The Part Played by Bells in the Emergence of American National Consciousness (Top Student Paper).

Following the work of Benedict Anderson, research on the emergence of national consciousness in the US has largely focused on the role of print capitalism. Newspaper circulation, so the story goes, combined with geographically proximate centers of population and commerce to constitute the conditions necessary for inhabitants of the thirteen colonies to imagine themselves as part of a sovereign, limited political community whose members might never meet face to face. Without downplaying print capitalism's pivotal role in the formation of American national identity, this paper foregrounds the part played by bells, a medium whose contributions, to the formation of national identity and the shaping of the social world more generally, have been long overlooked by communication scholarship. At one time, bells composed the score and set the tempo for daily life in colonial America. They summoned listeners for civic and religious meetings, sounded the alarm when danger threatened, marked the hours, and regulated activity at the local level, but they also oriented listeners toward distant political and ecclesiastic communities. As tensions mounted between the British empire and its American colonies, bells played an important role in defining membership in communities, both face-to-face and imagined. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]