The Printers, Rogues,
and Radicals Who Invented the American Newspaper
A sweeping history of America’s first media revolution—from
colonial print shops to Gilded Age media empires—and the transformation of a fledgling republic into the
world’s first information superpower.
Before chatbots and content farms, the penny press was generating slop at industrial scale. What the nineteenth century can teach us about today’s AI crisis — and what might come next.