Colonial Revivals

Colonial Revivals insightfully explores how the nineteenth-century impulse for reprinting colonial sources was central to the articulation of regional and national histories of the United States. Developing hand in hand with local and state historical societies, this impulse did not merely result in a proliferation of colonial reprints but potently inserted old texts into new material and ideological contexts. Lindsay DiCuirci, an associate professor of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, analyzes key episodes of historical reprinting descending from four colonial sites: New England, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and the Spanish Caribbean. For the first three, DiCuirci traces how reprints of colonial documents fueled competing visions of regional contributions to national identity. In the fourth, centering on a perceptive analysis of Washington Irving's The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828), she explores how “the teleological nature of the Columbian historical narrative” dovetailed with visions of American exceptionalism (p. 161). An introduction and first chapter place the body of the book within the contexts of nineteenth-century antiquarianism and archival research, while an epilogue makes the topic contemporary by considering the relationship between nineteenth-century scholarship and digital archives

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