Readex America's Historical Imprints: Early American Imprints Series I: Evans (1639–1800) (review)

Taken together, the Early American Imprints Series I: Evans supplements from the American Antiquarian Society (AAS and the Library Company of Pennsylvania (LCP) add 3,400 texts printed from 1652 to 1800 to the Readex America's Historical Imprints database. The sheer size of these supplements is impressive; these thousands of texts offer a wealth of information reaches into every corner of early American life. The breadth of these supplements represents one of its main strengths, complemented by the excellent organization and the high-quality images.

Both databases are organized in the same manner. The texts can be sorted by the standard categories of author, place of publication, and language, but the databases also benefit from an extensive genre list, detailed subject categories, and a history of printing feature that sorts by bookseller, printer, and publisher. The subject list has two levels and includes everything from honeybees to gynecology to fairy tales. These subjects make the database very easy to browse, enabling users to easily discover new texts. The extensive subject list and types of works available lend themselves to undergraduate exploration of this archive, if students were, for example, to have an assignment that asked them to browse the archive and find a text that relates to main themes of their class and report their findings in some way. Exploration of this archive takes advantage of one the best features of this database: its potential to ground familiar literary narratives in the wide-ranging, everyday world of writing in early America.

The databases purport to include "newly discovered" works printed in America (AAS: 2,300 from 1652 to 1800; LCP: 1,100 from 1670 to 1800). "Newly discovered" should be taken with a grain of salt. It does not necessarily mean entirely new texts, though there must be virtually unknown material in the three thousand entries, but local, specific imprints of texts that exist in other places. For example, the fiction lists do not reveal a hitherto unknown American novel, but they do show American printings of fiction published first in England and France. The idea of "newly discovered" can perhaps best be understood by considering the three texts under the subject "Labor—Slavery" in the AAS supplement. One, Anthony Benezet's "Notes on the Slave Trade," published in Philadelphia in 1783, strongly condemns the American slave trade and attempts to inspire the reader with "a suitable abhorrence for that detestable practice of trading in our Fellow Creatures" and probably is the first version of this text (2). Benezet was born in France, but he emigrated with his Huguenot family to join the Quakers in Philadelphia when he was eighteen, where he became an abolitionist. There is also a 1784 version of John Welsey's Thoughts upon Slavery, first published in London in 1774, with a preface from its Philadelphia printer Enoch Story justifying its printing and praising legislative efforts to abolish slavery. These two texts demonstrate local engagement with international colonial issues, and they could inspire class discussion on the international context of slavery, immigration, and the transatlantic print trade. But the most interesting text in this subject might be "A Negro Song: They Lightened Their Labour by Songs, Verified by the Duchess of Devonshire, Composed by Benjamin Carr" from 1800. Carr was a composer born in London who moved to the US in 1793 and became a prominent part of the Philadelphia musical community. The song lyrics represent Black women taking pity on a lost, weakened white man, caring for him and singing, "Ah! the white man shall our pity share." The tension between race, power, and sympathy in the text only grows more complicated when the text's history and the Duchess of Devonshire's involvement are taken into account. Carr's composition was apparently inspired by Mungo Parke's Travels, when Parke traveled down the...