Moral electricity--a term coined by American transcendentalists in the 1850s to describe the force of nature that was literacy and education in shaping a greater society. This concept wasn't strictly an American idea, of course, and Ronald Briggs introduces us to one of the greatest examples of this power: the literary scene in Lima, Peru, in the nineteenth century.

As Briggs notes in the introduction to The Moral Electricity of Print, "the ideological glue that holds the American hemisphere together is a hope for the New World as a grand educational project combined with an...