Press. Before we begin the program i would like to extend a special welcome to anyone who will be joining Virtual Program the first time. If your not familiar with the massachusetts historical society, we are the first historical site in america and have been collecting, preserving, publishing and sharing your history of 1791. We hold an amazing collection of 14 million pages including the papers of the first three president of the United States. Sorry three of the first six president of the United States. I misspoke. We are continuing to collect today and if you are interested, we are currently collecting material related to the covid19 experience, we have a special initiative who will record peoples experiences during this unusual time and preserve a standpoint firsthand accounts for future generations. In the date of social distancing, we have taken hosting Virtual Programs and online programs playing every week until the end of july. Even into the beginning of august. Next week we hop hosting a talkh kate nelson under publication, the three cornered war and you can find more information on that on our website. Before we begin we have a few quick housekeeping materials to go through. First of all, if you have a question, comment or concern about the program or programs, you can contact me or sarah, or Public Program coordinator in the email programs will make it to us or you can reach us through our website. As i mentioned we are producing all of our programs for free during covid19. But of course we are nonprofit and independent nonprofit so if you have the capability and would like to support the massachusetts society, we encourage you to do so and you could do that by visiting mass or support, to go over the details how we use zoom, we will have a presentation by ms. Harringtonlueker and then a question and answer. And there are two ways get can ask questions, the first you have to use a q a function if youre using a computer, this is at the bottom of your screen and if youre using a tablet or a cell phone and might be at the top your screen but essentially its a q a function you click on that and type a question again and sarah and i will read the questions to our speaker and then she will answer them. The other way that you can do it is used to raise hand function, this will allow you to indicate that you would like to ask a question and we will unmute people if we have time, the one thing with the mute function, you will most likely need to unmute yourself as well. Keep that in mind. Without further ado im going to introduce our speaker in this today we will be hearing from donna harringtonlueker and if you would like to turn on your camera and meet yourself we will get off to the races. Great to see you and im now going to fade off into a digita thank you, thank you so much, thank you all for coming, thank you to gavin and sarah for making this possible, before we begin i want to acknowledge these are such difficult times with so much at stake and so much on our minds and as i have worked on this lecture in the presentation in the last week i must admit i did find myself thinking is this the time to think about Summer Reading and summer leisure or 19th century publishing but the last quarter of the 19th century is a period that i focus on in my study and it was not without those challenges at the beginning of the period in 1877 federal troops were sent in with the blood he worker strike against the railroad in the United States found the spanishamerican war and in between the country struggled with the failure of reconstruction in a period of rapid industrialization so the period was not our economic, social and political appease. With those challenges in mind, i would like to invoke the most prominent arguments of the period in favor of leisure and i would extend that to Summer Reading. That is that a short period of time away from the depression of the 19 century life, they gave people the wherewithal to engage with the world once again on their return and i hope tonights will work in the same way with you. Lets just jump in. I talk about the lives of Summer Reading and can begin anywhere in the 19th century but i would like to start with most specifically with alice stone blackwell, the daughter of lucy stone and henry blackwell, the prominent 19th century abolitionist and womens rights advocate. You can see it as a family portrait in a family photo over here on the left of the three of them. In the early 1870s, alice was a teenager and she was a voracious reader, especially in the summertime when her reading turned very dramatically to stories of adventure and temptation. If you read of journals in this. There filled with entries in accounts of rushing into boston by train or streetcar that pick up the latest issue of the popular ledger and weekly story paper or she talks about stopping at the posten Public Library for stacks of books that she devours one week and then returns the next. And from her journals, it changed my books and got out in time for dinner she writes in july 1872. I got a very good set of books this time, though ive read them all before. Among the titles that she mentioned in the journal, she mentions a mystery which she admits readily upset her nerves and also Thomas Hughes tom browder oxford which he describes as a favor. Alice took part in a Summer Reading as well and thats where the picture on the right is going to come in, this is the family home in dorchester. Lots of summer the stone blackwell household engaged in shared family reading, this is a very common practice in the 19th century. But in the summer they did so on the widow walk, you can see the home to take advantage of the cool breezes from the nearby bay. And there alice reports the family of sir, walter in the vanity fair. They read long novels whose talks with spool out over summer evenings. And her delight in the shared reading was absolutely apparent in another quote from her journal, it was read upon the roof she wrote in july 1872 and they chased poppa about to tickle his toes. I was strange, informal given to action and adventure in alices Summer Reading choices and her reading practices still rising neighbor this today, every year around memorial day weekend this Summer Reading season begins. Oprah makes her picks for the best summer read but so does the New York Times, National Public radio, the wall street journal and a host of other media outlets. Summer is a time when were advised to turn to lightweight paperback that we can stuff into a beach bag or read without worry by the poolside, it is the time that we are told to reach for the popular novel or the actionpacked bestseller, as clive a critic for the New York Times wrote in the paper summer book issue for 1968 he said Summer Reading like the statue of liberty and motherhood is always with us. And that is still true today. The list of best summer reads continues in this very very fraud season. Ive just taken a screen graph of the first one to three of them and it came from the weekend, the memorial day weekend itself and the one on the bottom was just from today. We see the top one is from the New York Times and the beach may be close but these books are worth opening, the next one down refinery 29 with the millennial young woman, the 25 books you will watch this summer on the left is from oprah the 28th of the beach reads of the summer 2020 and then another list, this one came from today this afternoon boston globe online the best books tribute the summer. And i might know here about the boston globe and had a chance to go quickly through it and see what they were recommending and i was really struck and at one point they New York Times it was criticized that included primarily white authors in one season they were accused of reaching peak car cassidy with her choices. And the best books to read the summer in the boston globe are incredibly varied and diverse. But where did this idea of Summer Reading come from. Summer reading as a specific practice, how did it come to be an established part, not only of literary commerce but of American Culture as well and those are some of the questions white i began to explore. Im a book historian and a practice in the field that looks at the intersection of authorship, reading and publishing. History is a field that concerns itself with the material object, first but also with the Cultural Practices that surrounded books, how books are produced, how they are circulated, how they are received in one summer i was returning from a conference in nova scotia and in the airport bookstore looking for something to read on the flight home and they came across the ubiquitous brochure that was announcing the best summer read for that season. And i found myself as a result thinking about my own Summer Reading rituals and the ways in which the Publishing Industry may have shaped and sustained those. So that led me to the library at Ground University where he worked at the magazine called the book fire, a magazine from charles scribner, the story of near city publisher and ill talk about it later in this as well, the very rich text for the advertisement from other couples about what the book trade was right, what people were reading and from there i moved on and outward. Into other 19th century magazines and newspapers from across the United States, i did not want to leave this in new england. The africanamerican. And a number of alternative presses. After that it was on to publishing archives with harvard and princeton in columbia onto letters and journals into a long list of novels set at summer resorts, many of them written by some of the periods absolutely most famous authors. Stephen crane, william b howell, louisa may alcott, sarah, they all practice in the tradition of the summer novel at some point in their career. What i found as a result of th this, they were not so idle, what i found was very interesting chapter in the history of publishing. Summer reading to be sure in the 19th century was very much a commercial construction. The idea of Summer Reading is a product and part of the Publishing Industry really concerted efforts to redefine a slow season and to capitalize on a really dramatic rise of travel, tourism and summer leisure entering america and the gilded age. But 19th century Summer Reading involves more ecommerce as well in the last 19th century and also became a wellestablished Cultural Practice, a performance in many of those characteristics remain with us today. Overall an interesting chapter both in the history of the book in the history of summer leisure. Now my book is self covered a lot of ground i reduce the table contents to give you a flavor of a larger argument as well. In the. Rage changing from an elite Cultural Practice to being embraced from a middleclass and uses as a marker of gentility. And i would be remiss in not noting the professional authors of the. Indulge in summer leisure. I also look up a variety that were advertised as best summer read and especially in the american summer novel, the novel that was specifically set at the summer resort. And finally i looked at the ways in which authorship intersected with and exploited the new genre. And at the ways in which physical spaces shape Summer Reading and i looked from resort library and circle the springs to shares that were advertised for portside reading the had bookshelves that were built into the very, very wide arms. Today i want to focus on one part of the books argument and that is the role of the 19th century magazine culture played in reframing Summer Reading into a genteel practice. I am especially interested in the so call publication in every produced covers of these on here. These are the three most prominent, the Atlantic Monthly which was published in boston, harpers new monthly magazine arrival in new york city in the century illustrated, their role is going to be very significant, these are publication that had a significant degree of Cultural Authority and they describe the atlantic for example as an exemplar yankee humanism in the copy that it future. In this age of the magazine, these publications and others become the primary vehicle to what they call the machinery of publishing and reviewing, that is the machinery that presents the book to readers in a certain way and framed it with establishment of complex that prepares us as readers to read it in a certain way and with a certain framework in mind. So together, these and other publications, these and other magazines on this. Shape the Summer Reading through the text and visuals and thats what i like to explore. Let me just say and give you an idea of where i want to go with us as we move ahead, its been three parts, i want to look at early in the century, the very beginning of a discourse on Summer Reading. I then want to move on to the complete disruption of cheap fiction that develops in the period. Finally i want to look at the publishers efforts to reframe and reclaim Summer Reading as something that we will see how develops. So the first part, that barely discourse on Summer Reading. Lets go back a bit and i have some images, painting from there. , taking his lead from england and europe and Domestic Tourism in the United States developed in the late 1700s around places like niagara falls, the hudson river and the catskills over here on the left and tourism develops around there, by the 1830s wealthy travelers were visiting the White Mountains, you can see that the bottom image on the right and the painting of the writing in the side of Mount Washington and they were in Mount Desert Island in maine and Mineral Springs in the south and a host of other sites. Excuse me it is allergy season if you can bear with me. Rhode island begins to take shape in the summer. Now i want to look into magazines that gives you the tenor of how the discourse begins. On the left 1835 the magazine, you can see here the opening story is on goodman brown, 1835, the magazine wrote an article called southern philosophy and it began by invoking the political philosopher edmund and his advice to live, that is the theme of this article. From a philosophy of eyes younger and experienced travelers with ways to use their time and did advise that they needed to use their time to cultivate equal limiting. Here is a quote, walk slow, talk slow, think slow, feed, read, write, dress, undress, and shortlived with studied in exquisite deliberation. And that deliberation needed to extend whatever reading matter the traveler chose, the similar travel for example was advised to avoid reading anything having to do with politics as well as anything that snapped the egotism. The best articles were charles liam and my moms essay, here is another quote, the reviewer wrote his lambs essays were to soda, the glass of hock, the customary after dinner nap with visual limb regarding, his jazzmen and chat with good girls under it. The young man who follows this advice in the articles very specific about the gender of the summer reader would cultivate a sweet and invertible serenity that was going to last him until october. Putnams over here on the right, in the 1850s is simile dignified approach and in 1853 putnams read a review of a poetry collection, a book for the seaside from the boston firm of kettner infield, collection of poetry about the sea featuring the works of shelley, longfellow and others in putnams was very keen on it and said it was going to be its not just a good summer read but a collection of permanent value. Later in the 1850s he would also recommend the work of washington for Summer Reading. It would describe irving who happened to be one of his authors as a genial and beatable genius. It also noted that he worked as part of a convenient and railway classics series that would be delightful for Summer Reading. So here is our first glimpse of a discourse taking shape, it explained as masculine, deliberate and very, very distinctive and what it was designed to accomplish. The change is gone and the discourse changes and it does so in large because its a really Interesting Development in the literary field and that is the wave of cheap paperback fiction that flooded the marketplace after the civil war, this was really and absently unprecedented expansion of victorian americans Popular Culture and a significant challenge to mainstream publishers, now that challenge took a variety of forms and ill go to cheap fiction. In this. This was before the passage of the International Copyright act, this wave of cheap fiction included the addition of british and european fiction. So George Elliotts march, alice in wonderland, sir, walter scott the talisman, charles dickens, all of these were not protected by copyright and in the United States to quickly pick them up and publish them in very cheap paper covered editions. Often in librari