I was reading A Son of Thunder: Patrick Henry and the American Republic when I realized that political bloggers, far from being a new phenomenon, were an integral part of the national thought life that formented the American Revolution. They may not have been logging onto laptops via wi-fi to change the world, but they were just as subversive, unregulated, influential, and wildly speculative. Sometimes referred to as ‘pamphleteers’, they were often anonymous, took advantage of new media, displayed wide-ranging bias, and used humor as a weapon. Multimedia variants included engravers like Paul Revere, whose inaccurate portrayal of the Boston Massacre still holds great sway.
To read Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, click here.
To read a few current ‘pamphleteers’, check out Polliblogger or Wonkette.