Syllabus

Seminar 1:

Books, Print, and Readers in British America

Assigned readings:

• Botein, Stephen. "The Anglo-American Book Trade before 1776: Personnel and Strategies." Printing and Society in Early America, ed. William Joyce (Worcester: AAS, 1983), 48-82.
   
• Calhoon, Robert. "The Character and Coherence of the Loyalist Press." The Loyalist Perception and Other Essays. (Columbia: U of South Carolina Press, 1989): 109-45.
   
• Green, James. "English Books and Printing in the Age of Franklin." The History of the Book in America, vol. 1: The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, eds. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall (Cambridge UP, 2000): 248-97.
   
• Hall, David D. et al, "Practices of Reading," History of the Book in America, vol. 1, 377-409.
   

Recommended readings:

• Chartier, Roger. "Texts, Printing, Readings." The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 154-175.
   
• Cohen, Matt. "Introduction." The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010. 1-28.
• Hall, David D. "Contingencies of Authorship." In Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text making in Seventeenth-Century New England (U Penn Press, )
• Price, Leah. "Introduction: Reading Matter," PMLA 121 (2006): 9-16.
   

Archives 1
Printing Technology and the Materiality of the Book in British America
David Whitesell, Curator of Books, American Antiquarian Society

Reading:

• Gaskell, Philip. "Book Production: The Hand-Press Period 1500-1800." A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 5-16, 33-71, 78-83, 88-101, 108-85.
   

Seminar 2:

What is "Freedom of the Press"?

Assigned readings:

• Brown, Richard. "The Shifting Freedoms of the Press in the Eighteenth Century," History of the Book, vol. 1, 366-76.
   
• Buel, Richard, Jr. "Freedom of the Press in Revolutionary America: The Evolution of Libertarianism, 1760-1820." The Press and the American Revolution, eds. Bernard Bailyn and John Hench (Worcester: AAS, 1980): 59-97
   

Recommended readings:

• Franklin, Benjamin. "Apology for Printers."
   
• Livingston, William. "Of the Use, Abuse, and Liberty of the Press." The
  Independent Reflector, ed. Milton Klein (Harvard UP, 1963).
   

Archives 2

Selected materials from Revolutionary newspapers and broadsides

Seminar 3:

The Loyalists and Common Sense

Assigned readings:

• Everton, Michael. "‘The Would-be-Author and the Real Bookseller’: Thomas Paine and Eighteenth-Century Printing Ethics." Early American Literature 40 (2005): 79-110.
   

• Foucault, Michel. "What is an Author?"
  
  
   

  http://www.generation-online.org/p/fp_foucault12.htm

• Larkin, Edward. Thomas Paine and the Literature of Revolution (Cambridge UP, 2005). Chapter 2: "Paine's Critique of the Early American Public Sphere."
   
• Rose, Mark. "The Author as Proprietor: Donaldson v. Becket and the Genealogy of Modern Authorship." Representations 23 (1988): 51-85.
   

Recommended readings:

• Darnton, Robert. "Readers Respond to Rousseau: The Fabrication of Romantic Sensitivity." The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984): 215-56.
   
• Loughran, Trish. "Disseminating Common Sense: Thomas Paine and the Problem of the Early National Bestseller." American Literature 78 (2006): 1-28.
   
• McGill, Meredith, "The Matter of the Text: Commerce, Print Culture, and the Authority of the State in American Copyright Law," ALH 9 (1997): 21-59.
   
• Ross, Trevor, "Copyright and the Invention of Tradition." Eighteenth-Century Studies 26 (1992): 1-27.
   

Archives 3:
The Paine-Bell Controversy

Selected materials from Philadelphia print culture: Robert Bell, Paine, the Bradfords on the printing and re-printing of Common Sense.

Seminar 4:
Loyalist Actors and Interpretors
 

Assigned readings:

• Jasanoff, Maya. "The Other Side of Revolution: Loyalists in the British Empire." William and Mary Quarterly 65.2 (April 2008): 205-232.
   
• Gould, Philip. "Wit and Politics in Revolutionary British America: The Case of Samuel Seabury and Alexander Hamilton." Eighteenth-Century Studies 41.3 (2008): 383-403.
   

Assigned readings:

• Edelberg, Cynthia D. Jonathon Odell, Loyalist Poet of the American
  Revolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987): xi-xv and 94-130.
   
• Odell, Jonathan. "The American Times, a satire, in three parts" in [John Andre], Cow-Chace, in three cantos (New York: Rivington, 1780): 27-69. Available in Early American Imprints, Evans series, #16697.
   

Assigned readings:

• Rivington, James, ed. Royal Gazette, read entire issues of this New York City newspaper for June 26, 1779 (4 pages, plus 1-page supplement, especially the "Historical Ballad" [by Joseph Stansbury] on front page) and September 18, 1779 (4 pages, especially "The Word of Congress" [by Jonathan Odell] on p. 2), both poems appear anonymously. Accessible with subscription to America's Historical Newspapers online database. [The Stansbury poem, now with the title "The Town Meeting," also appears in Sargent, Loyal Verses, 39-44; the Odell one in Sargent, Loyalist Poetry, 38-55, see full citations to Sargent in Recommended Readings.]
   
• Van Doren, Carl. Secret History of the American Revolution: An Account of the Conspiracies of Benedict Arnold and Numerous Others (New York: Viking Press, 1941): 439-458 [reprinted wartime letters, see recommended Van Doren reading for supporting information]

Recommended readings:

• Bannister, Jerry. "Canada as Counter-Revolution: The Loyalist Order Framework in Canadian History, 1750-1840." Liberalism and Hegemony: Debating the Canadian Liberal Revolution, eds. Jean-Francois Constant and Michel Ducharme (University of Toronto Press, 2009): 98-146.
   
• Breen, T. H. "Ideology and Nationalism on the Eve of the American Revolution." Journal of American History 84 (1997): 13-39.
   

• Sargent, Winthrop, ed. The Loyal Verses of Joseph Stansbury and Doctor Jonathan Odell (Albany: J. Munsell, 1860): especially ix-xvii [Preface] and as many poems as interest you. Accessible via
   

  books.google.com

  .

• Shields, David S. "Eighteenth-Century Literary Culture," History of the Book, vol. 1.

  (for seminar participants; password required)

• Van Doren, Carl. Secret History of the American Revolution: An Account of the Conspiracies of Benedict Arnold and Numerous Others (New York: Viking Press, 1941): v-vii [Preface], 196-216.
  (Included in pdf above)

Seminar 5

Assigned readings:

• James Fenimore Cooper, The Spy (1821). New York: Penguin, 1997.
• Tamarkin, Elisa. "Imperial Nostalgia," Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2008. 87-149.
   
• Van Buskirk, Judith. "Introduction," and "The Web of Family," Generous Enemies: Patriots and Loyalists in Revolutionary New York. Philadelphia: Penn Press, 2002.
   

Seminar 6

Assigned readings:

• William Dunlap, André, A Tragedy (New York: Swords, 1798).
   
• William Dunlap, The Glory of Columbia Her Yeomanry (New York: Longworth, 1817).
   
• Trees, Andy, "Benedict Arnold, John André, and His Three Yeoman Captors: A Sentimental Journey or American Virtue Defined," Early American Literature 35:3 (2000): 246-78
• Waterman, Bryan, "The Public is in the House: William Dunlap's Park Theatre and the Making of American Audiences," ch. 4 in Republic of Intellect: The Friendly Club of New York City and the Making of American Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), pp. 154-88.

Seminar 7

Assigned readings:

• "An Account of the Life of Mr. David George"
  
  "Memoirs of the Life of Boston King"
  
   

  http://www.blackloyalist.com/canadiandigitalcollection/documents/documents.htm