The Bookrunner: A History of Inter-American Relations — Print, Politics, and Commerce in the United States and Mexico, 1800–1830

The historical roles of publishers and booksellers in the dissemination of ideas are often underrated, especially by historians and other observers rooted in the era of the Internet. Nancy Vogeley has researched and written a detailed study of an early nineteenth- century Philadelphia publishing house that printed and sold books and pamphlets for the market of the newly independent Mexico. This work provides a rare microhistorical glimpse into an enterprise that was at once both commercial and intellectual. Influenced by Robert Darnton and Benedict Anderson, Vogeley examines the dispersed but active (and interactive) communities of political leaders, ideological enthusiasts, and book dealers in Philadelphia, other US cities, Veracruz, and Mexico City during the crucial span from 1821 to 1823. The United States had won its independence from Britain four decades earlier and furnished examples of revolutionary activism and nation building that appealed to Mexicans advocating for representative democracy during the...