"Bring Forth the Old Because of the New": Early Americanists and Contemporary Culture

In her Wiggins Lecture, "The Emerging Media of Early America," Sandra Gustafson framed the American Antiquarian Society's June 2005 conference in the context not only of the digital media newly available to us for the study of early American culture but also of "media that were emergent in the colonies and early United States before 1900." In that category, she included print media from book to broadside, as well as "precursors to modern representational and communicative media": the daguerreotype and the photograph (the 1820s), the electric telegraph (1844), the telephone (an early form in 1828), the phonograph (patented 1877), and the electric light (1879). Gustafson noted that the "new media" of the nineteenth century often fall into a gap between the History of the Book (which tends to focus on print culture, manuscript, and oral forms) and communications studies (which generally begins with twentieth-century media, especially film and broadcasting). Indeed, the AAS conference suggested how much is to be gained by bridging these gaps, and by seeing early American culture as a complex web of print, manuscript, and performance.

Gustafson asked us to consider "what light . . . new forms of textuality shed on an earlier era's textual forms and practices." The conference presentations suggested that the converse is worth considering as well: What light can early America's "textual forms and practices" shed on new forms of textuality? Indeed, Gustafson's lecture itself showed the promise of this question. Gustafson discussed cultural critics working on new media, including several critics who offer narratives of media as evolving in successive stages—and in recent years, often decaying in ways that threaten intellectual, cultural, and civic life (Gioia vii). As Gustafson pointed out, such narratives oversimplify the relationship among different media, suggesting that one form supplants another, with perhaps a few stray relics of earlier forms lingering. Moreover, Gustafson suggested that telling such tidy stories requires critics to ignore earlier manifestations of the "electrified world," such as the telegraph and the electric light. Against "stadial theor[ies] of media and technology,"Gustafson posited a model of "emerging" media," treating "verbal media as always emerging, always in flux, and always in relation to one another."

Many of the papers presented at the AAS offered examples of such complex interactions. For example, Joan Radner's paper on "the intertwined spoken and written traditions of village lyceums" testified to the complex interplay of oral, manuscript, and print forms in nineteenth-century New England. Radner described the "manuscript literary newspapers" produced by members of northern New England village lyceums. As Radner explains, each newspaper issue was edited by a lyceum member, who collated the various essays and prepared a handwritten fair copy. While such manuscripts were carefully drafted to resemble printed newspapers in visual form, their circulation was "purely oral." Papers were read aloud to assembled lyceum members, rather than circulated in manuscript. While one might be tempted to chalk this up to the challenge of reproducing the paper, Radner emphasized that these papers were created for the sake of "ephemeral oral performance," and rarely archived. Radner related an anecdote which dramatized her point. An editor told of an instance in which she entertained a guest who had missed her reading at the lyceum. Fortunately, she happened to have the paper on hand. So, explained Radner, the editor read the paper to her guest. Radner's account of the lyceum's intertwined spoken and written traditions drawing on manuscript and printed material highlights the limitations of what Gustafson termed stadial theories. In the nineteenth-century New England lyceum, oral, manuscript, and print forms circulated in anything but a straightforward transition from oral transmission to manuscript to print.

Early American materials also challenge narratives that see decay in shifting textual forms. Take, for example, the impact of e-mail on our cultural life. As someone who teaches with technology, I have often been asked whether e-mail (especially student e-mail) reveals (or even exacerbates) the decay of literacy. My anxious interlocutors worry about the fluid practices of punctuation and capitalization, about...