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Events
Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
For submission guidelines, click here
Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Augst, Thomas. "Making Society Out of Books: Character, Self-Fashioning, and the Rhetoric of Market Culture in Nineteenth-Century America," History of American Civilization Program, Harvard University, October 1996.
This dissertation analyzes the significance of reading for young businessmen in the antebellum, urban northeast from five distinct perspectives: the annual reports and policies of the New York Mercantile Library; the campaign waged in popular guide-books and periodicals to define business as a learned profession; Emerson’s later career on the commercial lecture circuit; habits of reading, writing, and conversation revealed in clerks’ diaries; and Melville’s story, “Bartleby the Scrivener.” Situating the intellectual practices of urban merchant clerks within a complex social context, the dissertation demonstrates how the concept of character became linked with a specific form of literacy, oriented to fiction reading and leisure, and it suggests why a distinctive kind of reading experience became integral, in liberal arts pedagogy, to ethnical training for middle-class life.
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