As cultural authority was reconstituted in the Revolutionary era, knowledge reconceived in the age of Enlightenment, and the means of communication radically altered by the proliferation of print, speakers and writers in eighteenth-century America began to describe themselves and their world in strikingly new ways.

A Speaking Aristocracy deepens our understanding of these sweeping changes by grounding them in a local context: the intellectual culture at Yale College and the world of public speech and writing in eighteenth-century Connecticut.

Using biographical case studies and drawing on hundreds of printed and manuscript sources - including sermons, essays, speeches, letters, journals, plays, poems, and newspaper articles - Christopher Grasso elucidates the complex and changing relationships among religion, politics, law, science, and literature.