Readex America's Historical Imprints: Early American Imprints Series II: Shaw-Shoemaker (1801–1819) (review)

The Readex online database America's Historical Imprints has made important additions to the Early American Imprints Series II: Shaw-Shoemaker (1801–1819) from the American Antiquarian Society and the Library Company of Philadelphia, collections that are sure to interest teachers and researchers. As many readers here may already know, this collection contains scans from microfilm based on Ralph B. Shaw and Richard H. Shoemaker's massive bibliographic compendium of printed materials between 1801 and 1819 built on Charles Evan's earlier work, which had catalogued printed material before 1800. The readability of much of the material in this online archive, however, has been infamously challenging because they are based on digital scans of the microfilm. These four recent supplements, offered from the collections of the American Antiquarian Society and the Library Company of Philadelphia, have drawn on photographic technology (producing high-resolution images) that will allow readers both to read more seamlessly and to obtain insight into the items' textual materiality. As such, these newly released supplements to the online archive are well suited for renewed application and appreciation in the classroom.

The four recent supplements to the Shaw-Shoemaker collection are invaluable resources for the study of the early decades of nineteenth-century America's print and literary cultures. A few gems include beautifully illustrated botany texts, full-color maps, over two dozen previously unreleased editions of novels, an assortment of printed merchant notes and trade advertisements, and fascinating juvenile fiction and crime confessionals with ornately detailed woodcuts. The 2,000-plus available broadsides—now pristinely visible through the database—offer a glimpse into the materiality of the sheet's paper grain while also repackaging these broadly popular forms into more readable format. As a time period that generally gets overlooked—where syllabi might jump from Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette (1797) to Washington Irving's The Sketchbook (1819)—the materials provided here may invite a more immersive introduction to a messy and complicated era that has yet to dislodge the weight of nationalist fantasies, allowing for the telling of different stories other than the well-trod paths of the nineteenth-century nation-state. As the widely disparate materials in this archive suggests, there are so many additional textual threads to follow and explore. These new releases have such an improved quality of textual imaging that they will not only encourage further scholarly endeavors into questions around textual materiality but also enhance student engagement. For example, I regularly introduce students to the Early American Imprints archive, though in using the resource they often express mild frustration at the difficulty to read thoroughly the entirety of a document, due to the microfilm-to-digital transference. But these supplemental updates (which the search bar allows one to specify and select) provide excellent coloration and textual clarity, and I'm excited for the chance to see how students reengage with these materials.

When I teach surveys and seminars in early American literature, I often design assignments that invite students' exploration of America's Historical Imprints, and these recent updates to the Shaw-Shoemaker collection will allow smoother ease of access to students, allowing them to see clearer versions of the recently digitized printed material. I personally look forward to updating one of my assignments that I call Genre in the Archive, which requires students to locate a genre-specific text from the online database that enhances, conforms, or complicates their understanding of the genres we have examined in class. I then ask them to branch out to a few other intriguing genres that, in some manner, relate to their initial genre. They then upload the frontispieces of the texts to an online discussion board and include an accompanying written description (at least a paragraph) of what they found. This assignment surprises students when they see the [End...