Fundamentally reshapes our understanding of the causes of the
American Revolution and the pivotal role foreign news and
misinformation played in driving colonists to revolt. "Fake news"
is not new. Just like millions of Americans today, the
revolutionaries of the eighteenth century worried that they were
entering a "post-truth" era. Their fears, however, were not fixated
on social media or clickbait, but rather on peoples' increasing
reliance on reading news gathered from foreign newspapers. In
Misinformation Nation, Jordan E. Taylor reveals how foreign news
defined the boundaries of American politics and ultimately drove
colonists to revolt against Britain and create a new nation. News
was the lifeblood of early American politics, but newspaper
printers had few reliable sources to report on events from abroad.
Accounts of battles and beheadings, as well as declarations and
constitutions, often arrived alongside contradictory intelligence.
Though frequently false, the information that Americans encountered
in newspapers, letters, and conversations framed their sense of
reality, leading them to respond with protests, boycotts, violence,
and the creation of new political institutions. Fearing that their
enemies were spreading fake news, American colonists fought for
control of the news media. As their basic perceptions of reality
diverged, Loyalists separated from Patriots and, in the new nation
created by the revolution, Republicans inhabited a political
reality quite distinct from that of their Federalist rivals. The
American Revolution was not only a political contest for liberty,
equality, and independence (for white men, at least); it was also a
contest to define certain accounts of reality to be truthful while
defining others as false and dangerous. Misinformation Nation
argues that we must also conceive of the American Revolution as a
series of misperceptions, misunderstandings, and uninformed
overreactions. In addition to making a striking and original
argument about the founding of the United States, Misinformation
Nation will be a valuable prehistory to our current political
moment.
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