Program in the History of the Book in American Culture
AAS established the Program in the History of the Book in American
Culture (PHBAC)
in 1983 in order to focus its resources on promoting an emerging field of
interdisciplinary inquiry. Through the Program, AAS draws not only on its
traditional resources as a center of bibliographical research and as a
matchless repository of early American printed materials, but also on
recent intellectual currents that look at the history of books and other
printed objects in their full economic, social, and cultural
context.
In providing intellectual leadership of this field, the Program
has sponsored conferences, publications, seminars, and research
fellowships. A summer seminar in the history of the book, offering
short-term, intensive training in methodologies and concepts, was
initiated in 1985. These annual seminars have been successful in
assembling a stimulating range of persons as both faculty and matriculants
and putting them in touch with AAS library collections and, just as
importantly, with each other. The seminars have in fact helped recruit a
generation of scholars into the book history field. A conference that
included European scholars was held in 1984, and resulted in the
publication of Needs and Opportunities in the History of the
Book: America, 1639-1876. An earlier conference in 1980 resulted in
the
publication of Printing and Society in Early America, a collection
of
original essays, some of which have since become widely cited. More recent
conferences have focused on teaching the history of the book and on the
iconography of the book.
The annual series of James
Russell Wiggins
Lectures in the History of the Book in American Culture, inaugurated
in
1983, has brought forth important conceptual statements by leading
scholars in different disciplines touching on the field. A thrice-yearly
newsletter, The Book, serves as the chief
means by which the
Program
communicates with its various constituencies and publishes essay reviews
and substantive pieces on research collections and on research in
progress. The Wiggins Lectures and other works of book history
scholarship, written mainly by AAS fellows and summer seminar
participants, have helped make the AAS Proceedings a major journal
in the
field.
A significant goal of the Program is the publication of a five-volume,
collaborative scholarly work, A History of the Book in America, which
treats the subject from the early seventeenth century to our own
times. An Editorial Board of distinguished scholars, chaired by David
D. Hall, oversees the series, which is being published by AAS and
University of North Carolina Press. Volume 1, subtitled The Colonial
Book in
the
Atlantic World, was published in 2000, and
will be reissued
in the spring of 2007. Volume 3, The Industrial Book, edited by
Scott
Casper, Jeffrey Groves, Michael Winship, and Stephen Nissenbaum (covering
the period from 1840 to 1880) will be published in the spring of 2007.
Substantial funding from the National Endowment for the
Humanities provided major support for the editorial work on this important
project.
- John B. Hench, Vice-President for Collections
and Programs
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