“Wires That Bind: Democracy and Nationhood on the American Periphery, 1877-1914”

My project addresses issues of democratic understanding, local identity, and nationalism on the American periphery in the timeframe from 1877 until the finishing touches of the “long 19th century” at the onset of World War I.

These pivotal decades are often overlooked in discussions about the origin of today's understanding of democracy in America. Yet the Reconstruction Amendments with their unprecedented express endorsement of Congressional authority spoke a clear language of nationalization and concentration of power. This makes the period in and after which they were written the most worthwhile to examine when it comes to looking at the developing comprehension of nation and democracy in the United States.

Small local and amateur papers were the primary news sources for many in this first age of mass communication. They were produced by people who counted themselves among the local elites, and thus had certain notions of nation and democracy that invariably showed in the discourses they shaped. Using those papers, but also personal communications and other writings by the members of these local elites, I will assess what these ideas and ideals meant to people in only recently settled areas of the United States by the beginning of the surveyed time period, how they changed throughout, and how they appeared at the start of the 20th century, when the US emerged as a major power on the world stage.

By conducting a microhistoric study of three towns along the erstwhile Southern Pacific Railroad line, I seek to discover how spreading technology affected and altered discourses among the rural intellectual elites. As telegraph lines tended to spread along railroads to simplify communication during the construction of those roads, both technologies often arrived in a place at the same time. Railroads also simplified the transportation of heavy machinery, such as the printing presses required for newspaper publication. The roads themselves were instruments of nationalization, as they were built on federal lands and with federal aid, following a national wish to bind the country together, eventually making the US a transcontinental as well as democratic “imagined community” for the first time.