In the spring of 1722, a 16-year-old apprentice in a Boston print shop began slipping letters under the door at night, signed by a middle-aged widow named Silence Dogood, who did not exist. The apprentice was Benjamin Franklin. His brother James, who owned the paper, had no intention of printing his kid brother, so Franklin invented a woman and let her say the things he couldn’t. Readers wrote in guessing at the author. No one suspected the boy sweeping the floor.

Franklin would go on to be a printer, a postmaster, a scientist famous across Europe for his electrical experiments and a founder of libraries, fire companies and, in time, of the United States itself. He was the first of a restless American archetype the Old World seldom produced: the private citizen who builds, for himself and at his own risk, the machinery on which a public depends.

Historians have long argued that newspapers, pamphlets and almanacs did more than spread the Revolution. By 1776, when 13 colonies declared themselves independent of the British crown, the revolutionaries had come to see their 13 separate struggles as one continental cause. Two and a half centuries ago that infrastructure was cheap and open. Anyone with a few pounds and a grievance could print a pamphlet and go looking for readers at the nearest coffee house. Thomas Paine had neither money nor standing: a failed corset-maker and dismissed excise officer, he had reached Philadelphia in 1774 with a letter of introduction from Franklin, then in London. Little more than a year later, writing anonymously, he published Common Sense and made independence sayable in plain English. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” he wrote.

The problem with Burnham’s........

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