Battling for the Book: The Americanization of the Bible in the Publishing Marketplace, 1777-1860

During the first half of the nineteenth century, American publishing experienced exponential growth. An emerging market economy, widespread religious revival, reforms in education, and innovations in print technology worked together to create a culture increasingly formed and framed by the power of print. At the center of this new culture was the Bible, the book that Frank Luther Mott has called "the best seller" in American publishing history. Yet it is important to realize that the English Bible in America was not a simple, uniform entity. First printed in the United States during the Revolutionary War, it soon underwent a great many revisions, translations, and changes in format, as different editors and publishers appropriated it to meet a wide range of changing ideological and economic demands. Building upon the interdisciplinary scholarship that has come to be called "History of the Book," my dissertation examines how a wide range of constituencies (both secular and religious) fought to keep the Bible the preeminent text in the United States as the country's print marketplace experienced explosive growth. Most specifically, I examine the changing nature of Protestant English bibles produced in the United States between 1777 and 1860. On one level, my work explores the grand drama of the Bible's collapse as America's dominant written text. At the same time, I investigate how publishers, clergymen, politicians and reformers met the threat that new printed material posed to the dominance of the Bible by changing both the Bible's form and content. By paying close attention to the material nature of bibles and the cultural milieus in which they circulated, I argue that the very means employed to keep the Bible preeminent laid the foundation for what the religious historian Grant Wacker has called "the demise of biblical civilization" in the United States. By constantly retranslating the biblical text, changing bible formats, and blurring the line between biblical and fictional stories, Protestants found it increasingly difficult to stress the extraordinary nature of their timeless message when that message changed all the time.