UCI Department of History: FACULTY

My current project, a study of the Northern literary marketplace during the Civil War, is titled "Publishing the Civil War: the Literary Marketplace and the Meanings of the Civil War in the North, 1861-1865." In it I explicitly connect commerce with culture, as I seek to analyze the ways in which the practices of the literary marketplace had a fundamental impact upon the available political and literary meanings of the war in the North--and therefore upon long-term memories of the war. In particular I analyze publishers' business practices--understood broadly to include not only actual economic practices but also cultural conventions surrounding relationships between publishers, authors, editors and readers. These practices, I argue, played a central role in limiting and containing the revolutionary potential of the war. For instance, as the war was sculpted to fit the existing conventions of various genres of popular literature, the importance of emancipation to the meaning of the conflict often dropped out, to be replaced instead by an ethos of individual adventure.

I am particularly interested in the processes by which ideas have been formulated, shaped, and disseminated within American culture. I find that I am continually engaged by what might be called the sociology of culture--that is, how ideas are produced and received as well as the content of those ideas. In a future project, I hope to examine the history of lecturing in the postbellum period, a time during which a striking debate took place over the role of this increasingly commercialized institution within American culture. In short, I tend to take a broad and inclusive view of American cultural history, one that includes popular culture and the market as well as more traditional subjects of intellectual inquiry.