'Knowledge is Power'

Brown here exlores America's first communications revolution--the revolution that made printed goods and public oratory widely available and, by means of the steamboat, railroad, and telegraph, sharply accelerated the pace at which information travelled.

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One of the leading scholars dealing with early communication history in America, Richard Brown discusses how information moved through eighteenth and nineteenth-century American society, principally through the expansion of the printed word and its change from the property of the learned and wealthy into a mass-audience market.