The Global American South and Early American Print Culture

Led by Jeannine DeLombard and Lloyd Pratt

What happens when we view the imagined community of U.S. print culture from the vantage point of the South? How might such a reoriented book history challenge emerging transatlantic, transnational, and cosmopolitan histories of the U.S.? At a moment when industrial print culture was consolidating itself in the Northeast, "the South" appeared in print on several spatial scales. While asserting an "American" identity, Southerners represented themselves as a sectional alternative to the nation. Boasting a distinctive regional culture, they simultaneously celebrated local diversity. The seminar will investigate how these complementary practices of national, regional, and local self-definition circuited through print cultural conditions on the ground. How, we will ask, did distribution, copyright, authorship, and reading inflect the South's sectional self-fashioning, its attempt to lay claim to the nation, and its engagements with the wider world?

We can hear echoes of Southern print culture's sectional and local accents in the American Antiquarian Society's unsurpassed periodical holdings, which also allow us to track the printed South's circulation, reception, and representation throughout the nation. The seminar will benefit from the AAS' wealth of ephemeral print propaganda on the South's major political crises: Indian removal, the slavery controversy, and nullification/secession. Finally, the seminar will provide an introduction to the Tinker Collection's rich holdings in Francophone Louisiana materials-from legal ordinance digests to an original copy of Les Cenelles.

Of particular interest to literary scholars and historians, the seminar should also appeal to art historians and legal scholars, as well as those researching the multi-ethnic history and culture of the U.S.