Edited by Mark L. Kamrath and Sharon M. Harris

Similar to the "digital revolution" of the last century, the colonial and early national periods were a time of improved print technologies, exploding information, faster communications, and a fundamental reinventing of publishing and media processes. Between the early 1700s, when periodical publications struggled, and the late 1790s, when print media surged ahead, print culture was radically transformed by a liberal market economy, innovative printing and papermaking techniques, improved distribution processes, and higher literacy rates, meaning that information, particularly in the form of newspapers and magazines, was available more quickly and widely to people than ever before. These changes generated new literary genres and new relationships between authors and their audiences. The study of periodical literature and print culture in the eighteenth century has provided a more intimate view into the lives and tastes of early Americans, as well as enabled researchers to further investigate a plethora of subjects and discourses having to do with the Atlantic world and the formation of an American republic.

Periodical Literature in Eighteenth-Century America is a collection of essays that delves into many of these unique magazines and newspapers and their intersections as print media, as well as into what these publications reveal about the cultural, ideological, and literary issues of the period; the resulting research is interdisciplinary, combining the fields of history, literature, and cultural studies. The essays explore many evolving issues in an emerging America: scientific inquiry, race, ethnicity, gender, and religious belief all found voice in various early periodicals. The differences between the pre- and post-Revolutionary periodicals and performativity are discussed, as are vital immigration, class, and settlement issues. Political topics, such as the emergence of democratic institutions and dissent, the formation of early parties, and the development of regional, national, and transnational cultural identities are also covered. Using digital databases and recent poststructural and cultural theories, this book returns us to the periodicals archive and regenerates the ideological and discursive landscape of early American literature in provocative ways; it will be of value to anyone interested in the crosscurrents of early American history, book history, and cultural studies.

The Editors: Mark L. Kamrath is associate professor of English at the University of Central Florida.
Sharon M. Harris is Lorraine Sherley Professor of Literature at Texas Christian University.

Contributors: Seth Cotlar, Philip Gould, Timothy D. Hall, Sharon M. Harris, Mark Kamrath, Lisa M. Logan, Carla Mulford, Beverly J. Reed, Chad Reid, Frank Shuffleton, John Smolenski, Robert D. Sturr, W. M. Verhoeven.

Publication Date: November 2004
416 est. pp., Illustrations
Subject(s): American Literature, American Studies
Cloth Edition, $42.00s Cloth ISBN: 1-57233-319-7

Nora Pat Small

In the half-century following the American Revolution, rural New Englanders reordered houses, barns, and fields in accordance with newly popular and widespread notions of beauty and convenience, creating commercial and social town centers where none had existed before. They adapted old building forms to new uses, and even created new forms, while clinging to tradition and embracing innovation. Architectural historians have long recognized this flurry of building activity as a significant period in American architectural history. In Beauty and Convenience, Nora Pat Small examines the political and social forces that shaped the post-Revolution rural rebuilding of one New England community between 1790 and 1830.

The rebuilding of New England, during what architectural historians have labeled the Federal period, serves as the basis for most Americans’ visual or mental image of rural New England. This reconstruction became very controversial as a result of the differing definitions of republican virtue, taste, beauty, and economy held by the architects, rural reformers, and those engaged in rebuilding their homes and communities during this time. What could have promoted the attacks, primarily in the agricultural press, on the new two-story with ell rural homes? The answer lies in the attitudes and perceptions of cultural aesthetics and the notion of Republican virtue.

Nora Pat Small sharpens our understanding of the important changes that occurred in the New England landscape during the Federal period. Small effectively connects her study of post-Revolutionary reform ideology and political discourse to architectural evidence; the buildings and landscapes express cultural values, aesthetic choice, and personal identity.

The agricultural press, numerous architects’ and builders’ handbooks and guides, the buildings themselves, and outlines of the homeowners’ lives provide primary evidence to create a cultural as well as an architectural history. The numerous sources also present a source of the conflict between the reformers and those they would reform: the rural reformer’s vision of the countryside as the pastoral seat of republican virtue against the growing reality of the countryside as the hub of a national industrial economy.

The Author: Nora Pat Small is an associate professor of history at Eastern Illinois University. She has published articles in William & Mary Quarterly and has contributed chapters to volumes III and VII of the Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture series.

Publication Date: August 2003
168 est. pp., Illustrations
Subject(s): Vernacular Architecture, American History

J. Ritchie Garrison

With a New Introduction

Originally published in hardcover in 1991, this innovative study draws on anthropology, archaeology, art history, folklore, and history to illuminate the rich texture of a historic landscape and the complex process by which it changed over a ninety-year period between the American Revolution and the Civil War. Focusing on Franklin County in the upper Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts, a landscape that shares many characteristics with greater New England and with the rural North, Garrison describes the region’s town plans, agricultural patterns, dwellings, barns, outbuildings, fences, and transportation networks—and how they changed. He demonstrates that the transformation of this rural landscape was a dynamic process, a complex interaction between tradition and innovation, driven by people’s shifting expectations about material life.

Garrison’s carefully researched narrative begins with the lives of individual inhabitants and from them generates a larger picture: Who lived in Franklin County, what they thought and wrote about, what choices they made and by what principles they lived, what buildings and crops they raised and with what tools and methods, how they organized their homes, family life, farms, and workspaces, what they did with their leisure time, how they spent their money or manifested their social status. In his new introduction, Garrison furthers the dialog about the nature and timing of change in early New England. Garrison’s study provides insight into the changing values that accompanied the transition from an agrarian to an industrial society and raises questions about the nature of tradition and the character of American “folklife.”

The Author: J. Ritchie Garrison is associate director of the Museum Studies Program and associate professor of history at the University of Delaware.

John Anthony Caruso

With a New Introduction by John C. Inscoe
Appalachian Echoes, Durwood Dunn, Nonfiction Editor

John Anthony Caruso’s The Appalachian Frontier, first published in 1959, captures the drama and sweep of a nation at the beginning of its westward expansion. Bringing to life the region’s history from its earliest seventeenth-century scouting parties to the admission of Tennessee to the Union in 1796, Caruso describes the exchange of ideas, values, and cultural traits that marked Appalachia as a unique frontier.

Looking at the rich and mountainous land between the Ohio and Tennessee Rivers, The Appalachian Frontier follows the story of the Long Hunters in Kentucky; the struggles of the Regulators in North Carolina; the founding of the Watauga, Transylvania, Franklin, and Cumberland settlements; the siege of Boonesboro; and the patterns and challenges of frontier life. While narrating the gripping stories of such figures as Daniel Boone, George Rogers Clark, and Chief Logan, Caruso combines social, political, and economic history into a comprehensive overview of the early mountain South.

In his new introduction, John C. Inscoe examines how this work exemplified the so-called consensus school of history that arose in the United States during the cold war. Unabashedly celebratory in his analysis of American nation building, Caruso shows how the development of Appalachia fit into the grander scheme of the evolution of the country. While there is much in The Appalachian Frontier that contemporary historians would regard as one-sided and romanticized, Inscoe points out that “those of us immersed so deeply in the study of the region and its people sometimes tend to forget that the white settlement of the mountain south in the eighteenth century was not merely the chronological foundation of the Appalachian experience. As Caruso so vividly demonstrates, it also represented a vital—even defining—stage in the American progression across the continent.”

The Author: John Anthony Caruso was a professor of history at West Virginia University. He died in 1997.
John C. Inscoe is professor of history at the University of Georgia. He is editor of Appalachians and Race: The Mountain South from Slavery to Segregation and author of Mountain Masters: Slavery and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina.

Alberta and Carson Brewer

Starting high in the Georgia Blue Ridge near Rabun Gap, the Little Tennessee River cuts a tortuous northwestward path 134 miles through North Carolina into Tennessee. The valley carved by the river is particularly rich in human value and physical grandeur; its engrossing history comes alive in Valley So Wild.
From its prehistoric origins through 250 years of recorded history, the Little Tennessee River Valley’s geography has remained remarkably unchanged. In this folk history, you will gain insight into the people of the valley, their daily lives, their ingenious artisanship, and the richness of their “have-not” culture.

The Authors: Alberta Brewer was a United Press bureau writer and manager in Jacksonville, Knoxville, and Nashville. A longtime reporter and columnist for the Knoxville News-Sentinel, Carson Brewer is also author of the well-received Hiking in the Great Smokies.

Edited by Carroll Can West

From the misty heights of the Appalachian Mountains to the great waters of the Mississippi River, Tennessee’s human history reaches from the mastodon hunters to the current day. Tennesseans have played prominent roles in shaping the frontier, the Old and New South, and the nation. Their legacy is a vibrant tradition encompassing folklore, religion, politics, literature, music, and sports that reflects the state’s distinctive culture. A strong future requires an understanding of the richness of this legacy and how previous generations have enhanced it.

Copublished in book form by the Tennessee Historical Society (THS) and Rutledge Hill Press in 1998, The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History & Culture is a definitive and comprehensive reference work on the Volunteer State, its history, and its culture. In more than fifteen hundred articles written by 560 authors, it covers everything from agriculture to civil rights, from Reconstruction to the suffrage movement, from Andrew Jackson to Elvis Presley, from the Tennessee Valley Authority to Federal Express.

The tone of the encyclopedia is defined by thirty-two topical essays on such primary aspects of the state’s history and culture as agriculture, architecture, civil rights, the Civil War, commerce, conservation, education, geology, industry, the Jacksonians, law, literature, medicine, mining, music, Oak Ridge, publishing, railroads, Reconstruction, religion, science and technology, the suffrage movement, Tennessee Valley Authority, World War I, and World War II. The encyclopedia includes maps, 150 photographs, two sections of full-color illustrations, extensive cross-referencing, bibliographical information, and a detailed index.
The volume was a co-winner of the Tennessee History Book Award.

About the THS: The Tennessee Historical Society has worked to preserve and promote Tennessee history since its founding in 1849. The collections of this private, nonprofit, membership organization are located at the Tennessee State Museum and the Tennessee State Library and Archives.

Deborah Vansau McCauley and Laura E. Porter, with Patricia Parker Brunner
Photographs by Warren E. Brunner

“A remarkable achievement. Mountain Holiness combines Warren Brunner’s poignant and sensitive photographs with a succinct narrative by Deborah McCauley, the preeminent authority on Appalachian mountain religion. This is a landmark study that sheds light on one of the most neglected subjects in American religion.”—Randall Balmer, Ann Whitney Olin Professor of American Religion, Barnard College, Columbia University

Hidden deep in the hills of central Appalachia, thousands of tiny churches have quietly carried on their worship practices in an unbroken chain for two centuries. Harking back to the camp-meeting movement of the early nineteenth century, independent Holiness churches are considered by some to represent Appalachia’s single largest religious tradition. Yet it is one that remains uncounted in any census of American church life because of the lack of formal institutions or written records. Through vivid images and perceptive words, this book documents this rich history, showing how these independent churches have sustained both faith and followers.

The authors spent five years interviewing and photographing Appalachia’s Holiness people and participating in their services. From thousands of photographs, they have selected approximately 370 images for this large-format volume. Here are small one-room churches—many built to hold no more than a dozen people—scattered in the hills of Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia. Yet Warren Brunner’s striking images depict not only buildings but also the people and their faith practices: river baptisms and homecomings, serpent handling and tent evangelism, radio preaching and special holiday services.

Deborah McCauley and Laura Porter’s text combines descriptions of the pictures with the history of the churches and interviews with members. They create a representative window into the material and oral culture of central Appalachia’s independent Holiness heritage. Mountain Holiness is a book that will fascinate anyone who cares about these traditions, as well as anyone concerned with the preservation of America’s most vital folkways.
About the Authors: Deborah Vansau McCauley is a leading authority on religion in Appalachia and is the author of Appalachian Mountain Religion: A History. Laura E. Porter became familiar with Appalachian religion while pursuing a Master of Divinity degree at Union Theological Seminary; she is presently a computer consultant for religious and relief organizations. Warren E. Brunner is a renowned photographer of Appalachia who has lived and worked in Berea, Kentucky, for nearly half a century. He has published three collections of photographs of the region. Patricia Parker Brunner, his wife, is an ordained Southern Baptist deacon who holds an M.A. in biblical studies.

Riggins R. Earl Jr.

With a New Introduction

In Dark Symbols, Obscure Signs, Riggins R. Earl Jr. investigates how slave owners intentionally manipulated Christianity as they passed it on to slaves and demonstrates how slaves successfully challenged that distorted interpretation. Analyzing slaves’ response to Christianity as expressed in testimonies, songs, stories, and sermons, Earl reveals the conversion experience as the initial step toward an autonomy that defied white control. Contrary to what their white owners expected or desired, enslaved African Americans found in Christianity a life-affirming identity and strong sense of community.

Slave owners believed Christianity would instill docility and obedience, but the slaves discovered in the Bible a different message, sharing among themselves the “dark symbols and obscure signs” that escaped the notice of their captors. Finding a sense of liberation rather than submission in their conversion experience, slaves discovered their own self-worth and their values as children of God.

Originally published in 1993, Dark Symbols, Obscure Signs traces the legacy of slaves’ embrace of Christianity both during and after the slavery era. In a new introduction, the author places the book within the context of contemporary scholarship on the roots of the African American cultural experience. He argues that any interpretation of this experience must begin with a foundational study of the theological and ethical constructs that have shaped the way blacks understand themselves in relationship to God, their oppressors, and each other.

The Author: Riggins R. Earl Jr. teaches theology at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta.