Circulation, Subscription, and Circumscription: The Pennsylvania Journal and Newspaper Readership in Revolutionary Philadelphia

How many people read newspapers in early America? This is an important question for historians of the American Revolution, who rely on a model of widespread newspaper readership to explain broadscale political change. Yet given the limitations of the documentary record, addressing this question has required scholars to rely on a great deal of guesswork and anecdotal evidence. Building on an analysis of the subscription books of the Pennsylvania Journal from 1766 through early 1774, in dialogue with two Canadian subscription lists from the late eighteenth century, this essay embarks on a more empirically grounded approach to questions of newspaper readership and subscription in revolutionary America. Newspapers were not, as some have concluded, read widely among all classes. Instead, regular access to newspapers usually coincided with social privilege, in ways that trouble some of the prevailing narratives of political mobilization during the American Revolution.