Benjamin Ponder, Presidential Fellow 2005-2007
Communication Studies (Rhetoric)

From The Graduate School Quarterly, Spring 2005:

Benjamin Ponder is looking at the intersection of history and language from an entirely different angle. His research asks why Thomas Paine's incendiary pamphlet Common Sense had the power to change the tenor of political discourse in colonial America "from aimless consternation to concerted revolution." To do this, Ponder is studying both the text itself and the social context of its readers.

Common Sense, published in early January of 1776, was "far and away the bestselling publication of the period," Ponder says. Laboriously printed by hand, it sold out its first printing of 2,000 copies in two weeks. Endless pirated editions were printed, and Paine's pamphlet spread throughout the colonies. Read and discussed in taverns and coffeehouses from South Carolina to New Hapshire, Common Sense spoke to discontented colonists who until then found very little to unite them across their disparate cultures. "It's as if 30 million Americans today had purchased and read the same book," Ponder says.

In large part, Ponder credits Common Sense's "bare-knuckled arguments, galloping style, and plebian vocabulary" with its success. At the time of the pamphlet's publication, the language of public documents, generally written by and geared to the educated elite, tended toward "esoteric legal arguments and stilted Latinity," according to Ponder. Common Sense , written in plain language understandable to all, had the effect of disseminating its message beyond the elites to artisans and the rest of the "middling" classes, Ponder says. But that is not the whole story.

"Audiences, not authors, ultimately determine the meaning of any text," Ponder says. "I want to know what people in the colonies understood [this document] to mean." To find out, Ponder is looking at the broader economic, material and ideological culture of the time, as reflected in colonial newspapers, magazines and pamphlets published during 1775 and 1776, as well as diaries, letters, and autobiographies of the time.

In the process, Ponder hopes to "open up new pathways for research [and] widen the lens that scholars use to study the American Revolution." Ponder sees the interdisciplinarity of his research and his participation in the Society of Fellows as part of a continuum. Paine, like many other Revolutionary philosophers and writers, dabbled in a wide range of scientific fields. He conducted chemistry experiments and designed one of the first single-span iron bridges in addition to spending long hours in conversations with the most distinguished scientific minds of his day, according to Ponder. "From such societies in Edinburgh and Aberdeen flowed the Scottish Enlightenment," Ponder says.

Ponder's personal intellectual history is something of a microcosm of interdisciplinary questing. As an undergraduate at the University of Arkansas , he studied architecture, classics and communication, followed by a year studying theology and ethics at Regent College in Vancouver . Returning to Arkansas , he earned a master's degree in communication, focusing on organization and technology, and went on to manage data technicians for SBC in St. Louis . Deciding that corporate life was not for him, Ponder returned to the field of communication, this time focusing on rhetoric as a tool for studying public discourse. Ponder chose Northwestern to continue his studies largely because of the strong reputation of its communication studies department. "After looking at a number of programs, I observed that 90 percent of the professors I wanted to work with had gotten their PhDs at NU," Ponder says. "Since I couldn't study with them all, I decided to go to the place that produced them."

"Ben Ponder's dissertation topic speaks to issues in rhetoric, history, literature, and politics, and he is well read in each of those areas," says advisor David Zarefsky. "And he writes and speaks in a way that will make his work accessible and interesting to scholars in other disciplines, while making a strong analytical contribution to his own."