![]() ![]() ![]() 10, 1776), or the Federalist Papers (1787-88), which “sold” the new Constitution to a skeptical American public. As presses proliferated and the cost of publishing tracts, treatises, commentaries and books declined, an explosion of printed discourse transformed Europe from a hierarchical culture where subordination and deference prevailed and ancient authority was determinative, to a more fluid culture in which previously unheard-of thoughts and ideas could attempt to take their place in what, by the Enlightenment, was called a “free marketplace of ideas.” Just think of the importance in the American Revolution of the Declaration of Independence, first printed on July 4, 1776, the same day it was adopted by the Second Continental Congress, or Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, America’s first bestseller (Jan. Gutenberg and his moveable type printing press. ![]()
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