Was America Part of the Republic of Letters?

by Jonathan Wilson

There’s an interesting take on early America in the new issue of Modern Intellectual History. The article is an unusually layman-friendly essay on digital humanities, but it's also an excellent essay on the importance of a spatial imagination to those of us who work on American intellectuals. And it challenges conventional thinking about the intellectual significance of the American Revolution, so I think it merits careful reading.

In "Where Is America in the Republic of Letters," Caroline Winterer reflects on what modern digital tools can reveal about early American intellectual life. Specifically, Winterer discusses an ongoing initiative at Stanford called "Mapping the Republic of Letters." There she is the lead researcher on a project to visualize Benjamin Franklin's correspondence networks in the mid-18th century. In her new MIH article, Winterer tries to explain how digital projects like this can challenge or revise historians' thinking.

Winterer contrasts two dominant ways of conceptualizing intellectual exchange in colonial British America. "Put bluntly," she writes, "the Atlantic world has become an early Americanist's category, while the republic of letters has become an early modern Europeanist's category." She suggests that this is due to Americanists' nationalistic assumptions. European historiography, by definition, (and I'm embroidering a bit on her text here) starts from the the recognition that nations are contingent and porous, while Americanists, always conceiving of their subject teleologically as the future United States, struggle to recognize the limits of the nation at all. So for us, the British "Atlantic world" is useful as a rather grudging way frame and problematize the thing that was not yet the United States, while Europeanists are happy to follow the cosmopolitan "republic of letters" wherever it leads them, whether around the Mediterranean or into the Far East.

This may fall slightly off the mark, I think. The more important thing about the Atlantic world is that it's a sneaky way to maintain a special relationship between Britain and the United States, preserving the privileged place of English law and ideology in our studies of colonial and revolutionary America while acknowledging the existence of other empires and constituent peoples. In other words, I think the Atlantic world is actually more about U.S. historians' Anglophone nationalism than their American nationalism. Nevertheless, Winterer's observation seems important. It is true that the republic of letters gets far more play in early-modern European history than in early American history, and this almost certainly means something interesting.

According to Winterer, one thing it means is that early American intellectual history needs to take a closer look at where the letters of the republic were actually going. "The big, broad idea of an Atlantic world" is a clumsy replacement for more precise locating of nodes in transatlantic intellectual networks. Mostly, she writes, the paths taken by writers and writing reveal that British America's "Atlantic" intellectual life was really centered on England, and not just England but London (phenomena like the Edinburgh enlightenment and John Fea's rural enlightenment notwithstanding).

A second use for the concept of the republic of letters, Winterer argues, is to show that America's revolutionary "philosopher-statesmen," Benjamin Franklin in particular, weren't really as new as certain historians have claimed. Franklin, Winterer writes, should not be seen simply as a producer of Enlightenment knowledge. His real importance lay in his function as a key node in Enlightenment literary networks, a sort of "human switchboard" who relayed ideas to and from his many correspondents. This sort of figure, Winterer says, was not exactly new to Europe, but it may also have been more common in colonial America than most people realize. Winterer points to Prospero's America, Walter Woodward's recent study of John Winthrop Jr., which reveals that the 17th-century Connecticut governor maintained a similar transatlantic correspondence network one hundred years earlier. The scale of Franklin's literary output and scientific success was extraordinary, but he functioned as the literati had throughout the early modern era.

A harder problem, Winterer concedes, is what all of this means for the nature of intellectual cosmopolitanism and empire. For example, what was the relationship between centers and peripheries in the republic of letters -- and is it appropriate to view early America as intellectually peripheral? The answer is unclear. On ordinary maps of correspondence networks, American letters appear as long lines crossing the vast Atlantic ocean. But does this mean that Americans were less firmly connected to London and Paris than provincial Europeans were, or more? Similarly, does mapping intellectual networks shed any light on the role of religion in carrying ideas? In the absence of well-organized missionary-intellectual orders like the Jesuits, were British America's religious literary networks primarily a cause of empire or an effect? The concept of the republic of letters, Winterer suggests, opens these as important questions without resolving them.

Finally, and most importantly, Winterer argues that the concept of the republic of letters calls into question the significance of the American Revolution. "In fact," she writes, "seen in the broader context of the republic of letters, the specific influences of the American Revolution and republicanism on the deep structures of US intellectual life become more difficult to assert with confidence." In the first decades after the Revolution, the intellectual life of the new nation was not necessarily preoccupied with republican politics. Often, intellectuals in the early American republic were more concerned with the same sorts of questions that had long kept the public of letters humming -- questions of personal refinement and honor, virtue in a prepolitical sense, and appropriate sensibility. So when the ground beneath American intellectual life shifted later in the 19th century, was this because of the Revolution and democratization, or was it because of a wider evolution in the modern republic of letters? Winterer clearly favors the second thesis.

To say that I agree with Caroline Winterer about the importance of visualizing early American intellectual networks would be an understatement. That's true whether we're discussing "visualization" in a formal sense, i.e., the sense of precisely representing large data sets as comprehensible graphics, or in an informal sense -- meaning the presentation of stories about travel and communication that make it easy to imagine ideas as concrete, material, personal things rather than abstractions.

But I also worry about what Winterer's model might mean for the study of "intellectuals" as people. The great virtue of the concept of the Atlantic world is that it reminds us of the enormous importance of ships (bear with me a moment) to literally every aspect of life in early America. Not just particular ships, like, say, the Mayflower or the Arbella-- the special vectors of special people with special thoughts -- but shipping in general. It puts many different kinds of exchange at the center of what it meant to be and think in colonial America. And it makes it increasingly hard to set apart ideas as a special kind of thought, or to set apart colonial intellectuals, a priori, as special people. Early American intellectuals may be distinguishable as unusually good writers and thinkers, but they were also full participants in a culture of exchange  that encouraged written representations of all kinds. Their ideas had meaning not only in the republic of letters, but also in a much larger public of letters -- an enormous quasi-Habermasian commercial public sphere. So the concept of a watery world of exchange opens up intellectual history to new topics and new forms of relevance to other subfields, in ways that the concept of a relatively rarefied cosmopolitan republic of letters does not.

It seems to me that mapping the republic of letters will be most useful if it can help us represent that aspect of early American intellectual life. Benjamin Franklin's thousands of letters traveled overwhelmingly between London and a handful of American cities. But who were the thousands of people who sent and received them? With whom else did those people correspond about the same questions? And how closely were "ideas" bound up with their daily pursuits? If we can find better ways to visualize these dimensions of intellectual exchange, we may find ourselves in a much better position to argue for the importance of the life of the mind to the wider history of early America.


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Jonathan Wilson is a Ph.D. candidate in American intellectual history at Syracuse University, writing a dissertation on articulations of national identity in antebellum New York City. He is a member of a new early-American group blog, The Junto, which is scheduled to launch on December 10.

The Future of the Book

In connection with my post from two weeks ago about the fate of the codex in a digital age, I found this article from today's New York Times especially pertinent:  "In a Flood Tide of Digital Data, an Ark Full of Books."

It's an endearing story about a guy in southern northern California who is taking it upon himself to preserve a copy of every single book.  While his project itself may seem Noahically naive -- all those combustible books in one big wooden warehouse? -- the motivation behind it seems sensible enough:

Mr. Kahle had the idea for the physical archive while working on the Internet Archive, which has digitized two million books. With a deep dedication to traditional printing — one of his sons is named Caslon, after the 18th-century type designer — he abhorred the notion of throwing out a book once it had been scanned. The volume that yielded the digital copy was special. 

And perhaps essential. What if, for example, digitization improves and we need to copy the books again? 

“Microfilm and microfiche were once a utopian vision of access to all information,” Mr. Kahle noted, “but it turned out we were very glad we kept the books.”

The conversion -- or, as some would have it, transubstantiation -- of printed texts to some other medium is not new, nor is the destruction of those texts once they have been scanned. 


I have nothing against digitized, indexed, full-text searchable copies of printed works.  Scan them all, I say.  But for heaven's sake -- or the future's -- keep a hard copy. 

As for me, I will not be sending (or willing) my library, such as it is, to the Physical Archive of the Internet Archive.   I'm a big believer in redundancy.  So I will find someone who wants my books for keeps, and who knows how to use them, and I'll hand them along.

In the meantime, if the zombie apocalypse strikes, I have plenty of reading material that can double as a barricade.  And, unlike Burgess Meredith, I also have a backup pair of glasses.

The New Hieroglyphics

As regular readers of this blog  -- and former readers of my (now mothballed) personal blog -- are probably aware, I am profoundly ambivalent about the digital humanities.  This ambivalence derives in part from unfamiliarity. When it comes to the digital humanities, I am not yet clear on exactly what they are (or can be), exactly what they do, and exactly what they mean or can mean for both the scholarly enterprise and the wider cultural work of people collectively making sense of the world.

I'm working on remedying my admitted ignorance of DH as an academic discipline, but I still have some homework to do.  In the meantime, my colleagues who are digital humanists have been wonderfully patient about educating me.  Indeed, I expect to learn a thing or two from comments on this post.* 

As I understand them, most apologists for and practitioners of the digital humanities envision their discipline in a both/and kind of way.  In other words, the digital humanities are not a replacement for pen-and-ink scholarship, but a vast expansion and extension of the possibilities of all kinds of scholarship, including scholarship based upon and ultimately aimed at producing good old-fashioned printed texts.  I see nothing that is troubling and much that is promising about this approach.

Nevertheless, I have occasionally come across some apologists for the digital humanities who predict that print and print culture -- in a word, the book -- will eventually become obsolete, and who seem to think that this development is A Good Thing.  Indeed, some of them would like to speed the process along.

This hoped-for obsolescence of the book strikes me as a Very Bad Idea.

Now, I'm a historian, so by definition and inclination I am decidedly not in the business of predicting the future.  ("Not my table!")  But there's something unsettling for me about some people's hope for the demise of the codex.  I call this unsettling something the "hieratic potential" embedded in digital texts:  the possibility that written knowledge will once again become the exclusive property of (something like a postmodern secular version of) a priesthood.  I'm not really thinking of the pre-Reformation priesthood; I'm thinking more along the lines of the ancient Egyptian priesthood.


As Carlo Ginzburg so deftly demonstrates in The Cheese and the Worms, during the Reformation, common people gained access to texts which had once been the purview of the privileged and the priests. People with no special training beyond the ability to read and write could (mis)read those texts in ways that expanded their mental, moral and material universes, making them a menace to the hierarchy.  

Menocchio's ability to acquire a book, read it, and pass it on to someone else serves as a stunning synecdoche summing up a profoundly transformative historical moment.  The printing press -- a proto-industrial technology -- rendered written texts relatively cheap and suddenly, simply, widely accessible.  Beyond literacy (no small thing), Menocchio and the readers of his time required no special tools to access the words on those newly available pages except sunlight, candle-light, or firelight.  And sharing that knowledge was something they could accomplish with no technological mediation.  It was a matter of placing a text into a new reader's hands.

To this day, the technology for producing or reading a written text remains simple, robust, and nearly universally accessible.  It's nice if you own your own printing press -- it sure came in handy for William Lloyd Garrison.  But, at their simplest level, the tools for the production and dissemination of text-based knowledge are easily obtained and easily used. Paper, ink, a light source -- that's pretty much all you need to write with, or to read by.

This doesn't mean that all readers or potential readers have universal access to knowledge.   Economic advantage, advanced education, critical disciplinary training which has only been possible because we do not usually have to worry about where our next meal is coming from -- these inequalities allow some of us access to the text -- to its power -- in ways that are not open to others. And many are the gatekeepers who want to keep things as they are.

One of the most admirable goals of activists in the digital humanities is the goal of open access: moving "the text" out from behind the iron gates and ivied walls and paywalls, detaching it from some of the protective structures which make it unavailable and therefore unassailable -- the special collections room, the closed-stack library, the archive, the restricted-access database -- and opening it up to the scrutiny of anyone who has the basic ability to read it on a screen.

On a screen.

That screen adds a subtle but significant layer of mediation between the reader and the text, something altogether different from and deeper than the distance between the reader and the hand-written or press-printed page. 

Getting the texts from the library shelves to the ereader screen requires encoding them. They are translated into an inscrutable language -- a type of writing decipherable only by computer scientists and software engineers who, thankfully, design these reading tools to also decode for us what has been encoded.

What I see happening here, though, is the development of an elite system of writing, a new kind of hieroglyphics. Knowledge is being preserved in a language which is illegible without access to highly specialized training and expensive equipment. We are embedding texts in a coded language inscribed on microchips, and encasing those microchips in a proprietary system which controls how and what we may read.   Furthermore, the ability to get those texts from the servers on which they reside to our own screens -- Kindle, Nook, laptop -- depends upon how and under what conditions and by whose permission we can use the internet. 

So what happens if we lose (or are denied) the ability to download and read the coded texts?  What happens when someone decides that something you have downloaded onto your Kindle -- say, 1984 or Animal Farm -- is just not suitable reading material any more?  Yes, Amazon.com zapped those downloads due to an apparent copyright infringement -- a presumably legitimate reason for an astonishingly Orwellian demonstration of how easily digital knowledge can be "disappeared."

After over five hundred years of widely accessible "open source" coding -- Gutenberg's cosmologically transformative gift, a fast and reliable process for producing and distributing words on a page -- we are heading down a path that makes not just the production and distribution of texts, but their very reception, proprietary. We are de-democratizing knowledge, even as we talk about and advocate for increased access, because we are making that access dependent on the use of a proprietary coded language encased in manufactured products whose control remains in the hands of those who sold them, not those who bought them. And even if those manufactured products or distribution networks become so cheap as to be nearly ubiquitous -- free internet for everyone, free ereaders for all -- they will always be an inescapable mediating technology between the reader and the text, a technology that the reader cannot circumvent.

When there are no more printing presses -- when the books are gone, when all old knowledge has been digitized, and all new knowledge is digitally distributed -- then there will be only one way to access powerful and empowering knowledge, a way that is mediated (and monitored and limited) by corporations and governments who develop and control the proprietary delivery systems of all things digital. Who controls that technology? Who designs those tools?  For whom will they be made available, and under what conditions?  Who will guarantee texts a place on the grid, and who will guarantee us access to the grid as readers?  And who will assure us that even if the grid goes dark, and stays dark for far too long, we can still access the knowledge embedded in those unreadable digital files? 

Or will digital texts become the new hieroglyphics, faint scratchings on the pedestal of a vast colossal wreck of a culture that unwisely abandoned a well-worn instrument of liberation:  printed words on a page, "portable property," books simply -- but not always safely -- passed from one hand to another.



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*Readers of my old blog might recognize some sections of this post, which is a substantial revision of remarks I had made there last year.

Novel and Old School

Since the popular literature of the Early Republic, and especially the early American novel, is a crucial source for my work on the idea of home, I can't avoid the scholarship of Cathy N. Davidson.  Nor do I want to. 

Davidson's work on the novel as a democratic genre, her explorations of how novels were read, and by whom, and to what purpose and effect -- all of her painstaking research, rendered into brilliant prose, has cut a path through the wilderness, along which I will gladly and gratefully walk for as far as it will take me in pursuit of my quarry.

At the same time, Davidson's work on learning and pedagogy -- especially writing pedagogy and the  new literacy -- is likewise unavoidable for me.  I teach rhetoric (a.k.a. "freshman comp") at my university, and our standardized syllabus requires a blog project as part of our students' portfolio of work.  This requirement is due in no small part to the influence of Davidson and other scholars who are championing the blog as a tool for teaching writing -- perhaps even as a substitute for the research paper or term paper.

A recent article in the New York Times describes Davidson's take on "Blogs vs. Term Papers," and situates her as holding "a more extreme position" among professors and writing teachers who are all alike concerned with finding the best way to teach the best practices that make for the best writing both within and beyond the academy.  The concern to teach writing practices that have some practical application beyond the ivied walls of the Ivory Tower is made explicit in Davidson's pedagogy, but, as I will argue below, I believe a concern for practicality is implicit in the commitments of those of us who continue to see pedagogical value in the research essay.

Now, as the reader may have gathered, I am fond of blogging.  It is a fantastic medium for exploring ideas and establishing connections with fellow explorers working at other institutions.  (Oh mercy -- what is it with all these metaphors of hunting, exploring, wandering in the wilderness? Clearly, I have been spending too much time with Catharine Sedgwick and James Fennimore Cooper.)  Indeed, I think blogging can at least help create the conditions for establishing a vibrant intellectual community, a virtual post-modern Republic of Letters.

There's no doubt that blogging emphasizes the sense of writing for an audience and highlights the potential for interaction with one's readers in a way that writing a traditional term paper may not.  The (in)formal conventions of blogging may help students better recognize that scholarship is not about building little (or big) monumental plinths that just stand there and gather dust -- it's not about writing essays, term papers, theses, dissertations as finished objects and final words.  Rather, scholarship is about participating in and contributing to a larger conversation.  So to the extent that blogging foregrounds this crucial aspect of scholarly work, I think it can be a valuable use of students' time and energy.

But I worry that a near-exclusive emphasis on blogging is not a very good use of students' money -- especially working-class students, first-generation students, students who are going into debt to attain that which an education confers.  As Davidson has made clear in her own research on the early American novel and its readership, education confers empowerment -- often in ways that the educators never intended and that the educated never expected.  And maybe that democratic and democratizing empowerment will be (already is?) the lasting legacy of blogging, the internet, the new literacy.  In the meantime, though, I believe that championing the blog as the primary form of scholarly writing puts students at a profound disadvantage, not merely in the job market but, more crucially, in the public square. 

In an era when most of the paths to erudition were closed to women, when a university education was not merely impermissible but also impossible because most women were not trained to read Latin or Greek, the novel democratized education and became a means by which disempowered women and men could not only gain knowledge but also produce knowledge and shape public discourse.  As a result, the doors of educational opportunity that had been closed to women, to the working-class, to minorities, have been and are being opened.  And I can see the similarities between the novel and the blog as genres that open up access to knowledge.

In some ways, though, championing the blog over the research paper as a cornerstone of a university education seems to be turning back the clock, taking back part of what has been gained.  Knowledge is power, and the knowledge of how knowledge is constructed and deployed as a tool of empowerment and disempowerment --  not just how to recognize the process, but how to do it -- is the most powerful knowledge of all.

Judging from the Times' description of how Davidson uses blogging in her pedagogy, it is clear to me that she doesn't teach blogging as a substitute for careful research, but as a means of exploring new avenues for students to articulate what they have learned in ways that excite and ignite the interest of others.  I'm sure that her students leave her class well-equipped to pursue and present a savvy, sophisticated argument across a full range of knowledge platforms.  More power to them.

Nevertheless, despite the broad democratic potential of the blogosphere, there is still enormous privilege, power and prestige in traditional academic prose.  Nobody -- not even the English department at Stanford -- is going to throw that baby out with the bathwater.  So no matter the potential of blogging as a means of (re)producing knowledge, the best educated, the most privileged and empowered among us, will continue to learn the long-form, old-school research essay.   

In this age of the soundbite, this era of intentional and celebratory ephemerality, this epoch of the quick and the slick and the flickering flash of momentary thoughts twittering  across the collective mindscape, whose knowledge will carry the day?  Whose perspective will endure to shape the present and open or close the future?  In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.  In the country of those who don't learn to value, much less know how to construct, a sustained, logical argument based upon careful research and a judicious treatment of evidence, David Barton and Newt Gingrich will be our greatest historians, our most influential public intellectuals.