Syllabus

2024 Summer Seminar in the History of the Book

Comparative Migrations and Multilingual Cultures of Print 

Sunday, July 14 - Friday, July 19, 2024 

Required Materials 

All readings will be made available to participants via Dropbox except for the following book, which should be purchased: 

  • Javier Zamora, Solito: A Memoir (Random House, 2023), ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0593498064 (selected chapters will be made available in pdf for those who can’t purchase the book). 

Required viewing: Searching the American Antiquarian Society Catalog (time: circa 35 minutes) 

  • Five Things to Know about the AAS Catalog 
  • Anatomy of a Catalog Record 
  • Finding Digital Surrogates 
  • MARC View 
  • Wildcard Searches 

 

Sunday, July 24: Introduction and Orientation 

4:00-6:00pm: Antiquarian Hall, 185 Salisbury St. 

Welcome, introductions, and a tour of the library with Scott Casper (President, American Antiquarian Society), John Garcia (Director of Scholarly Programs and Partnerships), Rodrigo Lazo (Professor of Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz), and Patrick Erben (Professor of English, University of West Georgia). 

6:00-7:30pm: Goddard Daniels House (GDH), 190 Salisbury Street 
Post-tour reception and dinner.  

 

Monday July 15: Theorizing Migration Studies and Print Culture 

9:00-10:30am: Learning Lab (LL) in Antiquarian Hall. 
Participants complete library registration (bring 2 forms of ID) and meet the curators.  

10:30-11:00am: (GDH): Coffee/tea break  

11:00am-12:30pm (LL): Contemporary Migration Experiences and Migration Study Theory 

Required Primary Reading:  

Required Secondary Readings: 

  • Selections from Thomas Nail, The Figure of the Migrant (Stanford UP, 2015) 
  • Selections from Caroline B. Brettell and James F. Hollifield, eds., Migration Theory: Talking Across Disciplines, 4th edition (Routledge, 2023) 

Suggested Readings: 

Selections from David D. Hall,  A History of the Book in America 

  • David D. Hall, “Introduction.” The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World.  Vol. 1.  Amory, Hugh and David D. Hall, eds. A History of the Book in America.  Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.--pdf 
  •  A. Gregg Roeber, “German and Dutch Books and Printing.” The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World.--pdf 

12:30-1:30pm (GDH): Lunch 
 

1:30-3:00pm (LL): Migrants and Migration in 18th and 19th Century Source Texts–Case Studies 

Required Primary Readings:  

  • Anonymous, “The Ghost of Falkner Swamp” (1744, 1748, 1755, 1792). In: Worlding America: A Transnational Anthology of Short Narratives before 1800, ed. Oliver Scheiding and Martin Seidl, Stanford UP, 2015.- pdf 
  • Selections from Louisiana Staats-Zeitung. New Orleans, La.: George Lugenbühl & E.H. Bölitz. Daily (except Mon.),  Aug. 1850-1866, including excerpts from the serialized novel The Mysteries of New Orleans, by Baron Ludwig von Reizenstein. - pdf 

Required Secondary Reading: 

  • Oliver Scheiding and Martin Seidl, “Introduction,” “Cultures of Print,” and “Ghost Stories.” In: Worlding America: A Transnational Anthology of Short Narratives before 1800, ed. Oliver Scheiding and Martin Seidl, Stanford UP, 2015. 
  • Kirsten Silva Gruesz, “The Errant Latino: Irisarri, Central Americanness, and Migration’s Intention” in The Latino Nineteenth Century, eds. Rodrigo Lazo and Jesse Alemán (NYU Press, 2015) - pdf 
  • Sarah Klotz, “Black, White, and Yellow Fever: Contagious Race in The Mysteries of New Orleans.” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 65, no. 2 (Spring 2012), pp. 231-260. - pdf  

3:00-3:30pm: Break 

3:30-4:45pm (LL): Primary Source Perusal 

  • El Revisor de la Política y Literatura Americana (451579). 
  • El Correo Atlántico (4165)  
  • Verschiedene alte und neuere Geschichten von Erscheinungen der Geister, und etwas von dem Zustand der Selen [i.e., Seelen] nach dem Tode : nebst verschiedenen Gesichtern solcher die auch jetzo noch im Leben sind. Christoph Saur, 1755 (330294); 1792 (348238) 
  • Christianus Democritus (probably Johann Konrad Dippel), Geistliche Fama: mitbringend verschiedene Nachrichten und Begebenheiten von göttlichen Erweckungen, Wegen und Gerichten: Zweytes Stück: [Büdingen?],,1731. (438876) 
  • Louisiana Staats-Zeitung (6968). New Orleans, La.: George Lugenbühl & E.H. Bölitz. Daily (except Mon.) Aug. 1850-1866.  

5:00-7:00pm: Dinner on your own 

7:00-8:00pm (Antiquarian Hall): James Russell Wiggins Lecture in the History of the Book in American Culture. Joseph Rezek, “Haiti’s Media Revolution and the The Racialization of Print” (A reception in the Goddard-Daniels House will take place after the lecture.) 

 

Tuesday July 16: The Multilingual Archives of Migration 

9:00-10:30am (LL) 

Required Readings: 

  • Jacques Derrida, from Archive Fever (Chicago, 1995) - pdf  
  • Carolyn Steedman, from Dust (Rutgers, 2001) - pdf 
  • Verne Harris, Ghosts of Archive (intro and Ch. 1) (Routledge, 2021) - pdf 
  • Brian Connolly and Marisa Fuentes, “From Archives of Slavery to Liberated Futures” History of the Present 6, Vol. 2 (2016): 105-116. - pdf 

Suggested Readings: 

  • Saidiya Hartman, “The Dead Book Revisited” History of the Present 6, Vol. 2 (2016): 208-215. - pdf 

10:30-11:00am (GDH): Coffee/tea break  

11:00am-12:30pm (LL) 

Required Secondary: 

  • Susan Scott Parrish, “Rummaging / In and Out of Holds.” Early American Literature 45.2 (2010): 261-274 - pdf. 
  • Patrick Erben, “The Translingual Archive.” Teaching Early Modern English Literature from the Archives. MLA Options for Teaching Series. Eds. Heidi Brayman Hackel and Ian Frederick Moulton (MLA, 2015), 104-115. - pdf 
  • Sara E. Johnson, from Encyclopédie noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Mery’s Intellectual World (UNC Press, 2024) 

12:30-1:30pm (GDH): Lunch 

1:30- 3:00pm (LL): “Archive X.” Presentation and Discussion with Jesse Alemán, University of New Mexico and 2023-24 AAS Mellon Distinguished Scholar in Residence 

3:00-3:30pm - Break 

3:30-4:45pm (LL): Primary Source Perusal 

  • Folder from Louisiana with various materials (271793) 
  • California Papers, 1831-1859, 1906 (507494) 
  • Peter Leibert, “Account Book,” 1793-1812 (271767) 

  

  • Charles Sealsfield papers, 1839-1842 (480683) 

5:00pm: Dinner on your own 

 

Wednesday July 17: Genres and Modalities 

9:00-10:30am (LL): Newspapers, Magazines, and Other Serial Publications  

Required Readings: 

  • Nicolás Kanellos and Helvetia Martell, introduction to Hispanic Periodicals in the United States, Origins to 1960 
  • El Misisipi Vol. 1, No. 10 (pdf) 
  • Kelly Kreitz, “Counter Mapping the Archival Record: Reflections on Recovering New York City’s Nineteenth-Century Spanish-Language Press.” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies. 49.1 (2024). 175-189.  
  • Selections from Okker, Patricia. Transnationalism and American Serial Fiction.  New York: Routledge, 2012: - all pdf 
  • Patricia Okker, “The Transnational Serial.”  
  • Kirsten Silva Gruesz, “Tracking the First Latino Novel: Un Matrimonio Como Hay Muchos”  
  • Peter Conolly-Smith, “Prose Pictures of Kleindeutschland: German-Language Local Color Serials of the Late Nineteenth Century.”  

Suggested Readings: 

  • David Paul Nord, Ch. 4 from Communities of Journalism: A History of American Newspapers and Their Readers (U of Illinois Press, 2001) 
  • Andie Tucher, “The Penny Press” section from “Newspapers and Periodicals” in A History of the Book in America, Vol. 2, ed. Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley (AAS and UNCP, 2010): 404-408. 
  • Jutta Ernst and Oliver Scheiding, “Introduction: Periodical Studies as a Transepistemic Field.” In: Periodical Studies Today: Multidisciplinary Analyses, eds. Jutta Ernst, Oliver Scheiding, and Dagmar von Hoff. Brill, 2022.  

10:30-11:00am (GDH): Coffee/tea break  

11:00am-12:30pm (LL): Varieties of Print Culture – Ephemera, Broadsides, and Education 

Required Readings: 

  • Rosa Salzburg, intro and chapter to Ephemeral City: Cheap Print and Urban Culture in Renaissance Venice (Manchester UP, 2014)  
  • Lisa Minardi, “Introduction,” Drawn with Spirit: Pennsylvania German Fraktur from the Joan and Victor Johnson Collection (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2015). - pdf 
  • Bethany Wiggin, “Poor Christoph’s Almanac: Popular Media and Imperial Education in Colonial Pennsylvania.” New Perspectives on German-American Educational History: Topics, Trends, Fields of Research. Eds. Jürgen Overhoff and Anne Overbeck. Julius Klinkhardt, 2017. 43-62. - pdf  
  • Brief selections from German-language almanacs, primers/spelling books/grammars (German and bilingual), hymnals, and Sunday school literature.- pdf 

Suggested Readings: 

  • Brief selections from Hermann Wellenreuther, Citizens in a Strange Land: A Study of German-American Broadsides and Their Meaning for Germans in North America, 1730-1830 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013). - pdf 

PREPARATION for Friday Sharing.  

12:30-1:30pm (GDH): Lunch  

1:30- 3:00pm (LL): Primary Source Perusal  

  • Valentín de Foronda, Cartas presentadas a la sociedad filósofica (277807) 
  • El Redactor (New York) (2916) 
  • La America Ilustrada (463649) 
  • El album de Angelina (213712), Mirronga sobre los gatos (2192226) - children’s books 
  • Geburt- und Taufschein. Carlisle, PA, 1809 (278216) 
  • “Gruss zum neuen Jahre 1857 von den Trägern der New-Yorker Criminal-Zeitung.” 1856 (374373) 
  • Charles Sanders, Sanders’ Bilder Fibel. New York, 1846 (505127) 
  • Christoph Saur, Der Hoch-deutsch americanische Calender. 1744 (319795) 
  • Illustrierter deutsch-amerikanischer Volkskalender für das Jahr 1850. Belehrend und unterhaltend für Jedermann. New York, 1849. (196433).  
  • Deutscher Harmonie Club von Carrollton (part of New Orleans), “Constitution und Neben-Gesetze des Deutsche Harmonie Clubs von Carrollton. New Orleans, 1880. (475142).  

3:00-3:30pm - Break 

3:30- 4:45pm (AH): Individual Research in the Reading Room 

Time for viewing materials of interest to you – and also consultation with seminar leaders.  

5:00pm: Dinner on your own 

 

Thursday July 18: Sites and Cities 

9:00- 10:30am (LL): Sites and Cities 

Required Readings: 

  • Herminghouse, Patricia. “Radicalism and the ‘Great Cause’: The German-American Serial Novel in the Antebellum Era.”  America and the Germans: An Assessment of A Three-Hundred-Year History. Eds. Frank Trommler and Joseph McVeigh.  Vol. 1.  Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1985: 306-20. - pdf 
  • McDaniel, M. B. “Divergent Paths: Processes of Identity Formation among German Speakers, 1730-1760.” In O. Scheiding & J. Stievermann (Eds.), A Peculiar Mixture: German-Speaking People in the Greater Mid-AtlanticRegion from 1709 to the Revolution (Penn State University, 2013). - pdf  
  • Ignacio García de Paso (2023) “After the Purchase: Spanish Diaspora, Nation and Empire in New Orleans (1803–1865), Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 29:2 (2023): 251-271  
  • Rodrigo Lazo, “La Famosa Filadelfia,” Ch. 1 of Letters from Filadelfia (Virginia, 2020) 

Suggested Readings: 

  • Herminghouse, Patricia. “The German Secrets of New Orleans.” German Studies Review 27.1 (2004): 1-16. - pdf 
  • Wilson, Carol. The Two Lives of Sally Miller: A Case of Mistaken Identity in Antebellum New Orleans.  New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2007: “Introduction.” - pdf 

10:30-11:00am (GDH): Coffee/tea break 

11:00am-12:30pm (LL): New Orleans and Philadelphia  

Kirsten Silva Gruesz, in conversation with Seminar Leaders  

12:30-1:30 (GDH): Lunch 

1:30-3:00pm: California and the Gold Rush 
Research Project - Collaboration across languages and print culture forms.  

Required Readings: 

Primary Source Perusal: 

El Nuevo Mundo (San Francisco daily newspaper) (9847) 

California Demokrat (San Francisco daily newspaper) (7593) 

3:00-3:30pm: Break 

3:30-4:45 (AH): Individual Research in the Reading Room 

Time for viewing materials of interest to you – and also consultation with seminar leaders.  

6:00-7:30pm (GDH grounds): Evening Picnic 

 

Friday July 19: Presentations & Closing Thoughts 

9:00- 11:00am (LL): Presenting the Research Questions 

11-11:30am (LL): Overview of AAS Fellowship Program with Nan Wolverton 

11:30am-12:30pm (LL): Presenting the Research Questions and Closing Thoughts 

12:30-1:30pm (GDH):  Lunch 

2- 5pm: More research time on your own in the library or departures