To judge from the Concord collection, the public forum of antebellum America was no model of democratic deliberation.

For Jones and Allen, the problem was not a lack of information, but stubbornly partial accounts of that information.

Martin’s confession relates outlaw adventures that appear to be original. But were they real? 

Poe’s work reminds us that the separation of “Arts” and “Sciences” into discrete discourses of knowledge is itself a quite recent invention.

Especially in the early years, with no grammar books or dictionaries of spoken languages, missionaries relied heavily on their cultural know-how and linguistic expertise and came to learn about the nuances of Armenian culture through them.

Pet of the Petticoats extends the reach of Anglo-Atlantic anti-Catholicism to the stage, illustrating the ways its tropes and anxieties moved across genres and into sentimental stage comedy.

Cathcart’s moves through the slave hierarchy to a position of relative comfort and prosperity were accomplished partly through his ability to navigate—or manipulate—complex relationships and partly through the power of literacy.

Since I hadn’t found Memoir in the likely places based on the finding guide, I began going systematically, folder by folder, through the fifty boxes, more than a few of which still at that time contained bundles of Jenks’s many sermons inside, wrapped in wastepaper exactly as they had been when deposited at the library.

Cridge’s American utopia did not singularly hinge on technological innovation or economic equality. It was a comprehensive achievement that combined political and economic equality with women’s autonomy and health.

Brothel guides tended to be small, making them easy to conceal. They also mimicked other types of publications to make it easier to hide the guides’ true purpose.

By making pirate stories dramatic and exciting, Ellms transformed pirates from news objects and historical actors to distinctly literary characters.

Rather than seeking to extinguish the humanity of its victims, slavery rather invests in, and relies upon, their human capacity for suffering.

In “Learning to Read,” Harper prompts critical attention to textual materiality by depicting enslaved characters who advance their own literacy by exploiting white cultural expectations about the proper look of reading material.

In the early republic, social media had its own crucial importance, although what the media employed was not the tweet, but little bits of pasteboard.

In the crested buttes and slot canyons of the Internet that comprise the academic blogosphere, pseudonymity has been controversial.

The success of miscellanies such as Littell’s Living Age depended on the U.S. Congress’s repeated refusal to pass an international copyright law and on the cultural prestige of foreign periodicals.

[BLOGITORIAL NOTE: Just to model the true spirit of democratic pluralism, we wanted readers to know up front that today’s […]

Though The Wide, Wide World is probably not familiar to many people today, the concerns and claims of these fan letters, rather remarkably, may be.

In this 1861 story, white society treats a teenaged African American postal rider with dignity and respect.

From Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century. Copyright 2016 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Press.
Winner of the 2018 Children’s Literature Association’s Honor Book Award

The racial agenda preserved in nineteenth-century print culture resonates with contemporary U.S.-Mexico relations.

As Americans looked westward for new territory, many viewed mixed-raced Mexicans and their Roman Catholic religion as inferior and incompatible with the Anglo-Saxon Protestant republicanism that was fated to sweep the continent.

The ways that maps and boundaries failed to match actual landforms often had momentous historical consequences

Combining Revolutionary politics with the social and cultural valences of gender, race, class, nation, and power, this political cartoon serves as a multidimensional cipher which people at every knowledge level can participate in analyzing.

“As a result of their proximity to legal proceedings, many tavern keepers worked as common lawyers in addition to running their hostels.”

One of the most common printed images of the first half of the nineteenth century was also the one of […]

At a slim forty-seven pages and mere twenty centimeters high, the weightiest thing about the 1770 book, Directions for the […]

John Fea argues that the American Bible Society was an eminently American institution that sought to build a Christian nation.

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

By changing the head, the coat, and the background building, the publisher could quickly produce a dignified presidential image with all the expected components of high office.

Jefferson quoted in Greek to substantiate a racial hierarchy by linking racial identity and classical learning, but the Greek in that quotation has been plagued by errors.

Brothel guides’ positive descriptions of well-behaved, mannered, self-conscious brothelgoers suggested that if such genteel, respectable men allowed themselves to enjoy the sexual pleasures for sale in American cities, then why couldn’t the reader himself?

It is not hard to imagine the allure of such a work for readers—modest or otherwise—for it provided a rare detailed discussion of sex.

Newspapers have included a letter to the editor section as a public forum for debate for as long as they have circulated, yet we remain divided on how to read them.

Postbellum Teenage Subculture and the Amateur Press

Ink covers much of the wood work, various parts have been gouged by nails or other sharp tools, the bar handle has been smoothed by the hands of many journeymen printers, and overall the press has the worn but proud look of an old veteran.

Magazines warrant fresh analysis that will enable readers to understand “the modernization of America.”

Focusing attention on the various “temporal markers” in each text, Weinstein reveals the ways the novels in her archive unsettle straightforward chronology and leave time in disarray.

“It is clear even to my own inexpert eye that the penned inscription “by Clement C. Moore, A.M.” is not written in Moore’s rather distinctive hand.”

Historians are finally coming to realize that diet, the production of and commerce in foodstuffs, and cookery are not only important but are actually defining characteristics of a nation’s culture.

Of all aspects of food history, recipes are the most difficult to interpret.

Bon appétit!

These texts show how Anglo-Americans learned to love their walls and fences.

Impulsive and volatile, brave and rapacious, the pirates who came to life on the pages of Bucaniers of America served up an alternative model of manliness.

As a result of her exemplary efforts, McCaskill has given us not only our richest account of the Crafts’ remarkable lives but also made a significant contribution to African American print culture broadly construed.

In Abolitionist Geographies Martha Schoolman challenges the dominant maps of nineteenth-century American literary studies.

Anthony’s readings focus on texts where professional male figures seek some form of psychological compensation for the threats to their manhood posed by the potential for financial instability.

Nazera Sadiq Wright’s Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century is an exemplar of well-researched and innovative scholarship, an exciting book for scholars of early African American literature and beyond.

has had great power, and not just for colonial domination, yet one doesn’t want to reduce all minority communications history to the same story.

Even as New York was becoming an evangelical power center, it nevertheless also remained a foil against which ministers committed to the New England ideal of village life—homogenously white and Protestant—could rant and rail.

The main tale is a cautionary one, although it turns not on the dire consequences of legislating morality but instead on the futility of such attempts.

The challenge facing New Yorkers in Columbia County was how to make the political order legitimate in the eyes of those Americans who either lacked the vote or lacked the right to own the land they labored.

… when you visit Digital Paxton—which you can do from your desktop or your smartphone—you’ll automatically enter the introductory path.

If newspaper producers had aspirations to grandeur in their self-presentation, readers took a somewhat dimmer view.

The Fabrication of American Literature is a long-overdue examination of the antebellum practice of “puffing” books, or shamelessly promoting them for […]

“Does history, as currently written, represent only one-fifth of lived experience?”

The extensive republic was a deliberate creation in the realm of print.

The heart of Fagan’s argument concerns how black newspapers transmitted, shaped, and fostered the myriad “practices of a dynamic black chosenness,” a powerful ideological tradition linking the experiences of black Americans with God’s chosen nation.

Winiarski is primarily interested in the impact of the introduction of popular religion on New England. It will come as no surprise to scholars of the Great Awakening that he highlights the role that the 1740 arrival of Grand Itinerant George Whitefield played in unsetting an already religiously fractious New England.

Miller’s book centers on the queerness of suffering, theorizing modes of abjection that destabilize and shift sexual and racial identifications.

Wigginton reveals the many different kinds of American women—including women of color, lower-status women, and dissenting or exiled women—who participated in the public dialogues that helped to constitute an American sense of national identity.

Gretchen J. Woertendyke unsettles and unmoors our geographic conceptions, whether arranged by nation, region, continent, or hemisphere.

Many of the essays in Dillon’s and Drexler’s book focus on incidents of “obscured interdependence,” moments when the United States’s very attempts to distance itself from Haiti reveal the presence of a deep and abiding, if disavowed, relationship between the revolutionary neighbors.

Cohen looks at how readers forged social connections through poems—by reading them aloud, recopying them, buying and selling them.

Silverman is concerned with reading writ large: her analysis is not tied to particular genres, genders, races, localities, or ages, as is often the case in more deeply historical studies.

Beginning with Thomas’ initial gift of 2,650 titles, the research library currently boasts nearly 750,000 volumes, over 2 million newspaper issues, as well as large collections of periodicals, graphic arts, children’s literature, and manuscripts.

“We Used to Wait,” the second single from Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs (2010), begins like most of the songs on the record—with a […]

The Marquis de Lafayette visited Lexington, Kentucky, in May 1825 as part of his triumphal tour of the United States, […]

Culture in the Age of the […]

Modern seeks a difficult balance: he simultaneously looks to explain the methods, meanings, and effects of secularism in the antebellum United States and to assert that its discursive presence could never achieve its own universalizing goals.

These poems and images are the result of a sort of excavation of my paternal grandmother’s well-worn Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book (copyright 1950, and how!).

By dispensing with the notion that there is a master text or a master figure capable of standing for fugitive or free African America, Chaney’s analytic strategy parallels the experiences and perspectives of his subjects.

While readers may remain unconvinced that Fenno or Duane should share the spotlight with Thomas Jefferson, this book makes it abundantly clear that they were not bit players.

“It is with great pain we observe a species of libel has already appeared in our country in imitation of the abominable and licentious practice of the lower English, commonly called caricature, in which the unhappy object of abuse is exposed to vulgar derision…”

Jodi Schorb extends and revises the historiography of literacy, punishment, and incarceration during the long eighteenth century in British North America and the early United States.

Five unpublished letters (1825–1830) reveal the ornithologist’s dream and how he (almost) achieved it

Matthew Garrett, Episodic Poetics: Politics and Literary Form after the Constitution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 256 pp., $65. Matthew Garrett’s […]

Sponsored by The Chipstone Foundation.

Thinking about books as objects that were processed, stored, and packaged by industrialists (I use the term advisedly, instead of “printer”) like Isaiah Thomas helps re-orient the way we think about literature in early America.

Michael Millner’s Fever Reading begins with the appealing idea that it “seeks to understand the meanings of reading badly” (xiii). […]

More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle placed “spectacle” (opsis, that which is seen) dead last in importance among the […]

There’s an old military proverb: No army ever rode into battle shouting fine distinctions. In Philip Gould’s Writing the Rebellion, […]

When I was a teenager in Catholic school developing a sense of political consciousness, I fixated on the Apostle Jude, […]

Kelly A. Ryan’s work, Regulating Passion: Sexuality and Patriarchal Rule in Massachusetts, 1700-1830, explores the intersections of patriarchal power and […]

Scalping survivors were visual evidence for the narratives the nation wanted to tell itself.

In these accounts Washington did not add “So help me God” to the oath. In fact, no account of his inauguration, either contemporaneous or later, has Washington saying “So help me God”—until 1854.

The satire’s narrator is a louse who has lived on a series of heads in and around Paris and been witness to the political maneuverings happening behind the scenes of the American Revolution.

The lines between high and low culture were blurry in nineteenth-century America. Dime novels lacked critical acclaim, yet famous authors like Samuel Clemens readily drew from dime novel conventions.

We are at sea even before the Pequod’s voyage begins.

Age-phobic rhetoric is commonplace in American culture, especially as it relates to women, its history stretching back at least to the second half of the nineteenth century.

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each […]

Almost immediately upon starting a book I ask myself—usually while reading—what will I read next: should it be more fiction? a history book? current events? pure escape? enrichment?

Presented as part of the Special Literature Issue

More and more, we point our computers’ browsers at what we want to read, instead of lacing up for a walk to the library or the bookstore.

As the preceding slides suggests, Confederate songsters did not shy away from “foreign” material. For instance, “Mary of Argyle” is […]

Hendrick Aupaumut has had many collaborators, but it wouldn’t be entirely correct to say that he has worked with many of them.

The View from Mount Vernon

I was struck by the thin pamphlet’s integration of word and image: in ten engravings, the booklet plotted out the life of the Christian soul.

Automatic Writing If, as the scholar claims, a photograph is a sudden death, if the historian’s citational practice is cousin […]

Keeping up with the news

A sophisticated grasp of history is the exception, not the rule.

It has been several decades since large numbers of Americans used the U.S. mail for the majority of their long-distance communications or for casual daily contact with nearby friends and family.

By the turn of the twentieth century, thinking about American Indians had become integral to German culture.

Presented as part of the Special Literature Issue

The prehistory of American bestsellers takes us beyond questions about the content and literary value of bestselling texts and invites us instead to explore just what makes such a phenomenon possible.

Dry Creek Valley On the second and third wires over the wireon which forks the zinfandel vine:barbed knotsand spirals of […]

By the time the Union army reached Bayou Boeuf—the neighborhood where Solomon Northup, a free black man kidnapped from upstate […]

How Durben in Glasgow Became Dearborn in Quebec I discovered a Revolutionary-era journal written by a Captain Durben—from an unexpected […]

ed books are not only a marvelous technology in their own right but are rich with lifelong associations… [But textbooks] are rarely regarded as anything other than databases.

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“Our authors help us notice that men and women who are curious are themselves sometimes turned into curiosities.”

Presented as part of the Special Literature Issue

Natives were eager consumers of the kinds of print ephemera that circulated throughout New England.

Accounting was not an orderly process, but rather a vigorous and open-ended mixing and remixing of information.

In its intermingling of the national, the paternal, the feminine, and the global, this letter is perhaps not quite the warm epistle of friendship it purports to be.

Dickinson did not regard the book as a meaningful unit of analysis for her work, but too often, her editors and critics have.

Jefferson documented his collection decisions in this manuscript—which books to retain, which ones to give away, and to whom.

With Mightier Than the Sword, Reynolds has written the biography of a book, and 2012 might be the perfect time to […]

Presented as part of the Special Literature Issue

These groups exhibited several shared traits, most notably adherence to social elitism, masculine identity, and transatlantic modes of polite culture.

…printing shifted from a craft to an industry, printers became publishers, authorship became a profession, literary property became regulated, and reading became, increasingly, a value as much as a practice.

The devotional culture of early New England did not predict or facilitate a straight line from sin to salvation.

I’ve found myself feeling restless, and even irritated, with the reluctance on the part of some smart students to make any kind of active value judgments at all.

I imagined that my investigations might end up in a decisive graph that would map the number of pages printed against the number of Buddhist converts to Christianity.

By the time of John Brown’s failed raid on Harpers Ferry, both Northerners and Southerners seemed ready to go beyond the world of a make-believe courtroom.

An increasing popular interest in classical mythology proved liberating for American women.

This stamp pattern book opens up a rare glimpse into a small nineteenth-century American business, revealing just how many designs one man produced in his lifetime.

… here are thirteen emerging early American scholars introducing a pre-1800 text available online to the public for free.

The contents of the issue fulfill the imperatives of the new Food Studies: to view eating as an agricultural act

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Money

Nineteenth-century capitalists were frantic system builders, not because of any innate personality trait or some vague ethical imperative handed down by the Protestant Reformation, but because they had destroyed the existing foundations of social order in their rise to power.

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“By the late 1870s, guides mentioned a few pastimes as specifically well suited to women and children. Guides began to list carousels, circuses, pantomimes, and magic and marionette shows in conjunction with kids.”

Ward gives equal consideration to the historical evidence of text and image, reminding us that portraits are not just cultural commentary, but are in fact culture itself.

Presented as part of the Special Literature Issue

What then can the history of the asylum tell us about meanings and forms of liberal culture?

    <<One of many glamorous moments of the 1988 Al Gore campaign that I did not see. Scene of […]

Wright shared several traits with the prototypical blogger—his eccentric range of interests, his resolution “to write down what I see and hear and feel daily,” his use of journals to “let off” rants of “indignation,” his utopian conviction that writing might change the world, and (not least) his practice of spending the “greater part of the day writing in his room.”

Is the linear novel the only way one gets lost in a book?

“Godbeer challenges our early-twenty-first-century understanding that it is natural that each person have a distinct sexual orientation that comprises a major part of personal identity–a sexuality. Early European Americans had no such understanding.”

“[W]hile the New York Times and the Boston Globe are gleefully covering Historygate, is anyone, besides the Weekly World News, talking about history?”

“Too many historians of recent generations, according to Marwick, have been obsessed with theory and with abstractions such as discourse analysis.”

“What would it be like to step inside the memory of the diarist? To experience a diary as if it were a video replay? What would I ask an enchanted diary if it one day spontaneously responded to my marginal annotations?”

“[I]n contrast to those who simply lament the decline of bourgeois institutions of public reflection (for example, the coffeehouse), Henkin puts forward a story about a public that succeeded–and in some ways exceeded–those earlier institutions.”

Common-place is a common place for exploring and exchanging ideas about early American history and culture. A bit friendlier than […]

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