Patriot, printer, mechanic, editor, and politician, Benjamin Russell emerges as the key newspaper publisher linking eighteen-century revolutionary newspapermen such as Benjamin Franklin, Isaiah Thomas, and William Goddard with the mid-nineteenth-century journalistic giants James Gordon Bennett and Horace Greeley. There is no full-length biography of Russell, but John B. Hench has outlined in his doctoral dissertation the life of the man he calls an archetypal American "joiner." Hench analyzes the bitter newspaper rivalry in Boston between Russell's Centinel and Thomas Adams's Chronicle from 1784 until 1801. Russell's newspaper from 1784 until 1828 reveals a fiery, shrewd, innovative journalist. Russell's interest in politics and social reform parallels Greeley's, even though the explosive reform period in American life did not begin until after Russell had sold the Centinel.

Russell remembered all his life the thrashing that switched his career toward newspapers. On 19 April 1775, when he was thirteen, young Russell and his classmates were dismissed from...