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  • Theorizing Early American Information Culture:From Communication Frontier to Network Analysis
  • Trish Loughran (bio)
Katherine Grandjean. American Passage: The Communications Frontier in Early New England. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015. 320 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, and index. $29.95.
William B. Warner. Protocols of Liberty: Communication Innovation and the American Revolution. University of Chicago Press, 2013. 320 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, notes, and index. $48.00.

Katherine Grandjean and William B. Warner in many ways perform a two-step here, in a pair of books that describe, in great detail, how information circulated in early America. Grandjean works on the settlement period in New England (though her story expands at times to include much of the Northeast and the global doings of several European empires). Warner follows the story out the other side of the temporal “passage” that Grandjean sets up so well, focusing on the late eighteenth-century period of early nation building.

Grandjean’s account of how information circulated in seventeenth-century New England starts with a preface titled “Footprints,” which tells the story of a small group of English travelers lost in 1638. Each chapter is grounded in some similarly simple yet richly recovered materialist base—footprints, Indian paths, corn, stone mile markers, canoes, horses, roads, and bridges are pieces of a landscape that all carry both empirical and symbolic weight in a carefully crafted story of how New England got from point A to point B—from a scattered group of disconnected settlements to a densely settled Yankee homeland.

Chapters are loosely chained in a narrative arc that reaches across the seventeenth century, yet each has a discrete focus that brings into view the complicated relations among contending groups: the English, the Dutch, the French, and a range of Native nations. Chapter one focuses on the 1630s, using the Pequot War as a backdrop to tell a story about hunger, isolation, and the fragile ways the English tried to stay connected to one another on water (usually in Indian-made canoes), at a time when their Algonquian enemies and allies still controlled the dry land. Here, the death of a trader in his boat becomes [End Page 11] enough to make the English feel the precariousness of their position, leading to corn raids designed both to punish the Pequots and feed hungry settlers.

Chapter two further emphasizes the limits of early English power and mobility, focusing on the importance of Indian allies and servants in carrying letters across the dotted European landscape between the 1630s and 1650s. When news of John Winthrop’s death spread in 1648, for example, it went by way of Indian courier—the fastest, most reliable, and most secure way to send messages or news of any kind. Here, in one of the best chapters in the book, Grandjean recreates the stuff of these letters—right down to the paper, the ink, and the wax—but also traces something far more difficult to recover: their circulation by often nameless couriers whose presence is nevertheless clearly marked in the letters themselves.

Chapter three shifts attention to Dutch-English hostilities in the 1650s and specifically to the fear of a Dutch and Narragansett plot against New England in 1653. While this chapter narrows its timeframe significantly, it expands the book’s geographic and cultural scope to Dutch New York, exploring the ways that tenuous communication created the condition for the circulation of rumors and paranoia against the backdrop of global imperial conflict. More importantly, it suggests Native agency, less in any actual plot (none of which ever materialized) than in stoking fears among the English of a Dutch-Indian alliance. To theorize this, the chapter focuses on how rumors circulated in and across many languages (English, Dutch, Iroquian, Algonquian) in the polyglot Northeast. While many scholars emphasize mistranslation, this chapter theorizes the ease with which stories of uncertain origin managed to circulate across language gaps and the ways that Indian speakers, in particular, nimbly exploited such moments..

Chapter four details early fitful attempts to establish an official post in the 1670s, against the backdrop of continuing hostilities between the Dutch and the English, both in the Northeast and globally. The first real colonial post was...

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