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

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"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.

...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.