The Cover Design
- UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
- James V. Carmichael, Professor (Creator)
- Institution
- The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG )
- Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/
Abstract: The existence and number of private antebellum southern libraries remains a matter
of contention among American social historians-particularly historians of reading
and education. Apologists maintain that the flower of colonial intellectualism
lay south of the Mason-Dixon divide rather than in New England, among the Divines
and the later Transcendentalists, while critics point to the lack of statistics and documentation-
other than oral history and local legend-as detrimental to such inflated
claims. Few contest, however, the legacy of Nickajack Library and its imprimatur,
Nickajack Press, which, along with its famous owner, Frances Guerard Stanback
Eaton (1836-1934), refute the notion of a benighted South, lack of a broad range
of reading matter in the southern states, and hegemonic distinctions based upon
social class, legal franchise, or denominational predilection. Moreover, the Nickajack
legacy contradicts the currently popular feminist theory of the nineteenth-century private library as a heteronormative social space devoid of varied reading
matter and feminine influence.
The Cover Design
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Created on 9/24/2010
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Additional Information
- Publication
- The Library Quarterly, 72: 234-38.
- Language: English
- Date: 2002
- Keywords
- Nickajack Library, American south, Private libraries, Feminine influence