I’m a historian of the American Revolution and the Atlantic world, working on the Age of Revolutions, media and politics, and the histories of truth and falsehood.
The common thread is how information moved through space — and what happened to it along the way. I’m interested in the material and social history of the eighteenth-century news trade: how newspapers participated in the slave trade, the lives of newspaper carriers, who actually read the papers, and how weather and the sailing season governed what Americans could know.
If you can’t get past a paywall on anything below, write to me and we’ll figure something out.
Book
2022
Misinformation Nation: Foreign News and the Politics of Truth in Revolutionary America
How foreign news — much of it false — drove the politics of the Revolution. Reconstructs the networks that carried information from abroad, and the story of how Americans made sense of the flood.
2026
Democracy’s Dark Arts
The Founders and the problem of truth in a republic.
Articlespeer-reviewed
2022
Hiding in Paine Sight: Jonathan Shipley’s Forgotten Bestsellers and the Print Culture of the American Revolution
The second-most popular pamphleteer of the era has been almost entirely forgotten — because his work was pragmatic rather than ideological, and so doesn’t fit nationalist narratives of the Revolution.
2022
All the Old Dudes Carry the News: Carrier Addresses, Inequality, and the Privileges of Newspaper Subscription in Eighteenth-Century North America
Who read newspapers? According to the carrier addresses, through which newspaper printers poetically addressed their subscribers, the world of newspaper readership in eighteenth-century North America may have been more narrow than we have supposed.
2022
Circulation, Subscription, and Circumscription: The Pennsylvania Journal and Newspaper Readership in Revolutionary Philadelphia
Built from the Journal‘s subscription books, 1766–74. Newspapers were not read widely across all classes; regular access tracked social privilege, which troubles the standard account of political mobilization.
2022
Now is the Winter of Our Dull Content: Seasonality and the Atlantic Communications Frontier in Eighteenth-Century New England
When temperatures dropped, ships stopped arriving and foreign intelligence dried up. The material origins of a literary culture.
2020
Enquire of the Printer: North American Newspaper Printers, Advertising, and the Moral Economy of the Slave Trade, 1704–1807
Printers created the conditions that let local and regional slave-trading networks flourish. Winner of the John M. Murrin Prize and the RSAP Article Prize.
2020
The Literati and the Illuminati: Atlantic Knowledge Networks and Augustin Barruel’s Conspiracy Theories in the United States, 1794–1800
The Illuminati scare read not as paranoia but as a reasonable conclusion under the era’s own epistemological norms.
2019
The Reign of Error: The French Revolution and North American Information Politics, 1789–1795
Why Canadians and Americans experienced the same revolution so differently: Americans read news direct from France, Canadians read Francophobic reports from London.
Book Chapters
2026
Radicalism and Reaction
The Cambridge History of the American Revolution, vol. 3
2024
Media Literacy in the Age of Revolutions
The Age of Revolutions in the Digital Age — open access
Data& digital work
Topic modeling, text mining, mapping, and network visualization — used to trace how information moved. The datasets are public.
Dataset
Newspaper-Brokered Slave Trade Advertisements
Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation — the quantitative database behind the Early American Studies article
Exhibit
Maps
Animated citation maps
North American newspapers’ foreign citations by city, 1755–1804. Discussed in Sharon Block’s WMQ essay on digital early America.
Dataset
Eighteenth-century newspaper mottoes
By decade. Resulted in an essay in the Journal of the American Revolution.
Ongoing
Recovering Haitian Revolutionary Print Culture
Using U.S. newspaper reprints to reconstruct an archive of papers published in St. Domingue during the Haitian Revolution. An ongoing, long-stalled project.
More on the digital history page.