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

The James Russell Wiggins Lecture in the History of the Book in American Culture features an expert on book history. The lecture was endowed to honor James Russell Wiggins (1903-2000), who served as AAS president (1970-1977), an editor of the Washington Post (1947-1968), United States ambassador to the United Nations (1968-69), and editor of the Ellsworth (Maine) American (1969-2000).

Year	Presenter or Co-leaders	Title	Video
2024	Joseph Rezek	Haiti’s Media Revolution and the Racialization of Print	Yes
2023	Richard Yarborough	Caterina Jarboro, the 1898 Wilmington Riot, and the Challenges of the Archive	Yes
2017	Georgia Brady Barnhill	Bringing Pictures Back: Illustration for Nineteenth-Century American Literature	Yes
2016	Eric Gardner	Re-envisioning Black ‘Book History’: The Case of AME Church Print
2014	Meredith L. McGill	Disappearing Medium: Poetry and Print in the Antebellum United States
2014	Kenneth E. Carpenter	The incredible journey of Benjamin Franklin’s Way to Wealth--and its bibliographical traces	Yes
2012	Vincent Carretta	In Search of Phillis Wheatley	Yes
2011	David S. Reynolds	Igniting the War: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Antislavery Politics, and the Rise of Lincoln
2010	John B. Hench	Random Notes from a Book History Bureaucrat	Yes
2009	Joshua Brown	Catching His Eye: The Sporting Male Pictorial Press in the Gilded Age
2008	Patricia A. Crain	Babes in the Wood: Print, Orality, and Children's Literature in the Nineteenth-Century United States	Yes
2007	Wayne S. Franklin	Financing America's First Literary Boom
2006	David S. Shields	We Declare You Independent Whether You Wish It or Not: The Print Culture of Early Filibusterism
2005	Sandra M. Gustafson	The Emerging Media of Early America
2004	Philip F. Gura	Magnalia Historiae Libri Americana; or, How the American Antiquarian Society Brought the History of the Book into the New Millennium
2003	Gregory H. Nobles	Ornithology and Enterprise: Making and Marketing John James Audubon's The Birds of America
2002	Patricia Lockhart Fleming , Yvan Lamonde	Prophets, Publics, and Publication: A History of the Book from One Cultural Margin
2001	Richard H. Brodhead	Prophets, Publics, and Publication: A History of the Book from One Cultural Margin
2000	Richard Ohmann	Epochal Change: Economics and Print Culture
1999	Michael B. Winship	"The Greatest Book of Its Kind": A Publishing History of Uncle Tom's Cabin
1998	E. Jennifer Monaghan	Reading for the Enslaved, Writing for the Free: Reflections on Liberty and Literacy
1997	Carla L. Peterson	Reconstructing the Nation: Frances Harper, Charlotte Forten, and the Racial Politics of Periodical Publications
1996	David Paul Nord	Free Grace, Free Books, Free Riders: The Economics of Religious Publishing in Early Nineteenth-Century America
1995	Mary C. Kelley	Designing A Past for the Present: Women Writing Women's History in Antebellum America
1994	Lawrence Buell	The Rise and "Fall" of the Great American Novel
1993	Henry Louis Gates Jr.	Truth or Consequences: Putting Limits on Limits
1992	Ian Willison	The History of the Book in Twentieth-Century Britain and America: Perspective and Evidence
1991	Nina Baym	At Home with History: History Books and Women's Sphere Before the Civil War
1990	Michael Steven Schudson	Preparing the Minds of the People: Three Hundred Years of the American Newspaper
1989	Robert A. Gross	Printing, Politics, and the People
1988	John Bidwell	American History in Image and Text
1987	Roger Chartier	Frenchness in the History of the Book: From the History of Publishing to the History of the Book
1986	Cathy N. Davidson	Ideology and Genre: The Rise of the Novel in America
1985	Larzer Ziff	Upon What Pretext?: The Book and Literary History
1984	James M. Wells	American Printing: The Search for Self Sufficiency
1983	David D. Hall	On Native Ground: From the History of Printing to the History of the Book