The Origins of a Free Press in Prerevolutionary ... - Web Publishing

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When printed material became a part of the lives of an increasing number of
colonial Virginians, the ability to take part in critical discourse about the
government increased. This is not to suggest that the technology of printing was
the sole cause of such a transition. It was rather a critical precursor that was
interdependent on other factors in the social structure. As Eisenstein put it, print is
an agent of change, one of many factors, but one with an apparently subversive
nature. 86 As print enabled and encouraged such discourse to happen, it also aided in
the erosion of the culture of deference and the formation of a culture of dissidence.
Another relevant characteristic of almanac use is that people did not merely
read them, they wrote in
them and made notations
in them. Paper was scarce
and relatively expensive in
the eighteenth-century
colonies, so the pages of
the almanacs offered an
uncommon opportunity to
practice handwriting and
keep notations. Many of
the surviving copies have the owner’s name written on them and notations of when
people were born or died, when a calf was birthed, or when the first snowfall came.
Other issues have check marks in ink next to certain printed verse or sayings, and x
Print Culture in Virginia Society,” 18. See also Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 157,
and Carothers, “Culture, Psychiatry, and the Written Word,” 308-312.
86 Eisenstein, Printing Press as an Agent of Change, and Eisenstein, “On Revolution and the
Printed Word” in Revolution in History, eds. Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986), 191-193.