United States Government publications are books collectors have not
sought, bibliographers have not analyzed, historians have rarely
considered. But publication is a necessary part of law-making and
law-enforcing, and as the historian J. H. Powell traces national
printing through its first forty years (until the British fired the
capital in 1814) these dry-as-dust public documents become vivid,
exciting elements in the lively story of how a new nation was
built. In this volume collectors will find many "firsts" in public
documents, bibliographers will discover unknown chapters in the
history of printing in America, and historians will be challenged
by the new points of view government publications suggest for
interpreting national history. Lecture I describes the printing of
the Continental Congress before Independence, 1774-1176. Lecture II
deals with official publications during the Revolution, 1776-1787,
the printing history of the Federal Convention of 1787, and public
issues of the new government during its sojourn in New York and
Philadelphia, 1789-1800. Lecture III describes publication problems
in the new capital, Washington City, the printing contracts and
contractors, the complex process of drafting and emitting the laws
for a free people to know and understand. Books-even statutes,
reports, debates, such books as a government makes-are bits of
human history, each with a story of its own. As Dr. Powell makes
clear in these lectures, which bring to light one of the largest,
most important, but most neglected subjects in American Studies,
the charm of any book comes partly from the men behind it, in this
case men new to American history but bound to become familiar as
the field opened up by these lectures is more thoroughly explored:
Adolphus Washington Greely, the Polar explorer; Samuel A. Otis, the
elegant Secretary of the Senate; Roger Chew Weightman, the boy
printer in Washington; Clerk Beckley of the House whom the playing
fields of Eton had prepared for Jeffersonian party battles; and the
printers, the politicians, the civil and military servants of the
government as it grew from small beginnings to what Hamilton
finally described as-"majestic, efficient, and operative of great
things."
General
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