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

The James Russell Wiggins Lecture in the History of the Book in American Culture features an expert on book history. The lecture was endowed to honor James Russell Wiggins (1903-2000), who served as AAS president (1970-1977), an editor of the Washington Post (1947-1968), United States ambassador to the United Nations (1968-69), and editor of the Ellsworth (Maine) American (1969-2000).

Event Date	Leaders / Presenters	Title	Video
6/24/2026	Phillip Round	Indigenous Books and America 250 with Phillip Round	Yes
6/11/2025	Christopher J. Looby	Revisiting Jonathan Edwards and the "Bad Books" Controversy	Yes
7/15/2024	Joseph Rezek	Haiti’s Media Revolution and the Racialization of Print	Yes
7/19/2023	Richard Yarborough	Caterina Jarboro, the 1898 Wilmington Riot, and the Challenges of the Archive	Yes
5/18/2017	Georgia Brady Barnhill	Bringing Pictures Back: Illustration for Nineteenth-Century American Literature	Yes
4/14/2016	Eric Gardner	Re-envisioning Black ‘Book History’: The Case of AME Church Print
10/6/2014	Meredith L. McGill	Disappearing Medium: Poetry and Print in the Antebellum United States
4/10/2014	Kenneth E. Carpenter	The incredible journey of Benjamin Franklin’s Way to Wealth--and its bibliographical traces	Yes
9/28/2012	Vincent Carretta	In Search of Phillis Wheatley	Yes
5/24/2011	David S. Reynolds	Igniting the War: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Antislavery Politics, and the Rise of Lincoln
11/16/2010	John B. Hench	Random Notes from a Book History Bureaucrat	Yes
10/16/2009	Joshua Brown	Catching His Eye: The Sporting Male Pictorial Press in the Gilded Age
11/14/2008	Patricia A. Crain	Babes in the Wood: Print, Orality, and Children's Literature in the Nineteenth-Century United States	Yes
6/21/2007	Wayne S. Franklin	Financing America's First Literary Boom
6/16/2006	David S. Shields	We Declare You Independent Whether You Wish It or Not: The Print Culture of Early Filibusterism
6/10/2005	Sandra M. Gustafson	The Emerging Media of Early America
11/19/2004	Philip F. Gura	Magnalia Historiae Libri Americana; or, How the American Antiquarian Society Brought the History of the Book into the New Millennium
11/6/2003	Gregory H. Nobles	Ornithology and Enterprise: Making and Marketing John James Audubon's The Birds of America
9/27/2002	Patricia Lockhart Fleming , Yvan Lamonde	Prophets, Publics, and Publication: A History of the Book from One Cultural Margin
11/14/2001	Richard H. Brodhead	Prophets, Publics, and Publication: A History of the Book from One Cultural Margin
11/3/2000	Richard Ohmann	Epochal Change: Economics and Print Culture
9/24/1999	Michael B. Winship	"The Greatest Book of Its Kind": A Publishing History of Uncle Tom's Cabin
11/6/1998	E. Jennifer Monaghan	Reading for the Enslaved, Writing for the Free: Reflections on Liberty and Literacy
10/3/1997	Carla L. Peterson	Reconstructing the Nation: Frances Harper, Charlotte Forten, and the Racial Politics of Periodical Publications
10/15/1996	David Paul Nord	Free Grace, Free Books, Free Riders: The Economics of Religious Publishing in Early Nineteenth-Century America
10/27/1995	Mary C. Kelley	Designing A Past for the Present: Women Writing Women's History in Antebellum America
11/4/1994	Lawrence Buell	The Rise and "Fall" of the Great American Novel
11/4/1993	Henry Louis Gates Jr.	Truth or Consequences: Putting Limits on Limits
9/23/1992	Ian Willison	The History of the Book in Twentieth-Century Britain and America: Perspective and Evidence
10/18/1991	Nina Baym	At Home with History: History Books and Women's Sphere Before the Civil War
11/12/1990	Michael Steven Schudson	Preparing the Minds of the People: Three Hundred Years of the American Newspaper
10/17/1989	Robert A. Gross	Printing, Politics, and the People
11/2/1988	John Bidwell	American History in Image and Text
9/30/1987	Roger Chartier	Frenchness in the History of the Book: From the History of Publishing to the History of the Book
10/29/1986	Cathy N. Davidson	Ideology and Genre: The Rise of the Novel in America
11/1/1985	Larzer Ziff	Upon What Pretext?: The Book and Literary History
10/31/1984	James M. Wells	American Printing: The Search for Self Sufficiency
11/7/1983	David D. Hall	On Native Ground: From the History of Printing to the History of the Book