Resumen de The Pioneer Americanists: Early Collectors, Dealers, and Bibliographers

Amy Hildreth Chen (res.)

• Editors J. Kevin Graffagnino, Terese M. Austin, Jayne Ptolemy, and Brian Leigh Dunnigan seek to turn Americanists’ attention back to the origins of their field, before the titans of twentieth-century industry built our country’s major collections with the wealth of the industrial revolution. By devoting a book to the earliest collectors, dealers, and bibliographers of Americana, the editors argue that the field was already motivated by nostalgia; they assert that embedded in this history of bookmen is a narrative of how “middle and upper-class America: white, Protestant filiopietistic, and male” chose recent history, an intriguing insight in the time of “Make America Great Again” (11).