Soriano demonstrates that coastal Venezuela suffered profound transformations in the wake of the French Revolution in the Caribbean. She thus recovers older narratives that had long connected the Latin American wars of independence to the wider late eighteenth-century Atlantic radical politics and texts.--Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina

The book's major contribution (and argument) stems from late colonial Venezuela's apparent absence of 'formal centers of debate,' such as printing houses, literate societies, and bookshops. Using neglected Venezuelan, Spanish, and US sources such as contraband books, pasquinades, pamphlets, and songs, she [Cristina Soriano] reconstructs the development of what she terms 'semiliterate forms of knowledge,' including rumor, visual media, and orality.--Jesse Zarley, Latin American Research Review

The book's major contribution (and argument) stems from late colonial Venezuela's apparent absence of 'formal centers of debate,' such as printing houses, literate societies, and bookshops. Using neglected Venezuelan, Spanish, and US sources such as contraband books, pasquinades, pamphlets, and songs, she [Cristina Soriano] reconstructs the development of what she terms 'semiliterate forms of knowledge,' including rumor, visual media, and orality.--Jesse Zarley, Latin American Research Review

Cristina Soriano makes an innovative argument about the emergence of the public sphere in Latin America through a fascinating and groundbreaking study of media, culture, and political movements in late colonial Venezuela.--Edward P. Pompeian, Hispanic American Historical Review

Tides of Revolution constitutes an important contribution to the scarcity of research on information circulation in the Americas. One of Soriano's main merits is to document the relevance of multimedia sources in a territory without a printing press. She thus goes well beyond the more limited conception that privileges printed and written materials only.--Kevin Sedeño-Guillén, New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century

Engaging and thought-provoking.
--H-LatAm