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Economy (1990); Ronald Shaw, Canals for a Nation (1990); and Carter Goodrich, ed., Canals and American Economic Development (1961). Robert G. Albion, The Rise of New York Port (New York, 1939) is a classic. The lives of the workers who dug North American canals are described in Peter Way, Common Labour (1993).
    On the communications revolution and its political and economic implications, Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (1995) is a broader study than its title might suggest. Also valuable are Allan Pred, Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information (1973); Richard Kielbowicz, News in the Mail (1989); Gerald Baldasty, The Commercialization of News in the Nineteenth Century (1992); Richard D. Brown, The Strength of a People: The Idea of an Informed Citizenry (1996); and Donald Cole, A Jackson Man: Amos Kendall (2004). On literacy and its consequences, see William Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life (1989); Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power (1989); and Dan Headrick, When Information Came of Age (2000). The cultural implications of mail are explored in David Henkin, The Postal Age (2006). For newspapers, see William Huntzicker, The Popular Press (1999); Bernard Weisberger, The American Newspaperman (1961); Rosalind Remer, Printers and Men of Capital (1996); Robert C. Williams, Horace Greeley (2006); and Jonathan Sarna, Jacksonian Jew: The Two Worlds of Mordecai Noah (1981). A fine study of the mechanization of paper-making, so important to the expansion of print, is Judith McGaw, Most Wonderful Machine (1987). For interaction between the communications revolution and religion see Candy Gunther Brown, The Word in the World (2004); Wayne Fuller, Morality and the Mail in Nineteenth-Century America (2003); Leonard Sweet, ed., Communication and Change in American Religious History (1993); David Reynolds, Faith in Fiction (1981); and David Paul Nord, Evangelical Origins of Mass Media in America (1984) and Faith in Reading (2004).
    The best places to learn about Morse and his telegraph are: Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media (2004), chap. 5; Kenneth Silverman, Lightning Man: The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse (2003); David Hochfelder, “Taming the Lightning: American Telegraphy as a Revolutionary Technology” (Ph.D. diss., Case Western Reserve University, 1999); Menahem Blondheim, News over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844–1897 (1994); James Carey, Communication as Culture (1989), chap. 8; Richard R. John, Spreading the News (1995); and Jill Lepore, A is for American (2002), chap. 6. A lucid popular account is Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet (1998). Also helpful are Lewis Coe, The Telegraph (1993); George Oslin, The Story of Telecommunications (1992); Daniel Czitrom, Media and the American Mind (1982), chap. 1; Brooke Hindle, Emulation and Invention (1981), chaps. 4–6; and Robert Thompson, Wiring a Continent (1947). For the effects of telegraphy on accurate timekeeping, see Ian Bartky, Selling the True Time: Nineteenth-century Timekeeping in America (2000). An excellent work on Morse as a painter is Paul Staiti, Samuel F. B. Morse (1989).
    Partly because of the communications revolution, nineteenth-century history throughout the Western world concerned public opinion as never before. Readers with a taste for German social theory can explore this subject through Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere , trans. by Thomas Burger (1989; first pub. in German in 1962).
    Some of the finest political history written about this period consists of state and local studies that transcend their seemingly narrow focus. Of broad interest are Lee Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (1961); Ronald Formisano, The Birth of Mass Political Parties, Michigan, 1827–1861 (1971) and The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts, 1790s–1840s (1983); Gerald