Abstract
As the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, this essay revisits one of the republic’s earliest experiments in mediated nation-building: Mathew Carey’s American Museum (1787–1792). Published in Philadelphia by an Irish immigrant printer formed in the oppositional print culture of late eighteenth-century Dublin, the Museum was conceived not merely as a periodical but as a technology of public formation. It sought to convert revolutionary legitimacy into a civic habit sustained through serial reading, moral pedagogy, and circulation. Drawing on Carey’s correspondence, subscriber networks, editorial negotiations, and the transatlantic movement of texts, the essay situates the American Museum at the intersection of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, sentimental moral philosophy, and the emerging commercial information economy. Carey attempted to domesticate universalist ideals within a distinctly American frame, cultivating what Benedict Anderson would later theorise as an ‘imagined community’ through editorial selection, framing, and repetition rather than through political mobilisation. This project, however, was structurally constrained: democratic aspirations were sustained by elite patronage, uneven payment, and inherited European models of civic virtue. Reinterpreting the American Museum as an early laboratory of American myth-making, the essay concludes by placing Carey’s eighteenth-century ‘information republic’ in dialogue with contemporary media nationhood. The comparison highlights a persistent problem: how national publics are assembled when publicity is economically conditioned, infrastructurally mediated, and politically unstable.