HIST 150: History Through Objects: The Atlantic World (Spring 2024)

The five volumes in A History of the Book in America offer a sweeping chronicle of our country's print production and culture from colonial times to the end of the twentieth century. This interdisciplinary, collaborative work of scholarship examines the book trades as they have developed and spread throughout the United States; provides a history of U.S. literary cultures; investigates the practice of reading and, more broadly, the uses of literacy; and links literary culture with larger themes in American history.
5 volumes

Provides a history of William & Mary's college library, 1963-1793

Child's play? : children's books in early America : an exhibition from the collections of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation for the 22nd Congress of the International Board on Books for Young People.

Illustrated in the style of the period, each softbound booklet in this series describes a trade of eighteenth-century Williamsburg and the lives and times of the artisans who practiced it.

A chapter within A History of the Book in America, specifically about the book trade in Virginia in the 18th century.

Describes the full range of items surviving from the presses of colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, including books and newspapers, but emphasizing the ephemera produced by local printers.

The Stamp Act, which was imposed on the American colonies by the British government in 1765, was an essential preface to the American Revolution. Historians have observed that it brought about an important transition for colonial printers, politicizing them and turning them into influential purveyors of propaganda. The act had a critical impact on print culture in Virginia, which was the largest of the colonies and one that was crucial to the formation of a new nation. This study helps to clarify an historical debate regarding the colonial printers' supposed unanimous opposition to the tax. Focusing on the print-related cultural shifts of this period, it concludes that a newly critical Virginia press and an accompanying broadening civic discourse led to a new regard for freedom of the press. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reviews Richard Beale Davis' 'Literature and Society in Early Virginia, 1608-1840' (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U. Press, 1973), and discusses trends in colonial Virginia literature, with emphasis on the writings of William Byrd II, George Sandys, William Munford, Arthur Blackamore, and Samuel Davies.

This study examines six master printers of three printing businesses in Williamsburg, Virginia, all of whom called their newspapers the Virginia Gazette, and competed with each other prior to and during the Revolutionary War from business locations on the same street in the colonial capital. The years covered in this study are from 1766–1776. These newspapers were the key communication throughout the colony, as no others existed outside Williamsburg before 1780, other than a paper that attempted to survive under three printers in Norfolk for part of a one-year period from 1774–1775. Little attention has been paid to the Williamsburg printers from this time-frame, and much of the information that has been disseminated to date about them is inaccurate. Some researchers did not realize that there were actually three newspapers, rather than one with multiple master printers, when they all carried the same name. The first portion of this study provides a biography of each printer compiled from close readings of 907 extant issues and 129 supplements from the 11-year period, augmented with the small amounts of primary data available, and also compares and contrasts these printers with each other. The second half of the study applies criteria from Fred S. Siebert's Four Theories of the Press to ascertain whether Virginia followed the pattern of the rest of the colonies in articulating a predominantly Libertarian rather than Authoritarian stance through its newspapers in the years prior to and during the early years of the war. The findings show that Virginia did not fit the pattern, as the complete switch to a Libertarian revolutionary ideology did not occur until the last three to six months (depending on the printer) before independence was declared in that colony. This slower change in ideological development in Virginia as opposed to the middle and northern colonies probably resulted from the differences in the social structure of the colony itself as governed by the wealthy elite, and from their tremendously close attachment to the mother country over years of almost exclusive trade with Britain instead of the sister colonies in America.