Mary Kelley

Education was decisive in recasting women's subjectivity and the felt reality of their collective experience in post-Revolutionary and antebellum America. Asking how and why women shaped their lives anew through education, Mary Kelley measures the signifi

Women, Education, and Public Life in America's Republic

Learning to Stand & Speak

Robert A. Gross

Michael Schudson

Janice A. Radway

Stephen Nissenbaum

David D. Hall

Scott E. Casper

Joan Shelley Rubin

Hugh Amory

David Paul Nord

Carl F. Kaestle

Jeffrey D. Groves

A History of the Book in America: Industrial book, 1840-1880

Education was decisive in recasting women's subjectivity and the lived reality of their 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. Constituted in a curriculum that matched the course of study at male colleges, women's liberal learning, Kelley argues, played a key role in one of the most profound changes in gender relations in the nation's history: the movement of women into public life. By the 1850s, the large majority of women deeply engaged in public life as educators, writers, editors, and reformers had been schooled at female academies and seminaries. Although most women did not enter these professions, many participated in networks of readers, literary societies, or voluntary associations that became the basis for benevolent societies, reform movements, and activism in the antebellum period. 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.

Learning to Stand and Speak

"This impressive collaborative effort by two dozen leading authorities in the field will be essential reading for any serious student of the history of American publishing and print culture during one of its most crucially transformative periods." Lawrence Buell, Harvard University "A magnificent achievement. Brilliant editing and graceful writing shatter many old assumptions about the world of the Founders. Linking intellectual history with politics, social change, and the distinctive experiences of women, African Americans and Indians, An Extensive Republic is the rare reference book that is also a mesmerizing read." Linda K. Kerber, author of No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship "This volume provides a fascinating revisionist history of the United States through its focus on what was printed, how the economy of the book trades worked, who was reading, and what role reading came to assume in all sorts of people's lives. Editors Gross and Kelley make a strong team, and the contributors represent an array of disciplines suitable to the equally wide range of printed material in the United States between 1790 and 1840." Patricia Crain, New York University Volume 2 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.

Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790-1840

An Extensive Republic

Mary Kelley

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