Stephen Campbell

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US, antebellum era, media, politics, and finance

Ph.D. candidate
B.A., University of California Davis; M.A., California State University, Sacramento

Advisor: John Majewski
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I study the intersection of media, politics, and finance in the antebellum era of US history. My dissertation analyzes how newspapers, executive department agencies, and financial intermediaries interacted with public opinion. It uses Andrew Jackson’s conflict with the Second Bank of the United States as a test case to underscore how the American state shaped the business of journalism. The federal government subsidized newspaper circulation through generous postage rates, lucrative printing contracts, and other forms of political patronage. In a trade where consistent profits were notoriously unstable, public subsidies and innovative business techniques assumed critical importance. By subsidizing partisan newspapers, the national state not only prefigured the development of American journalism along certain institutional lines, but it also influenced mass political parties, the public sphere, and voter attitudes. (more...)

While engaging larger questions relating to bureaucratic governance, the foundations of modern journalism, the blurred lines between public and private, and the history of capitalism, this project reframes our traditional understanding of the Bank war with a closer look at media. One intent is to address what one historian called the “collective amnesia” among Americans regarding the importance of state powers in the nineteenth century. Employing an institutional approach while leaving sufficient room for individual agency, it moves beyond older frameworks and puts forth a new periodization of the Bank war. It navigates between previous narratives that have focused on either elite political figures or individuals at the grassroots level, and instead, focuses on the crucial middle men that formed the glue of party development. Newspaper editors emerge as key actors. This emphasis on early media strategies, state institutions, and public-private partnerships properly contextualizes the Bank war within the larger communications revolution and adds to a growing literature that helps us better understand the convulsive politics of the 1830s.