Protocols of Liberty
Communication Innovation and the American Revolution
320 pages
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13 halftones, 14 line drawings
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6 x 9
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© 2013
The fledgling United States fought a war to achieve independence from Britain, but as John Adams said, the real revolution occurred “in the minds and hearts of the people” before the armed conflict ever began. Putting the practices of communication at the center of this intellectual revolution, Protocols of Liberty shows how American patriots—the Whigs—used new forms of communication to challenge British authority before any shots were fired at Lexington and Concord. To understand the triumph of the Whigs over the Brit-friendly Tories, William B. Warner argues that it is essential to understand the communication systems that shaped pre-Revolution events in the background. He explains the shift in power by tracing the invention of a new political agency, the Committee of Correspondence; the development of a new genre for political expression, the popular declaration; and the emergence of networks for collective political action, with the Continental Congress at its center. From the establishment of town meetings to the creation of a new postal system and, finally, the Declaration of Independence, Protocols of Liberty reveals that communication innovations contributed decisively to nation-building and continued to be key tools in later American political movements, like abolition and women’s suffrage, to oppose local custom and state law.
Eric Slauter, University of Chicago
“William B. Warner’s profoundly learned and well-timed Protocols of Liberty provides readers with a distant mirror for our own moment, returning us to the conditions of communication that determined the course of ‘Whig’ politics in the 1760s and 1770s and made the American Revolution possible. Built upon the close scrutiny of printed sources and making excellent use of generations of scholarship, Warner’s book patiently reconstructs the political networks and nodes of revolutionary America. In doing so, he provides a pointed and much-needed synthesis, bringing together what we know about the various communicative practices of the period to tell a new story about the modernity of eighteenth-century politics.”
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History: American History
Literature and Literary Criticism: American and Canadian Literature | British and Irish Literature
Political Science: American Government and Politics
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