From the colonial era to the onset of the Civil War, Magazines and the Making of America looks at how magazines and the individuals, organizations, and circumstances they connected ushered America into the modern age. How did a magazine industry emerge in the United States, where there were once only amateur authors, clumsy technologies for production and distribution, and sparse reader demand? What legitimated magazines as they competed with other media, such as newspapers, books, and letters? And what role did magazines play in the integration or division of American society? From their first appearance in 1741, magazines brought together like-minded people, wherever they were located and whatever interests they shared. As America became socially differentiated, magazines engaged and empowered diverse communities of faith, purpose, and practice. Religious groups could distinguish themselves from others and demarcate their identities. Social-reform movements could energize activists across the country to push for change. People in specialized occupations could meet and learn from one another to improve their practices. Magazines built translocal communities—collections of people with common interests who were geographically dispersed and could not easily meet face-to-face. By supporting communities that crossed various axes of social structure, magazines also fostered pluralistic integration. Looking at the important role that magazines had in mediating and sustaining critical debates and diverse groups of people, Magazines and the Making of America considers how these print publications helped construct a distinctly American society.

The literature of American music librarianship has been around since the 19th century when public libraries began to keep records of player-piano concerts, significant donations of books and music, and suggestions for housing music. As the 20th century began, American periodicals printed more and more articles on increasingly specialized topics within music studies. Eventually books were developed to aid the music librarian; their publication has continued over the course of nearly a century. This book reflects the great diversity of the literature of music librarianship. The main resources included are items of historical interest, descriptions of individual collections, catalogues of collections, articles describing specific library functions, record-related subjects, bibliographies designed for music library use, literature from Canada and Britain when relevant to U.S. library practices, key discographies, and information on specialized music research. The material is ordered by topic and indexed by author, subject, and library name.

Choral music represented an important part of American cultural life during the nineteenth century, whether integral to worship or merely for entertainment. Despite this history, choral music remains one of the more neglected studies in the scholarly community. In an effort to fill this gap, N. Lee Orr and W. Dan Hardin offer a new approach to the study of choral music by mapping out and bringing bibliographical control to this expansive and challenging field of study. Their unique guide focuses on literature related to choral music in the United States from the end of the second decade of the nineteenth century through the earlier part of the twentieth century. Choral Music in Nineteenth-Century America explores the entire range of choral music conceived, written, published, rehearsed, and performed by an ensemble of singers gathered specifically to present the music before an audience or congregation. The guide expertly sifts through the extensive literature to cite the most notable sources for study and provides individual chapters on the leading nineteenth-century composers who were instrumental in the development of choral music.

A classified and annotated bibliography of pre-1865 American music that, so far as we have ascertained, was in print and available for purchase in 1976.