Introduction

Media have tremendous impacts on society. Most basically, books, newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and the Internet provide us with facts about our world that shape our understanding and our actions: details of political races and sports contests; prices for goods and services; statistics and forecasts about weather and the economy; news of advances in science and medicine; and stories about notable accomplishments, happy occasions, and shameful events. In addition to "just the facts," the media offer us opinions that subtly influence what we know and how we behave: commentaries on politics and the economy; reviews of the arts and literature, entertainment, fashion, and gadgets; praise and criticism of prominent individuals and groups; and advice about health, finances, work, hobbies, romance, and family. Last but not least, the media entertain us with a mix of fact and fiction, both tragedy and comedy. By transmitting facts, opinions, and entertainment, media literally mediate between people, weaving "invisible threads of connection" (Starr 2004: 24) that connect geographically dispersed individuals into cohesive communities whose members share knowledge, goals, values, and principles (Park 1940; Anderson [1983] 1991).

My focus on media leads me away from the view that communities are collections of people with common interests and identities in particular localities (towns, cities, or neighborhoods), which is how urban sociologists tend to define community (e.g., Duncan et al. 1960; Warner 1972; Fischer 1982). I am instead interested in how media like magazines make it possible to build translocal communities — collections of people with common interests, beliefs, identities, and activities who recognize what they have in common but who are geographically dispersed and cannot easily meet face-to-face. Their interactions are literally mediated by media (Tarde 1969; Thompson 1995).

Media support a realm of social life that lies in between the state and the individual, variously labeled "civil society" (Ferguson 1767) or "the public sphere" (Habermas [1962] 1991). This realm of social life is constituted by openly accessible information and communication about matters of general concern; it springs from conversation, connection, and common action. In this realm, people assemble to discuss and engage with politics and public policy, an exercise that is essential for the functioning of democracy. Starting with Alexis de Tocqueville ([1848] 2000), many scholars have argued that the higher the quality of discourse and the larger the quantity of participation in this realm, the stronger the bonds between citizens and the better democracy is served.

But media are involved in many more realms of social life than formal politics. They also deliver educational content in the arts and humanities, the social and natural sciences, medicine and health, business, and engineering and technology; information for people with many different occupations and in many industries; and material designed to appeal to members of particular ethnic groups, religions, and social reform movements, as well as to sports enthusiasts, lovers of literature and the arts, and hobbyists. In all these realms, which lie outside formal politics and which are the focus of this book, media collectively create and sustain diverse communities of discourse, many of which transcend locality and knit together large numbers of people across vast distances. Thus, the development of media helps propel the transition from a traditional society composed primarily of small, local communities to a modern one composed of intersecting local and translocal communities (Higham 1974; Bender 1978; Eisenstein 1979; Thompson 1995; Starr 2004).

I study America because, by the early nineteenth century, the United States was the leader in mass media even though it was sparsely populated and possessed a small, relatively primitive economy (Starr 2004). Moreover, the United States was always an uncertain union. In 1776 it was just barely possible to imagine a federation of thirteen disparate colonies — if not a fully imagined community, then a community of partial inclusion, centered on white male property owners — only because the colonies were strung along the Eastern Seaboard, connected by rivers and the Atlantic, and migration between the colonies had, by the mid-eighteenth century, engendered an intercolonial creole elite whose members shared an "American" mind-set. But even then, the United States was a daring project: an uneasy amalgam of thirteen societies that varied greatly in terms of religion, ethnicity, politics, and economic organization and that were only loosely bound into a federation with a central government whose powers were quite limited. The new nation covered far more territory than any earlier republic and, compounding the difficulties created by distance, it was fringed by a vast wilderness that had not yet been wrested from the grasp of natives or European powers. Political elites fretted that this republic might dissolve (Nagle 1964; Wood 1969; Wiebe 1984). As one founding father neatly summarized the situation, "The colonies had grown up under constitutions of government so different, there was so great a variety of religions, they were composed of so many different nations, their customs, manners, and habits had so little resemblance, and their intercourse had been so rare, and their knowledge of each other so imperfect, that to unite them the same principles in theory and the same system of action was certainly a very difficult enterprise" (John Adams to Hezekiah Niles, 13 February 1818, quoted in Koch 1965: 228–29).

Elites' concern about the fragility of the new nation was well founded. Just three years after the US Constitution was ratified, the Whiskey Rebellion broke out to contest federal excise taxes on distilled spirits. More generally, state legislators quickly began to formulate mercantilist policies to support their own local economies by blocking the inflow of goods and money from other states, based on the assumption that different states in the American "common market" were competing over capital, labor, and entrepreneurial ingenuity (Scheiber 1972). This concern persisted until after the War of 1812. As Henry Adams remarked in his History of the United States, "Until 1815, nothing in the future of the American Union was regarded as settled. As late as January, 1815, division into several nationalities was thought to be possible" (1921: 219).

If the original thirteen colonies could be conceivably, if optimistically, unified into a single society, by the middle of the nineteenth century the task of maintaining national unity was far more...