Introduction: Information Wars: Communicating Trust and Suspicion in the Early Republic

This essay introduces a forum about how changes in communication shaped relations of power in the early republic. Historians of ideas, media, and the public sphere have long examined how printers and politicians created and marshaled information to influence public life. The essays in this forum expand that story by looking at different actors—stenographers, bureaucrats, Indigenous intelligence gatherers, and joiners of voluntary associations. Moreover, the essayists take seriously misinformation, lies, and fabrications, as of equal importance to more straightforward forms of news and information.