WORLD HISTORY

World History

World History

Introduction

This paper is on world history. In order to explore on world history we will be comparing to scholarly books. The two books that will be compared are, “A History of the Book in America, Vol. 1: The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World”, written by Hugh Amory and David D. Hall and “A History of Islam in America: From the New World to the New World Order”, written by Marsh Christopher.

Book Comparison Analysis

A History of the Book in America: The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World

It is produced in the colonies when not brought over from London, chiefly religious yet sometimes secular, usually printed but often "published" scribally, read silently but also spoken and heard: the early American book lived a schizophrenic life, much like the colonists themselves. Indeed, as the coeditor David D. Hall and the contributor Elizabeth Carroll Reilly note, the most fundamental "social and cultural hierarchies of colonial society . . . were mirrored in the presence and meaning of books." (Kamensky, 2001)

Bringing together the work of fourteen scholars from diverse backgrounds-historians, literary scholars, curators, librarians, and bibliographers are all represented here-the volume thus tackles a vast topic, one with few clear boundaries. So before trying to sketch what its authors discover about the presence and meaning of books in the prerevolutionary United States, it may be useful to say a bit about what The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World is not.

It is not, for one, a history of communicative practice. Though some of the contributors-- Hall and David S. Shields, especially-are sensitive to the interconnections of typeset, handwritten, and oral modes of "publishing," the printed word, broadly defined, is the book's main quarry. Nor is The Colonial Book a history of early American literacies (Kamensky, 2001). Apart from a multipart chapter on "Modalities of Reading," book producers-writers, printers, and sellers-rather than consumers occupy center stage. For both of those reasons, The Colonial Book focuses more on elites than on ordinary folk, more on men than on women, and more on white than on nonwhite peoples. Native Americans, the objects of so much European print and preaching, take up only a dozen of the volume's more than five hundred pages; the difficult relationship between books and slavery receives a mere two paragraphs.

Finally, despite Hall's claim to the contrary in the volume's introduction, this is emphatically not "a narrative history." Its price, typography, and tone all mark it as a reference work, and not one for rank beginners at that. If you do not know what incunabula are or cannot tell a folio from a duodecimo format, you will not find explanations here. Nor are the main lines of the story always readily apparent amid the vast erudition assembled on particular topics.

That said, it is, therefore, a history marked by continuity as well as change. Eschewing black-and-- white verities about the birth of the novel, the growth of the public sphere, and the rise of domestic imprints, The Colonial Book paints in shades ...