Revolutionary Currents: Newspapers, Publicity, and the Imperial Public Sphere, c.1760-1784
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2026-04-17Citation:
Herman, Joel William, Revolutionary Currents: Newspapers, Publicity, and the Imperial Public Sphere, c.1760-1784, Trinity College Dublin, School of Histories & Humanities, History, 2024Download Item:
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The concept of the public sphere has generated significant debate across the varied fields of historical studies. This debate has centred on Habermas's original explanation, and how it failed to comprehend and take into account forces, processes, and features of the cases he sought to describe. One thing that has been almost entirely left out of these discussions of 'The Model Case of British Development' is empire, and the political communities that were part of the expanding imperial state but could never be fully integrated in it. This study examines the processes through which the news connected communities living beyond the realm into an imperial public sphere, but at the same time into developing local public spheres in the eighteenth-century British Empire. Indeed, at the very moment that this imperial public sphere was allowing a new kind of shared political conversation to emerge in the 1760s, local news and associational cultures began to increase the pull of colonial centres of power and destabilize the imperial state.
In exploring these processes, 'Revolutionary Currents' first sets out the emergence of the imperial public sphere in Ireland and the American colonies in wider imperial context. It then shifts to local context, honing in on the cities of Dublin and New York in the 1770s and 1780s in a series of comparative urban case studies. These local case studies chart the very different revolutionary trajectories of the political communities living in these cities, outline the degeneration and collapse of the imperial public sphere, and reveal the ways in which publicity was changing popular politics in urban centres in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. By approaching the period of the imperial crisis in this way a new narrative takes shape - one of dismemberment and fracture, but also one of connection, continuity, and change as 'the news' tied publics to new centres and old ones.
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Author: Herman, Joel William
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Walsh, PatrickPublisher:
Trinity College Dublin. School of Histories & Humanities. Discipline of HistoryType of material:
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