Hey CNN!

I got your new motto right here: "From realms far distant and from Climes unknown, we make the Knowledge of [Hu]Mankind your own" (qtd. in Gross 6). How awesome would the news cycle be if every thirty minutes, James Earl Jones recited the quote listed above? On a more serious note, my feelings regarding our reading for today echo some of my fellow classmates, in that there is a lot here that we have seen before. However, there is some information that we haven't come across yet. I wonder how much all of our opinions regarding the reading will change once we get into the book; in other words, how much does the fact that what we read for today is an introduction to an extensive collection of essays (that cover a variety of different topics and perspectives) play into our beliefs. Of course there is going to be some overlap, but I think that Robert A. Gross does a substantially better job at presenting a more well-rounded approach to print culture of the Early Republic than Cathy N. Davidson or Paul Starr. Not that Davidson or Starr are without their merits, but by nature of what he has to accomplish in his introduction, Gross points to a number of different ideas that are ignored or slightly discussed by Davidson and Starr.

The first of these is geography and its role in shaping print culture in the United States. Whereas Starr claims that what developed was the result of American Exceptionalism, Gross cites the need to send information quickly across the expansive tracts of land now part of the burgeoning nation. The South is not treated as a stupid sibling of the North and Gross provides a logical and acceptable explanation for the lack of print culture below the Mason-Dixon. The sparsely populated South simply did not have the infrastructure present to facilitate the transmission of goods; moreover, it was not profitable for Norther booksellers to attempt to sell print goods to Southern readers. For Gross, it appears that geography was at the center of the print explosion that occurred during the Early Republic. Geography also serves to explain how decentralized the American printing industry became when compared to the British; this is a characteristic that (if I remember correctly, and I probably don't) Starr and Davidson fail to explain in an great detail.

Reading Gross, we get a larger sense of print culture in the Early Republic. Subjects such as children's literature, the progression of the novel, the rise of full-fledged publishers, the formation (or lack thereof) of a national identity, the role the telegraph played in the transformation of print culture, the rise of the penny press, and the influence of European culture on the American identity. All of these topics are discussed with more clarity by Gross than by either Davidson or Starr. With that said, I am sure that all of these topics are discussed in greater detail in the collection of essays that follows Gross's introduction, so he needed to at least touch on them to some extent in his introduction. However, I am already more interested to read on to discover whether or not I am correct than I have been with our previous readings.