American Tract Society Research Articles

Sinicization characteristics of American periodical The Child’s Paper and its effects in Late Imperial China

ABSTRACT In the 19th century, the American Tract Society (ATS) published The Child’s Paper (1852–1871) in the United States. Amid the noteworthy Eastward Transmission of Western Learning movement three eponymous Xiaohai Yuebao(hereinafter referred to as TheXHYB）were published in Late Imperial China with the Eastward Spread of Western Learning. By exploring the relationship between the American periodical The Child’s Paper and three editions of The XHYB in the course of Late Imperial China, this study attempts to shed light on the Sinicization characteristics of The XHYB and its effects in Late Imperial China. The study has found that there existed transplantation and translation by tracing back to their historical origins and XHYB in Late Imperial China. In the process of transplanting, translating, and dissemination of ATS’s The Child’s Paper in Late Imperial China, it highlights the Sinicization characteristics: waning of religious indoctrination, nativization of the periodical management, localization of language selection and secularization of illustrated narrative, which had deep effects on children’s education, thoughts andviews on children and children’s literature in Late Imperial China.

The American Tract Society and the Refinement of the Evangelical Book, 1825–1861

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe American Tract Society and the Refinement of the Evangelical Book, 1825–1861Sonia HazardSonia Hazard Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America Volume 114, Number 2June 2020 Published for the Bibliographical Society of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/708835 Views: 178Total views on this site © 2020 Bibliographical Society of America. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Evangelical Encounters: The American Tract Society and the Rituals of Print Distribution in Antebellum America

AbstractThe American Tract Society, an evangelical publisher, built one of the largest media distribution systems in antebellum America. Called “colportage” from 1841, the system mobilized hundreds of “colporteurs” who delivered tracts and books to people, mostly poor whites, in their homes across the United States. This article draws on ritual studies and affect theory to argue that colportage encounters were affectively charged rituals in which colporteurs staged a disposition of spaces, bodies, speech acts, and tempos to transmit affect, shape the subjectivity of readers, and consecrate books and tracts as sacred objects. An up-close examination of these encounters puts pressure on ideas of religious print as a democratizing medium, demonstrating that the reception of evangelical texts was conditioned by the forceful processes through which they were delivered into the hands of readers.

Female Tract Distributorsand Their Door-to-Door Rhetorical Education

In the nineteenth century, religious tract distribution was a popular form of evangelism. Drawing on evidence from the American Tract Society’s periodical, American Tract Magazine, and tract society reports, this essay claims tract distribution as an early site for women’s rhetorical education. While distributing tracts, women received a door-to-door rhetorical education where they acquired and honed skills including canvassing, establishing ethos, and adapting appeals and evidence to different audiences and rhetorical situations. Ultimately, this essay contributes to a broader understanding of what counts as rhetorical education and how and where that education takes place.

Thing

Thing Sonia Hazard KEY WORDS material culture, evangelicalism, thing theory, American Tract Society, new materialism, posthumanism, material texts, history of reading, reception, bookbinding, reform, book history, daguerrotype photography, Jane Bennett, David Brainerd In his 2001 article “Thing Theory,” the literary critic Bill Brown posed a distinction between objects and things. Objects are prisoners in our familiar dialectic between subjects and objects. As the subordinate term, objects are pliant to the subject’s concerns and intentions. Subjects objectify objects. Things, according to Brown, are another matter. Unlike an object, a thing may surprise us, refusing to follow the subject’s script as it pursues its own agenda. Brown’s definition of things prefigured a theoretical development in the humanities today, one that poses a set of provocations for scholars of early American material texts. These ideas are variant and wide-ranging but, for our purposes, may be summarized as forms of “new materialism.” New materialists share with Brown the premise that material things wield an agency, of a kind, that shapes human practice and culture. This point is intuitive at some level. The present sequence of words, for instance, is altered by the substance of caffeine that my body metabolizes as it writes. Meanwhile, my eyes are lured toward the glowing screen, which affords forms of thinking and writing different from the imposed linearity of the typewriter. This is not to claim that all things have the same type or level of agency. My computer does not have intentions and it cannot pour my coffee. But if we can accept that coffee and screens can do certain things, however subtle, to scholars today, might we also ask: What did books do to early Americans?1 [End Page 792] The question may feel quite retro for scholars of material texts. Decades ago, Elizabeth Eisenstein touched off a debate regarding material agency with the publication of The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979). Eisenstein argued that print technology triggered cultural transformations that defined modernity, but her detractors countered that print’s material arrival must be contextualized within preexisting cultures. On their view, cultural meanings mattered more than their post hoc physical expressions in words—whether those words were printed, manuscript, or spoken. In the wake of the larger cultural turn across the disciplines in the 1980s and 1990s, consensus turned against Eisenstein, and “material determinism” and “material agency” accrued pejorative connotations.2 For altogether different reasons, the use of agency as a term applied to material things may also sit uneasily with scholars of early American studies. With his article “On Agency” (2003), Walter Johnson set in motion early American studies’ version of the agency debate. Johnson upbraided historians, especially white historians, as overeager to attribute “agency” to enslaved people. Among his critiques, Johnson argued that championing their agency risked minimizing the oppressions endured under the objective conditions of the slave system. In the hands of some historians, moreover, attempts to recover agency had turned up evidence so thin as to be meaningless, making agency equivalent to something like “humanity.” Given withering critiques of the concept, scholars of early America might wonder, eyebrows raised: If we should no longer use this category to describe people, then why should we apply it to mere things?3 [End Page 793] My purpose is not to induce déjà vu by drudging up timeworn debates, but to draw on new materialist philosophy to pose the problem of material agency differently from how it has been articulated, either in material texts or in early American studies. The challenge of new materialism is to think outside the logic that assumes that objects (and objective conditions) and subjects can be conceptually separated, and that agency may reside with only one or the other: in our terms, either with printing technologies (for Eisenstein) and institutions and structures (as Johnson might put it) or with human intentions and meanings. New materialists urge scholars to approach agency as something distributed across assemblages of subjects and objects, human and nonhuman actors. On this view, it is not I who writes. It’s a group effort: my brain and my fingers and the computer and the chair and the coffee write. Things...

El descubrimiento del Códice Sinaítico, narrado por su descubridor

El Códice Sinaítico (representado en las ediciones críticas con la letra latina S o la letra hebrea alef: א) es un manuscrito griego en forma de códice escrito en letras mayúsculas, cuyo texto se encuentra distribuido en cuatro columnas. Aunque hallado en forma fragmentaria, ha conservado casi todo texto del Antiguo Testamento y todo el Nuevo Testamento, además de otros documentos extracanónicos, como la Epístola de Bernabé y el Pastor de Hermas. De los testigos en formato de códice de la escritura bíblica, es el más completo de los textos antiguos; está fechado en el siglo IV de nuestra era. Fue descubierto en 1844 por Constantine von Tischendorf en el Monasterio de Santa Catalina, al pie del Monte Sinaí, en Egipto.A pesar de su importancia en los estudios de crítica textual y reconstrucción del texto bíblico, la historia de su descubrimiento es poco conocido, y no ha sido traducido completamente al español. La presente traducción tiene como origen la relación hecha por el mismo Tischendorf, publicada por primera vez en inglés como parte del libro When Were Our Gospels Written? An Argument by Constantine Tischendorf. With a Narrative of the Discovery of the Sinaitic Manuscript. Fue publicado originalmente en Nueva York para la American Tract Society, en 1866.

Evangelical Space

This essay argues that antebellum Protestant evangelicals used the landscape to produce a modern form of sacred space. Thomas Cole’s The Oxbow (1836) provides a case study of how this “evangelical space” emerged at the intersection of landscape representation, material space, and religious print culture. Viewed in the context of Cole’s earlier religious paintings, published accounts of Mount Holyoke, and contemporary bible illustrations, the painting materializes sacred history in the landscape itself. The essay then connects this cosmic terrain to the spiritualized spaces that filled the illustrated publications of the American Tract Society. The Oxbow thus tells a neglected story about how antebellum Americans used the landscape as a spiritual technology.

Consecrated Merchants and Midnight Criers: Commercial Evangelicalism and a Jazz Theory of Gender Distinctions in Nineteenth-Century America

Drawing on Jeanne Boydston’s “aesthetic of jazz” and the contributions of queer theory, this article complicates notions of a “normative” gender binary and feminized Protestant religion in nineteenth-century America. Evangelical tract and book sellers known as “colporteurs” constructed spiritual personalities that failed to organize neatly around a gender binary, combining private, passive, and dependent roles as servants and employees with conquering, public identities as sellers of the gospel message. Moving away from a focus on female preaching and the liminal gender fluidity of “fringe” sects, this paper argues that colportage reflected a larger cultural instability in the gender binary where spiritual selling collapsed conventional masculine and feminine traits, opening a queer space for expressions beyond the gender line. Tracing colporteur identities from the American Tract Society and Millerites of the 1840s to the International Bible Students of the 1890s and 1900s, this article suggests that colportage was one expression of the vast variation and instability of potential gender identities that marked America in the nineteenth century.

“Have You Ever Read?”: Imagining Women, Bibles, and Religious Print in Nineteenth-Century America

“Have You Ever Read?”Imagining Women, Bibles, and Religious Print in Nineteenth-Century America Monica L. Mercado In March 1837, the Unitarian Christian Register and Boston Observer published a short dialogue allegedly between an “inexperienced” Protestant clergyman and a “pious” and “quick witted” Catholic woman on the streets of Baltimore. Questioning the Catholic woman about her beliefs, the Protestant clergyman related his conversation to the Christian Register’s readership: ‘How do you know,’ said I, ‘that [the Catholic Church] is the true church? ‘O,’ said she, ‘it is founded upon the teaching of the apostles.’ ‘How do you know that? Have you ever read the history of the church?’ ‘No, I have not.’ ‘How then do you know?’ ‘The priest has told us.’1 As one of thousands of similar nineteenth-century reports circulated by Protestant reformers and anti-Catholic spokesmen, “Reminiscences of an Inexperienced Clergyman” suggested Catholics in the United States did not have the intellectual sophistication to interrogate religious texts or were forbidden from doing so. Echoing arguments as old as the Reformation, Protestant critiques of the Catholic Church’s beliefs and practices often placed ideas about books and reading at their center—as in the case of the clergyman’s female interlocutor, who claimed piety but had never perused a study of church history for herself.2 [End Page 1] As studies of the U.S. “Bible Wars” remind us, nineteenth-century religious conflicts drew distinct lines between the ways in which Protestants and Catholics envisioned the role of God’s word in the material world.3 Stories appearing in the Christian Register and other U.S. religious publications reveal Protestant evangelization and widespread anti-Catholicism in the new nation. Read with missionary chronicles and fictitious anti-Catholic exposés, these narratives fueled the suspicions many Americans already harbored about the growing threat of a secretive and sinister “popery” on their shores. While such developments serve as important markers of a sometimes violent religious intolerance, the literature of nineteenth-century anti-Catholicism and Protestant reform also functions as an important window into American Catholic encounters with print in which women were often the primary actors, “approaching every family with words of wisdom and everlasting truth.”4 An examination of this intersection of women, books, and reading reveals anti-Catholic writers and Protestant home missionaries frequently traded in images of biblical literacy.5 In antebellum anti-Catholic narratives, female characters illustrated charges that Catholics were not people of the word, forbidden from having or reading religious books. In contrast, evangelical Protestant missionaries—represented here by the prolific American Tract Society (ATS)—found reason to portray Protestant women as special conveyors of the word. In conversation with one another, these depictions of women illustrated battles over religious literacy and women’s influence in nineteenth-century America. Forbidden Books in the Convent Exposé For U.S. Catholics, the convent school served as one of the most important foundations of female literacy in the new nation.6 Protestant families [End Page 2] joined their Catholic neighbors in having Catholic sisters educate their daughters, to the horror of anti-Catholic critics, who focused on these sites of women’s education to charge that Catholic educators forbid their reading Bibles and religious books.7 Hence, despite U.S. Catholic bishops’ exhortations to read the Bible, and, in particular, encouragement to read Mathew Carey’s American edition of the Douay-Rheims Bible, nineteenth-century Protestants continued to suggest that Catholics could not be considered people of the word.8 One of the most violent examples of this prejudice, the burning of Boston’s Ursuline Convent in August 1834, drew regional attention to the numbers of elite Protestant families seeking Catholic education for their daughters, and how opposition to Catholic schools stirred opponents to extreme lengths.9 Moreover, the mob’s actions would be debated in print over the next three decades, shedding light on the role books and reading played in Protestant and anti-Catholic discourses around women’s education. While a sympathetic 1834 incident report cited Bible and library book burnings as the most heinous of the destructive mob’s crimes against property, other reports questioned the Ursuline’s reading lists, and local...

Mighty Upheaval on the Minnesota Frontier: Violence, War, and Death in Dakota and Missionary Christianity

Stephen Riggs, Presbyterian missionary to the Dakota Indians, anxiously awaited a letter from the American Tract Society. He expected a reply about his proposed account of the recent war between the Dakotas and Euro-American settlers in Minnesota. After more than two centuries of contact between Dakotas and Europeans, and later Americans, relations had broken down entirely. Confined to reservations with some of their people starving, disgruntled Dakota warriors attacked villages and outlying cabins across southern Minnesota. Over several weeks in August and September 1862, they killed at least five hundred settlers and depopulated as many as twenty-three counties. The Reverend Riggs and his family barely escaped. Like so many Minnesota settlers, their home and possessions were destroyed. Military reinforcements eventually stopped the Dakotas' progress, compelling some to surrender and others to escape west to the plains. When hostilities ended, Riggs served as an interpreter in the negotiations over captives and at military tribunals organized to deal with detained Dakota fighters. He later visited Dakotas incarcerated in prison camps, paying special attention to the more than three hundred men sentenced to death for their part in the uprising. In light of his dramatic experience, Riggs proposed an account of his family's escape, along with details of the Dakota warriors' capture and confinement, in order to share how God had worked through this “mighty upheaval.”

Spreading the Word: The American Tract Society, The Dairyman's Daughter , and Mass Publishing

Spreading the Word:The American Tract Society, The Dairyman's Daughter, and Mass Publishing* Cynthia S. Hamilton (bio) Legh Richmond (1772-1827) is not generally recognized today as an influential author, but he penned a widely read tract, The Dairyman's Daughter (1810-1811). This text achieved the status of a popular classic, moved countless readers toward religious conversion, and provided a model of effective narrative strategies for those seeking to reach a wide audience. Given its impact, Richmond's tract deserves greater attention than it has yet received. Certainly the narrative dynamics, as written by Richmond and edited by the American Tract Society (ATS), invite a detailed examination of the text in relation to the evangelical aim of reaching and converting a mass audience. More intriguingly, The Dairyman's Daughter provides a case study of attempts by the ATS to secure a mass readership for the tract, and to ensure a "correct" reading by its audience. The latter ambition foundered on the nature of the reader's involvement with the text. The novelistic character of the stylistic devices employed brought popularity, but prompted questions about the factual integrity of the tract as memoir. The ATS then directed attention beyond the text, toward the exemplary character of the tract's author, and toward artifacts that underwrote the text's factual status. This strategy merely exacerbated the "misuse" of the tract, for although it helped to authenticate the material, it pulled the reader away from what the ATS saw as a proper reading—to stimulate self-examination and spiritual growth. Instead, the text became a means of experiencing emotional excitement and sentimental gratification. The attention that was directed at the possessions of the dairyman's daughter (Elizabeth Wallbridge) and toward [End Page 25] the places of pilgrimage associated with her life threatened the very religious message that gave these places and possessions meaning. More worryingly for the ATS, the objects and locations threatened to become subjects of idolatry in themselves.1 Interestingly, the ATS directed its criticism toward those who refused to read the text correctly, rather than at the way the text was edited and abridged for popular consumption. This failure of insight is particularly striking given the ATS's sophisticated understanding of the requirements of mass publishing. This essay examines the dynamics that enabled the subversive readings that so disturbed the tract's defenders. It does so in relation to theories of the "New Rhetoric" then current, which, by setting out guidelines for balancing claims based on reason, sentiment, and authority, might have enabled a diagnosis of the sources and effects of imbalance even at that time. An Effective and Popular Tract The Dairyman's Daughter is arguably one of the most popular and influential—and neglected—works of the first half of the nineteenth century. Richmond's tract was abridged, stereotyped, and distributed in vast quantities by the ATS, both at home and—in translation—abroad. Zion's Herald claimed, in an 1836 article, that by 1828 four million copies of the tract were in circulation around the world.2 Samuel Whiting, an Englishman touring the United States in 1820, was astonished and gratified to find a worn copy in a log cabin in the Alabama wilderness.3 In 1836, the New England Institution for the Education of the Blind was paid to produce an edition with raised letters.4 By the end of the nineteenth century, it was said to have been published in over fifty languages, with many millions of copies sold.5 An article written for the New York Evangelist in 1901 called it the most popular tract in the English language during the first half of the nineteenth century.6 In addition to being distributed by tract societies, it was sold commercially. In 1823, an advertisement in the Saturday Evening Post suggested it as a suitable Christmas present for juveniles, characterizing it as "an authentic and interesting narrative."7 Nearly a quarter of a century later, D. Appleton released a new, and much touted, edition of The Dairyman's Daughter: An Authentic Narrative, just in time for the Christmas market in 1856, calling it "the most charming, instructive, and popular work of its kind...

From the Periodical Archives: Susan Warner's "How May an American Woman Best Show Her Patriotism?"

After January 1851 release of her first and most popular novel, Susan Warner (known by her pen name, Eliz abeth Wetherell) spent rest of her literaiy career being identified as the author of The Wide, Wide World. Her literaiy career before this in cluded just one published piece: an essay in Ladies' Wreath for De cember of 1850 by an Elizabeth Witherell, an early version of her future pseudonym, entitled How May an American Woman Best Show Her Patriotism? This essay and circumstances surrounding its appearance provide an important context for understanding Warner's aspirations as a female literary professional, her excessive concern with personal anonymity, and personal goals that would shape her texts and guide her literary career. The Ladies' Wreath was founded in 1846 as a monthly women's magazine. Between 1846 and 1851, Wreath was published prima rily by New York firm of Martyn & Ely (though magazine would circulate among multiple publishers during its years in print) and ed ited by Sarah Towne Smith Martyn. a Congregationalist, temperance activist, and prolific author of religious pamphlets for American Tract Society. Martyn retired from her reform work to edit monthly and continued in this role until 1852, when editorship passed to Helen Dodge Irving, her co-editor of several years.1 The Wreath, with an annual subscription cost of one dollar, boasted of its very healthy circulation of 25,000 in its 1851 subscription renewal notice to its readers. Each issue was thirty-six pages long and contained several colored illustrations, samples of sheet music, and a collection of varied written pieces, over half of which were attributed. Individual volumes of magazine were also republished at end of year as Ladies' Wreath: An Illustrated Annual by J. M. Fletcher & Co, and with magazine's miscellaneous contents and emphasis on fine illustra

Evangelical Secularism and the Measure of Leviathan

Statistics point to a “surge” in evangelical publications as well as in the practices of evangelical piety in the first half of the nineteenth century. In order to explain these parallel trends, however, mere measurement falls short in adequately addressing the strange power evangelical media institutions assumed during this period. In 1825, for example, the American Tract Society announced its agenda of “systematic organization,” a directive that applied equally,and simultaneously, to words on the page, to readers on the ground, and to the airy abstractions of the nation-state.

Locating Popular Religion in the Evangelical Tract: The Roots and Routes of The Dairyman's Daughter

In 1830, a woman wrote to the American Tract Society (ATS) to share an experience she had with one of its publications. At a recent gathering of her sewing circle, she heard one of its most popular tracts, The Dairyman's Daughter, read aloud. She admitted she had not previously been inclined to read ATS publications, "[b]ut the interesting character that is drawn in that Tract, made a deep impression on my mind. I saw my own need of the Saviour, who comforted, supported and saved the dairyman's daughter. These impressions did not leave me, till, as I hope, I found the same Saviour precious to my soul." Wishing to provide others with a similar experience, she forwarded five dollars to aid in the printing and circulation of tracts. In gratitude for her generosity and in hopes of inspiring further conversion and benevolence, the ATS published her letter, one of dozens of testimonials appearing in the annual reports, periodicals, and almanacs of tract societies in the early nineteenth century.1 [End Page 233] Tracts like The Dairyman's Daughter have long been acknowledged as a staple of nineteenth-century evangelicalism. Published and distributed by denominational, nondenominational, and enterprising commercial publishers throughout the century, a ready supply of free or low-cost pious literature found its way into British and American cities and across the countryside. Despite the space this literature takes up today on the shelves of libraries, churches, and used bookstores, historians (with a few notable exceptions) have been slow to explore the vital function such texts played in evangelical culture. The testimonial above, however, suggests just how important they were. Evangelicals believed a tract could effect the conversion of its reader, or in this case, its listener. It could transform a person reading a tract aloud into a minister exhorting the unconverted, and in the process, turn the confines of a private home into a sacred space. Evangelical tracts fostered a sense of membership in a religious community that in the eighteenth century crossed the northern Atlantic, and by the end of the nineteenth century, spanned the globe. The commissioning and distribution of tracts could be an effective way of fulfilling evangelicalism's distinguishing charge for the converted to spread the gospel. Most important, and least explored, are the ways tracts informed the personal religious practices and belief systems of generations of evangelicals. Interest in recovering the individual, quotidian experience of religion has flourished over the past two decades, and historians have begun to mine sources as diverse as manuscript writings, hymns, and material culture, looking to bridge the gap between official doctrine and individual belief.2 They have argued that the experience of religion for most men and women is far more popular than previously acknowledged, found less in the unquestioned adoption of official church doctrine, as formulated by institutions and authors, and more in the creation of a rich, personal syncretism, blending the oral and the written, the orthodox and the folk. Drawing from "a central zone of religious symbols, values, and beliefs—many of them provided by official, [End Page 234] Click for larger view Figure 1 In the nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of copies of Legh Richmond's The Dairyman's Daughter were published in major cities, like Londonand New York, and in smaller outposts around the world, seen in this rare survivalfrom Belfast. Publishers sometimes took liberties in their packaging, here changingthe twenty-seven-year-old subject of the story into a child of two or three. Private Collection. [End Page 235] formal, religious traditions," men and women "erect for themselves worlds of meaning, they create identities for themselves, they engage in the age-old task of religion by finding a way to make sense out of their lives."3 Born in revivalism that cut across, and...

Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America (review)

Reviewed by: Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America Erin A. Smith Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America. By David Paul Nord. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. viii, 212 pp. Index. $35.00. Faith in Reading contributes to the fields of business history, popular religion, and the history of reading in America. Nord argues that the origins of the mass media in the United States were noncommercial and religious. In a compelling, engagingly written account, he narrates how the American Bible Society (ABS), the American Tract Society (ATS), and the American Sunday School Union (ASSU)—founded in 1816, 1825, and 1824, respectively—mobilized modern business practices to get religious texts into the hands of every American. Fueled not by the profit motive, but by missionary zeal, these organizations pioneered a new business enterprise—the modern, not-for-profit corporation. The enterprise was filled with ironies. Although many nineteenth-century evangelicals felt that modern technology and mass media were eroding traditional religious faith, they harnessed these same technologies to win souls for Jesus. Religious publishers were pioneers in the modernization of printing, adopting stereotyped plates, steam-powered presses, and machine-made paper, but they did so in the name of "traditional" literacy—that is, intensive reading of a few, classic texts of the Protestant tradition (Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Baxter's A Call to the Unconverted). Where profit-seeking enterprises concentrated their efforts in densely populated, well-to-do markets, the flow of Bibles, tracts, and religious periodicals was aimed particularly at poor, isolated readers. The early chapters of Faith in Reading are dedicated to faith in the power of the written word and the idea of salvation through scripture alone that made possible the founding of these missionary societies. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 narrate the birth of the nonprofit business organization through examining the economic foundations, institution building, and attempts to systematize distribution of print at the ABS, ATS, and ASSU. Calling tracts the first mass medium in America, Nord details the noteworthy attempts of these societies to achieve universal circulation in the 1820s and 1830s. Critical to their success was the combination of centralized, efficient mass production and locally [End Page 115] organized and controlled distribution. In the 1840s and 1850s, the organizations focused on improving distribution networks. For example, the ABS sent their local auxiliaries standard forms, record-keeping guides and "helps" detailing the best way to distribute according to differential pricing schemes. Frustrated by the tendency of the market to turn their efforts back toward the populated East, the ATS in 1841 built a national distribution system based on colporteurs (itinerant booksellers) whose salaries mitigated pressure to sell rather than give away religious texts. Nord estimates that half the population received a visit from an ATS colporteur in the system's first ten years (98). He also demonstrates how centralized budgeting and accounting, systematic gathering of statistics, formal recruitment and training of colporteurs, standardized record-keeping, and the circulation of monthly magazines pioneered modern administrative practices. Chapters 6 and 7 take up two central questions in history-of-the-book scholarship—how people were supposed to read, and how they actually did. In the pages of their monthly periodical, American Messenger (founded 1843), the ATS represented how religious reading ought to work. The perusal of a single tract could bring about the conversion of a sinner. Conversely, young readers of either "infidel" (heretical) literature or morally poisonous French novels were often driven to suicide, murder, or madness (116). Moreover, religious reading required study, prayer, and sustained reflection, not cursory skimming. What colporteurs encountered in the field was more diverse and complicated than the accounts of reading in the Messenger. Although most households had a Bible and one or two other religious books, many colporteurs were horrified by the material and literary destitution on the frontier. They told stories of books that had been lovingly repaired or rebound after a community of readers had worn them out through repeated borrowing. Some readers traveled many miles to get their hands on a religious text and willingly spent their last cent for books; others...

Enhanced by Technology: New Directions in American Studies Scholarship

Enhanced by Technology:New Directions in American Studies Scholarship Andrew M. Wentink (bio) 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 [End Page 375] 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 [End Page 376] 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...

Seeing Protestant Icons: The Popular Reception of Visual Media in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century America

Although it is commonly asserted that Protestantism bears an intrinsic antagonism toward images, this claim is manifestly, contradicted by a long history of the production and use of images among Protestants the world over. At the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, British organizations such as Hannah More’s Cheap Repository and the Religious Tract Society, and a host of tract and Sunday school societies formed in the United States, all made zealous use of illustrated tracts, handbills, broadsides, newspapers, magazines and books in order to address the disparity between the small number of evangelists and the vast number of those requiring evangelization. Founded in 1825, the American Tract Society invested unprecedented sums in materials and technology to illustrate its tracts and children’s literature and attracted the best wood engraver in the United States to do so. British and American tract producers explicitly felt that illustrations were a strong form of appeal to children and the semi-literate, such as immigrants and the poor. And they happily relied on images in urban settings to compete with secular advertisements and the rival trade of books and pamphlet sellers.

Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America

David Paul Nord's analysis of the large-scale publishing ventures of early national charitable organizations such as the American Bible Society and the American Tract Society offers valuable insight into the long history of the intimate connection between Protestant evangelicalism and the mass media, and it provides a useful corrective to histories of the book that tend to attribute the sudden growth of print in this period solely to market forces. Nord compellingly shows how voluntary associations, spurred by millennial zeal, pioneered the mass publication of cheap Bibles and tracts and coordinated their distribution to households scattered across remote frontier settlements. Nord observes that these ventures ran counter to market logics even as they provoked the development of techniques we will come to associate with the modern publishing industry. Evangelicals insisted on the mass production and distribution of religious texts despite, or even because of, the lack of demand for such books, and they only cautiously embraced the idea of selling some of their stock (in addition to giving books away) so as to finance the cost of production. Nord delights in the irony of charitable publishers' use of cutting-edge nineteenth-century technology, such as stereotype, steam presses, and machine-made paper, in order to mass-produce and circulate classics of seventeenth-century Protestantism, such as Richard Baxter's A Call to the Unconverted (1658). He traces the idea of mass media to evangelicals' repeated launching of “general supplies” (p. 63), attempts at the universal circulation of identical texts—either a stripped-down Bible, published “without note or comment” (p. 43), or simple stories of Christian conversion that steered clear of doctrinal controversy. In order to achieve this ideal, these voluntary societies employed innovative systems of business administration, such as cost accounting, the keeping of statistics, and the exercise of centralized control over local distribution, well in advance of their adoption by for-profit publishers.

Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America (review)

Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America. By David Paul Nord. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. 224. Cloth, $35.00.)In this important and well-written book, David Paul Nord examines America's early religious publishing and argues convincingly that this effort was something new: the country's first foray into nationwide mass media. Faith in Reading reflects the growing scholarly attention being given to the influence of economics on religious practices. The monograph also provides greater understanding of the role that national religious societies played in disseminating written material and promoting faith through publishing.Nord, a professor of journalism and associate editor of the Journal of American History, explores the efforts by local and national religious organizations to spread the during the early national and antebellum periods. What began as the distribution and sale of literature evolved into the publishing of tracts, bibles, and books with the goal of putting religious literature into the hands of every American. Through this enterprise, the hope was that Americans would strengthen their faith, move toward conversion, and possibly achieve millennial perfection on earth.The author's well-informed understanding of journalism and the mass media reveals the profound influence that religious organizations and their publications had on spreading faith across America. Nonsectarian organizations such as the American Tract Society, the American Bible Society, and the American Sunday School Union emerged by the second quarter of the nineteenth century, ambitious and bold in their plans to expand and strengthen the nation's faith. They set up offices in the field to attract donors, distribute materials, and hire local agents to canvass urban centers and venture into the backcountry.The conflict between religious idealism and practical necessity was apparent from the start. Initially, religious organizations insisted on handing out free material to deliver the free word as freely as possible (59). But funds were essential to carry out this effort, and soon officials began to reshape the message. An important lesson could be learned if people paid for materials; their value to customers increased if they had to purchase them. Eventually, religious societies created differential pricing schemes, giving free publications to those in need and charging those who could afford their literature.Beyond the desire to get religious messages to every family, officials saw the infusion of religious material as a golden opportunity to teach Americans how to read responsibly, sensitively, and attentively. They often wrote about how to absorb words and savor their meaning. They encouraged people to circulate books they bought and to learn to enjoy reading. Nothing pleased a book agent more than to discover a well-worn volume in need of replacing. An alarming challenge that fueled an even greater commitment to this goal became evident by the second quarter of the nineteenth century. The nation seemed to be awash in trashy literature. Wherever one looked, cheap novels had become the books of choice. …

From the Celestial City to the Emerald City

From the Celestial City to the Emerald City Charlotte F. Otten (bio) MacDonald, Ruth K. Christian's Children: The Influence of John Bunyan's "The Pilgrim's Progress" on American Children's Literature. New York: Peter Lang, 1989. When I caught the train out of Chicago to go to college as a freshman, I had one suitcase with me. In that suitcase was my father's tercentenary copy of The Pilgrim's Progress, published by the American Tract Society in 1928. I thought I would read it in my freshman year, but my senior year came, and it stood on the shelf untouched (but impressive in its deep maroon and gold) and unread. It isn't that The Pilgrim's Progress wasn't important to me. I first heard it as a child. My father told me the story of Christian, Sunday after Sunday, in exciting episodes, omitting all the theological intricacies, though not the subtleties of conflict. I nearly drowned in the Slough of Despond (he pronounced "Slough" to rhyme with "slew," and that sounded like something David did to Goliath); and [End Page 40] I fought with Giants Pope, Pagan, and Despair. I rejoiced (and breathed a sigh of relief) when I with Christian was welcomed to the Celestial City. After that experience, the printed text, complete with marginal notes, seemed forbidding, even second-hand. When Ruth MacDonald's book arrived, I took the 1928 text down from my shelves and read it. I recognized my copy in her description of it: "In 1928, the tercentenary of Bunyan's birth, the Society issued a commemorative volume of The Pilgrim's Progress, divided into chapters with biblical citations and side notes, copiously illustrated from earlier editions, elegantly bound with gold-leaf lettering and decorations. The large type and wide margins of this volume make a more attractive book than the cramped editions on cheap paper of the earlier Tract Society editions." My own personal reader-history is obviously only a minute part of its world history. This book—so individual and so communal; so theological and so political; so literary and so popular; so parochial and so universal—has been translated into over 200 languages and today is selling well in Third World countries. The Pilgrim's Progress had a world-wide impact from its earliest days. Christopher Hill, in A Tinker and a Poor Man, gives evidence: "It was published in Edinburgh in 1680, in Belfast in 1700. . . . The allegory was translated into Welsh as early as 1687. . . . It was translated into French before 1685. . . . The Pilgrim's Progress was the first English literary work to be translated into Polish. . . . It was published in French in the Protestant Netherlands, in Polish by Lutheran Germans. . . . In the 1850s and early 1860s the Taiping rebels came very near to conquering the whole of China. . . . Their leader . . . called his capital the New Jerusalem. His two favourite books were the Bible and The Pilgrim's Progress. If the Taiping had won, Bunyan's allegory might have become China's earlier little red book" (374-75). Books are different things to different people: it takes no Stanley Fish to tell us that. Adults read different books than children do, though they read the same books. MacDonald recognizes these differences in her influence study. She begins with the suitability of The Pilgrim's Progress to a juvenile audience, examines its appeal to the American reading public from its initial appearance to the present, shows its influence on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American children's works (including television), and concludes with a bibliography of children's editions of The Pilgrim's Progress published in the United States. In discussing the suitability of The Pilgrim's Progress for the child reader, MacDonald cites the opinions of a number of critics who have attempted to discover reasons for its appeal to children. The reasons run like this: it is exciting and suspenseful on its literal level; it has primordial image patterns that children enjoy; it pays respect to the narcissism of the child; it reveals the psychological adolescence of the hero; it is high romance, a heroic fairy-tale adventure with a happy ending; it is an...