In the long nineteenth century, the specter of lost manuscripts loomed
in the imagination of antiquarians, historians, and writers. Whether by
war, fire, neglect, or the ravages of time itself, the colonial history
of the United States was perceived as a vanishing record, its archive a
hoard of materially unsound, temporally fragmented, politically fraught,
and endangered documents.
Colonial Revivals traces the labors of a nineteenth-century cultural
network of antiquarians, bibliophiles, amateur historians, and writers
as they dug through the nation's attics and private libraries to
assemble early American archives. The collection of colonial materials
they thought themselves to be rescuing from oblivion were often
reprinted to stave off future loss and shore up a sense of national
permanence. Yet this archive proved as disorderly and incongruous as the
collection of young states themselves. Instead of revealing a shared
origin story, historical reprints testified to the inveterate regional,
racial, doctrinal, and political fault lines in the American historical
landscape.
Even as old books embodied a receding past, historical reprints
reflected the antebellum period's most pressing ideological crises, from
religious schisms to sectionalism to territorial expansion. Organized
around four colonial regional cultures that loomed large in
nineteenth-century literary history--Puritan New England, Cavalier
Virginia, Quaker Pennsylvania, and the Spanish Caribbean--Colonial
Revivals examines the reprinted works that enshrined these historical
narratives in American archives and minds for decades to come. Revived
through reprinting, the obscure texts of colonial history became new
again, deployed as harbingers, models, reminders, and warnings to a
nineteenth-century readership increasingly fixated on the uncertain
future of the nation and its material past.
