INTRODUCTION:

Communication and the American Crisis

This introduction describes the pivotal role of communication within the political crisis that culminated in Revolution. On the day after the Boston Massacre, the Boston town meeting used certain techniques to compel the royal governor to remove troops from the town: an emergency town meeting, a resolve or "vote" of the town that was delivered by a committee, expresses to nearby towns that precipitated a mass mobilization, and, in subsequent days, an elaborate machinery of publicity. On that day, Britain’s project of imperial reform, which had been carefully developed by the ministry and Parliament after 1763, confronted the constituents of Boston’s independent economic and political power, as it had developed since first settlement. Instead of telling the Revolution through founders, ‘the people,’ or the history of ideas, this book understands the Revolution as mediated by a new associational practice (the committees of correspondence), a new genre (the popular declarations), a communication infrastructure (the newspaper distributed by post) that was open and public, and the protocols that regulate each of these. This account allows us to grasp the Revolution as an event in the history of communication.