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 Researchselected
2026
2024
Media Literacy in the Age of Revolutions
The Age of Revolutions in the Digital Age (Cornell UP) — open access
Fall 2022
Summer 2020
Enquire of the Printer: Newspapers and the Slave Trade
Early American Studies. Winner, Murrin Prize and RSAP Article Prize.
Fall 2019
The Reign of Error: The French Revolution and North American Information Politics
Journal of the Early Republic
In the Mediaselected
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.