Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean D. Moore
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
British Literature ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
British Identity ◽  
Atlantic Studies ◽  
Early American ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
History Of

Early American libraries stood at the nexus of two transatlantic branches of commerce—the book trade and the slave trade. Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries bridges the study of these trades by demonstrating how Americans’ profits from slavery were reinvested in imported British books and providing evidence that the colonial book market was shaped, in part, by the demand of slave owners for metropolitan cultural capital. It makes these claims on the basis of recent scholarship on how participation in London cultural life was very expensive in the eighteenth century, and evidence that enslavers were therefore some of the few early Americans who could afford importing British cultural products. In doing so, this work merges the fields of the history of the book, Atlantic studies, and the study of race, arguing that the empire-wide circulation of British books was underwritten by the labor of the African diaspora. This book, accordingly, is the first in early American and eighteenth-century British studies to fuse our growing understanding of the material culture of the transatlantic text with our awareness of slavery as an economic and philanthropic basis for the production and consumption of knowledge. In studying the American dissemination of works of British literature and political thought, this book claims that Americans were seeking out the forms of citizenship, constitutional traditions, and rights that were the signature of that British identity. Even though they were purchasing the sovereignty of Anglo-Americans at the expense of African-Americans through these books, however, some colonials were also making the case for the abolition of slavery.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan E. Whyman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Political Participation ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Economic Change ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Formal Schooling ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literate Society

The introduction shows the convergence and intertwining of the Industrial Revolution and the provincial Enlightenment. At the centre of this industrial universe lay Birmingham; and at its centre was Hutton. England’s second city is described in the mid-eighteenth century, and Hutton is used as a lens to explore the book’s themes: the importance of a literate society shared by non-elites; the social category of ‘rough diamonds’; how individuals responded to economic change; political participation in industrial towns; shifts in the modes of authorship; and an analysis of social change. The strategy of using microhistory, biography, and the history of the book is discussed, and exciting new sources are introduced. The discovery that self-education allowed unschooled people to participate in literate society renders visible people who were assumed to be illiterate. This suggests that eighteenth-century literacy was greater than statistics based on formal schooling indicate.

IS THERE AN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF EARLY AMERICAN WOMEN?

2007 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 173-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
CAROLINE WINTERER
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Formal Schooling ◽  
John Adams ◽  
James I ◽  
Early American History ◽  
Cornell University ◽  
Early American ◽  
History Of

Catherine Kerrison, Claiming the Pen: Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American South (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005)Susan Stabile, Memory's Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004)Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America's Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2006)Consider Abigail Adams. Known to us mostly through over one thousand letters that she exchanged with her husband, John Adams, she was a woman of redoubtable intelligence and energy. Wife of the second president of the United States, she was mother to its sixth. She traveled to France and England, rubbing elbows with dukes and diplomats; she read deeply in history and literature; she supported the literacy of black children; she was a conduit for the American reception of Catharine Macaulay's republican-friendly History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line (1763–8). The letters between John and Abigail fly so fast and furious, are so full of learned banter and palpable yearning, that their marriage appears strikingly modern, a union of equals. Let us not be deceived. Abigail Adams, like other women of her generation even in the social stratosphere, had no formal schooling, and her erudition was dwarfed by the massive learning bestowed upon John. He had a Harvard BA and read law for three years. He took for granted a vast public arena in which to unleash his colossal, if tortured, political ambitions. Abigail never published a word.

scholarly journals Political Engines: The Emotional Politics of Bells in Eighteenth-Century England

2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 555-581
Author(s):  
William Tullett
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
British Identity ◽  
Political Status ◽  
Emotional Suffering ◽  
Emotional Politics

AbstractThis article asks how and why bells maintained their central place in political culture between 1660 and 1832, a question that can best be approached from the perspective of histories of the emotions and senses. Such a consideration of bells allows us to extend the concept of “emotives” to encompass material culture. Often believed to “speak,” bells were fundamental to a binary emotional regime: the joy and sorrow they expressed and created were essential to perceptions of deference, community, and national feeling. But they could also be inverted and used a form of resistance. For those outside the religious or political status quo, bells could instantiate forms of emotional suffering. Tracing the “listening public” of which bells were part demonstrates the importance of the freedom to hear in the eighteenth-century public sphere. In this context, the ascription of material and emotional agency to bells was a useful rhetorical tool. Its deployment in newspaper reports of ringing, which served to encourage certain ways of listening, points to the importance of both text and sound in creating a “listening public.” But this listening public was also marked by forms of emotional suffering and exclusion that trouble the place of practices of celebration in any nascent “English” or “British” identity.

Global Energy Cultures of Speed and Lightness: Materials, Mobilities and Transnational Power

2014 ◽  
Vol 31 (5) ◽  
pp. 127-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mimi Sheller
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Energy Transition ◽  
Power Grids ◽  
Figured Worlds ◽  
Aluminum Production ◽  
Industrial Complex ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
Production And Distribution ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Military

Following aluminum as part of a material culture of speed and lightness, this article examines how assemblages of energy and metals connect built environments, ways of life, and ideologies of acceleration. Aluminum can be theorized as a circulatory matrix that forms an energy culture. Through a discussion of speed and social justice, the history of aluminium-based socioecologies reveals how the materiality of energy forms assemblages of objects, infrastructures, and practices. The article then traces the aluminum industry’s involvement in the production and distribution of energy itself both at the national scale of power grids and in the emergence of transnational transfers of energy, such as hydropowered smelters in Iceland. Finally, this analysis of deeply embedded energy cultures calls for a transnational approach to the accelerated socioecologies of aluminum production and consumption; and for energy transition theories to pay closer attention to the figured worlds and figuring work of the military-industrial complex.

The Encyclopedist and the Peruvian Princess: The Poetics of Illegibility in French Enlightenment Book Culture

PMLA ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 121 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-123
Author(s):  
Lorraine Piroux
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
French Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Book Culture

This study focuses on the French Enlightenment's fascination with the materiality of non-Western and nonalphabetic scripts in the broader context of the history of the book. By examining definitions of writing in the Encyclopédie as well as Françoise de Graffigny's novelistic appropriation of the Inca quipu script in Lettres d'une Péruvienne (1747), I argue that there emerges from these texts a conception of the literary sign capable of challenging the fundamental principles of the Enlightenment printed book: dematerialized textuality and absolute legibility. Shaped by the scriptural imagination of eighteenth-century book culture, literature was able to acquire full aesthetic legitimacy only insofar as it was defined as the other of the purely semantic text. (LP)

Histrionics of the Pulpit

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-337
Author(s):  
Scott Larson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Gender Norms ◽  
Evangelical Christianity ◽  
American Christianity ◽  
Early American ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Form ◽  
The Masses

Abstract The eighteenth-century Atlantic world was swept with a radical new form of Christian preaching that aimed to engage the feelings and sensations of mass audiences. In the nineteenth century, this heart-centered preaching became a mainstream form of American Christianity, but in its first hundred years, it was widely regarded as perverse, effeminate, and depraved. Early evangelical Christianity threatened to destabilize social and political orders, to drive the masses “out of their senses,” and to throw gender norms into chaos. This article argues that attention to “trans tonality”—an investigation of trans at the level of tone, expression, and sensation—offers a surprising trans history of early American culture and opens up an archive rich with accounts of gender and sensory variance.

A Cultural History of Memory in the Middle Ages

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Social Fields ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Phenomenon ◽  
Almost All ◽  
The Middle Ages

This volume covers the vast field of memory, commemoration and the art of memory in the Middle Ages. Memory was not only a religious, social and historical phenomenon but also a driving factor in cultural life and in the production of art. It played an important role in medieval intellectual, visual and material culture, touching on almost all spheres of personal and social life. Yet the perception of memory did not remain static. The period covered by this volume, 500-1450, was one of enormous change in the way memory was understood, expressed, and valued. The authors of the essays trace the changes in the understanding of memory in its diverse forms and social fields, analysing everyday life as well as politics, philosophy and theology. As can be demonstrated, functions and perceptions evolved over the medieval millennium and laid the foundations for the modern understanding of individual and social memory.

A Loyalist Who Loved His Country too Much: Thomas Hutchinson, Historian of Colonial Massachusetts

2017 ◽  
Vol 90 (3) ◽  
pp. 344-384
Author(s):  
Liam Riordan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
American Culture ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
British Atlantic ◽  
Colonial Society ◽  
History Of ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
British Atlantic World

A history of the book approach to Thomas Hutchinson's History of Massachusetts Bay (published 1764-1828) recovers his commitment to preserve facts and his place in eighteenth-century historiography. Hutchinson's vilification by patriots still obscures our understanding of his loyalism. The article reassesses late colonial society, the American Revolution, and Anglo-American culture in the British Atlantic World.

Reading and Sociability

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abigail Williams
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
Leisure Time ◽  
Leisure Activity ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Domestic Spaces ◽  
Living Space ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Performed Music

This chapter shows how the social history of the book was closely linked to other practices—to ideas about sociability, conventions of visiting, use of leisure time, nature of domestic spaces, value of conversation. By the end of the eighteenth century there were plenty of newly available places in which to spend leisure time and money in company, including pleasure gardens, coffeehouses, museums, and concerts. Although many people took full advantage of these innovations in external leisure activity, the home remained an essential place of recreation for men and women of property. People supped, dined, played cards, read, gossiped, argued, and performed music together in their homes throughout the eighteenth century. The choice of books on display within a house—whether being read or in sight on table or shelves—was also significant. In larger houses, it had an added significance because of the eighteenth-century shift towards the use of the library as a general living space.

The Numinous Body and the Symbolism of Human Remains

2020 ◽  
pp. 294-316
Author(s):  
Christopher Allison
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
The Body ◽  
Early American History ◽  
Early American ◽  
Material Religion ◽  
George Whitefield ◽  
Religious Material ◽  
Sacred Matter ◽  
Two Bodies

This chapter engages the concept of the numinous and applies it to the material culture of the sacred body in American material culture, with two examples from early American history. It introduces early twentieth-century scholar Rudolph Otto’s idea of the numinous, and it proposes that it can help dispel confusion over the nature of sacred matter, leading to a better grasp of the phenomenological complexity of religious material culture, especially as it relates to the body. The chapter focuses on two bodies, that of nineteenth-century American missionary to Liberia Ann Wilkins and famous eighteenth-century preacher George Whitefield. These bodies are used as case studies to demonstrate the prevalence of numinousness, even among American Protestants who had traditionally eschewed material religion. The author makes the claim that the invisibility of religion is a verdant precondition for its materialization.

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