Intro -- Prologue: Networks of Nineteenth-Century Letter-Writing -- Introduction: Epistolary Studies and Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing -- Part I: Material, Social, and Institutional Contexts -- 1 From Mind to Hand: Paper, Pens, and the Materiality of Letter-Writing -- 2 The Business of Letter-Writing -- 3 Name and Address: Letters and Mass Mailing in Nineteenth-Century America -- 4 Paper Evidence: Handwriting, Print, Letters, and the Law -- 5 Nineteenth-Century American Science and the Decline of Letters -- 6 The Means and the End: Letters and the Work of History -- 7 Letters, Telegrams, News -- 8 Dead Letters and the Secret Life of the State in Nineteenth-Century America -- 9 The Spider and the Dumpling: Threatening Letters in Nineteenth-Century America -- Part II: Travel, Migration, and Dislocation -- 10 Longing in Long-Distance Letters: The Nineteenth Century and Now -- 11 Working Away, Writing Home -- 12 Letters from America: Themes and Methods in the Study of Irish Emigrant Correspondence -- 13 The Usual Problems: Sickness, Distance, and Failure to Acculturate in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Emigrant Letters -- 14 Indigenous Epistolarity in the Nineteenth Century -- 15 Dueling Epistles: Enslaved Letter-Writers and the Discourse of (Dis)Honor -- 16 Home and Belonging in the Letters of Sarah Hicks Williams -- 17 'An Oblique Place': Letters in the Civil War -- 18 Social Action in Cross-Regional Letter-Writing: Ednah Cheney's Correspondence with Postbellum Teachers in the U.S. South -- Part III: Politics, Reform, and Intellectual Life -- 19 Founding Friendship: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the American Experiment in Republican Government, 1812-26 -- 20 Corresponding Natures: Ralph Waldo Emerson's Letters -- 21 'This Epistolary Medium': Friendship and Civil Society in Margaret Fuller's Private Letters.

22 'Will You live?': Thoreau's Philosophical Letters -- 23 'Frederick Douglass, the Freeman' and 'Frederick Bailey, the Slave': Private versus Public Acts and Arts of Letter-Writing in Frederick Douglass's Pre-Civil-War Correspondence -- 24 Old Master Letters and Letters from the Old World: Julia Griffiths and the Uses of Correspondence in Frederick Douglass's Newspapers -- 25 Letters from 'Linda Brent': Harriet Jacobs and the Work of Emancipation -- 26 Abraham Lincoln: The Man through His Letters -- 27 Between Science and Aesthetics: The Letters of William James -- 28 'My Dear Dr.': American Women and Nineteenth-Century Scientific Correspondence -- 29 'A Chain of Correspondence': Social Activism and Civic Values in the Letters of Lydia Sigourney -- 30 A Fighting Platform: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Epistles -- 31 'The Stamp of Truth': Historiographical Dissent and Its Limits in the Letters of Jared Sparks -- 32 Defenses and Masks and Poses in Henry Adams' Letters -- Part IV: Literary Culture -- 33 The Letters of Charles Brockden Brown: Epistolary Performance and New Paths for Scholarship -- 34 Publishing and Public Affairs in the Correspondence of James Fenimore Cooper -- 35 The Transatlantic Village: The Rise and Fall of the Epistolary Friendship of Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Mary Russell Mitford -- 36 The Literary Professional and the Country Gentleman: The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe and Philip Pendleton Cooke -- 37 Melville's Flummery -- 38 The Epistolary Romance and Rivalry of Sophia and Nathaniel Hawthorne -- 39 Co-Responding with Walt Whitman -- 40 'Rare Sparkles of Light': Intimacy and Distance in Emily Dickinson's Letters to Thomas Wentworth Higginson -- 41 'Soul Friends': Harriet Beecher Stowe and Lady Byron in Correspondence -- 42 Louisa May Alcott's Family Post Box.

43 Profanities, Indecencies, and Theologies: Mark Twain's Letters to Joseph Twichell, William Dean Howells, and Henry Rogers -- 44 Charles W. Chesnutt's Letters: 'The Vaguely Defi ned Line Where Races Meet' -- 45 Sarah Orne Jewett's Foreign Correspondence -- 46 'Too Intimate to Publish, Too Rare to Suppress': Henry James in his Letters -- 47 'Ill Correspondent': Stephen Crane's Trouble with Letters -- Notes on Contributors -- Index.

This comprehensive study by leading scholars in an important new field--the history of letters and letter writing--is essential reading for anyone interested in nineteenth-century American politics, history or literature.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2022. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.