23. See Sandra Petrulionis, “The Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society,” New England Quarterly 74 (2001): 385–418.
24. “Resistance to Civil Government,” in Henry David Thoreau, Reform Papers , ed. Wendell Glick (Princeton, 1973), 63–90. The commonly used title “Civil Disobedience” was invented after Thoreau’s death. I discuss the essay in some detail in Making the American Self , 235–55.
25. “Letter to Martin Van Buren,” in The Political Emerson , ed. David Robinson (Boston, 2004), 27–32; “Emancipation in the British West Indies,” ibid., 91–119.
26. See Anne Rose, Transcendentalism as a Social Movement (New Haven, 1981); Dean Grodzins, American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism (Chapel Hill, 2002).
27. Walden , 8.
28. Mercantile Library Company of Philadelphia, Essay on the History of the Mercantile Library Company of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1867).
29. Channing, “The Present Age,” in Complete Works , 131–42, quotations from 132–33.
30. See Nina Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers (Ithaca, N.Y., 1984); the North American Review is quoted on 16. Writing as well as reading was democratized, as explained in Ronald Zboray and Mary Zboray, Literary Dollars and Social Sense (New York, 2005).
31. Michael Gilmore, American Romanticism and the Marketplace (Chicago, 1985), 4–7; Mary Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage (New York, 1984); Nina Baym, American Women Writers and the Work of History (New Brunswick, N.J., 1995).
32. Ian Watt’s classic The Rise of the Novel (London, 1957) treats England; for America, besides Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers, see Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word , 2nd ed. (New York, 2004).
33. Ronald Zboray, A Fictive People (New York, 1993), 141.
34. See Lawrence Buell, “The Literary Significance of the Unitarian Movement,” in American Unitarianism , ed. Conrad E. Wright (Boston, 1989), 163–79; Marshall Foletta, Coming to Terms with Democracy (Charlottesville, Va., 2001), 61–70. A different interpretation is presented by Peter Field, “The Birth of Secular High Culture,” JER 17 (1997): 575–610.
35. Candy Brown, The Word in the World (Chapel Hill, 2004), 95–99; David Reynolds, Faith in Fiction (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 130–44, Sigourney quotation from p. 113.
36. Melissa Teed, “A Passion for Distinction,” New England Quarterly 77 (2004): 51–69, Charles to Lydia Sigourney (1827) quoted on 55; Baym, American Women Writers and the Work of History , 81–87.
37. “A Psalm of Life,” in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Poems and Other Writings , ed. J. D. McClatchy (New York, 2000), 3–4. For a fine reevaluation of the poet’s merits, see Christoph Irmscher, Longfellow Redux (Urbana, Ill., 2006).
38. Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (New York, 1987); David Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance (New York, 1988), 204–8; Shelly Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley, 2002), 162–69.
39. Simms is placed in his context by Eric Sundquist, “The Literature of Slavery and African American Culture,” Cambridge History of American Literature , II, esp. 261–64; and Michael O’Brien, Conjectures of Order (Chapel Hill, 2004), passim.
40. See Kenneth Silverman, Edgar A. Poe (New York, 1991).
41. Gilmore, Romanticism and the Marketplace , 147. Nathaniel Hawthorne to William D. Ticknor, Jan. 19, 1855, quoted in Brenda Wineapple, Hawthorne (New York, 2003), 282.
42. See Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture (Cambridge, Eng., 1986), 269, 279, 470.
43. Andrew Delbanco, Melville (New York, 2005). On the scriptural echoes in Moby-Dick , see Buell, New England Literary Culture , 177–87.
44. Meredith McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting (Philadelphia, 2003), 76–108, presents the publishers’ arguments sympathetically; most other scholars sympathize with the writers. See also William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge, Eng., 2004), 382–93.
45. See Gilman Ostrander, Republic of Letters (Madison, Wisc., 1999), 218–20.
46. Zboray, Fictive People , 3.
47. Ann Withington, Toward a More Perfect Union (New York, 1991), 11, 20–37; John Witherspoon, A Serious Inquiry into the Nature and Effects of the Stage (1757; New York, 1812).
48. Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham (Oxford, 1999), 483–85; John Kasson, Rudeness and Civility (New York, 1990), 227; Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America , ed. Phillips Bradley (New York, 1945), II, 55; Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 13–16.
49. See Susan Porter, With an Air Debonair (Washington, 1991).
50. David Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America (New York, 1995), 94–97.
51. See Dale Cockrell, ed., Excelsior: Journals of the Hutchinson Family Singers (Stuyvesant, N.Y., 1989).
54. Robert Toll, Blacking Up (New York, 1974), is still useful. See also Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York, 1993); William Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask (Urbana, Ill., 1999).
55. On the minstrel show as a rejection of the ethic of self-improvement, see also Nathan Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York, 1971), 256.
56. Ken Emerson, Doo-dah! Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture (New York, 1998), 183.
57. Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans , 2nd ed. (New York, 1983); Dena Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals (Urbana, Ill., 1977); James Weldon Johnson, The Books of American Negro Spirituals (1925–26; New York, 1944).
58. Henry Wilder Foote, Three Centuries of American Hymnody (Cambridge, Mass., 1940). See also Brown, The World in the World , 190–242.
59. Ralph Branham and Stephen Hartnett, Sweet Freedom’s Song (Oxford, 2002).
60. James Parakilas, Piano Roles (New Haven, 1999), 11–19; Gary Kornblith, The Industrial Revolution in America (Boston, 1998), 71–77; Craig Roell, The Piano in America (Chapel Hill, 1989), 1–17.
61. Mark Grant, Maestros of the Pen (Boston, 1998), 35–52; Margaret Fuller, Nov. 25, 1843, quoted in Bell Chevigny, The Woman and the Myth (New York, 1976), 61–62.
62. Theodore Parker, “The American Scholar” (1849), in his Collected Works , ed. Frances Cobbe (London, 1864), VII, 245.
63. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself , ed. David Blight (1845; Boston, 2003), 63–67.
64. Heather Williams, Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (Chapel Hill, 2005), 7–29.
65. Janet Cornelius, “When I Can Read My Title Clear”: Literacy, Slavery, and Religion in the Antebellum South (Columbia, S.C., 1991), vii; Douglass, Narrative , 51–52.
66. Ibid., 79–89.
67. Ibid., 62; Barbara Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground (New Haven, 1985), 47–57; Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (Durham, N.C., 2002), 13.
68. Frederick Douglass in North Star , November 23, 1849.
69. Daniel Feller, “Rediscovering Jacksonian America,” in The State of U.S. History , ed. Melvyn Stokes (Oxford, 2002), 79. See further Jeannine DeLombard, Slavery on Trial: Law, Abolitionism, and Print Culture (Chapel Hill, 2007), esp. 101–27.
70. Parker Pillsbury, quoted in James B. Stewart, Holy Warriors , rev. ed. (New York, 1997), 142; Nathan Huggins, Slave and Citizen: The Life of Frederick Douglass (Boston, 1980), 38.
71. David Turley, The Culture of English Antislavery (London, 1991); Alan Rice and Martin Crawford, eds., Liberating Sojourn: Frederick Douglass and Transatlantic Reform (Athens, Ga., 1999); William McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York, 1991), 119–45.
72. See John McKivigan and Stanley Harrold, eds., Antislavery Violence (Knoxville, Tenn., 1999).