Colonial Revivals

The Nineteenth-Century Lives of Early American Books

288 pages

English language

Published Feb. 18, 2018 by University of Pennsylvania Press.

ISBN:
978-0-8122-5062-6
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In the long nineteenth century, the specter of lost manuscripts loomed in the imagination of antiquarians, historians, and writers. Whether by war, fire, neglect, or the ravages of time itself, the colonial history of the United States was perceived as a vanishing record, its archive a hoard of materially unsound, temporally fragmented, politically fraught, and endangered documents.

Colonial Revivals traces the labors of a nineteenth-century cultural network of antiquarians, bibliophiles, amateur historians, and writers as they dug through the nation's attics and private libraries to assemble early American archives. The collection of colonial materials they thought themselves to be rescuing from oblivion were often reprinted to stave off future loss and shore up a sense of national permanence. Yet this archive proved as disorderly and incongruous as the collection of young states themselves. Instead of revealing a shared origin story, historical reprints testified to the inveterate regional, racial, doctrinal, and …

2 editions

Subjects

  • Reprints (publications)
  • Early printed books
  • Books and reading, history
  • American literature, history and criticism, colonial period, ca. 1600-1775
  • United states, history, colonial period, ca. 1600-1775
  • United states, intellectual life