also more peripheral than central to many of the authors. Several essays hardly engage the law or legal institutions at all. Doubtless the next generation's "new legoalhistory" will address this shortcoming. University of Northern Colorado G. S. RowE "The Tyranny of Printers":Newspaper Politics in the Early Republic. ByJEFFREY L. PASLEY. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001. xvii, 517p. Illustrations, appendixes, notes, bibliography, index. $37.50.) Jefferson had it wrong. We were not "all Republicans"; we were not "all Federalists." At best, Jefferson's olive branch was held out only to political elites 2002 BOOK REVIEWS 501 across a narrow span of shared gentility and aristocratic status. For the humble newspapermen of little status and fewer means who created the "newspaper-based party" (p. 17), orchestrated the "revolution of 1800," and stood at the vanguard of nineteenth-century democracy, the frontline battle between aristocratic Federalists and ordinary Republicans, and all that these divisions implied, was continuing and in earnest. In this comprehensive book, Jeffrey Pasley presents an intelligent, engaging "analytical narrative" (p. 22) of printer-editors, primarily focusing on Republican editors who, after all, were much more responsible than their Federalist counterparts for the advancement of partisan political newspapers. He does so generally by employing something numerically less rigorous but quafitatively more satisfying than Namierist collective biography to achieve his argument. (His personal website, www.pasleybrothers.com/newspol, provides easily accessible biographic vignettes of many of the printer-editors from 1776 to the mid-nineteenth century.) Pasley begins by tracing the role of printer-editors from their colonial origins, when they were only slowly drawn into political conflict, through the Revolution, when they "were more conduits for Revolutionary rhetoric than initiators of it" (p. 37). He arrives at the real start of his story in the 1790s when newspapermen launched the fight "to secure the right of American citizens to peacefully change their government and to implement the democratic promise of the early days of the American Revolution" (p. 46). Oddly, the banal John Fenno, who brought his editorship to the service of Alexander Hamilton's Federalists, seems slightly favored in the first episode of printer-editor partisan initiative in contrast to the more intelligent Philip Freneau, whom Pasley exposes as more the "hireling" in the politics ofjJefferson and Madison. Ambiguities of many kinds receded, Pasley rightly argues, when Benjamin Franklin Bache, with "great courage" (p. 79), advanced the partisan press in the Philadelphia Aurora, a paper that finally succeeded in addressing an "imagined partisan community of readers" (p. 96) willing to support the Republican cause. Pasley sentimentalizes Bache's democratic martyrdom, however, by creating a fictional aristocratic inheritance for Bache, claiming extravagantly that he even "lost caste by siding with the Republicans" (p. 89). Bache was raised for industry and artisanship, did not inherit any of his grandfathers property aside from his printing house and tools, and had no aristocratic cachet worth mentioning. He learned very early on that public ideology and private accomplishment interlocked where aristocracy had no place, in the ideals of independence, republicanism, and democracy. Change en masse began to take place when "the Sedition Act 'failed' by transforming a large number of printers into something more than simple pliers of the printer's trade" (p. 131). Featuring lesser-known printer-editors like Charles Holt, Pasley identifies "a new breed of printer, a group of artisan politicians who BOOK REVIEWS dispensed almost entirely with the standard commercial ideology of the printing trade" (p. 161), and pushed on through poverty and even physical attacks to create a cooperative network of newspapers largely free of top-down Republican control. Radical democratic partisanship found its early epitome in William Duane, Bache's uncompromising successor, who along with others attacked the genteel aristocratic forms and the lawyer-bound exclusivity of officeholding to which Federalist and Republican leaders alike dung. As partisan printing advanced, it remained in the hands of persons of lower to middling status. When the Federalists turned their hand to the same game, they proved either incompetent or vicious and vulgar, while Republican editors became the ones who generally suffered the withering fire of libel suits. Nor did eventual Republican victories lead to spoils until much later, as Duane's career