Sonia Hazard discusses her new book, Empire of Print: Evangelical Power in the Age of Mass Media (2025), uncovering how the American Tract Society (ATS) leveraged print media to spread its evangelical message across an expanding nation. One of the era's largest media corporations and a pillar of the benevolent empire, the ATS circulated some 5.6 billion printed pages between its founding in 1825 and the eve of the Civil War. However, it wasn't just the volume of materials that mattered. Evangelicals developed a sophisticated media infrastructure―including publication format, avenues of their movement, and circumstances surrounding their reading―to reach audiences across the country. As a non-coercive yet effective form of power, this infrastructure shaped how, when, and why readers engaged with evangelical texts.
While showing how the ATS became a formidable force in American society during the nineteenth century, Empire of Print opens larger questions about the entanglements among people, things, texts, and institutions, the dynamics of power in a media-saturated world, and the salience of race, class, and region in the distribution and reception of media.
Sonia Hazard, assistant professor of religion at Florida State University, specializes in religions in early national and antebellum U.S. history, as well as media, material texts, and new materialisms. Her first book, Empire of Print: Evangelical Power in an Age of Mass Media (2025), examines the infrastructures of evangelical print culture. Her current project, Christianity and the Book in the Cherokee Diaspora, 1821–1861, extends her interest in media and U.S. empire. She also co-directs More-than-human Religion, an interdisciplinary research initiative at FSU.. She was a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at AAS in 2019 and a Jay and Deborah Last Fellow in 2013-14 and 2017-18. She was a co-leader for Material Religion: Objects, Images, Books, the 2023 seminar for the Center for Historic American Visual Culture and the Program in the History of the Book in American Culture.