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"The World Has Gone to Reading":
How Nineteenth-Century Religious
Publishers and
Readers Learned to Use the New Mass Medium of Print
by
David Paul Nord
Thursday, May 19, 2005, at 7:30 p.m.
Antiquarian Hall
185 Salisbury Street, Worcester, Massachusetts
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In the early nineteenth century, a few entrepreneurs decided the time was
right to launch true mass media in America. Though these entrepreneurs
were savvy businessmen, their enterprises were not commercial businesses;
they were nonprofit religious publishing organizations. And they were
remarkably successful, churning out millions of Bibles, tracts, religious
books, and periodicals. In this program, based upon his latest book,
Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in
America, 1790-1860, David Paul Nord tells the story of those
publishers
and their readers.
David Paul Nord is professor of journalism and adjunct professor of
history at Indiana University. He is also associate editor of the
Journal
of American History. He is the author of Communities of Journalism:
A
History of American Newspapers and Their Readers and is the co-editor
with
Joan Shelley Rubin and Michael Schudson of The Enduring Book:
Publishing
in Post-War America, the forthcoming fifth volume in the American
Antiquarian Society's A History of the Book in America.
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This lecture is open to the public free of charge.
Directions to Antiquarian Hall
Please consult the 2005 schedule
for a
complete list of this year's public lectures.
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