W. Caleb McDaniel, a graduate student in the department of history at The Johns Hopkins University, is not only a blogger at Mode for Caleb and Cliopatria, a group blog for historians, he argues that blogging has a long and distinguished American pedigree. He says that blogs today have much in common with 18th and 19th century reading and journal-keeping practices. So here is a bit of what McDaniel says in: Blogging in the Early Republic: Why bloggers belong in the history of reading

If you scoff at this suggestion, this is probably because you hold this truth to be self-evident: In the course of human events, blogging is the newest of newcomers.

After all, blogs—short for "Web logs"—are Web pages, which means that they cannot be older than the World Wide Web. Moreover, a blog refers to a kind of Web page that has only become widespread in the past five or six years. Blogs are frequently updated pages that list brief, time-stamped posts. These can contain text, links, images, or all of the above. Though seemingly ubiquitous today, the form itself is relatively new, even in the abbreviated history of cyberspace. The term "Web log" was never used until circa 1997, when it was coined to refer to a few dozen journals that were being published online by early Internet users, mainly as annotated lists of links to interesting Web pages.

As these early bloggers began to link extensively to other blogs, the "blogosphere" was born—about fourscore and seven months ago. That makes the career of the blogosphere only slightly older than that of Britney Spears—hardly a hoary age . . .

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[B]y 1850, this scarcity of print had given way to a bewildering abundance—a rapid growth no less impressive in its own time than the exponential proliferation of blogs in the last few years. Newspapers began to crop up not just in major urban areas but in smaller towns, and as print became more abundant, it was also diffused more widely and rapidly, thanks to a transportation revolution fueled by steam, railroads, and internal improvements like roads, canals, and an expanding postal service. These changes were, of course, not unique to the United States, but even foreign travelers to the young nation were awed by its burgeoning print culture. Alexis de Tocqueville, after touring the United States in 1831, wrote, "[W]hen I compare the Greek and Roman republics to these republics of America, the manuscript libraries of the first . . . to the thousand newspapers that crisscross the second . . . I am tempted to burn my books so as to apply only new ideas to a social state so new."

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Indeed, blogging demonstrates the persistence of a key truth in the history of reading, an insight as obvious to Tocqueville as it should be to most bloggers today. The insight is that readers, in a culture of abundant reading material, regularly seek out other readers, either by becoming writers themselves or by sharing their records of reading with others. That process, of course, requires cultural conditions that value democratic rather than deferential ideals of authority. But to explain how new habits of reading and writing develop, those cultural conditions matter as much—perhaps more—than economic or technological innovations. As Tocqueville knew, the explosion of newspapers in America was not just a result of their cheapness or their means of production, any more than the explosion of blogging is just a result of the fact that free and user-friendly software like Blogger is available. Perhaps, instead, blogging is the literate person’s new outlet for an old need. In Wright’s words, it is the need "to see more of what is going on around me." And in print cultures where there is more to see, it takes reading, writing, and association in order to see more.

So, write, er, blog on!