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.

Additional Information

Publication
The Library Quarterly, 72: 234-38.
Language: English
Date: 2002
Keywords
Nickajack Library, American south, Private libraries, Feminine influence

Email this document to