Programs > Academic Programs > History of the Book

James Russell Wiggins Lectures
in the History of the Book in American Culture

• Tuesday, May 24 - 7:30 p.m.
  Igniting the War: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Antislavery Politics, and the Rise of Lincoln
  

  by David S. Reynolds Twenty-eighth Annual James Russell Wiggins Lecture in the Program in the History of the Book in American Culture

  Lincoln reportedly called Harriet Beecher Stowe "the little woman who made this great war." Although Stowe's mammoth best-seller Uncle Tom's Cabin is vaguely associated in many people's minds with the Civil War, several modern commentators have tried to argue that it actually had only a minimal influence on the political decisions that led to the war. One historian maintains that "its political effect" was "negligible." Another asks, "In what sense does a novel have the power to move a nation to battle?" Such remarks ignore the tremendous power of public opinion in America, which Tocqueville regarded as stronger than the government—an idea Lincoln echoed when he declared, "Our government rests in public opinion. Whoever can change public opinion can change the government."

  No book in American history molded public opinion more powerfully than Uncle Tom's Cabin. Based on his new book, Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America, David S. Reynolds will describe how Stowe's novel shaped the political scene by making the North, formerly largely hostile to the antislavery reform, far more open to it than it had been. The novel and its dissemination in plays, essays, reviews, and the tie-in merchandise directly paved the way for the public's openness to an antislavery candidate like Lincoln. Simultaneously, it stiffened the South's resolve to defend slavery and demonize the North. Uncle Tom's Cabin thus ratcheted up the political tensions that led to the war that ended slavery.

  David S. Reynolds is a Distinguished Professor of English and American Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His works include the award-winning Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson, Walt Whitman's America, Beneath the American Renaissance, and John Brown, Abolitionist.

   

  The James Russell Wiggins Lecture in the History of the Book in American Culture, inaugurated in 1983, is an annual activity of the American Antiquarian Society through its Program in the History of the book in American Culture. The lectureship honors James Russell Wiggins, former editor of the Washington Post, former United States ambassador to the United Nations, and editor of the Ellsworth (Maine) American until his death on November 19, 2000, at the age of 96.

  James Russell Wiggins (1903-2000)

  The president of the American Antiquarian Society from 1970 to 1977, Wiggins was a longtime student of the history of printing and journalism and an articulate spokesman for the freedom of the press. The lectureship was endowed with gifts to the Society from his friends and admirers. Wiggins Lectures have featured statements on key methodological and interpretive issues by scholars in several disciplines from the United States and abroad. The lectures are published in the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society and as separate offprints available from the Society.

  PREVIOUS LECTURES

  2010 - John B. Hench

  
  Random Notes from a Book History Bureaucrat
  Twenty-seventh Annual James Russell Wiggins Lecture in the Program in the History of the Book in American Culture

  This talk by John B. Hench, retired vice president for collections and programs at AAS, will combine elements of memoir, reflections on the development and influence of the Society's Program in the History of the Book in American Culture, and notes on some of the themes in his recent scholarship on publishing in the World War II era.

  John B. Hench worked at AAS for 33 years beginning as editor of publications in 1973. He is the author of Books as Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing, and the Battle for Global Markets in the Era of World War II (2010). Additionally, he co-edited The Press and the American Revolution (1981) and Printing and Society in Early America (1983).

  2009 - Joshua Brown

  
  Catching His Eye: The Sporting Male Pictorial Press in the Gilded Age
  

  The post-Civil War pictorial press covered the gamut of the American reading public, but few publications were as brazen as illustrated sporting papers. Depicting blood sports, sex, scandal, crime, and, less predictably, current events, these weeklies reveled in impropriety and outrage and were ubiquitous in bars, barbershops, hotel lobbies, liveries, clubs, and other male enclaves. This lecture examines the two most prominent pictorial sporting weeklies, the National Police Gazette and The Days' Doings, and the vision of Gilded Age America they offered to a distinctly male readership.

  Joshua Brown is executive director of the American Social History Project and professor of history at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is author of Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America (2002), co-author of Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (2005), and executive producer of award-winning Web projects, including History Matters, The Lost Museum, The September 11 Digital Archive, and Picturing U.S. History. His illustrations and cartoons appear regularly in print and online.

   

  2008 - Patricia Crain

  
  Babes in the Wood: Print, Orality, and Children's Literature in the Nineteenth-Century United States
  

  Originating as a broadside ballad in the sixteenth century, "Babes in the Wood" had a long afterlife in the United States as a staple of the nineteenth-century juvenile literature market in poetry, in prose, and in a range of printed formats. This lecture explores the striking resilience of this text and its illustrations in order to reflect on the role of "the death in childhood" in the creation of modern children's literature.

  Patricia Crain is associate professor of English at New York University. She is the author of The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from the New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter (Stanford University Press, 2000). She held an AAS-NEH fellowship in 2005-2006.

   

  2007 - Wayne Franklin

  
  Financing America's First Literary Boom
  American literature has had many origins, but as a modern commercial phenomenon it took its clearest rise in New York City and Philadelphia in the two decades immediately following the War of 1812. Here a group of apologists for the coming maturity of American culture battled English condescension in a series of publications such as James Kirke Paulding's Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan (1812), Robert Walsh's Appeal from the Judgments of Great Britain (1819), and Charles Jared Ingersoll's Discourse of America on the Mind (1823). More importantly, writers in this region invented both a series of popular literary types and innovative means of marketing them. "Financing America's First Literary Boom" will examine the parallel efforts of Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper to secure the profits from their wildly successful books in the United States and abroad in the years from 1820 to 1830. In doing so, it will offer a lively portrait of how literature was transformed from a cultural ambition into a paying profession in the new American nation. This lecture is based on Franklin's forthcoming book, James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years (Yale University Press, May 2007).

  Wayne Franklin is the author of several studies of early American literature and culture, including Discoverers, Explorers, Settlers (1979) and The New World of James Fenimore Cooper (1982). He is the editor of the pre-1700 section of the Norton Anthology of American Literature and is the founding editor of the 25-volume American Land and Life series (1990-present). He is a professor of American Studies and English at the University of Connecticut.

   

  2006 - David S. Shields

  
  We Declare You Independent Whether You Wish It or Not: The Print Culture of Early Filibusterism

   

  2005 - Sandra Gustafson

  
  The Emerging Media of Early America

  45 pp. ill. paperbound. $10.00 Offprint number: 1020
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  2004 - Philip F. Gura

  
  Magnalia Historiae Libri Americana; or, How the American Antiquarian Society Brought the History of the Book into the New Millennium

  31 pp. ill. paperbound. $7.50 Offprint number: 1014
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  2003 - Gregory H. Nobles

  
  A Book in the Hand is Worth Two in the Press:
  Making and Marketing John James Audubon's Birds of America

  35 pp. ill. paperbound. $7.50 Offprint number: 1009
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  2002 - Patricia Fleming and Yvan Lamonde

  
  Cultural Crossroads: Print and Reading in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Montreal

  36 pp. ill. paperbound. $10.00. ISBN: 0:929545-21-5 Offprint number 1002
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  2001 - Richard Brodhead

  
  Prophets, Publics, and Publication:
  A History of the Book from One Cultural Margin

  27 pp. ill. paperbound. $7.50. ISBN: 0-929545-17-7 Offprint number: 998
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  2000 - Richard Ohmann

  
  Epochal Change: Economics and Print Culture

  27 pp. paperbound. $7.50. ISBN: 0-0-929545-13-4 Offprint number: 995
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  1999 - Michael Winship

  
  'The Greatest Book of Its Kind':
  A Publishing History of Uncle Tom's Cabin

  paperbound. $7.50. ISBN: 0-0-929545-06-1 Offprint number: 990
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  1998 - E. Jennifer Monaghan

  
  Reading for the Enslaved, Writing for the Free:
  Reflections on Liberty and Literacy

  32 pp., paperbound. $7.50. ISBN:0-944026-98-2. Offprint number: 981
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  1997 - Carla Peterson

  
  Reconstructing the Nation:
  Frances Harper, Charlotte Forten, and the Racial Politics of Periodical Publications

  34 pp., paperbound. $7.50. ISBN: 0-944026-90-7 Offprint number: 974
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  1996 - David Paul Nord

  
  Free Grace, Free Books, Free Riders:
  The Economics of Religious Publishing in Early Nineteenth-Century America

  31 pp., paperbound. $7.50. ISBN: 0-944026-74-5 Offprint number: 965
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  1995 - Mary Kelley

  
  Designing A Past for the Present:
  Women Writing Women's History in Antebellum America

  24 pp., paperbound. $7.50. ISBN:0-944026-62-1 Offprint number: 957
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  1994 - Lawrence Buell

  
  The Rise and "Fall" of the Great American Novel

  24 pp., paperbound. $7.50. ISBN:0-944026-62-1 Offprint number: 952
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  1993 - Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

  
  Truth or Consequences:
  Putting Limits on Limits

  18 pp., paperbound. $7.50. ISBN:0-944026-49-4 Offprint number: 941
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  1992 - Ian Willison

  
  The History of the Book in Twentieth-Century Britain and America:
  Perspective and Evidence

  28 pp., paperbound. $7.50. ISBN:0-944026-41-9 Offprint number: 932
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  1991 - Nina Baym

  
  At Home with History:
  History Books and Women's Sphere Before the Civil War

  20 pp., paperbound. $7.50. ISBN: 0-944026-36-2 Offprint number: 925
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  1990 - Michael Schudson

  
  Preparing the Minds of the People:
  Three Hundred Years of the American Newspaper

  22 pp. In Clark, Nord, Baldasty, Schudson, and Ghiglione, Three Hundred Years of the American Newspaper. 100 pp., paperbound. Illus. $13.95 (Available from Oak Knoll) ISBN: 0-944026-29-x
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  1989 - Robert A. Gross

  
  Printing, Politics, and the People

  22 pp. paperbound. $10.00 ISBN: 0-944026-20-6 Offprint number:
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  1988 - John Bidwell

  
  American History in Image and Text

  Offprint edition is SOLD OUT; the issue of the Proceedings in which the essay appeared is available for $22.50
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  1987 - Roger Chartier

  
  Frenchness in the History of the Book:
  From the History of Publishing to the History of the Book

  31 pp., paperbound. $8.95. ISBN: 0-944026-01-X Offprint number: 897
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  1986 - Cathy N. Davidson

  
  Ideology and Genre:
  The Rise of the Novel in America

  31 pp., paperbound. $4.95. ISBN: 0-912296-88-7 Offprint number: 887
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  1985 - Larzer Ziff

  
  Upon What Pretext?:
  The Book and Literary History

  23 pp., paperbound. $6.00. ISBN: 0-912296-81-X Offprint number: 879
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  1984 - James M. Wells

  
  American Printing:
  The Search for Self Sufficiency

  31 pp., paperbound. $6.00. ISBN: 0-912296-69-0 Offprint number: 871
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  1983 - David D. Hall

  
  On Native Ground:
  From the History of Printing to the History of the Book

  28 pp., paperbound. $6.00. ISBN: 0-912296-64-X Offprint number: 863
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