Mr. Pasley is Associate Professor of History at the University of Missouri-Columbia and the author of "The Tyranny of Printers": Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic. He writes the historical punditry column "Publick Occurrences," for Common-Place: The Interactive Journal of Early American Life. In a former life, he was a speechwriter and journalist, working for a formerly liberal journal of opinion that he can now barely stand to read. Many of his historical and journalistic writings, along with some useful and much useless information, can be found on his web site.