The Republic in Print
Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770-1870
Trish Loughran
"Trish Loughran possesses an unusually and admirably capacious intellectual character. This is a book that will have to be read by any serious student of the early republic and by any serious student of the crisis over slavery."
—Jonathan Arac, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English, University of Pittsburgh
"The Republic in Print delivers a knock-out punch to the supposedly determinate linkages between print culture and nation formation that underwrite much of the scholarship about early America in a number of fields. The book is a massive achievement, marvelously original, refreshingly polemical, compelling in its argument, and complex in its implications. Its importance will be immediately evident and its influence widespread."
—Jay Fliegelman, William Robertson Coe Professor in American Literature, Stanford University
"Asking us to rethink the meaning of nation and nation building in the aftermath of 1790, Trish Loughran has provided a series of remarkable case studies that support her skepticism about those subjects. An immensely valuable book."
—David D. Hall, Bartlett Professor of New England Church History, Harvard University
"A masterful reconceptualization of the role of print culture in the founding of the American nation. The claims of this book are ambitious and original, and Trish Loughran delivers. I can think of very few works of American studies that I have read in the past twenty years that are as intellectually satisfying, as archivally meticulous, and as broadly conceived as The Republic in Print."
—Cindy Weinstein, professor of English, California Institute of Technology
"In the beginning, all the world was America."—John Locke
In the beginning, everything was America, but where did America begin? In many narratives of American nationalism (both popular and academic), the United States begins in print-with the production, dissemination, and consumption of major printed texts like Common Sense, the Declaration of Independence, newspaper debates over ratification, and the Constitution itself. In these narratives, print plays a central role in the emergence of American nationalism, as Americans become Americans through acts of reading that connect them to other like-minded nationals.
In The Republic in Print, however, Trish Loughran overturns this master narrative of American origins and offers a radically new history of the early republic and its antebellum aftermath. Combining a materialist history of American nation building with an intellectual history of American federalism, Loughran challenges the idea that print culture created a sense of national connection among different parts of the early American union and instead reveals the early republic as a series of local and regional reading publics with distinct political and geographical identities.
Focusing on the years between 1770 and 1870, Loughran develops two richly detailed and provocative arguments. First, she suggests that it was the relative lack of a national infrastructure (rather than the existence of a tightly connected print network) that actually enabled the nation to be imagined in 1776 and ratification to be secured in 1787-88. She then describes how the increasingly connected book market of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s unexpectedly exposed cracks in the evolving nation, especially in regards to slavery, exacerbating regional differences in ways that ultimately contributed to secession and civil war.
Drawing on a range of literary, historical, and archival materials-from essays, pamphlets, novels, and plays, to engravings, paintings, statues, laws, and maps—The Republic in Print provides a refreshingly original cultural history of the American nation-state over the course of its first century.
About the Author
Trish Loughran received her B.A. from Rutgers University and her masters and doctorate degrees from the University of Chicago. She has curated print and material artifact exhibits at the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia and the David Library of the American Revolution in Washington Crossing, PA, and has held fellowships from the Bibliographical Society of America, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Huntington Library, and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently associate professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she teaches courses in the material culture and literature of the early United States.
$45.00September, 2007
cloth
568 pages
26 illus
ISBN: 978-0-231-13908-3
American Environmental History: An Introduction
Carolyn Merchant
"Merchant takes a most useful approach to environmental scholarship by encapsulating a daunting range of factual information and critical information into this practical volume . . . one of the best books of its kind."
—History
"This is a one-volume resource not to be missed . . . our primary reference work."
—Environmental History
"An impressive introduction to environmental history . . . Merchant has succeeded in producing an accessible first stop handbook that will be relied on for many years."
—Environmental Practice
"This guide fills an important niche in American environmental history for both the expert and the casual reader. There is no better person than Carolyn Merchant to do this job."
—John Opie, University of Chicago
"Merchant has been one of the most important scholars building the field of environmental history. Her excellent guide will be of use to new students in environmental history and to established scholars coming into the field from other areas."
—John H. Perkins, The Quarterly Review of Biology
By studying the many ways diverse peoples have changed, shaped, and conserved the natural world over time, environmental historians provide insight into humanity's unique relationship with nature and, more importantly, are better able to understand the origins of our current environmental crisis. Beginning with the precolonial land-use practice of Native Americans and concluding with our twenty-first century concerns over our global ecological crisis, American Environmental History addresses contentious issues such as the preservation of the wilderness, the expulsion of native peoples from national parks, and population growth, and considers the formative forces of gender, race, and class. Entries address a range of topics, from the impact of rice cultivation, slavery, and the growth of the automobile suburb to the effects of the Russian sea otter trade, Columbia River salmon fisheries, the environmental justice movement, and globalization. This illustrated reference is an essential companion for students interested in the ongoing transformation of the American landscape and the conflicts over its resources and conservation. It makes rich use of the tools and resources (climatic and geological data, court records, archaeological digs, and the writings of naturalists) that environmental historians rely on to conduct their research. The volume also includes a compendium of significant people, concepts, events, agencies, and legislation, and an extensive bibliography of critical films, books, and Web sites.
About the Author
Carolyn Merchant is the Chancellor's Professor of Environmental History, Philosophy, and Ethics at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of several books, including Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture and The Death of Nature, and is a past president of the American Society for Environmental History.
$74.50
October, 2007
cloth
504 pages
42 illus
ISBN: 978-0-231-14034-8
October, 2007
paper
464 pages
42 illus.
ISBN: 978-0-231-14035-5
Inventing English
A Portable History of the Language
Seth Lerer
"Lerer pays particular attention to some of the more important passages in the central texts of English literary history, but he is equally at home when analyzing more immediately popular works and always capable of discovering deep and general interest in the most startlingly simple places."
—Christopher Cannon, Cambridge University"This is an excellent introduction to the history of our language for readers without knowledge of linguistics or even of early English language and literature itself. Lerer uses his engaging format to present and elucidate the considerable number of issues and concepts involving the study of usage which have become part of the matter of the history of English."
—John Hollander, Yale UniversityWhy is there such a striking difference between English spelling and English pronunciation? How did our relatively simple grammar rules develop? What are the origins of regional dialect, literary language, and everyday speech, and what do they have to do with you?Based on the enormous success of his video and lecture series and the widespread popularity of his public speaking events, Seth Lerer's Inventing English is a masterful, engaging history of a language constantly in flux. Many scholars and journalists have written about the changing nature of our grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary, but only Lerer situates these developments in the larger history of English, reconstructing an epic tale of creation, celebration, and reinvention.Lerer begins in the seventh century with the poet Caedmon teaching himself to sing our earliest poem in English. Then we meet the scribes of Peterborough Abbey who recorded grammar. The Great Vowel Shift can be traced to the spelling choices of personal letter writers in the fifteenth-century. Then in 1755, Samuel Johnson produced his Dictionary. Lerer describes the differences between English and American usage and the link between regional dialect and race, class, and gender. He tells his own story of growing up in an immigrant community in Brooklyn, torn between a desire to "better" himself through proper English and his love for the melodic, Italian-Yiddish mash-ups of his childhood.Contact with foreign languages, popular culture, advertising, the Internet, and e-mail continue to shape English for future generations. In conclusion, Lerer wonders whether globalization and technology have turned English into a world language and reflects on what has been preserved and what has been lost. Each concise, entertaining chapter can be read individually or in sequence, proving that the history of the English language is both personal and a part of the larger history of our world.About the Author
$24.95
April, 2007
cloth
256 pages
18 illus.
ISBN: 978-0-231-13794-2
October 17, 2007