Recently digitized children’s books available in Readex collections include three that show the interplay between adult work and child’s play—opening up newly accessible vistas in areas such as visual culture and child studies. In my tenure of over thirty years at the American Antiquarian Society, I have either cataloged or...
A biannual publication offering insights into the use of digital historical collections
Teaching Bibliography and Research: Using Early American Imprints in an Online Graduate Class
The Charles Brockden Brown Electronic Archive and Scholarly Edition is currently preparing for its archive nearly 900 periodical texts, many of which were published anonymously or under a pseudonym. Our goal is to identify these texts, and make them available electronically in the archive. During the course of locating Charles...
The Muslim World in Early U.S. Texts
About a decade ago, I began researching representations of Islam in early national American literary texts; when someone would ask what the subject of my dissertation was, and I gave this answer, I often received responses along the lines of, “ Was there any literature about Islam in the early...
Travel to New Worlds: Reconceptualizing Research and Early America with Early American Imprints
One of the challenges—but also one of the joys—of teaching classes on colonial American literature is that students often enter the classroom with few preconceived notions and little background knowledge in the period. As my comments on my course evaluations have attested, students are often surprised to find that early...
Hymns Without Hymnbooks: Tracking a “Late Puritan” Practice
When researching a topic such as the history of eighteenth-century hymnbooks, databases such as America’s Historical Imprints can greatly enhance access to rare materials, but I recently found that research questions also lurk in the digital archive. Out of curiosity, I did a search for materials listing Isaac Watts (the...
