On the Circumstances Surrounding the Creation of "Early American Literature"

There was no immediately recognizable heritage of identity politics at work in the emergence of Early American Literature in the 1960s-the sort of sensus communis that undergirded the study of southern literature in the 1930s for instance, or American studies in the wake of World War II. The new medium that enabled a new community of interest to form around early American writings was microphotography.2 In the 1950s a group of librarians armed with new imaging technology imagined an information order in which any library might have the entirety of American literature up to 1800, the corpus that Charles Evans had described in his monumental American Bibliography: A Chronological Dictionary of All Books, Pamphlets, and Periodical Publications Printed in the United States of America from the Genesis of Printing in 1639 down to and Including the Year 1820.