Podcast Summary: New Books Network

Episode: Sonia Hazard – Empire of Print: Evangelical Power in an Age of Mass Media (Oxford UP, 2025)

Host: Jacob Barrett
Guest: Dr. Sonia Hazard
Date: January 14, 2026

Episode Overview

This episode features an in-depth conversation with Dr. Sonia Hazard about her book, Empire of Print: Evangelical Power in an Age of Mass Media. The central focus is on how 19th-century American evangelicals, particularly through the American Tract Society (ATS), built a vast media infrastructure to engineer religious influence and national identity. Discussion topics include the mechanics of print distribution, the concept of “media infrastructure,” intersections of race, power, and citizenship, the fragility of institutional power, and contemporary resonances with digital media.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Book’s Central Argument and Historical Focus

[01:59–04:20]

• Dr. Hazard’s book explores how evangelicals in the early United States used mass print—especially through the American Tract Society—to “make the US more Christian.”
• ATS, founded in 1825, was one of the world’s largest publishers, producing over 5.6 billion pages of print by the Civil War.
• Hazard’s argument: The power of evangelical print didn’t simply come from the sheer quantity or persuasive content, but from the media infrastructure behind distribution, materiality, and reception.
• Key point: Infrastructure, rather than merely dissemination, “was a pervasive but underappreciated style of evangelical power in the 19th century.”
  – Sonia Hazard (03:50)

2. The Materiality of Power—Formats and Distribution

[05:27–13:17]

• Media format: ATS deliberately designed tracts as thin, cheap, unbound pamphlets to encourage sharing and accessibility, unlike hefty family Bibles.
  – “The tract was the opposite… the lack of binding was really key for the ATS, and it’s what distinguishes a tract from a book.” [06:32]

• Visual cues (titles, illustrations on the cover) were intentional to arrest a reader’s eye and prompt engagement.

• Circulation was encouraged: Tracts were meant to be passed from hand to hand, tucked into letters, or left in public places—designed for mobility and surprise discovery.

• Prompting vs. Compulsion:
  – “Material format is not force… it’s that muddy middle between force or discipline on the one hand, and nothing, that interests me.” [08:44]

The Role of Colportage

• “Colportage” (from French, adapted by ATS) referred to itinerant book distributors (“colporters”).
• Colporters’ strategy: Spend up to half an hour canvassing at homes, escalate conversations toward personal spirituality, and offer books at peak emotional receptivity.
• The success of this method hinged on forging a memorable, emotional encounter with the reader:
  – “It was really essential that the book kind of come enveloped in this really intense emotional moment that was generated by the colporter.” [11:42]
• Colportage was designed to prompt, not coerce—aligned with Calvinist ideas about gradual conversion.

3. Empire and Infrastructure as Analytical Tools

[14:41–16:45]

• “Empire” in the book’s title refers to both U.S. territorial expansion and the challenge of evangelizing a rapidly growing, far-flung population.
• Infrastructure is the means by which influence traverses space “much like a sewer system or an electrical grid,” not centered in one place but spread across the social and geographic landscape.
• This lens helps analyze the “nitty gritty questions of mechanics”: How was behavior shaped across distance, and how did sprawling material and social systems enable religious influence?

4. Structure of the Book and Scholarly Process

[16:45–21:55]

• The book is structured around three modalities of media infrastructure:
  • Production
  • Circulation (Distribution)
  • Reception
• Hazard describes this structure as emergent, shaped by archival materials as much as deliberate design—mirroring the ATS’s own iterative processes:
  – “There's something about it that starts to get a mind of its own and starts to tell me where things need to go.” [18:45]
• The production-distribution-reception model echoes classic media studies but also tracks chronologically how the ATS adapted its interventions.

5. Race, Citizenship, and the Limits of Print Evangelism

[22:03–29:09]

• The ATS primarily targeted citizens or those with “citizenship potential”—i.e., white Americans deemed central to national transformation.
• Racial boundaries were shaped by ATS’s need to maintain favor with white Southern planters; explicit proselytizing to Black and Indigenous people was rare until abolitionist pressures forced limited change in the 1850s.
• Notable moment: Dr. Hazard recounts a story of a distributor ignoring a Black enslaved woman at the door, focusing exclusively on the white mistress inside:
  – “He never thinks, even for a second, that maybe I should talk to this person who's standing in front of me. He's mostly interested in the white citizen with the power behind the door.” [24:16]
• Marginalized groups, like the Cherokee Nation, sometimes appropriated ATS infrastructure—hiring colporters to canvas their own communities, then terminating the arrangement when ATS overstepped.

6. Fragility and Adaptation of Infrastructural Power

[29:09–34:07]

• At its peak (1858), ATS distributed 9 million tracts annually, employed nearly 800 colporters, and held a budget surpassing many states—yet by 2012, it ceased operations.
• Hazard’s takeaway:
  – “Whatever the ATS was able to accomplish, it was propped up at every moment by an extraordinary amount of effort, sweat equity, and a lot of really random contingency…” [30:46]
• ATS’s power depended on its constant adaptation to shifting audiences and regional dynamics; its decline followed a failure to “stay ahead of the curve.”
• Broader lesson: All infrastructures of power are contingent, fragile, and subject to collapse—“other worlds are possible.” (referencing David Graeber)

7. Rethinking Power: Media Infrastructure as a Theoretical Lens

[34:07–39:44]

• Scholarship on evangelicalism has split between “social control” (elite domination) and “agency” (individual empowerment), which Hazard found unsatisfactory.
• Media infrastructure theory allows for a nuanced “middle” position: recognizing both top-down institutional ambition and the ways individuals could still make choices—shaped but not coerced.
• – “It's not like a culture industry… Rather, it's these fleeting encounters with print media. And those fleeting encounters do wage a power, but it's an infrastructural power. It's a prompting power, not a coercive one.” [38:32]

8. Contemporary Resonance—Media Infrastructure Today

[39:44–44:29]

• Closing the book, Hazard reflects on present-day analogues: tracts tied in trees in Boston Commons, zines, media “ambushing” us unexpectedly, and most pervasively, digital media.
• The dynamics are much more sophisticated and intrusive today:
  – “In some ways, what am I saying, in almost every way, [media corporations] are much more sophisticated than they were in the 19th century, and that should be cause for alarm.” [43:08]
• Infrastructure is still about “producing a product and distributing it in such a way as to attract our attentions and keep them,” often in less visible but more powerful configurations (algorithms, platforms, etc.).

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On ATS’s scale:
  “If you were to put every single page [the ATS published] on its end, it would reach the moon and then halfway back to Earth.” – Sonia Hazard [02:41]

• On material format and power:
  “Material format is not force. It's not a violence backed power... but the work that the tract's format is not nothing either. It's that muddy middle between force or discipline on the one hand, and nothing, that interests me.” – Sonia Hazard [08:44]

• On audience targeting:
  “Citizens were the prize for the ATS because they were the ones who had the power to change the character of the nation... And in this period, the only people who unambiguously possessed citizenship were white.” – Sonia Hazard [23:36]

• On fragility of power:
  “No one social arrangement or ideology is dominant forever, even though it may feel that way when you're inside it... it’s actual real people who are making these decisions, who are propping up the systems that feel inevitable with a great amount of effort.” – Sonia Hazard [33:29]

• On the lessons for today:
  “We live in a time now with media all around, and it's produced by media corporations that are actively scheming to produce a product and distribute it in such a way as to attract our attentions and keep them... infrastructure continues to offer us a vocabulary for why that is true.” – Sonia Hazard [43:08]

Important Timestamps

• [01:59] Book’s central argument & focus on ATS
• [05:27] The material qualities of tracts and their strategic design
• [09:36] ATS distribution strategies and the invention of colportage
• [14:41] Explaining “empire” and “infrastructure”
• [16:45] Book structure: production, circulation, reception
• [22:03] Opening vignette: race, citizenship, and print’s limits
• [29:09] The fragility and eventual decline of the ATS
• [34:07] Theoretical intervention: media infrastructure as a lens
• [39:44] Parallels to contemporary media environments

Conclusion

Dr. Sonia Hazard’s Empire of Print reframes the narrative of 19th-century American evangelicalism by examining the behind-the-scenes mechanics—media infrastructure—that allowed the ATS to shape religious life and national identity at scale. The conversation with Jacob Barrett highlights how intentional design of objects, distribution networks, and even social scripts can yield power that is subtle, persistent, yet always fragile. The episode ties this history provocatively to our present-day experiences with digital and social media, inviting listeners to consider how infrastructures shape our behaviors in unseen but potent ways.