Chapter 3
The Media and the Road to Modernity
The Media, Revolutions and Nationalism, 1760–1848
During the major revolutions that took place in the late eighteenth and second
half of the nineteenth century, the media experienced a development that was
entirely new and downright explosive. They played a central role not only in
the American War of Independence and the French Revolution but in the
revolutionary upheavals that took place around 1830 and 1848 in Germany
and in Western Europe generally. On the one hand the media fostered the
dynamics of these movements in multiple ways, while on the other the revo-
lutions transformed the media. A systematic comparative study of this mutual
relationship has yet to appear, although some programmatic anthologies do
exist (cf. Grampp et al. 2008).
This interactive relationship was already in evidence during the American
Revolution, which originated in the protests of the North American colonies
against tax increases levied by England. The colonies began by striving for
equal representation and ended by gaining their independence. Research has
shown that the driving forces behind this movement were, for instance, local
committees or patriotic Protestant preachers. However, if one considers what
actually triggered the protests, it becomes apparent that the media played a
crucial role. Thus the tax on printed matter levied by England with the Stamp
Act of 1765 mobilised media protests. The Stamp Act was seen as an attack on
North American newspapers and was consequently combated in many ways:
newspapers printed petitions and readers’ letters voicing their grievances about
the tax; they demonstratively refused to pay it, instead using stamps imprinted
with a skull; and they organised gatherings, notably the ‘Stamp Tax Congress’
of 1765 in New York. In fact the newspapers succeeded in stirring up unani-
mous resistance to this law, which led to its repeal a year later. Thus the media
public became aware of their own power (Sloan and Williams 1994: 123–30).