Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: State Secrets: Ben Franklin and WikiLeaks
Chapter 2: Memes, Plagiarism, and Revolutionary Drama
Chapter 3: From East India to the Boston Tea Party: Propaganda at
the Extremes
Chapter 4: Epistolary Propaganda: Counterfeits, Stolen Letters, and
Transatlantic Revolutions
Chapter 5: Aftermath: The Poetry of the Post-Revolution
Coda
Bibliography
Russ Castronovo is Tom Paine Professor of English and Dorothy Draheim Professor of American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His previous books include Beautiful Democracy: Aesthetics and Anarchy in a Global Era; Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States; and Fathering the Nation: American Genealogies of Slavery and Freedom.
"[B]oth books have done a service to the field of early North
American studies in pushing our understandings of rumor, rhetoric,
and, yes, propagandistic communications forward. This fascinating
field, once opened, should continue to yield new insights and
prompt new methods of analysis. We owe a debt to each of these
authors for his work in this area." --Ann Marie Plane, Early
American Literature
"Burke was also a shrewd political operative, who reframed issues
and changed positions depending on the exigencies of the moment. It
is this tactical aspect of political life-the qualities that make
sports analogy often seem so apt-that comes through most clearly in
Castronovo's treatment of propaganda. This focus distinguishes his
approach from that of Chomsky, who critiques the mainstream news
media as state-sanctioned disseminators
of misinformation and propaganda froma stance of philosophical
certainty. In the political writings of the Revolutionary era,
Castronovo sees something more fluid and multifaceted at work, with
imaginative and even playful elements being central. At its best,
this book celebrates the arts of politics. --Sandra M. Gustafson,
Modern Philology
"Neo-whig historians attacked progressive historians who debunked
patriot 'propaganda' by telling us that American revolutionaries
were true believers, if ideological, and radical in ways we can
embrace without much reservation. Too often this has devolved into
another version of American exceptionalism. Russ Castronovo has
another take on their political talents: he finds a creative
resistance to power in the modes of dissemination as much as their
message.
The radicalism of the Revolution is back up for grabs in this
fascinating corrective." --David Waldstreicher, author of Runaway
America and Slavery's Constitution
"In this fresh, provocative look at the revolutionary era, Russ
Castronovo challenges our knee-jerk assumptions about propaganda
and enhances our understanding of early American politics....
Castronovo encourages a deeper appreciation for revolutionary
propaganda as a way to make sense of American democracy and its
fractures.... Castronovo's bold reconceptualization offers plenty
of tools for rethinking this crucial-and misunderstood-phenomenon."
--Journal
of American History
"Castronovo deftly-even audaciously-shuttles his way back and forth
across the last three centuries to uncover the democratic work of
propaganda operative at the nation's founding and continuing to
this day. Understanding propaganda as a lateral and volatile form
of 'communications in motion,' Castronovo especially challenges our
ideas about Revolutionary-era texts, redefining what they meant by
recovering how they moved. Propaganda 1776 will be of
great interest to scholars of U.S. literary, communications, media
and political history." --Susan Scott Parrish, author of American
Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British
Atlantic World
"Propaganda 1776 is an elegantly written, compellingly
conceptualized book. A provocative read from page to page, it makes
an original argument about the American Revolution by reviving and
revivifying the concept of propaganda." --Konstantin Dierks, author
of In My Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early
America
"In Propaganda 1776, Russ Castronovo sets forth a bold new paradigm
of early American letters--one that describes the printscape of
revolutionary era writing in vivid terms, and locates the meaning
and significance of texts in their capacity to spread and propagate
rather than in their truth content. This important book challenges
us to reconsider pieties of the Habermasian public sphere and
classical republicanism in early America and invites rich
speculation on the relation of media and democracy." --Elizabeth
Maddock Dillon, author of New World Drama: The Performative Commons
in the Atlantic World, 1649-1849
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