As the book summary says: "Focusing on the years between 1770 and 1870, Loughran develops two richly detailed and provocative arguments. First, she suggests that it was the relative lack of a national infrastructure (rather than the existence of a tightly connected print network) that actually enabled the nation to be imagined in 1776 and ratification to be secured in 1787-88. She then describes how the increasingly connected book market of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s unexpectedly exposed c More...

Loughan's revision of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, which has underwritten American cultural studies since 1983, is truly groundbreaking.