Colonial Southern Bookshelf : Reading in the Eighteenth Century

A Colonial Southern Bookshelf studies popular books among southern readers in eighteenth-century America. From booksellers’ lists and sale catalogs, Richard Beale Davis’s study focuses on three key groups of literature: books in law, politics, and history; books on religious topics; and belles lettres. His examination of the colonial southern library suggests many revealing conclusions: persons of many social and economic levels owned and read books; literacy was more widespread than many historians have perceived; the vast majority of the books in southern libraries were published in England and Europe; and colonial newspapers constituted an important influence on cultural tastes. A Colonial Southern Bookshelf takes a historical look at the popular reading lists of the time and what they say about society in eighteenth-century America.

The Georgia Open History Library has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this collection, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

RICHARD BEALE DAVIS (1907–81) was a literary historian, professor, and documentary editor. Davis edited several works about Virginia and early southern history, including The Correspondence of Thomas Jefferson and Francis Walker Gilmer, 1814–1826 and The Colonial Virginia Satirist: Mid-Eighteenth-Century Commentaries on Politics, Religion, and Society. Honors Davis earned in his lifetime include the Guggenheim Fellowships of 1945 and 1959 and being named Honored Scholar of Early American Literature in 1977.

CATHERINE KERRISON is a professor of history at Villanova University. She is author of Jefferson’s Daughters: Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America and Claiming the Pen: Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American South.