SOME DEGREE OF POWER: Preindustrial American Printing Trades, 1778-1815 [Hardcover]

MARK LAUSE (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 261 pages
• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press; 1ST edition (July 1, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1557281858
• ISBN-13: 978-1557281852
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,611,501 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Mark A. Lause (1950- ) was born to a family of trade unionists at Washington, Missouri, and grew up interested in labor and in history. The political unrest of the 1960s deepened these concerns. Graduating from the University of Missouri-St. Louis, he took advanced degrees at Chicago from Roosevelt University and the University of Illinois. After teaching at various institutions, he is currently a full professor of history at the University of Cincinnati.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Union Printer's World, June 12, 2001

By 

Janine C. Hartman (University of Cincinnati) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: SOME DEGREE OF POWER: Preindustrial American Printing Trades, 1778-1815 (Hardcover)

"Some Degree of Power" is a close examination of primary sources from the American revolutionary printing trade, and is the first coherent attempt to create a database of the active, political American working class. The project antedates Sean Wilentz's "Chants Democratic", and undertakes a larger mission.

Dr Lause recovers, from their own voices, the political life and discourse of the radical printing elite of the Atlantic Enlightenment. This book tracks the employment, political associations, publications, military and revolutionary activity of almost one thousand printers from the eighteenth into nineteenth century.

He demonstrates that workers were articulate, organised and made their own significant contributions to civic culture and political events, other than as "the crowd in history." It is evident from this work that printers were the literate and organising elite among workers in the eighteenth century as weavers and masons were in medieval work forces. This corrects the concept of worker as "tool of the bourgeoisie, and follows the interpretive tradition of E.P.Thompson.

If you want to know what early American printers read,wrote, and believed, and what they did as citizens, this is your portal into their world.

3 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A True American Patriot, March 7, 2001

By 

Paul R. Moran "Plan-Hatcher" (Cincinnati, Ohio) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: SOME DEGREE OF POWER: Preindustrial American Printing Trades, 1778-1815 (Hardcover)

...Some Degree of Power is a detailed study and an enlightening look at printers and their many plights and subsequent importance in the early history of The United States. The meticulous care and lengthy detail that have gone into the book, as well as copious research, make it a must-read for those interested in broadening their perspective of early American history. The author, Lause, seems to be a true patriot in the American Colonial sense, and not a detractor of America. Lause's sources reflect top-notch research and no errors of substance can be found.