Enhanced by Technology: New Directions in American Studies Scholarship

The American Antiquarian Society's conference "Histories of Print, Manuscript, and Performance in America," the 2005 offering in the society's ongoing program in the History of the Book in American Culture, offered an irresistible array of presentations directly related to my personal research. Scholarly presentations on "how the verbal arts of print, manuscript, and performance reflected and influenced each other, often in unpredictable ways, in pre-twentieth-century America" promised to inform my work in American cultural history, primarily in the field of social and theatrical dance. In my capacity as an archivist and special collections librarian, I was eager to learn to what degree the kind of primary source materials I promote to American Literature and Studies faculty in their teaching and research were represented in the papers presented by scholars on the panel. The presentations, with few exceptions, exceeded my expectations. I left the conference inspired by the exciting new direction in American studies scholarship that challenges print-driven media history through the innovative use of a diverse range of primary source materials and embraces the invaluable contribution electronic and digital technologies have made in the advancement of scholarly research tools.

Overall, the conference revealed how the evolution of American political, civic, domestic, religious, and cultural identities in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was shaped by a broad development in media and performance technologies. Grouped into panels according to related themes, presenters discussed new technologies in text and performance as agents of change for the most critical issues in the evolution of the American experience—democracy, race, gender, individualism, religion, education, westward expansion/manifest destiny, national identity/ nationalism, industry and commerce, and popular culture. In considering the broader interpretation of "text" as "textual media"—especially in connection with a broadly conceived definition of performance—papers revealed multiple intersections of print and new technologies with public and private performance in a full range of spheres of performance: public square, battlefield, prison, the floor of Congress, pulpit, theater, schoolroom, library and lyceum, the home, and, finally, the interior of the heart, mind, and soul of the individual. One of the most compelling concepts to emerge collectively from these presentations was the proposition that, rather than resulting in the depersonalization of the individual, new media and performative technologies augment, enhance, reveal, and even probe, dimensions of the self within interior landscapes.

Given the consistent high quality of scholarship at the conference, it is difficult to select individual presentations for mention. It was fascinating to see how often papers complemented and/or responded to each other. Question and answer sessions, as well as discussions at lunches, dinners, and receptions, continued the lively and compelling intellectual discourse. My assessment of the conference would not be complete, however, without mention of several presentations that left a lasting impression on me. In "Speaking Our Way to Improvement," Joan Radner (Literature, American University) described education as a collaborative lifelong effort among members of rural New England debating societies; democratic "crazy quilts of local society" that permitted an equal voice and "cultural cross-dressing" through oral reading of papers of anonymous authorship. Lloyd Pratt (English and African American Studies, Yale University) proposed in "Semiprivate Space and a Democracy of Race" that the appearance by Frederick Douglass at the Nantucket Anti-Slavery Convention represents how the democratization of public institutions coincided with the disenfranchisement of African Americans and, furthermore, that what allowed the possibility of Douglass's participation in the antislavery movement was the support of a semiprivate organization that "could and should exclude part of the population." In her moving presentation "Silenced Women and Silent Language in Early African- and Anglo-American Newspapers," Joycleyn Moody (English, St. Louis University) argued that slave narratives were reshaped by amanuenses of the American Tract Society and, as abolitionist constructs packaged for white men's ends, did not reflect the real voices or identities of enslaved women. In "Reading the Image: Visual Culture as Print Culture and the Performance of the Bourgeois Self," Laura Schiavo (Director of Museum Programs, Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington) argued that the revolution...