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This project began with books. Quite literally. On a trip to New York City early in my graduate career, I browsed through shelves of deaccessioned books outside Columbia University's Butler Library. Dusty volumes in shades of navy, maroon, and dark green stretched on for yards: twenty-five cents a book, five for a dollar. I had only recently decided to study American history and was intrigued by the multiple volumes filled with the writings of people whose names were only faintly recognizable: the life and letters of Charles Eliot Norton, the complete prose writings and poetical works of James Russell Lowell, the orations and addresses of George William Curtis, the essay collections of Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Twenty dollars poorer and the car weighed down by an impressive new library of nineteenth-century Americana, I headed back to New Haven and began reading.
What I read fascinated me, and I decided to work through my fascination in a research paper for David Brion Davis. But when I began reading the secondary scholarship concerning this group of Americans, my fascination turned to consternation. The richness and texture of these nineteenth-century writings seemed flattened out in dull abstractions with such names as “The Genteel Tradition” and “Liberal Reform.” The scholarly treatment seemed especially perplexing when I compared these figures with their British counterparts (and, it turned out, correspondents), who had engendered a lively and compelling body of scholarship.
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