Letters and Cultural Transformations in the United States, 1760-1860

Rejecting the common categorization of letters as primarily private documents, this collection demonstrates the genre's persistent public engagements with changing cultural dynamics of the revolutionary, early republican, and antebellum eras. Transatlantic studies, authorship, reform movements, and the politics and practices of editing letters are treated in this exemplary collection that offers scholars a template of new approaches for exploring an understudied yet critically important genre.