A comprehensive account of early papermaking in America

The Wilderness, the Nation, and the Electronic Era: American Christianity and Religious Communication 1620-2000: An Annotated Bibliography contains over 2,400 annotations of books, book chapters, essays, periodical articles, and selected dissertations dealing with the various means and technologies of Christian communication used by clergy, churches, denominations, benevolent associations, printers, booksellers, publishing houses, and individuals and movements in their efforts to disseminate news, knowledge, and information about religious beliefs and life in the United States from colonial times to the present. Providing access to the critical and interpretive literature about religious communication is significant and plays a central role in the recent trend in American historiography toward cultural history, particularly as it relates to numerous collateral disciplines: sociology, anthropology, education, speech, music, literary studies, art history, and technology. The book documents communication shifts, from oral history to print to electronic and visual media, and their adaptive uses in communication networks developed over the nation's history. This reference brings bibliographic control to a large and diverse literature not previously identified or indexed.

This book considers three defining movements driven from London and within the region that describe the experience of the Church of England in New England between 1686 and 1786. It explores the radical imperial political and religious change that occurred in Puritan New England following the late seventeenth-century introduction of a new charter for the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Anglican Church in Boston and the public declaration of several Yale ‘apostates’ at the 1722 college commencement exercises. These events transformed the religious circumstances of New England and fuelled new attention and interest in London for the national church in early America. The political leadership, controversial ideas and forces in London and Boston during the run-up to and in the course of the War for Independence, was witnessed by and affected the Church of England in New England. The book appeals to students and researchers of English History, British Imperial History, Early American History and Religious History.

Standing outside elite or even middling circles, outsiders who were marginalized by limitations on their freedom and their need to labor for a living had a unique grasp on the profoundly social nature of print and its power to influence public opinion. In Empowering Words, Karen A. Weyler explores how outsiders used ephemeral formats such as broadsides, pamphlets, and newspapers to publish poetry, captivity narratives, formal addresses, and other genres with wide appeal in early America. To gain access to print, outsiders collaborated with amanuenses and editors, inserted their stories into popular genres and cheap media, tapped into existing social and religious networks, and sought sponsors and patrons. They wrote individually, collaboratively, and even corporately, but writing for them was almost always an act of connection. Disparate levels of literacy did not necessarily entail subordination on the part of the lessliterate collaborator. Even the minimally literate and the illiterate understood the potential for print to be life changing, and outsiders shrewdly employed strategies to assert themselves within collaborative dynamics. Empowering Words covers an array of outsiders including artisans; the minimally literate; the poor, indentured, or enslaved; and racial minorities. By focusing not only on New England, the traditional stronghold of early American literacy, but also on southern towns such as Williamsburg and Charleston, Weyler limns a more expansive map of early American authorship.

Shakespearean Educations examines how and why Shakespeare’s works shaped the development of American education from the colonial period through the 1934 Chicago World’s Fair, taking the reader up to the years before the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (popularly known as the GI Bill), coeducation, and a nascent civil rights movement would alter the educational landscape yet again. The essays in this collection query the nature of education, the nature of citizenship in a democracy, and the roles of literature, elocution, theater, and performance in both. Expanding the notion of “education” beyond the classroom to literary clubs, private salons, public lectures, libraries, primers, and theatrical performance, this collection challenges scholars to consider how different groups in our society have adopted Shakespeare as part of a specifically “American” education. Shakespearean Educations maps the ways in which former slaves, Puritan ministers, university leaders, and working class theatergoers used Shakespeare not only to educate themselves about literature and culture, but also to educate others about their own experience. Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

"Burdick's exhaustive research has unearthed numerous examples of books not previously cataloged as mathematical. While it was thought that no mathematical writings in English were printed in the Americas before 1703, Burdick gives scholars one of their first chances to discover Jacob Taylor's 1697 Tenebrae, a treatise on solving triangles and other figures using basic trigonometry. He also goes beyond the English language to discuss works in Spanish and Latin, such as Alonso de la Vera Cruz's 1554 logic text, the Recognitio Summularum; a book on astrology by Enrico Martinez; books on the nature of comets by Carlos de Siguenza y Gongora and Eusebio Francisco Kino; and a 1676 almanac by Feliciana Ruiz, the first woman to produce a mathematical work in the Americas.".

This book considers two key typifications within the Anglo-American captivity tradition: the Captive Self and the Captivating Other. It analyzes a hegemonic tradition of representation and illuminates the processes through which typifications are constructed, made authoritative, and transformed.