Matt Cohen

The History of the Book in New England: The State of the Discipline

The region of New England has been fertile ground for the study of what has been termed ‘‘print culture.’’ Such work has been remarkable for its impact beyond the field of American book history. Work by David D. Hall, Robert A. Gross, Michael Warner, and Cathy N. Davidson, to name just a few, appears in debates in political science, religious studies, and postcolonial theory, in addition to the usual homes to book history, literary and historical studies. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery’s Book History Reader (2001) includes essays by Jane Tompkins on Nathaniel Hawthorne and by E. Jennifer Monaghan on literacy instruction and gender in New England. Studies of New England’s media history have also persistently troubled the boundaries of book history, asking definitional questions about literacy, the relationship between orality and literacy, the existence of a ‘‘public sphere’’—even the definition of the ‘‘book’’ and of ‘‘culture.’’ Institutionally, too, New England has been an epicenter for Anglo-American book studies. The American Antiquarian Society (AAS), founded in 1812 in Worcester, Massachusetts, launched its influential Program for the History of the Book in American Culture in 1983.1 The mulling over of books, society, consciousness, and power has a long pedigree in New England. Two years before he helped found the AAS, Isaiah Thomas, one of the republic’s most successful printers, published his History of Printing in America (1810), which is to this day the starting point for most historians of the book in North America. A little over a decade later, Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok (1824) asked its readers to think about the connections among textual media, meaning, and sociopolitical power in colonial New England. Child’s audiences are expected to know that Hobo-