Popular history and the literary marketplace, 1840-1920 / Gregory M. Pfitzer.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Pfitzer, Gregory M.

Series:

Studies in print culture and the history of the book

Studies in print culture & the history of the book

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

History publishing.

History.

Historiography.

United States--Historiography.

United States.

Historiography--United States--History--19th century.

Historiography--United States--History--20th century.

Historiography--Economic aspects--United States--History.

History publishing--United States--History.

United States--Intellectual life--19th century.

Intellectual life.

United States--Intellectual life--20th century.

Historians--United States--Biography.

Historians.

American literature--19th century--History and criticism.

American literature.

American literature--20th century--History and criticism.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

xiv, 469 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Other Title:

Popular history & the literary marketplace

Place of Publication:

Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, [2008]

Summary:

Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, most Americans "heard" rather than "read" national history. They absorbed lessons from the past more readily by attending Patriots' Day orations and anniversary commemorations than by reading expensive, multivolume works of patrician historians. By the 1840s, however, innovations in publishing led to the marketing of inexpensive, mass-produced "popular" histories that had a profound influence on historical literacy and learning in the United States. In this book, Gregory M. Pfitzer charts the rise and fall of this genre, demonstrating how and why it was born, flourished, and then became unpopular over time.

Pfitzer begins by exploring how the emergence of a new literary marketplace in the mid-nineteenth century affected the study of history in America. Publishers of popular works hoped to benefit from economies of scale by selling large numbers of inexpensive books at small profit. They hired authors with substantial literary reputations to make the past accessible to middle-class readers. The ability to write effectively for wide audiences was the only qualification for those who dominated this field. Privileging narration and effusive literary style over dispassionate prose, these artists adapted their favorite fictional and poetic conventions with an ease that suggests the degree to which history was viewed as literary art in the nineteenth century.

Beginning as a small cottage industry, popular histories sold in the hundreds of thousands by the 1890s. In an effort to illuminate the cultural conditions for this boom, Pfitzer focuses on the business of book making and book promotion. He analyzes the subscription sales techniques of book agents as well as the aggressive prepublication advertising campaigns of the publishers, including the pictorial embellishments they employed as marketing devices.

He also examines the reactions of professional historians who rejected the fictionalizing and poetic tendencies of popular history, which they equated with loose and undisciplined scholarship. Pfitzer explains how and why these professionals succeeded in challenging the authority of popular histories, and what the subsequent "unpopularity of popular history" meant for book culture and the study of history in the twentieth century.

Contents:

Introduction: "Whatever Popularizes Vulgarizes": Defining Popular History 1

Chapter 1 When Popular History Was Popular: Washington Irving, George Lippard, John Frost, and Book Culture in the Nineteenth Century 18

Chapter 2 The "Terrible Image Breaker": William Cullen Bryant, Sydney Gay, and Scribner's Hybrid History 73

Chapter 3 The Metahistorian as Popularizer: John Clark Ridpath and the Universal Laws of Popular History 123

Chapter 4 "The Past Everything": Edward Eggleston, Realism, and the Rise of the "New" History 179

Chapter 5 "A Background of Real History": Edward S. Ellis and the Dime Novel as Popular History 227

Chapter 6 Writing Himself Out of Trouble: Julian Hawthorne and the Commercialism of Popular History 282

Conclusion: The Unpopularity of Popular History 332.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [433]-454) and index.

ISBN:

9781558496255

1558496254

9781558496248

1558496246

OCLC:

145431655