I study how people in revolutionary America decided what was true, and what happened when they got it wrong.
The news that mattered most to the peoples of North America arrived by ship, weeks or months after the fact, filtered through printers who could rarely verify any of it. My work follows that news across the Atlantic and into the politics it produced.
In addition to my work as a historian, I am an editor and writer. I’m the Manager of Digital Content for The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. This site is about my personal scholarship, not my work for my employer.
Books
Lately Published
Misinformation Nation
Foreign News and the Politics of Truth in Revolutionary America. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022.
The Revolution is usually told as a story about ideas. This one argues it was also a story about bad information, and about a generation that fought false news at every turn.
Winner, Research Society for American Periodicals Book Prize, 2021–22. Runner-up, Journal of the American Revolution Book of the Year, 2022.
Also at Bookshop.org and
your library.
Coming Soon
Democracy’s Dark Arts
How did America’s founding generation make sense of the problem of truth in representative government?
The book follows about a dozen lives — Samuel Adams and Abigail Adams, Thomas Hutchinson and Thomas Jefferson, and a number of non-Adamses and non-Thomases — through the question of what a republic does when it cannot agree on the facts.
Other Research
Summer 2020
March 2022
What role did winter weather play in early newspaper communication in New England?
New England Quarterly
Fall 2022
Written for general readers
Jan. 2024
Spreading the News
Trend & Tradition
Dec. 2022
July 2020
America’s first newspapers were financed by the slave trade
The Daily Beast
All public writing. I’m glad to hear from editors.
Digital History
I am interested in the use of computational tools to solve storytelling and analytical problems for the study of information media.
See digital projects.
Teaching
Previous syllabi and classroom resources are posted for anyone who wants them.