American Intelligence: Small-Town News and Political Culture in Federalist New Hampshire is the product of Ben P. Lafferty's interest in “how information, in the form of newspapers, traveled around the Federalist-era United States” (7). The author explores “rates of transmission” (8), “communication network[s],” (9), and the extent to which readers contributed to the content of New Hampshire newspapers between 1790 and 1800. Lafferty selected New Hampshire because of the geographical distribution of extant newspapers, the state's high literacy rate (about 90 percent), and its support for the Federalist Party. Most previous work on the press during this period focuses on large cities and Democratic-Republican papers.
While there was no technological revolution in the “manufacture or distribution” (213) of newspapers and no improvement in print quality in the 1790s, there were other significant changes during the decade. The number of newspapers in New Hampshire increased at a rate faster than the...