678 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY primary sources date to the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s, an era she quite rightly calls “antebellum” in the text. I also question the author’s use of two terms associated with critical theory. She asserts that the tran- sient poor “comprised a subaltern class” (2, 6, 180), but she does not develop this idea or situate her study within the field of postcolonial studies, where “subaltern” is most widely used. She also characterizes the transient poor as “stateless” (10), but does not pursue the impli- cation that these people had no national identity in the modern sense of the term. Vagrants and Vagabonds is a rewarding book. Professor O’Brassill- Kulfan’s commitment to wide archival research, excellent writing, and robust scholarly engagement make her work a pleasure to read and a model of good historical method. Ruth Wallis Herndon is professor of history at Bowling Green State University. She is the author of Unwelcome Americans: Living on the Margin in Early NewEngland (2001) and the co-editor and contributing author of Children Bound to Labor: The Pau- per Apprentice System in Early America (2009). Colonial Revivals: The Nineteenth-Century Lives of Early American Books. By Lindsay DiCuirci. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl- vania Press, 2019. Pp. 279. $69.95 cloth.) Late in Colonial Revivals Lindsay DiCuirci uses six verbs to de- scribe Washington Irving’s approach to then-newly-available archival materials in his writing of Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828): “he preserved and transformed them, he exploited and mined them, he cultivated and curated them” (156). Preservation, transfor- mation, exploitation, and curation might well describe the range of approaches to the archive taken by all of the editors and publishers DiCuirci analyzes. DiCuirci opens her study with a discussion of the preservation im- pulse; nineteenth-century antiquarians feared that the colonial past was being lost and sought to recover it through reprinting key texts. Moreover, they linked preservation of these texts with preservation of the nation itself, though ironically the mostly seventeenth-century books and manuscripts on which they pinned these hopes were by nationality British rather than American. Although she writes of uncovering “the accumulation of mean- ing that followed the colonial book into the nineteenth century” (5), Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_r_00782 by guest on 01 October 2021 BOOK REVIEWS 679 DiCuirci also maintains that “textual recovery and reprinting were central . to nurturing legacies and propagating historical myths” (21). The latter claim is the one substantiated by the book’s analy- sis. What DiCuirci shows is that colonial books were not so much followed by meaning as recreated and reimagined to suit the often political and polemical purposes of their reprinters, who tended to be less concerned with texts’ static original meanings than with their potential uses in contemporary arguments. In particular, DiCuirci re- veals that colonial texts were used to shore up arguments about re- gional identity, what she calls “a politics of local history that resisted national consolidation” (10). Building on the work of historians like Trish Loughran (on print, the nation, and regional identity) and liter- ary scholars like Meredith McGill (on reprinting), DiCuirci carefully reconstructs editors’ and publishers’ decisions to demonstrate how reprinting both reflected and shaped debates about region, nation, and history. Three chapters devoted sequentially to New England, Virginia, and Pennsylvania explain how particular texts were transformed and ex- ploited. In New England, DiCuirci argues, new editions of Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana (1702, 1820, 1855) and of John Winthrop’s journals were presented as reprintings of texts central to New England—and hence American—culture even though each had been all but unavailable for over a century. Further, both Winthrop’s History of New England (1825, 1853–55) and Mather’s Magnalia were selectively reshaped by their editors. DiCuirci writes of Winthrop’s editor that, “rather than producing a surrogate book, Savage acted as a surrogate Winthrop” when he “crafted the journals themselves into the history of New England that he felt Winthrop had intended” (73). If New Englanders sought their origins in Winthrop and Mather, Virginians “sought to root the American character in the soil of Jamestown” (85). By reprinting Robert Beverley’s History and Present State of Virginia (1705, 1722, 1855), publisher J.W. Randolph both as- serted the primacy of Virginia to the country’s history and suggested, at least implicitly, the continuing relevance of Beverley’s diatribes. Beverley’s “warning against economic dependence, luxurious indul- gence, and poor stewardship,” DiCuirci writes, “powerfully echoed into nineteenth-century political and cultural debates in the South” (100). Beverley’s critique of colonial dependence on British imports, for instance, became for Randolph a critique of the popularity of northern goods in antebellum Virginia and an argument for south- ern exceptionalism. Yet African Americans in Virginia used reprinting Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_r_00782 by guest on 01 October 2021 680 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY to reject racially-specific nationalism, defending black patriotism and citizenship claims through reprinted Revolutionary-era texts. For Pennsylvania’s Quaker historians, too, reprinting was both an attempt to reify a particular past and an intervention in contemporary disputes. On one hand, editors who reprinted the works of William Penn and other early Quaker leaders were united in seeking “to install Pennsylvania as the national conscience, with the Penn family at its center” (126). These editors tuned to early Quaker works as support for arguments against Indian removal and slavery. On the other hand, disputes over how to apply these texts to Quaker practice “yielded a permanent rupture” (123); Quakers might have been united in seek- ing to apply Quaker teaching to national politics, but closer to home competing factions sought to exploit colonial-era texts in support of competing theological interpretations. The book’s treatment of Irving’s Life and Voyages moves the fo- cus from British-colonial texts to the Spanish colonial archive. In- vited to Spain to translate rare documents into English, Irving instead reshaped them into a fanciful biography of the explorer. Although Irving claimed to be presenting an impartial and accurate history, in DiCuirci’s reading his Columbus was a representation of Spanish colonialism itself, and Irving’s history was a means of wrestling not just with the explorer but with the legacy of empire. DiCuirci’s study is both wider and narrower than her title implies. She is interested in the reprinting not only of books narrowly defined but also of manuscripts, while her nineteenth-century ends before the Civil War. Still, within these bounds, DiCuirci ranges widely. It is much to her credit that the book encompasses a broad geographical scope, paying as close attention to the Mid-Atlantic and the South as to New England. An epilogue that reads modern digitization projects as analogues to nineteenth-century antiquarian reprinting projects and argues for a more inclusive approach than that practiced two cen- turies ago is thoughtful and cogently argued. DiCuirci’s focus on ed- itors and printers does leave open questions about readers. It would be interesting, for instance, to know who read reprinted colonial texts and what readers thought of them. How effective were these reprint- ings in influencing the contemporary debates they entered? These questions, however, are beyond DiCuirci’s intended scope, and both historians and literary scholars interested in book history will find Colonial Revivals worth reading for its new interpretations of classic texts, for its careful archival work, and for the ways DiCuirci con- tributes to ongoing conversations in book history. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_r_00782 by guest on 01 October 2021 BOOK REVIEWS 681 Lynda K. Yankaskas is associate professor of history at Muhlenberg College, where she teaches courses in early American history and book history. Her book manuscript examines early American social libraries as civic institutions. Books for Idle Hours: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and the Rise of Summer Reading. By Donna Harrington-Lueker. (Boston and Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2019. Pp. xiv, 229. $90.00 cloth. $29.95 paper.) Summer reading might seem like a light topic for a scholarly mono- graph, but in Books for Idle Hours Donna Harrington-Lueker shows that summer reading has been serious business for a century and a half. With its project of “trac[ing] the cultural and commercial gen- esis of today’s summer reading in nineteenth-century print culture” (3), Books for Idle Hours is a fascinating study of a distinct but largely overlooked body of nineteenth-century American fiction and the au- thors, readers, publishers, and economic and social conditions that gave rise to it. Among the many strengths of Books for Idle Hours is its range of methodological approaches, which conduce to a complex and multi- faceted account of summer reading. Defining summer reading as both product and practice, Harrington-Lueker organizes the book topically, beginning with a wide perspective on nineteenth-century leisure and