Before the Public Library : Reading, Community and Identity in the Atlantic World, 1650-1850
Overview
Before the Public Library explores the emergence of community-based lending libraries in the Atlantic World before the advent of the Public Library movement in the mid-nineteenth century. Essays by eighteen scholars from a range of disciplines seek to place, for the first time, community libraries within an Atlantic context over a two-century period. Taking a comparative approach, this volume shows that community libraries played an important - and largely unrecognized - role in shaping Atlantic social networks, political and religious movements, scientific and geographic knowledge, and economic enterprise. Libraries had a distinct role to play in shaping modern identities through the acquisition and circulation of specific kinds of texts, the fostering of sociability, and the building of community-based institutions.
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Details
- ISBN-13: 9789004348660
- ISBN-10: 9004348662
- Publisher: Brill
- Publish Date: December 2017
- Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
- Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
- Page Count: 418
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