History
The Center, a joint program of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Wisconsin Historical Society, was approved in 1992 following several years of discussions between the founding co-directors, Wayne Wiegand and James Danky, and Carl Kaestle, the first Chair of the Advisory Board.
Wiegand, Danky, and Kaestle, were part of a national conversation about reading, writing, and publishing. This conversation grew out of a sense that the traditional history of the book was limited as it did not account for the reader as well as the larger social processes of texts.
In planning for the Center several key decisions were reached, each aimed at creating an important national identity for the programs we hoped to mount.
We emphasized our interest in all forms by using the then-new term "print culture."
The preeminent American Antiquarian Society, sponsors of A History of the Book in America Program, limits its collections to the period before 1875, so we determined that our Center would concentrate on the period after 1875.
While the Center occasionally hosts lectures that focus on earlier centuries or other continents, we knew our expertise lay in studying the ways American culture produced and consumed texts.
With this foundation an Advisory Board was formed of interested colleagues from around the University campus. One of the hallmarks of this interested and active group is that they come from many colleges and departments on campus, making the Center truly inter-disciplinary. This strength is evident in the variety of approaches and topics speakers and conference participants have taken in their research.
After much discussion with the Advisory Board, the co-directors developed a book series proposal for the University of Wisconsin Press, which was accepted in 1999. The Center will produce all of the publications in this Print Culture History in Modern America series through the Press beginning with 2004.
"Print Culture History in Modern America" fosters research and writing on the mediating role that print has played in American culture since 1876. Its scope encompasses studies of newspapers, books of all kinds, periodicals, advertising, and ephemera. Special attention is given to groups whose gender, race, class, creed, occupation, ethnicity or sexual orientation (among other factors) have historically placed them on the periphery of power but who have used print sources as one of the few means of expression available to them.
Danky and Wiegand (who continues in his role as co-editor of the UW Press series), are interested in well-crafted, easily accessible narratives, 250-350 pages in length. They should be based on substantial research into all the relevant primary sources. The editors welcome themes national in scope as well as topics of regional and local significance addressing community formation and replication facilitated by the culture of print.
Publications
The first volume to appear was Purity in Print: Book Censorship in America from the Gilded Age to the Computer Age. The second edition of this classic work was suggested by , the second Chair of the Advisory Board, who wrote two new chapters to bring it up to the present.
Libraries as Agencies of Culture, edited by and , was originally a special issue of American Studies. This investigation of the library in the life of the reader as well as a place in the life of its users represents a significant development in advancing our cultural understanding of print and structure.
Apostles of Culture: the Public Librarian and American Society, 1876-1920 is one of the most widely cited cultural histories of libraries and those who inhabit them. The new introduction by Christine Pawley sets the context for the debates around Garrison's book over the last three decades.
Print Culture in a Diverse America, edited by and , offers a unique foray into the multicultural world of reading and readers in the United States. Interdisciplinary essays examine the many ways print culture functions within different groups; they link gender, class, and ethnicity to the uses and goals of a wide variety of publications; and they explore the role print materials play in constructing certain historical events; such as the Titanic disaster. The volume includes exemplary scholarship in history, library studies, literature, journalism, and mass communications.
Women in Print: Essays on the Print Culture of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Women, edited by and , with an introduction by Elizabeth Long. This volume was based on the cancelled conference of September 2001. Women readers, editors, librarians, authors, journalists, booksellers, and others are the subjects in this stimulating collection on modern print culture. The essays feature women like , editor of Smoke Signal, a mid-twentieth century periodical of the Federated Indians of California; Lois Waisbrooker, publisher of books and journals on female sexuality and women's rights in the decades after the Civil War; and Elizabeth Jordan, author of two novels and editor of Harper's Bazaar from 1900 to 1913. The volume presents a complex and engaging picture of print culture and of the forces that affected women's lives in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
For more detailed information on our Publications, see: http://slisweb.lis.wisc.edu/~printcul/publications.html.
Conferences and Colloquia
In our first five years the Center hosted an annual lecture and developed a series of colloquia and in 1995 held its first national conference, "Print Culture in a Diverse America." This wide-ranging conference resulted in the first book sponsored by the Center which the University of Illinois Press published and which was awarded the 1999 Carey McWilliams Award for outstanding scholarly work relating to the U.S. experience of cultural diversity.
Our second national conference, "Defining Print Culture for Youth," was held in 1997 and was led by , Professor in the School of Library and Information Studies at UW. Building on the tradition of the 1995 conference, this one also produced publications, a special issue of Library Quarterly (1998) and in 2003, Defining Print Culture for Youth: the Cultural Work of Children's Literature (Westport, Libraries Unlimited, 2003), co-edited with .
In 1999 the Center hosted the annual meeting of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) to great acclaim. The 220 plus attendees from nearly every continent brought a welter of analytic traditions to Madison for three days in July.
In 2004 the Center hosted its national conference, "Religion and the Culture of Print," continuing the tradition of biennial gatherings of scholars on a broad topic of wide-ranging interests to print culture historians.
In 2006, the Center hosted its national conference, "Education and the Culture of Print," once again continuing the tradition of biennial gatherings of scholars on a broad topic of wide-ranging interests to print culture historians.
For more detailed information on our Conferences, see: http://slisweb.lis.wisc.edu/~printcul/conferences.html
For more detailed information on our Colloquia, see: http://slisweb.lis.wisc.edu/~printcul/colloquia.html.