American Aurora: The Supressed History of Our Nation's Beginnings and the Heroic Newspaper That Tried to Report It

Despised by presidents George Washington and John Adams, who tried to suppress it, the Philadelphia Aurora, an outspoken newspaper founded in 1790, charged that the Founding Fathers had adopted a British-style constitution to avoid Benjamin Franklin's plan for a true democracy. Rosenfeld, an associate fellow at Yale's Timothy Dwight College, stirringly recreates the Aurora's battles for press freedoms and grassroots democracy by interpolating excerpts from the paper, prickly rebuttals from opposing gazettes, letters, eyewitness accounts and early government documents. Decked out with period engravings and banner headlines, the impassioned, heavily annotated narrative is told as quasi-autobiography in the assumed first-person voice of Aurora editor William Duane, a historian self-exiled from George III's England. His co-editor, ""Young Lightening-Rod"" Benjamin Bache, who was Ben Franklin's grandson and Thomas Paine's publisher, was arrested in 1798 on charges of sedition. Mobs of Federalist supporters attacked his home, where his wife was pregnant with her fourth child. Bache died of yellow fever in prison awaiting trail; Duane continued at the paper's helm until 1822, fighting for Jeffersonian democracy. A crazy-quilt of a book, this time-capsule into a vigorous age of independent journalism significantly revises our understanding of America's beginnings. (Apr.)