Chapter 4

Quote: “The greater diffusion and fragmentation of power in America produced a wider dispersion of communicative capacities" (p. 146)

Comment: By the early decades of the nineteenth century, the American religious and political print ideology was increasingly heterogeneous. Political divisions and the breakdown of Protestant religion into denominations failed to provide Americans with a textual consensus. Ironically, print itself became the very instrument of fragmentation. Unlike Europe, where secularism was triumphing, in the United States it was a religious momentum that carried with it the rise of print culture. The explosion of print in the 1820s served new waves of evangelical proselytism and indeed generated "a wider dispersion of communicative capacities" fueled by relationship between the print culture and the elite political culture.