American Aurora
Richard Rosenfeld's dramatic epic traces the incendiary history of the young American nation in the 1790s, and chronicles the birth and near-death of civil liberties in that turbulent decade. Rosenfeld, who has exhaustively examined the Philadelphia Aurora, has chosen as his heroes its two young editors, Benjamin Bache, Benjamin Franklin's grandson, and William Duane, who fearlessly waged a decade-long campaign to keep America's Founding Fathers true to their original mission. They claimed that George Washington was not the true "father of his country," but a completely incompetent commander-in-chief, and that John Adams, his presidential successor, wanted a monarchy and was plotting to be king. As a result of their inflammatory articles, both editors were arrested. Bache died awaiting trial, and the paper was briefly silenced. Nonetheless, the Aurora was eventually successful in persuading the nation to oust Adams and to usher in a Jeffersonian democracy, of which Benjamin Franklin, the true father of our country, could only dream.
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What Hacker News says
- You keep saying "peer review" but I'm not sure how it applies here. The main way information was distributed in the era of the Federalist Papers was through newspapers, and at the time newspapers were almost entirely enterprises set up by political activists to advance the line of their particular faction. The Federalist Papers were written by several prominent members of the Federalists (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_Party), a movement that would go on to become the first real American political party, and published anonymously in Federalist-leaning newspapers. There was no "peer review" in the sense of any of their opponents reviewing them before publication.
If you want a good sense for what newspapering was like in the early American republic, I highly recommend Richard Rosenfeld's book American Aurora (https://www.amazon.com/American-Aurora-Democratic-Republican...), the story of a newspaper that opposed the Federalists and the price its editor paid for that opposition.
- The letters of most of the major figures of the time are publicly available, as are the newspapers of the era via Google Books and other free, online resources. I highly recommend reading as much as you can. That's a lot of reading, so if you want a shortcut, I'd recommend the book "American Aurora." It is essentially a selection of newspaper articles, Federalist and Democratic-Republican both, and letters, concatenated to form a narrative. You should, however, keep in mind that it is intentionally slanted towards the Democratic-Republicans.
> I feel like Washington is extremely venerated, which makes me a bit suspicious. It's not quite a cult of personality like Stalin but nobody's perfect.
The cult of personality around Washington was quite deliberately engineered and some of his contemporaries - some even nominally his friends - privately lamented that someone (in their eyes) so awful would be, for all ages, venerated as a great man and a hero, but they regarded it as necessary that the nasty infancy of the country would be glossed into something more noble. (I do think his contemporaries judged him too harshly, but things always look different centuries later.)
- I think this is inseparable from the current fake news controversy. The US Government to the rescue, in the same manner as the 1950's Red Scare, and the 1790's.
H.R. 5181, which passed Congress and awaits the President, gives the USGOV $20 million to allocate to companies, NGO's and other institutions to correct anything it deems misinformation on the internet.
H.R. 6393, not yet passed will Give the USGOV additional authorities to choose which news it deems to be misinformation and to take action.
I can't recommend enough Richard Rosenfeld's "American Aurora", or because its over 900 pages long this mixed review: http://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?ar...
Striking is the similarity in vitriol, personal smears and false allegations among papers in the 1790's and the internet today. We're doomed to repeat past mistakes and learn over again past lessons. This manufactured crisis will be no different.
