Sonia Hazard's "Empire of Print"

Sonia Hazard is an assistant professor in the Department of Religion at Florida State University.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Empire of Print: Evangelical Power in an Age of Mass Media, with the following results:

Page 99 is the first page of chapter three, titled “Distance and Distribution’s Exclusions in the West.” It consists of the chapter’s opening paragraphs, which introduce Ornan Eastman’s 1828 appointment as the first “General Agent of the West” for the New York-based American Tract Society, and his sharp criticism that the organization had long neglected areas of the US beyond the Allegheny Mountains. His comments mark the first public acknowledgment that the publisher’s tract distribution efforts were falling short.

The page also explains how ATS leaders viewed the West not only as a geographic area outside the Northeast but as a spiritually deficient missionary field populated by poor, churchless settlers. Many of them were Catholic immigrants, whom they considered vulnerable to superstition and religious error (“the victims of a superannuated and rotten superstition,” “bound hand and foot” by priests!).

The Page 99 Test is not a perfect shortcut. Page 99 introduces the American Tract Society’s distribution struggles, and it captures several of the book’s concerns: the difficulties of national distribution, the vastness of American space, and the chauvinistic assumptions embedded in evangelical publishing. However, it doesn’t capture much about the central argument of the book, which is that the ATS built a “media infrastructure” to distribute evangelical media over distances, and to make that media compelling to readers. The book further posits that media infrastructure was a pervasive but overlooked form of evangelical power in the nineteenth century. The two paragraphs on page 99 are setting up the problem of distance, but do not yet describe the solutions that are the heart of the book. Page 101, which describes some of the ATS’s distribution systems, would be a better shortcut.

I want to say a little more about what the book is about. Nineteenth-century evangelicals believed that print media like tracts and newspapers could change minds and save souls, and they often described that power as an “influence,” something vague and mysterious. I was motivated to write this book because I wanted to explain that mystery. How does print work? How can a printed text change someone's mind? And, moreover, how does it do it over the vast distances that characterized the period’s imperialism?

The book argues that evangelical power lay less in the content of the messages than in the infrastructures that shaped how texts were made, circulated, and read. Writing this book was my effort to explain those mechanics and to rethink the power of texts and religion in the nineteenth-century US.

Learn more about Empire of Print at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue