 |
 |
Additional resources for this issue of History Now
|
 |
|
General Resources I won’t try
to guide you through histories of American literature
here. I’ll confine myself to suggestions that
seem relevant to an issue about printed books and their
place in American history.
Even in the Revolutionary era, American politics and
culture were affected by newspapers and brief pamphlets.
By the mid nineteenth century, however books were also
becoming a force to be reckoned with in American society
because (a) more and more Americans could read easily,
thus allowing them to enjoy books of hundreds of pages,
not just newspapers of a few leaves and (b) book publishing
became industrialized, making books affordable for most
Americans who could read. These are just a few of the
studies of these phenomena:
Baym, Nina. Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses
to Fiction in Antebellum America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1984.
Lehuu, Isabelle. Carnival on the Page: Popular
Print Media in Antebellum America. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, c2000.
Loughran, Trish. The Republic in Print: Print Culture
in the Age of US Nation Building. New York: Columbia
University Press, c2007.
Michelson, Bruce. Printer's Devil: Mark Twain and
the American Publishing Revolution. Berkeley: University
of California Press, c2006.
Stern, Madeleine B. Publishers for Mass Entertainment
in Nineteenth Century America. Boston: G. K. Hall,
c1980.
Zboray, Ronald J. A Fictive People: Antebellum
Economic Development and the American Reading Public.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
For convenience, I’ll use this section to recommend
some Internet sources of use for the entire issue:
EDSITEment’s “Language and Literary Arts”
section has an ever-expanding list of lesson plans for
American books. At the moment (June 2008), you’ll
find classroom materials listed for only Frederick Douglass’s
Autobiography; Hawthorne as an author;
The Great Gatsby; and a piece on American Literary
Humor ( Mark Twain, George Harris, and Nathaniel Hawthorne).
While not all of the books discussed in this issue have
a place in the list, keep an eye out for additions:
http://edsitement.neh.gov/view_lesson_plan.asp?id=708
Even though it’s a “dot com,” Endnotes
provides free access to its own “study guides.”
Be warned that the “lesson plans “listed
at the site are all links to materials done by other
publishers that you’ll have to pay for. Hey –
any site that provides anything for free is worth looking
at. You’ll find resources for all of the books
discussed in this issue at this site:
http://www.enotes.com/
Inevitably, some of your students will want to talk
about movies made from famous literary works. Most Websites
that discuss “teaching with movies” focus
on recent films, not film versions of classic literary
works.
Teachwithmovies.org is a Website devoted to teaching
books that have film versions but don’t let the
“org” fool you – you have to purchase
the lesson plans or subscribe to the series. Look at
one of their free online samples to decide whether it’s
worth it:
http://www.teachwithmovies.org/
|
