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James Russell Wiggins Lectures in the History of the Book in American Culture The 27th Annual Wiggins Lecture Catching His Eye: The Sporting Male Pictorial Press in the Gilded Age by Joshua Brown Friday, October 16, 2009 6:00 p.m. Antiquarian Hall 185 Salisbury Street Worcester, Massachusetts 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. This is the twenty-seventh annual Wiggins Lecture, named for James Russell Wiggins (1903-2000), chairman of the Society from 1970 to 1977, who was editor of the Washington Post and, until his death at the age of 96, editor of the Ellsworth (Maine) American. Wiggins also served as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations in 1968. 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 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 Order a copy   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 Order a copy   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 Order a copy   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 Order a copy   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 Order a copy   2000 - Richard Ohmann Epochal Change: Economics and Print Culture 27 pp. paperbound. $7.50. ISBN: 0-0-929545-13-4 Offprint number: 995 Order a copy   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 Order a copy   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 Order a copy   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 Order a copy   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 Order a copy   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 Order a copy   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 Order a copy   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 Order a copy   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 Order a copy   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 Order a copy   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 Order a copy   1989 - Robert A. Gross Printing, Politics, and the People 22 pp. paperbound. $10.00 ISBN: 0-944026-20-6 Offprint number: Order a copy   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 Order a copy   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 Order a copy   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 Order a copy   1985 - Larzer Ziff Upon What Pretext?: The Book and Literary History 23 pp., paperbound. $6.00. ISBN: 0-912296-81-X Offprint number: 879 Order a copy   1984 - James M. Wells American Printing: The Search for Self Sufficiency 31 pp., paperbound. $6.00. ISBN: 0-912296-69-0 Offprint number: 871 Order a copy   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 Order a copy   Joshua Brown is the executive director of the American Social History Project, located in the Graduate Center of The City University of New York. A number of the Wiggins Lectures are available from AAS as Offprints.   American Antiquarian Society 185 Salisbury Street Worcester, Massachusetts 01609-1634 Tel.: 508-755-5221 Fax: 508-753-3311 e-mail the library Contact Us Staff Directory Site Map Site Index Last updated September 23, 2009 This site and all contents © 2010 American Antiquarian Society