Programs > Academic Programs

Program in the History of the Book
in American Culture

AAS established the Program in the History of the Book in American Culture (PHBAC) in 1983 in order to focus its resources on promoting an emerging field of interdisciplinary inquiry. Through the Program, AAS draws not only on its traditional resources as a center of bibliographical research and as a matchless repository of early American printed materials, but also on recent intellectual currents that look at the history of books and other printed objects in their full economic, social, and cultural context.

In providing intellectual leadership of this field, the Program has sponsored conferences, publications, seminars, and research fellowships. A summer seminar in the history of the book, offering short-term, intensive training in methodologies and concepts, was initiated in 1985. These annual seminars have been successful in assembling a stimulating range of persons as both faculty and matriculants and putting them in touch with AAS library collections and, just as importantly, with each other. The seminars have in fact helped recruit a generation of scholars into the book history field. A conference that included European scholars was held in 1984, and resulted in the publication of Needs and Opportunities in the History of the Book: America, 1639-1876. An earlier conference in 1980 resulted in the publication of Printing and Society in Early America, a collection of original essays, some of which have since become widely cited. More recent conferences have focused on teaching the history of the book and on the iconography of the book.

The annual series of James Russell Wiggins Lectures in the History of the Book in American Culture, inaugurated in 1983, has brought forth important conceptual statements by leading scholars in different disciplines touching on the field. A thrice-yearly newsletter, The Book, serves as the chief means by which the Program communicates with its various constituencies and publishes essay reviews and substantive pieces on research collections and on research in progress. The Wiggins Lectures and other works of book history scholarship, written mainly by AAS fellows and summer seminar participants, have helped make the AAS Proceedings a major journal in the field.

A significant goal of the Program is the publication of a five-volume, collaborative scholarly work, A History of the Book in America, which treats the subject from the early seventeenth century to our own times. An Editorial Board of distinguished scholars, chaired by David D. Hall, oversees the series, which is being published by AAS and University of North Carolina Press. Volume 1, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, was published in 2000, and reissued in the spring of 2007. Volume 3, The Industrial Book, 1840-1880, edited by Scott Casper, Jeffrey Groves, Michael Winship, and Stephen Nissenbaum was published in the spring of 2007. Volume 4, Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880-1940, edited by Janice A. Radway and Carl F. Kaestle will be available in January 2009. Volume 5: The Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, edited By Joan Shelley Rubin, David Paul Nord and Michael Schudson, will be published in July 2009. The final volume (2), An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790-1840, edited by Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley will complete the series in late 2009.

Substantial funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities provided major support for the editorial work that inaugurated this important project.

- John B. Hench, Vice-President for Collections and Programs

Summer Seminar in the History of the Book

The Book

James Russell Wiggins Lectures in the History of the Book in American Culture