"A New Song Suitable to the Season," Philadelphia, 1765
Oratory and print media and the making of political publics
In this research, I am most fundamentally concerned with understanding the multiple roles played by the media in the lives of women and men in the early national United States. By looking at how non-elites interacted with the mediums of oratory and print, I believe we can gain new insights into facets of public and political culture during that era. I look at a broad range of on-the-ground institutions and social practices wherein ordinary women and men presented public speeches and published their writings. Exploring early American print and oral communications from the bottom up ultimately seeks to offer a new interpretation of communications and the public sphere as laid out by influential theorist Jürgen Habermas.
“Speechifying” is an ideal subject for understanding how people envisioned and enacted nationalism after the Revolution. To a much greater extent than today, early Americans took their rhetorical training seriously, attending carefully to the most quotidian level of everyday conversation. They sought to perfect their speaking abilities in both common schools and self-improvement groups, for they believed eloquent speech could advance one’s career, guarantee an advantageous marriage, or allow one to epitomize civic virtue within one’s community. They also scrutinized oratory by social leaders. Great speeches, they trusted, could inspire the people and galvanize their patriotism, while poor ones might lead to apathy or social chaos, and invite the derision of the world. By focusing on the politics of public speech, my work shows that American citizenship was more than a legal status or patriotic stance: it was an identity actively and repeatedly performed by women and men at all levels of society.
After publishing A Nation of Speechifiers in 2009, I am now developing a book manuscript on James Ogilvie -- a man now forgotten, but who was a celebrity traveling orator in the very early nineteenth century, long before traveling speakers became a familiar part of the American lyceum movement.