Jordan E. Taylor - Misinformation Nation: Foreign News and the Politics of Truth in Revolutionary America

Misinformation Nation

Foreign News and the Politics of Truth in Revolutionary America

JORDAN E. TAYLOR

Johns Hopkins University Press

Baltimore

2022 Johns Hopkins University Press

All rights reserved. Published 2022

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

Johns Hopkins University Press

2715 North Charles Street

Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363

www.press.jhu.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-4214-4449-9 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-4214-4450-5 (ebook)

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Special discounts are available for bulk purchases of this book. For more information, please contact Special Sales at .

So convenient a thing is it to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.

Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

This book explores the ways that we are all informed by far-reaching networks of exchange. It is a product of such networks of friends, family, institutions, colleagues, and animals. I am pleased to acknowledge them.

My family made enormous sacrifices to pay for my undergraduate education. Perhaps most significantly, they trusted me to study what I cared about, a form of support that deserving students too seldom receive. Thank you to my parents, grandparents, and sister for teaching me to experience the world with the curiosity and empathy that sustain historical investigation.

As an undergraduate student at the University of Dayton, I benefited from dedicated teachers and mentors. This project grew out of an offhand comment from Michael Carter as I was trying to find a senior thesis topic: that someone should look into anti-Catholicism in the American response to the French Revolution. This isnt that book, but investigating the United States in the 1790s for my undergraduate thesis set me on the path to it.

This book is based on research for my doctoral dissertation, which was completed at Indiana University. I was lucky to have Sarah Knott as my graduate advisor. She guided the project from inception to completion while providing a model of scholarly generosity and precision. Her patient counsel and high expectations helped me to find my strengths as a researcher, writer, and thinker. Likewise, Konstantin Dierks always pushed me to think capaciously and ambitiously. This book would be far less interesting without his unanswerable questions. Additionally, Rebecca Spang, Ben Irvin, and Christina Snyder provided valuable feedback at crucial moments. Thanks to Ed Linenthal, Steve Andrews, and colleagues at the Journal of American History for keeping things light.

Thank you to Bloomington friends, including Adrienne Chudzinski, Mark Durbetaki, Dave Eacker, Justin Ellison, Jenn Haylett, Hannah Craddock Mossman, Fielder Valone, Jon Warner, and Bobby Wells. The Lilly Fellows, especially Laura Carlson, Lauren Eriks Cline, Jessica Criales, Josh Hasler, Karen Kovaka, and Stephen Margheim, sustained me during research trips and conferences and from afar. Thanks to Northampton comrades, including Vanessa Adel, Susanna Ferguson, Matt Ghazarian, Bona Kang, Rachel Newman, Javier Puente, Dan Vahaba, and Stefanie Wang, for helping us to make it through the pandemic.

While writing this book, I benefited from workshops, conversations, fellowships, conferences, Twitter exchanges, and reviewers too numerous to mention. Indeed, this book about falsehood would contain many more inaccuracies without the assistance of a larger community of scholars, editors, and public historians. Unlike my historical subjects, I take full responsibility for the errors that remain. Thank you especially to the participants in the Omohundro Institute Scholars Workshop for two weeks of sparkling conversation. Thank you to the University of Dayton, Indiana University, Smith College, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, and the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America for providing resources that supported this project. Thanks to Ben Carp and Mark Schmeller for their thoughtful comments and suggestions. Thanks to Laura Davulis and everyone at Johns Hopkins University Press for their help and advice. Thank you to my copyeditor, Merryl A. Sloane, for polishing my prose and sparing many future blushes.

I cannot live without dogs. Thank you to my beagles (and writing companions), Dustin and Charlie.

Thank you to my students at Indiana UniversityBloomington, Indiana State University, Indiana UniversitySoutheast, Purdue UniversityNorthwest, and Smith College for challenging me to become a better communicator. Special thanks to Portia Caruso, Eli Cronin, Lena Miller, Elizabeth Sacktor, and Madi Spina for helping me to close the book on Northampton.

But even as I salute the people and institutions that made this book possible, it is worth acknowledging that creating this book has been a difficult journey. Unlike many professional historians, I did not write it as a tenure-track professor, or out of hope that I would one day earn a tenure-track position. Instead, I researched and wrote as a contingent faculty member teaching at several institutions and as an editor working outside of academia. I wrote this book on screens shared with anxious cover letters, sloppy resumes, and a dwindling list of teaching opportunities. A global pandemic didnt help. This book is undoubtedly a product of these contexts.

Ongoing institutional investment would have allowed this research project to blossom in ways that I try not to think about. Unfortunately, US society no longer values higher education or the humanities. Many great historians, including some of my close friends, will never publish their important research because of this shortsightedness. It is a great loss to our shared knowledge of ourselves. That this book has been published, while theirs may never be, is both an accomplishment and a tragedy, a testament more to stubbornness than talent.

One person has made it possible for me to overcome the obstacles of the past few years. My final thanks go to my partner, my wife, my beagle coparent, and my favorite historian, Paula Tarankow. As long as we have been together, she has been my strongest advocate. She used her considerable talents as a listener, thinker, and editor to improve every page of this work. She also understood it years before I did, which was handy. This bookand all that is to comeare for her.