Empire of Ink: The Printers, Rogues, and Radicals Who Invented the American Newspaper (2026)

A lively recent guide to how America became a nation of newspapers. Wright concentrates on the nineteenth century, when the number of American papers grew roughly five hundredfold between the Revolution and the early twentieth century, and fills it with printers, editors, reformers and chancers rather than dates and circulation tables. It ends as syndicates and wire services take over, so it sets up the big-city newsroom stories of the twentieth century neatly.