Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society Volumes 112-115
Volume 115, Part 2 (2005)
Contains the Proceedings of the Semiannual Meeting in October 2005, the
Report
of the Council, obituaries of recently deceased members, and the following
articles:
- "The Emerging Media of Early America" by Sandra M. Gustafson. Pages
205-50.
Electronic media are reshaping our understanding of what texts are, how
they produce meaning, and how verbal forms affect society and culture. The
2005 Wiggins Lecture examines common assumptions about the history of
verbal technologies and offers new ways of thinking about the emergent
properties of textual media. Contrasting the printed medium with the
allegedly static forms of oral performance and manuscript, media histories
often focus on print as an emerging technology and an agent of social
change. An alternative to print-driven media history considers how
theories of technology and history are bound up with the ways that we talk
about textual forms and suggests a perspective that better accounts for
the complex evolution of verbal culture.
Available
as offprint number 1020
- "From Microprint to Megapixels: The Fifty-Year Partnership between
Readex and the American Antiquarian Society." Pages 231-316.
Panelists representing AAS, Readex, and the scholarly and library
communities discuss the past, present, and future of the AAS-Readex
relationship. Introduced by Hench, the four papers trace the history of
the technology underlying the current array of digital products, the
association between Readex and AAS, and assess their impact on these
organizations and on the worlds of librarianship and historical
scholarship.
- Introduction by John B. Hench. Pages 252-52.
- "Albert Boni: A Sketch of a Life in Micro-Opaque" by August
Imholtz, Jr. Pages 253-277.
- "Into the Unknown in 1955 -- AAS and Readex" by Marcus A. McCorison.
Pages 279-88.
- "Cultures of Invention: Exploring Tom Paine and His Iron Bridge in the
Digital Age" by Edward Gray. Pages 289-94.
- "The Readex Corporation, the American Antiquarian Society, and the
Brave New World of Electronic Text: A Librarian's Perspective" by Robert
Scott. Pages 295-316.
Available
as offprint number 1021
- "A New Bibliography of the Work of Wood Engraver and Illustrator
Alexander Anderson" by Jane R. Pomeroy. Pages 317-40
A recent Oak Knoll Press publication sponsored by the American Antiquarian
Society is a comprehensive view of the work of Anderson by the
bibliographer Jane R. Pomeroy. Anderson, the first skilled relief engraver
in America, achieved a prodigious output covering subjects and
publications including literature, separate prints and broadsides,
children's books, ephemera and political cartoons, almanac advertisements
and bookplates. Through the use of Anderson's proof books, Pomeroy has
identified the images that he created and the publications for which they
were commissioned, thereby revealing Anderson's status as an artist and
master wood engraver.
Available
as offprint number 1022
Volume 115, Part 1 (2005)
Contains the Proceedings of the Semiannual Meeting in April 2005, the
Report
of the Council, obituaries of recently deceased members, and the following
articles:
- "Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century New England: An
Introduction and Checklist" by David D. Hall. Pages 29-80.
The reproduction and circulation of handwritten texts -- scribal
publication -- played a significant role in the civil, religious, and
literary culture of seventeenth-century New England. Although a printing
office was established in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by the end of 1639 and
another in Boston by 1674, scribal publication persisted alongside the
efforts of these printers. The checklist including some eighty-four items
represents a preliminary effort to identify a body of texts that were
produced in this manner and to suggest some of the implications of this
mode of publication for our understanding of politics and culture.
Available
as offprint number 1017
- "A Long False Start: The Rejected Chapters of Cooper's 'The Bravo'
(1831)" by Lance Schachterle. Pages 81-126.
Cooper's manuscript of The Bravo at the American Antiquarian
Society, the nearly complete, holograph rough draft of the entire novel, includes two
chapters numbered by Cooper as XVIII and XIX (and the beginning of Chapter
XX) that proved to be completely different from chapters 18 through 20 in
the novel as published in 1831. This essay presents a diplomatic
transcription of the two rejected chapters and the start of chapter XX,
and speculates as to why Cooper rejected them in favor of the completely
different chapters with which he replaced them.
Available
as offprint number 1018
- "Davy Crockett is Dead, But How He Died Lives On" by Brenda Gunn.
Pages 127-46.
An account of Davy Crockett's death that differs from the popular version
is found in the José Enrique de la Peña narrative that reports that
Mexican soldiers captured Crockett and executed him. A thirty-year-old
controversy that began 120 years after the Battle of the Alamo with the
1955 publication in Mexico City of Peña's memoir surrounds this document
and its accounting of Crockett's death.
Available
as offprint number 1019
Volume 114, Part 2 (2004)
Contains the Proceedings of the Annual Meeting in October 2004, the Report
of the Council, obituaries of recently deceased members, and the following
articles:
- "Magnalia Historiae Libri Americana; or, How AAS Brought the
History of the Book into the New Millennium" by Philip F. Gura. Pages
249-80.
In this, the twenty-fifth annual Wiggins Lecture, Gura traces the
evolution of the program in the history of the book at the Society. He
provides an overview of the lectures, show how David D. Hall's inaugural
lecture offered what has turned to be a road map for the inauguration of a
new field of study both at the Society and in the academy, generally. Gura
reviews subsequent lectures in the series, summer seminars, and key
publications concluding with a look into the future based on the premise
that the history of the book, properly conceived and accomplished, leads
to nothing less than new ways to view the history of American society and
culture.
Available
as offprint number 1014
- "Thomas Hutchinson In Context: The Ordeal Revisited" by Bernard
Bailyn. Pages 281-300.
Bernard Bailyn reviews his reasons for writing The Ordeal of Thomas
Hutchinson, published in 1974, and concludes that, while still in
agreement with his overall assessment of the last colonial governor, he
evaluated Hutchinson's plight too narrowly. The local issues that trapped
Hutchinson might have seemed like a problem of his own making, but turn
out to have been part of a larger, transformational shift that was taking
place in the Atlantic world. 1776 was not only the year of American
independence, but also of the publication of works by authors such as Tom
Paine, Edward Gibbon, Richard Price, Adam Smith, and Jeremy Bentham that
pointed to the end of the ancien régime in Europe and later in Latin
America. The first annual Robert C. Baron Lecture.
Available
as offprint number 1015
- "Slavery Would Have Died of That Music.: The Hutchinson Family
Singers and the Rise of Popular-Culture Abolitionism in Early
Antebellum-Era America, 1842-1850" by Brian Roberts. Pages 301-68.
The Hutchinsons were abolitionists and they were extremely popular at
a
time when the movement challenged traditions of American slavery and
racism. Slavery was viewed as traditional, and radicalism had no place in
America. Perhaps the last place one would expect to find abolitionism
would be at the heart of American popular culture. Their story argues for
a new approach to abolitionism, one that places it not on the "radical"
margins of American politics or society but at the very center of American
popular culture.
Volume 114,
Part 1 (2004)
Contains the Proceedings of the Semiannual Meeting in April 2004, the
Report
of the Council, obituaries of recently deceased members, and the following
articles:
- "'Such is Change in California': James Mason Hutchings and the
Print Metropolis, 1854-1862" by Jen A. Huntley-Smith. Pages 35-86.
A gold-rush emigrant from England, James Mason Hutchings spent the 1850s
traveling through the central and northern California. He recorded his
impressions of the economic and social changes in his diary and, by
establishing a publishing business in San Francisco, attempted to use
print culture to effect further changes by fostering visions of California
as a place to settle rather than to plunder. Between 1853 and 1862, he
published illustrated letter sheets for miners, magazines, almanacs,
lithographic prints, and the illustrated monthly, Hutchings' California
Magazine.
This appraisal of Esther Forbes's Johnny Tremain (1943) describes
the
novel as a book about the uses of reading. The fictional adventures of an
apprentice silversmith who lived in Boston, observed Paul Revere at work,
listened to his impassioned clandestine speeches, and carried the word to
the sexton of the Old North Church that he was to position two lanterns in
the steeple on the night of April 18, 1775, are well known to several
generations of readers. As the story unfolds, considerations of the value
of silver and of reading reveal ultimately that literacy, not wealth, will
create the informed citizenry that will sustain the new republic.
Available
as offprint number 1012
- "Models of Agency: Frederick Douglass and 'The Heroic Slave'" by
Cynthia S. Hamilton. Pages 87-135.
In the novella "The Heroic Slave" Frederick Douglass explores African
American heroism and various models of agency available to him for the
depiction of liberation, liberators, and sentimental appeals for
assistance. A vehicle for Douglass to describe his split with Garrison,
it becomes his own declaration of independence and a means to expose the
cultural politics of benevolence within antislavery culture. "The Heroic
Slave" enabled Douglass to explore the personal politics of interracial
cooperation within the antislavery movement and the cultural politics of
agency within antislavery rhetoric.
Available
as offprint number 1011
- "Martha Buck's Copybook: New England Tragedy Verse and
the Scribal Lineage of the American Ballad Tradition" by Daniel A. Cohen.
Pages 137-86
North America's earliest enduring tradition of indigenous balladry emerged
out of the highly literate folk culture that flourished in New England,
and elsewhere in the Northeast, from the second half of the eighteenth
century. This essay examines the process by which topical poems inspired
by local tragedies--including some of America's earliest homegrown
ballads--were composed, transmitted, and preserved in print and manuscript
form, focusing on a small but exemplary group of old tragedy verses that a
Connecticut farmer's daughter wrote into her copybook during the 1820s and
1830s. More broadly, Martha Buck's copybook challenges the conventional
understanding of folk ballads as quintessential products of "oral culture"
and the related view of the South as the natural seedbed of early American
balladry.
Available
as offprint number 1013
Volume 113, Part 2 (2003)
Contains the Proceedings of the Annual Meeting in October 2004, the Report
of the Council, obituaries of recently deceased members, and the following
articles:
- "Ornithology and Enterprise: Making and Marketing John James Audubon's
The
Birds of America" by Gregory H. Nobles. Pages 267-302.
John James Audubon's double elephant folio edition of The Birds of
America
(4 vols., 1827-38), a massive work of natural history that offers the
reader an innovative interplay between image and text still stands as one
of the most remarkable artistic and scientific achievements in the history
of the book. For Audubon, though, producing this "Great Work" proved to
be as much about entrepreneurship as ornithology. The changes in the
popular perception of Audubon's birds from his time to our own is the
background for looking at the connection between the cultural and
commercial significance of this big book about birds, which represents
both an investigation of nature and an investment in art. The various
ways people have valued Audubon's work leads to the question of whether
The Birds of America is--or should be--a book at all.
Available
as offprint number 1009
- "Worcester Through a Child's Eyes: The Diaries of Louisa Jane
Trumbull,
1829-37" by
Holly V. Izard. Pages 303-491.
Diaries kept by Louisa Jane Trumbull from 1829 to 1837 are a rare and
valuable resource, as few records kept by children have survived for
study. Remarkable for the quality of their content, the journals offer an
intimate and highly engaging connection with a past time and place through
youthful eyes and sensibilities. Includes a transcription of Volume 1 of
the diary: "L. J. Trumbull's Book: Louisa Jane Trumbull's First Journal,
November 3, 1829-May 20, 1834," and four appendices. Clap, Lincoln, and
Trumbull Genealogies, compiled by Holly V. Izard; Biographical Sketches of
Individuals and Families Named in the Trumbull Diary, compiled by Holly V.
Izard; Key to the Map of the Village of Worcester, July 1829, by Holly V.
Izard; and A Reflection on Louisa Jane Trumbull's Book List and Annotated
List, by Laura E. Wasowicz.
Available
as offprint number 1010
Volume 113, Part 1 (2003)
Contains the Proceedings of the Semiannual Meeting in April 2003, the
Report of the Council, obituaries of recently deceased
members, and the following articles:
- "Silver Linings: Print and Gentility in the World of Johnny Tremain"
by Joan Shelley Rubin. Pages 37-52
This appraisal of Esther Forbes's Johnny Tremain (1943) describes
the
novel as a book about the uses of reading. The fictional adventures of an
apprentice silversmith who lived in Boston, observed Paul Revere at work,
listened to his impassioned clandestine speeches, and carried the word to
the sexton of the Old North Church that he was to position two lanterns in
the steeple on the night of April 18, 1775, are well known to several
generations of readers. As the story unfolds, considerations of the value
of silver and of reading reveal ultimately that literacy, not wealth, will
create the informed citizenry that will sustain the new republic.
Available
as offprint number 1005
- "History, Memory, and a House Museum Artemas Ward of Shrewsbury,
Massachusetts
- A Harvard Seminar Looks at the Wards" by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.
Pages 53-57
- "Minutemen For Months: The Making of an American Revolutionary Army
Before Washington, April 20-July 2, 1775" by Justin Florence. Pages
59-101.
During the brief period that General Artemas Ward was in command, he and
his fellow leaders made a drastic impact on the immediate course of events
of the Revolution by shifting the attitudes, motivations, and mindsets of
the New Englanders in military service. Men, who on April 20, 1776,
rushed to defend their hometowns, had by July 2, when George Washington
took command of the troops, become part of an American army that was
engaged in a war with the British in defense of the life, liberty, and
properties not just of their townsmen, but of all Americans.
- "General Artemas Ward: A Forgotten Revolutionary Remembered and
Reinvented, 1800-1938" by Rebecca Anne Goetz. Pages 103-134.
Members of the Ward family of Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, employed a
variety of techniques -- genealogies, biographies, paintings, mausoleums,
and
even statutes to memorialize their distinguished ancestor, the
Revolutionary General Artemas Ward. For over a century after his death in
1800, Ward's descendants used his life and accomplishments in the complex
creation of family, local, and ultimately national identity. The Wards
are a unique and provocative case study in the uses of historical memory.
Available
as offprint number 1006
- "Auctions and the Distribution of Law Books in Antebellum America"
by
M. H. Hoeflich. Pages 135-61.
Traditional legal history has been doctrinal history interested in the
content of books rather than in how such doctrines were made known to
lawyers and the public. Law books got into circulation through booksellers
and auctions of new and unsold stock and the libraries of lawyers. A
survey of auction catalogues suggests their value in helping to
reconstruct the intellectual milieu of the antebellum Bar.
Available
as offprint number 1007
- "Geography, Pedagogy, and Race: Schoolbooks and Ideology in the
Antebellum United States" by Anne Baker. Pages 163-99.
This essay examines the media through which new ideas about race were
disseminated in the antebellum period. Schoolbook authors, motivated both
by pedagogical zeal and by the desire to sell more textbooks, began to
organize geographical information according to categories such as
"Rivers," "Mountains," and "Races of Men," rather than grouping such
information under the heading of nations or regions. By encouraging
students to conceptualize the world in new ways, these authors played a
powerful role in predisposing Americans to accept new theories of race.
Available
as offprint number 1008
Volume 112, Part 2 (2002)
Contains the Proceedings of the Annual Meeting in October 2002, the Report
of the Council, obituaries of recently deceased members, the index to
Volume 112, and the following articles:
- "Cultural Crossroads: Print and Reading in Eighteenth- and
Nineteenth-Century Montreal" by Yvan Lamonde and Patricia Lockhart
Fleming. Pages 231-67.
From the establishment of its first press in 1776 when Fleury Mesplet
arrived with a printer's commission from the Continental Congress,
Montreal has been a dynamic center of cultural exchange and printing
activity, a crossroads linking France, British North America, and the
United States. Drawing upon two scholarly traditions and their respective
approaches to book history--analytical bibliography theorized by
Anglo-American researchers and the analysis of quantitative and
documentary evidence developed by their French colleagues--the general
editors of a 'History of the Book in Canada/Histoire du livre et de
l'imprimé au Canada' demonstrate the use of material and cultural evidence
for the study of printers and readers in early Canada.
Available as offprint number 1002
- "The Unexceptional Eloquence of Sarah Josepha Hale's "Lecturess'" by
Granville Ganter. Pages 269-89.
This interpretation of Sarah Hale's 1839 novel, The Lecturess, is
based on
a recovery of traditions of women's successful public oratory. Hale's
novel is viewed as an endorsement of women's public speech, provided it is
done on behalf of the public good. Hale's publication in Godey's of
"Esther," a coded closet drama, in 1838 also legitimates women's public
speech.
Available as offprint number 1003
- "The Imagined Republic: The Fenians, Irish American Nationalism, and
the
Political Culture of Reconstruction" by Mitchell Snay. Pages 291-313.
The Irish American nationalist Fenian movement is situated in the
political context of Reconstruction. Pointing out the similarities to
freed people and conservative Southern whites in the early postwar period,
it suggests the centrality of enfranchisement and democracy to movements
of self-determination and ethnic autonomy during the Reconstruction
era.
Available as offprint number 1004
Volume 112, Part 1 (2002)
Contains the Proceedings of the Semiannual Meeting in April 2002, the
Report of the Council, obituaries of recently deceased
members, and the following articles:
- "'This whole country have their hands full of Blood this day':
Transcription and Introduction of an Antislavery Sermon Manuscript
Attributed to the Reverend Samuel Hopkins" by
Jonathan D. Sassi. Pages 29-92.
In the latter half of 1776, the Reverend Samuel Hopkins of Newport, Rhode
Island, preached a stirring antislavery sermon from Isaiah 1:15. A
transcript of the twenty-eight-page manuscript is published here for the
first time with an introductory essay that discusses how the sermon sheds
important new light on the social and intellectual origins of Hopkins's
abolitionism. The sermon reveals a combination of Hopkins's New Divinity
Calvinism, his experiences living in Newport, his reading and
correspondence from throughout the Atlantic world, and the libertarian
rhetoric of the American Revolution, all of which he synthesized to
produce this powerful antislavery jeremiad.
Available as offprint number 999
- "Another 'American Cruikshank' Found: John H. Manning and the New York
Sporting Weeklies" by
Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz. Pages 93-126.
The sporting papers in New York in the early 1840s were filled with the
witty and irreverent drawings of John H. Manning. A clever delineator from
Boston, Manning moved to New York and worked in the shop of Robert
H. Elton, known for his comic almanacs. Mannings farcical illustrations in
the Whip, the Libertine, the Weekly Rake, and the
Flash enable us to see
important elements of the popular culture of their day, especially that
segment created for the new male sporting life appearing on the streets of
American cities in the era preceding the Civil War.
Available as offprint number 1000
- "The Nineteenth-Century Serial as a Collective Enterprise: Harriet
Beecher
Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Eugéne Sue's Les
Mystéres de Paris by
Claire Parfait. Pages 127-152.
Two works serve as particularly striking mid-nineteenth century examples
of the complex relationships between the writer, readers, editor, and,
finally, book publisher of serialized novels: Eugéne Sue's Les
Mystéres de
Paris (1842-43) and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin
(1851-52). The
periodicals in which the serializations appear offer significantly
different environments for the production and reception of the fiction.
Available as offprint number 1001
Volumes 108-111
|
|
Offprints of individual
articles from the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society are
available for purchase more ...
Abstracts of other recent issues:
|
|
