Volume Two of A History of the Book in America documents the development of a distinctive culture of print in the new American republic. Between 1790 and 1840 printing and publishing expanded, and literate publics provided a ready market for novels, almanacs, newspapers, tracts, and periodicals. Government, business, and reform drove the dissemination of print. Through laws and subsidies, state and federal authorities promoted an informed citizenry. Entrepreneurs responded to rising demand by investing in new technologies and altering the conduct of publishing. Voluntary societies launched libraries, lyceums, and schools, and relied on print to spread religion, redeem morals, and advance benevolent goals. Out of all this ferment emerged new and diverse communities of citizens linked together in a decentralized print culture where citizenship meant literacy and print meant power. Yet in a diverse and far-flung nation, regional differences persisted, and older forms of oral and handwritten communication offered alternatives to print. The early republic was a world of mixed media. Contributors: Elizabeth Barnes, College of William and Mary Georgia B. Barnhill, American Antiquarian Society John L. Brooke, The Ohio State University Dona Brown, University of Vermont Richard D. Brown, University of Connecticut Kenneth E. Carpenter, Harvard University Libraries Scott E. Casper, University of Nevada, Reno Mary Kupiec Cayton, Miami University Joanne Dobson, Brewster, New York James N. Green, Library Company of Philadelphia Dean Grodzins, Massachusetts Historical Society Robert A. Gross, University of Connecticut Grey Gundaker, College of William and Mary Leon Jackson, University of South Carolina Richard R. John, Columbia University Mary Kelley, University of Michigan Jack Larkin, Clark University David Leverenz, University of Florida Meredith L. McGill, Rutgers University Charles Monaghan, Charlottesville, Virginia E. Jennifer Monaghan, Brooklyn College of The City University of New York Gerald F. Moran, University of Michigan-Dearborn Karen Nipps, Harvard University David Paul Nord, Indiana University Barry O'Connell, Amherst College Jeffrey L. Pasley, University of Missouri-Columbia William S. Pretzer, Central Michigan University A. Gregg Roeber, Pennsylvania State University David S. Shields, University of South Carolina Andie Tucher, Columbia University Maris A. Vinovskis, University of Michigan Sandra A. Zagarell, Oberlin College

In the decades spanning the nineteenth century, thousands of women entered the literary marketplace. Twelve of the century's most successful women writers provide the focus for Mary Kelley's landmark study: Maria Cummins, Caroline Howard Gilman, Caroline Lee Hentz, Mary Jane Holmes, Maria McIntosh, Sara Parton, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, E.D.E.N. Southworth, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mary Virginia Terhune, Susan Warner, and Augusta Evans Wilson. These women shared more than commercial success. Collectively they created fictions that Kelley terms "literary domesticity," books that both embraced and called into question the complicated expectations shaping the lives of so many nineteenth-century women. Matured in a culture of domesticity and dismissed by a male writing establishment, they struggled to reconcile public recognition with the traditional roles of wife and mother.

Drawing on the 200 volumes of published prose and on the letters, diaries, and journals of these writers, Kelley explores the tensions that accompanied their unprecedented literary success. In a new preface, she discusses the explosion in the scholarship on writing women since the original 1984 publication of "Private Woman, Public Stage" and reflects on the book's ongoing relevance.

An anthology of the writings of Margaret Fuller (1810-1850), American editor, essayist, poet, teacher and author. An associate of Emerson, Thoreau and William Henry Channing at the Brook Farm Community in Massachusetts, Fuller edited the transcendentalist journal "The Dial", and became the first woman journalist for the "New York Tribune".;This book includes the texts "Summer on the Lakes" and "Women in the Nineteenth Century" in their entirety, a selection of criticisms, her despatches from Italy for Horace Greeley during the Italian Revolution, and selected correspondence.;Mary Kelley has edited and prefaced the collection with a critical introduction, and provided chronology and notes.

This title examines training women in the arts of citizenship. Education played a decisive role in recasting women's collective experience in post-Revolutionary and antebellum America. Asking how and why women shaped their lives anew through education, Mary Kelley measures the significant transformation in individual and social identities fostered by female academies and seminaries. With a curriculum that matched the course of study at male colleges, women's liberal learning, Kelley argues, cultivated one of the most profound changes in gender relations in the nation's history: the movement of women into public life. Kelley's analysis demonstrates that female academies and seminaries taught women crucial writing, oration, and reasoning skills that prepared them to claim the rights and obligations of citizenship.