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Reviewed by:
  • Print Culture, Enlightenment, and Revolution in the Americas
  • Frank Shuffelton (bio)
Print Culture, Enlightenment, and Revolution in the Americas History of the Book Conference: American Antiquarian Society Worcester, Massachusetts 16–18 June 2006

A new direction for early American literary studies began to appear in the late 1980s, leading the way to an understanding of American [End Page 191] literatures. William Spengemann began to trouble the notion of a merely nationalist, monolingual American literature with his A Mirror for Americanists (1989), and in the following year the widely touted Heath Anthology of American Literature appeared with its inclusion of texts translated from Native American, French, Spanish, and other languages. In 2002 and 2004 two conferences held in Tucson and Providence brought together scholars of the literatures of the Americas, North and South, to further expand comparatist conversations. Historians, for their part, had been debating notions of American exceptionalism for some time, and influenced variously by the studies done by Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, J. G. A. Pocock, and others of the impact of British whig political theory on America and perhaps by the conception of world history put forward by Immanuel Wallerstein, they began to think about early American history in terms of a larger Atlantic world. Bailyn's annual Atlantic History Seminar at Harvard has brought together a core of young historians with the goal of creating an international community of scholars ready to explore unfamiliar archives and to embrace new approaches to the history of the Atlantic world. Although this has already led to numerous stimulating essays and important books, the seminar has been for the most part a historian's game somewhat defensive about disciplinary turf.

Simultaneously with these developments has been the emergence of the discipline of the history of the book, an area of interest that frequently confounds and complicates traditional disciplinary boundaries. At the recent conference sponsored by the American Antiquarian Society, historians and literary scholars with expertise in a wide range of national texts and events came together under the aegis of the society's interest in the history of the book in order to discuss the era of revolutions beginning with that in Britain's North American colonies and concluding with the 1837–38 rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada. Papers were delivered in plenary sessions, so the relatively small number of attendees were able to hear each presentation and to participate in discussion encouraged by a generous allowance of time for responses and questions. The presentations as a whole emphasized the circulation of texts within the Atlantic world and consequently meshed surprisingly well with each other.

The conference opened with David Shields's delivery of the 24th annual James Russell Wiggins Lecture, speaking on "The Print Culture of Early Filibusterism." A string of adventurers in the era of the early republic, seeking [End Page 192] to provoke revolutions, mostly in the interest of carving out private domains for themselves, represented the dark underside of the American Revolution. Shields distinguished between conspiratorial adventurers such as those behind the "Republic of West Florida," whose hallmarks were secrecy and the exchange of manuscripts, and nationalist adventurers who drew on the powers of publicity and the vox populi in order to find a warrant for their schemes. In the West, where the Republic itself was a phantasm and fears were rife about European diplomacy deciding their fate, secret filibusters thrived and frequently were involved with European powers as illustrated by the conspiracy of William Blount. The records of many of these adventures can be found in Congressional reports, newspapers, and trial proceedings but frequently end up in the world of rumor, secrecy, and national paranoia, an area in need of greater theorization.

The afternoon speakers examined topics in the spread of political ideas. David Armitage noted that in 1780 Jeremy Bentham coined the term "international," but four years earlier the American Declaration of Independence was beginning to be rapidly translated and circulated. Initial assessments, claimed Armitage, put greater stress on it as a declaration of a state's right to self-determination and less on its declaration of the rights of individual citizens; even in the United States the latter was...

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