Today The Atlantic is running a fascinating piece by Andrew Ferguson on researching Nixon’s marginalia. Here is a taste: Call it coincidence, serendipity, an aligning of the planets—whatever the term, the moment was creepy and amusing all at once. I...
book history
2019 Princeton Seminar: Day 5
Day 5 of the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History summer seminar on colonial America is in the books. It was a long day, but a very good one. In the morning I lectured on the Middle Colonies, South Carolina, and...
Princeton Seminar: Day 5
Read all of our Princeton Seminar 2018 posts here. It was another busy day yesterday at the Gilder-Lehrman Summer Seminar for teachers on the “colonial era.” The teachers heard lectures on women and dissent in Puritan New England, slave culture...
Kevin Hayes’s *George Washington: A Life in Books* Wins the 2018 George Washington Book Prize
Congrats to Kevin Hayes. Click here for our Author’s Corner interview with Hayes. Here is the Mount Vernon press release: MOUNT VERNON, VA – Author and historian Kevin J. Hayes has won the coveted George Washington Prize, including an award of...
A Nice Intro to the Early American Book Trade
When I was writing The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian and the Rural Enlightenment in Early America I spent a lot of time reading scholarship on the book trade in early America. I was trying to trace the print...
The Author’s Corner with Kevin J. Hayes
Kevin J. Hayes, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Central Oklahoma, now lives and writes in Toledo, Ohio. This interview is based on his new book, George Washington, A Life in Books (Oxford University Press, 2017). JF: What...
The Author's Corner with Jonathan Yeager
Jonathan Yeager is UC Foundation Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. This interview is based on his recent book Jonathan Edwards and Transatlantic Print Culture (Oxford University Press, 2016). JF: What led you to write Jonathan...
The AAS Printers' File Is Being Digitized
The American Antiquarian Society‘s Printers’ File contains information on 6000 people who were involved in the early American book trade. Emily Wells, a staff member at the AAS and an incoming College of William and Mary graduate student, will be...
Amy Sopcak-Joseph: SHARP Things at AHA 2016
Amy Sopcak-Joseph checks in with another dispatch from the floor of the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in Atlanta. To read Sopcak-Joseph’s previous post at The Way of Improvement Leads Home click here. –JF This conference has been...
Bay Psalm Book (1640) Could Draw Between $15 Million and $30 Million
Jill Lepore, writing at The New York Times, reports on tomorrow’s historic auction. A taste: THE first English-language book printed in the New World is scheduled to be auctioned on Tuesday by Sotheby’s of New York. It’s expected to command...