suggesting that Maryland is unique in its archival development, support of archives and historical records, or in the evolution of some sort of records mentality. Much of what has been described in the previous chapters concerns fairly natural activities. Marylanders – along with New Yorkers, Pennsylvanians, Alabamians, 1 and citizens and policymakers in other states – became interested in older records because of their fascination with the past or in using the past, in that great antiquarian tradition, to justify or explain the present. The present day interests in the past – in which many Americans “participated regularly in a wide range of past-related ‘activities,' from taking photos to preserve memories, to watching historical films and television programs, to taking part in groups involved in preserving or presenting the past” 2 – have their foundation or at least roughly their parallels in the earlier activities of collecting documents, editing and publishing documentary editions, founding historical societies, and establishing government archives. While today a much broader range of people are involved in these historical activities than we can find in the previous three centuries of American life, it is nevertheless obvious that our present sense of documentary preservation owes much to these predecessors. The ability to do genealogical research, the impetus to write a diary, or the idea of visiting a museum all extend from the generations before who gathered the organizational and government records and personal papers.
political and other utilitarian purposes, so were their peers in New York and Pennsylvania and, somewhat later, in the Alabama territory. Libraries included legal texts and historical treatises across the colonies and through the early national period, reflecting common ways of approaching work and life. The climates, crops, ethnic groups, and other aspects of society might differ, but the ways of carving out an existence brought together people in a fairly consistent manner. In all of the states, no matter their origins, certain government institutions served as a unifying force, especially when they were where records were deposited and public notices were posted. The Pennsylvania Court of Common Pleas did this in the late seventeenth century by enforcing commercial contracts, ensuring the collection of debts, assembling juries, and posting laws. 3Local courts often tied local people to larger governmental entities and social systems, including an awareness of the importance of records for everyday life. In every colonial area or sparsely populated pioneer region, whether in early Maryland or Pennsylvania or latter Alabama, courts – with their records and functions -- served as a means of connecting people to the larger society. 4After all, the effort of compiling digests of laws, requiring access to good government and court records, was a universal quest. Knowing processes related to land ownership and sale, also requiring knowledge of and access to records, was another universal concern – not just something that would be unique to Maryland . The challenges faced by Maryland 's Thomas Bacon, for example, in combing through old records to compile a reliable set of laws was faced by many others in other colonies, as no colony or state managed to develop a complete published guide to their own laws. 5The story of archival development in Maryland seems generally typical to other states and regions.
historical societies and state government archives. The private historical society (in the West and Midwest it was the publicly funded institution combining historical society and state archives) always provides the first indication of an organized archival tradition, as it did in Maryland . Pennsylvania saw the establishment of a historical society in Philadelphia in 1822 and another major one in Pittsburgh in 1879, both private institutions and both programs that have moved from an antiquarian focus to far more dynamic historical agencies with broader visions and activities. Both societies focused on mainly collecting everything (and anything) at first, although they had shifted their missions in considerable fashion by the late twentieth century to emphasize educational programs and other public activities (where their earlier counterparts were much more closed and restricted). Like most states, there were many stillborn efforts in founding such institutions, just as it took a very long time to create in Maryland a historical society or a state archives. The establishment of the Western Pennsylvania program was preceded by failed efforts in 1834, 1843, and 1858. 6In New York, the New York State Historical Association was founded in 1900, although its library and archival collections did not emerge into a major resource until after 1945, focusing on areas like agricultural history, folklore and folklife, and literary history. 7The New-York Historical Society, one of the earliest private historical societies, essentially served as a template (along with the first historical society in Massachusetts), but it has mainly become an example of the more limited archival role (in both collecting and leadership) that such organizations can now serve. 8While the Maryland counterpart seems strong, there is a lesson that these institutions, built on a Renaissance notion of gentlemanly and scholarly collecting, can now play only part rather than the lead role in archival work (such work dominated by electronic recordkeeping systems, vast quantities of records, and other complex issues requiring much different professional orientations, purposes, and funding sources). 9
Maryland the historical society served as a surrogate public archives for nearly a century, in other states government archives emerged at much later times. New York, with the more recent establishment of its state archives following the founding of the historical society nearly one and three quarters of a century later, was able to build a stronger sense of leadership and community among its archives. The New York State Archives, especially under the able leadership of Larry J. Hackman, saw its role as one of building partnerships among the various and diverse archival programs, as well as its constituents who would use archival records or be interested in good records administration, in that state. 10In most of these states the establishment of an institution with a statewide mandate often took a protracted time, allowing local programs to sprout up often with no real sense of standards or even clear mission (and certainly no sense of community). The long movement to establish a state government archives in Maryland was replicated in other states. New York has the most complicated history. While many older state records were transferred to the state library in 1892, a weak Division of Archives and History was founded only in 1915, and a full-fledged state government archives not until the 1970s. 11In Pennsylvania , a state historical society was created in Harrisburg in 1913, was reorganized in 1937 and again in 1945 when it was connected administratively to the state government archives and museum, and finally evolved into the Historical and Museum Commission with a new building in 1964. 12In Alabama , multiple efforts to create a historical society in the mid to late nineteenth century finally gave way to the first state government archives in 1901, an institution absorbing both roles of public and private archival agency. 13In all this we can see some differences. The size (in geographical scope and the range of archival and historical manuscripts repositories eventually established) of the states of Pennsylvania and New York led to greater challenges in building communities of archivists, whereby in Alabama the Department of Archives and History grabbed and maintained its dominant role and in Maryland the historical society and state archives seemed sufficient to provide whatever degree of archival leadership was necessary.
preservation efforts involving documentary editing and publication. These efforts were often connected to other emerging interests in aspects of the past, and they were often the earliest publicly funded efforts to manage the archival records. Most geographic areas saw the early publication of documentary sources that featured major problems with selection, transcription, and use of the records. The publication in 1749 of a Quaker journal reveals that the original manuscript was much tampered with in order to reflect Quaker objectives and values. 14In the early to mid nineteenth century, as an interest in history and the sources and artifacts of the past emerged, in each state pioneers emerged to collect, copy, transcribe, edit and publish early sources. 15Nearly every state in the early nineteenth century embarked on copying projects in Europe , employing individuals to make copies of records in European records offices concerning the early history of their states. New York passed a bill in 1839 and employed John R. Brodhead to copy records in The Hague, Amsterdam, London, and Paris between 1841 and 1844. These copies were later published. 16Most of these states tried, in the early to mid nineteenth century, to begin publication programs for their earlier records – all efforts long pre-dating the formation for official state government archives. Pennsylvania began to publish its early records in 1838, although a state archives did not come into being until a division of public records was established in the state library in 1903 (ultimately placed within its current configuration in the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission in 1945. 17These early documentary publishing efforts, essentially because they were early manifestations of interest in the older records, often worked against great odds. 18In the early twentieth century, Hiram Shenk, holding the position of Custodian of Public Records in Pennsylvania, tried to continue publication of the official archives of the state, but he was sidetracked by political issues, poor funding, and problems in dealing with the various historical societies in the state. 19Maryland 's efforts to gather and, at times, to publish selectively the archival records of government and other organizations and individuals were not unique in anyway. The impulse to gather and publish was often a reaction to the basic human fears of inadvertent records destruction. Just as records disasters spurred on, from time to time, renewed efforts in Maryland to provide better care for the records, other states demonstrated a similar cause and effect, such as when the New York State Library burned in 1911, destroying countless seventeenth century records. 20Closer examinations of other states will certainly reveal similar incidents.
proliferation of archival programs. While all now struggle with how to deal with voluminous public records or new technologies requiring new approaches far different than what had been tried in the past, 21 the emphasis could honestly be redirected to the commonalities of such challenges. All of the states being described here feature both a wide array and large number of records programs. 22Much of this has come about with the establishment of academic archives with missions to collect and document regions or subjects. This is especially evident in certain specialized areas, such as labor archives, as universities began to build collecting programs in this area after the Second World War. 23 This explains one reason why in the early archival development in Maryland no university programs figure as leaders – the emergence of academic archives was a development mostly occurring in the past thirty years or so. Some states featured the development of unique kinds of archives programs, even in the earlier years, that are not noticeable in the Maryland story. The Schomburg Collection, focused on books and archives about black history and culture, was founded in 1926 and re-established in 1980 as the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City 24Nothing like this emerges in Maryland before the Second World War. In Pennsylvania, the Presbyterian Historical Society was founded in the mid-nineteenth century and grew into a major repository of religious records; in fact, this institution was the first of the major denominations to establish a program for its archives. 25 The lack of a strong state presence in records matters, such as in New York until the latter end of the twentieth century, worked against the development of local government archives, 26 suggesting how unique Baltimore's municipal records program – despite its uneven and malformed development, was in America.
communication, and working are reflections of basic human needs, impulses, and, perhaps, even nature. Saving records as a window on the past is as basic as creating them in the first place; creating records is part of the basic human instinct to communicate and network with each other. Indeed, when some look to the societal implications of the present information technologies, they often miss the aspects of the uses of these technologies that are really reflections of human nature and behavior. RAND mathematician James Dewar's recent essay, “The Information Age and the Printing Press: Looking Backward to See Ahead,” 27 turns to historical explanation because “it is difficult to see where the information age is leading because the technologies fueling it are still being developed and at a furious rate [and] . . . because of the breadth of the impact of information technologies to date.” Dewar finds Elizabeth Eisenstein's explanation of the impact of the printing press to be uncannily parallel to today, leading to a final argument for an unregulated Internet because the future will be dominated by unintended consequences and take a long time to develop. Dewar believes that “there has been only one comparable event in the records history of communications” to the recent revolution in the information technologies – the printing press. What makes the printing press comparable is the “one-to-many communications capability” since, in his opinion, “it is networked computers that define the information age.” One might ask, what about other innovations such as the development of archival repositories to store records and the harnessing of printing and later technologies to disseminate copies of these records (at least a selected portion of these records).
individuals' homes and family units, and particular places in tightly defined time periods would demonstrate that the idea of networking is really part of human nature and every era. The European settlement of North America brought with it many cultural barriers involving communication and, except for the issue of digital technologies, problems not unlike what we face today. Historian Karen Kupperman carefully charts the first encounters between the American Indians and the White English settlers by trying to determine how both groups “tried to make sense of what was happening [by looking at the documents emerging from the contacts] and how they attempted to manipulate the elements that contributed to these processes.” 28Kupperman's interesting analysis reveals two very different cultures, one relying on the written word (both print and manuscript) and the other existing mostly via oral transmission. While she finds many instances in which the different peoples strove to understand each other or simply reflected deep curiosity about each other (such as with clothing), Kupperman carefully chronicles the struggling means of understanding. While the Europeans created records, the Indians produced wampum belts, symbolic beadwork, painted bark and skins, and tally sticks along with oral tradition – and the difficulties of comprehending each other becomes more obvious. Such analysis suggests a much richer area of study than the traditional historical society or state government archives that is the subject of this brief book, but we need to know about the origins and subsequent development of these other, more traditional and more obvious institutional manifestations of recordkeeping in order to appreciate the broad scope of how early and other Americans have approached the preservation of their documentary heritage. The diversification of Maryland's archival impulse, drawing in societal minorities, disaffected groups, and the full range of ethnic and racial groups is not an event of the early formation of this state's archives (as it is nowhere else in the United States), but it is a story needing telling.
became a contested history. Prior to the late twentieth century archives were more concerned with problems of funding, staffing, and general understanding and support, and there is even the sense that many archives and archivists were content to avoid social or political conflict. Yet, the records being collected by archival repositories have often (perhaps, almost always) been the result of social and other conflicts. The problems with cultural misunderstandings, revolving to a large extent around information and communication, in Early America is more evident in two other recent books. Jill Lepore's study of King Philip's War, an Indian uprising in New England in 1675-76, is a “study of war and of how people write about it.” 29Drawing on private letters, government archives, publications, portraits, and material culture, Lepore provides an interesting contrast between two nations with very different means of communicating and remembering, prompting her to ask – “If war is, at least in part, a contest for meaning, can it ever be a fair fight when only side has access to those perfect instruments of empire, pens, paper, and printing presses?” 30This historian goes to great pains both to re-examine how the English settlers dealt with the war in their own culture and to re-construct what the supposedly inarticulate Indians thought about this conflict. On a more restricted (in time and place) topic, historian Donna Merwick writes a poignant portrait of the life of Dutch notary Adrian Janse van Ilpendium, whose life and career ends in suicide in 1686 in Albany , New York . The study reconstructs his vocation and the problems he faced when the English took over and Dutch notarial practice was no long supported or authorized. For a while, Janse eeks out a living, even for a time trying to adapt to both the English language and English records systems. As Merwick writes, “Janse's life was inescapably entangled with the English conquest of New Netherland . My purpose in telling his story has been to suggest how subtle and personal that entanglement was . . . The conquered had to read their environment, their social and moral space, in a radically different way.” 31Perhaps, the very early efforts of Governor Benedict Leonard Calvert in trying to protect the colonial records in Maryland were nixed by cultural misunderstandings between those tied to England and those looking more to their immediate circumstances in the colonial wilderness. Perhaps, the tensions between the Maryland Historical Society and the Maryland Hall of Records were the result of another kind of conflict between those concerned with social class and prestige and those focused on good government. Additional study of such matters might lead to some interesting different conclusions about the nature of archives.
communities and worked against others, just as has been claimed for the Internet/World Wide Web today. The kinds of recordkeeping tried and experimented with in Maryland through three centuries is a more primitive form of not mere documentation, but of networking. Peter Thompson has demonstrated how the eighteenth century Philadelphia tavern provided a forum in which all social classes converged, shared opinions, and considered matters outside the more regulated spaces of this era. 32Thompson also indicates that the “first two or three generations of Philadelphians fashioned from tavern talk and action a realm of discourse that existed outside the effective cultural control of both government and private or domestic authority.” 33 David Shields looks at coffeehouses, private societies, literary salons, clubs, and other venues for societal communication in the same period. Shields reveals how, even with much more primitive technologies, the eighteenth century was a networked era. 34In Maryland , taverns and coffeehouses, along with courts and other venues provided environments for both the creation and use of records and other texts.
present communications systems and contemporary promises or worries about them may be nothing new at all. In the nineteenth century, the personal handwritten letter managed to build quite remarkable networks and while the form and content of these epistles often reflect the lack of telecommunications, it is obvious that the receipt of a letter or the act of creating one was an intense form of personalized networking that seems to have a role even today with the Internet. 35The preparation and use of cookbooks was another form of networking in the nineteenth century, as one historian argues, “what we may designate as fairly private activity or discourse (sewing, the writing of letters, contributing to a cookbook) may actually have been seen by women of the past as forms of public participation.” 36We can see that in the antebellum period a city like New York was enmeshed in “urban texts” that built community, from books and newspapers to the “writing and print . . . on buildings, sidewalks, sandwich-board advertisements, the pages of personal diaries, classroom walls, Staffordshire pottery, needlepoint samples, election tickets, and two-dollar bills. . . .” 37As such analysis suggests, “despite their anarchic, patchwork character, . . . the flood of written and printed ephemera created a now-familiar language of publicity linking political action, civic pageantry, and commercial promotion, and reinforced the use of the streets for impersonal address.” 38In states like Maryland , groups forming organizations like historical societies added another means for creating and using texts . While it is important in American archival history to sketch in the outlines of how, when, and what kinds of archival and historical manuscripts repositories were created and nurtured, it is just as important that we hold onto a view of the social, economic, and cultural contexts of these repositories.
network or networking. The Oxford English Dictionary provides the details on the etymology of this word when we see that its oldest definitions (sixteenth century) relate to the “threads, wires, or similar materials, are arranged in the fashion of a net,” then moves to a nineteenth century idea of a “system of rivers, canals, railways” – much more compatible with the modern connotation of the Internet, and ultimately to the late nineteenth and twentieth century notions of a “system of cables for the distribution of electricity to consumers” and “broadcasting system, consisting of a series of transmitters capable of being linked together to carry the same program.” It is not, in fact, that we see the term used for meaning something more akin to the Internet, an “interconnected group of people; an organization.” 39Even these dictionary definitions do not help. The implications of the word network or networking is very different today, implying a kind of new, virtual community made possible because of the technical capabilities of the Internet. Even a historian working on periods before the advent of telecommunications can see that “it is perilously easy for people who routinely speak telephonically or who regularly transmit and receive e-mail to assume that all other potential speakers and letter writers are likewise ‘wired' – that telephone and Internet totalize the world. For there remain, of course, large parts of the world unserved by the Internet, and even in affluent Western countries severely marginalized people . . . generally lack access to electronic terminals and are thus excluded from the electronic community. Correspondence nevertheless exists for such people.” 40In other words, people will find ways to create networked communities no matter what technologies are there to support them. Are these communities different? Certainly. But they are still communities exchanging information (in some cases, surprisingly large quantities of information). The development of archives are harbingers of what transpired in the much later electronic networks, bringing together people and a society in seeing the past through the accumulation of records. The future of archives will undoubtedly be very different than anything we have ever seen, but the archival past has an interesting story to tell about how people create, preserve, use, and imagine themselves through private letters, government records, and careful collections of documents.
1 These observations are based on my working experiences in these three other states, especially my work on analyzing statewide historical records issues, as reflected in my serving as principal author of Assessing Alabama's Archives: A Plan for the Preservation of the State's Historical Records (Montgomery: Alabama Historical Records Advisory Board, 1985) and Principal author, Strengthening New York's Historical Records Programs: A Self-Study Guide (Albany: New York State Archives and Records Administration, 1988) and as a consultant to the revision of the statewide plan completed for the Pennsylvania Historical Records Advisory Board in 1999-2000 (working with Elizabeth Yakel). See also my " Alabama 's Archival Heritage, 1850-1985," Alabama Review 40 (October 1987): 284-307; "A Documentation Strategy Case Study: Western New York ," American Archivist 52 (Spring 1989): 192-200; and "Archival Education in the New York Library Environment," Bookmark 48 (1989): 32-36. 2 Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen , The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 9. 3 Alfred L. Brophy, “'For the Preservation of the King's Peace and Justice': Community and English Law in Sussex County, Pennsylvania, 1682-1696,” American Journal of Legal History 40, no. 2 (1996): 167-212. 4 Laura L. Becker, “The People and the System: Legal Activities in a Colonial Pennsylvania Town ,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 105, no. 2 (1981): 135-149. 5 Erwin C. Surrency, “The Beginnings of American Legal Literature,” American Journal of Legal History 31, no. 3 (1987): 207-220. 6 Barbara Clark Smith, “The Authority of History: The Changing Public Face of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania ,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 114, no. 1 (1990): 37-66; Nicholas B. Wainwright, One Hundred and Fifty Years of Collecting by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania , 1824-1974 (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1974). For the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, see Clarke Thomas et al, “Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center,” Pittsburgh History 79, nos. 1-2 (1996): 1-84; Timothy J. Meagher, “Not Hell, Home,” American Quarterly 50, no. 1 (1998): 130-148, a review of a recent exhibition; and William F. Trimble, ed., “One Hundred Years of the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania,” Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 62, no. 2 (1979): 113-130. 7 Paul Z. DuBois, “The New York State Historical Association Library: From Junk Pile to Scholar's Workshop,” New York History 50, no. 4 (1969): 397-419. 8 Kevin M. Guthrie, The New-York Historical Society: Lessons from One Nonprofit's Long Struggle for Survival (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1996). 9 Sally Griffith, Serving History in a Changing World: The Historical Society of Pennsylvania in the Twentieth Century ( Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press , 2001) spins a similar tale to that of the New-York Historical Society. 10 See Hackman's series of articles describing both his vision and the efforts to develop statewide archival planning and activities: Larry J. Hackman, “From Assessment to Action: Toward a Usable Past in the Empire State,” Public Historian 7, no. 3 (1985): 23-34; “State Government and Statewide Archival Affairs: New York as a Case Study,” American Archivist 55 (Fall 1992): 578-599; and “Historians and State Archives: Challenge and Opportunity,” OAH Newsletter 22, no. 4 (1994): 3-5. 11 Bruce W. Dearstyne, “Archival Politics in New York State, 1892-1915,” New York History 66, no. 2 (1985): 164-184. 12 S. K. Stevens, “The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission,” History News 20, no. 7 (1965): 146-148, and S. K. Stevens, “Operation Heritage: A Glance Backward and a Look Forward,” Pennsylvania History 33, no. 1 (1966): 1-12. For a description of the 1964 building, see William N. Richards, “The William Penn Memorial Museum and Archives Building,” Curator 10, no. 3 (1967): 183-205. 13 See Cox, " Alabama 's Archival Heritage, 1850-1985.” 14 George J. Willauer, Jr., “Editorial Practices in Eighteenth Century Philadelphia : The Journal of Thomas Chalkley in Manuscript and Print,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 107, no. 2 (1983): 217-234. 15 Vivian C. Hopkins, “The Dutch Records of New York : Francis Adrian Van Der Kamp and De Witt Clinton,” New York History 43, no. 4 (1962): 385-399. 16 Nicholas Falco, “The Empire State's Search in European Archives,” American Archivist 32, no. 2 (1969): 109-123. 17 Frank B. Evans, “The Many Faces of the Pennsylvania Archives,” American Archivist 17, no. 2 (1964): 269-283. 18 Roland M. Baumann, “Samuel Hazard: Editor and Archivist for the Keystone State ,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 107, no. 2 (1983): 195-216. 19 Roland M. Baumann, “Dr. Shenk's Missing Series of the Published Pennsylvania Archives,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 103, no. 4 (1979): 415-431. Lyman H. Butterfield, “History at Its Headwaters,” New York History 51, no. 2 (1970): 127-146 describes the efforts of amateur historians and local historical societies to publish the journals of a military campaign in the American Revolution, arguing that the role of making such materials available in this fashion is at the heart of what such historical organizations do for society. 20 Peter R. Christoph, “Books from Ashes: A Project of Recreating Lost Documents,” Halve Maen 56, no. 2 (1981): 17-18, 24-25. 21 George D. Wolf, “The Scranton Papers,” Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 51, no. 4 (1968): 365-375 describes an effort to actively participate in political matters in such a way that the records of seminal public officials are protected and made available to researchers. 11 Kate Moore, comp., “Archival Repositories and Museums/Exhibits in Southern History: Alabama , Part II,” Southern Historian 13 (1992): 71-82. 23 Norma Fain, “Archival Resources and Writing Immigrant American History: The Bund Archives of the Jewish Labor Movement,” Journal of Library History 16, no. 1 (1981): 166-176; Dorothy Swanson, “Tamiment Institute/Ben Josephson Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives,” Labor History 23, no. 4 (1982): 562-567; Dorothy Swanson and Debra E. Bernhardt, “Labor History Resources at New York University,” Labor History 31, nos. 1-2 (1990): 48-58; David M. Weinberg, “Labor Collections at the Urban Archives Center, Temple University Libraries,” Labor History 31, nos. 1-2 (1990): 71-76; Geoffrey A. Huth, “Labor Archives in the University at Albany, State University of New York,” Labor History 32, no. 1 (1991): 130-135; Eileen Mountjoy Cooper, “Labor Archives at Indiana University of Pennsylvania,” Labor History 31, nos. 1-2 (1990): 77-80; Peter Gottlieb and Diana L. Shenk, “Historical Collections and Labor Archives, Penn State University,” Labor History 31, nos. 1-2 (1990): 81-85; Ronald L. Filippelli and Alice Hoffman, “Labor Sources at Penn State University,” Labor History 23, no. 4 (1982): 516-519. 24 Yusef A. Salaam, “The Schomburg Library Then and Now,” Freedomways 23, no. 1 (1983): 29-36. 25 James H. Smylie, “The Presbyterian Historical Society: One Hundred and Twenty-five Years,” Journal of Presbyterian History 55, no. 1 (1977): 1-12. 26 Robert W. Arnold, III, “The Albany Answer: Pragmatic and Tactical Considerations in Local Records Legislative Efforts,” American Archivist 51, no. 4 (1988): 475-479, describes the complicated political origins of a joint city-county local government archival records program. 27 This article is available at http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/j_dewar_1.html . 28 Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2000), p. 4. 29Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), p. ix. 30 Lepore, The Name of War , p. xxi. 31 Donna Merwick, Death of a Notary: Conquest and Change in Colonial New York (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). 32 Peter Thompson, Rum Punch & Revolution: Taverngoing & Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), p. 17. 33 Thompson, Rum Punch & Revolution, p. 115. 34 David S. Shields, Civil Tongues & Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press, 1997), p. 60. 35 William Merrill Decker, Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America Before Telecommunications (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). 36 Anne Bower, “Bound Together: Recipes, Lives, Stories, and Readings ,” in Bower, ed., Recipes for Reading : Community Cookbooks, Stories, Histories (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), p. 6. 37 David M. Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 6. 38 Henkin, City Reading, p. 15. 39 From the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary , http://digital.library.pitt.edu/cgi-bin/oed/oed-idx.pl?type=entry&byte=279934055&q1=network&q2=&q3 =, accessed 8 September 2000 . 40 Decker, Epistolary Practices, p. 235. |