A Colonial Southern Bookshelf studies popular books among southern readers in eighteenth-century America. From booksellers' lists and sale catalogs, Richard Beale Davis's study focuses on three key groups of literature: books in law, politics, and history; books on religious topics; and belles lettres. His examination of the colonial southern library suggests many revealing conclusions: persons of many social and economic levels owned and read books; literacy was more widespread than many historians have perceived; the vast majority of the books in southern libraries were published in England and Europe; and colonial newspapers constituted an important influence on cultural tastes. A Colonial Southern Bookshelf takes a historical look at the popular reading lists of the time and what they say about society in eighteenth-century America. The Georgia Open History Library has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this collection, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

A Colonial Southern Bookshelf studies popular books among southern readers in eighteenth-century America. From booksellers' lists and sale catalogs, Richard Beale Davis's study focuses on three key groups of literature: books in law, politics, and history; books on religious topics; and belles lettres. His examination of the colonial southern library suggests many revealing conclusions: persons of many social and economic levels owned and read books; literacy was more widespread than many historians have perceived; the vast majority of the books in southern libraries were published in England and Europe; and colonial newspapers constituted an important influence on cultural tastes. A Colonial Southern Bookshelf takes a historical look at the popular reading lists of the time and what they say about society in eighteenth-century America. The Georgia Open History Library has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this collection, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

In 1711, the imperious Virginia patriarch William Byrd II spitefully refused his wife Lucy's plea for a book; a century later, Lady Jean Skipwith placed an order that sent the Virginia bookseller Joseph Swan scurrying to please. These vignettes bracket a century of change in white southern women's lives. Claiming the Pen offers the first intellectual history of early southern women. It situates their reading and writing within the literary culture of the wider Anglo-Atlantic world, thus far understood to be a masculine province, even as they inhabited the limited, provincial social circles of the plantation South.Catherine Kerrison uncovers a new realm of female education in which conduct-of-life advice-both the dry pedantry of sermons and the risque plots of novels-formed the core reading program. Women, she finds, learned to think and write by reading prescriptive literature, not Greek and Latin classics, in impromptu home classrooms, rather than colleges and universities, and from kin and friends, rather than schoolmates and professors. Kerrison also reveals that southern women, in their willingness to "take up the pen" and so claim new rights, seized upon their racial superiority to offset their gender inferiority. In depriving slaves of education, southern women claimed literacy as a privilege of their whiteness, and perpetuated and strengthened the repressive institutions of slavery.

In 1711, the imperious Virginia patriarch William Byrd II spitefully refused his wife Lucy's plea for a book; a century later, Lady Jean Skipwith placed an order that sent the Virginia bookseller Joseph Swan scurrying to please. These vignettes bracket a century of change in white southern women's lives. Claiming the Pen offers the first intellectual history of early southern women. It situates their reading and writing within the literary culture of the wider Anglo-Atlantic world, thus far understood to be a masculine province, even as they inhabited the limited, provincial social circles of the plantation South. Catherine Kerrison uncovers a new realm of female education in which conduct-of-life advice-both the dry pedantry of sermons and the risque plots of novels-formed the core reading program. Women, she finds, learned to think and write by reading prescriptive literature, not Greek and Latin classics, in impromptu home classrooms, rather than colleges and universities, and from kin and friends, rather than schoolmates and professors.Kerrison also reveals that southern women, in their willingness to "take up the pen" and so claim new rights, seized upon their racial superiority to offset their gender inferiority. In depriving slaves of education, southern women claimed literacy as a privilege of their whiteness, and perpetuated and strengthened the repressive institutions of slavery.