One of the leading scholars dealing with early communication history in America, Richard Brown discusses how information moved through eighteenth and nineteenth-century American society, principally through the expansion of the printed word and its change from the property of the learned and wealthy into a mass-audience market.

Richard D. Brown, Professor of History, University of Connecticut

""There may be no better way to comprehend the deluge of daily information under which we exist than to turn the clock back to early America. Richard D Brown's analysis of information networks in New England and Tidewater Virginia provides the context that places our current information explosion in perspective. A professor of history at the University of Connecticut, Brown derives the bulk of his data from selected diaries, journals, and letters....The book is an immensely readable portrait of early Americans, the product of a writer in control of his material. it is a story of both the small and great, engaged in the formation and diffusion of information." Journalism Quarterly"