How the Printing Press Changed History examines the invention and development of the printing press, how it works, and how its role in speeding the dissemination of information revolutionized society. Features include essential facts, a glossary, selected bibliography, websites, source notes, and an index, plus a timeline and maps, charts, and diagrams. Aligned to Common Core Standards and correlated to state standards. Essential Library is an imprint of Abdo Publishing, a division of ABDO.

"This complete, definitive, and illustrated survey of small nineteenth-century printing presses, written by a former curator at the Smithsonian Institution, is the first history of these lovely, useful, and varied machines. For there were, in those days, small printing presses created for every purpose. And there were, as well, innumerable boys and countless men eager to make their fortunes by investing in one, buying a few fonts of type, printing for a local clientele, and, with luck, building a printing or publishing empire." "What the desktop computer is to today, these small iron workhorses were to the nineteenth century. This book catalogues, describes, and illustrates over a hundred, with their makers, giving machine specifications as well as patent information. It provides a mine of previously undocumented printing information. No one seriously interested in the history of printing technology can afford to be without it."--BOOK JACKET.

The true scale of paper production in America from 1690 through the end of the nineteenth century was staggering, with a range of parties participating in different ways, from farmers growing flax to textile workers weaving cloth and from housewives saving rags to peddlers collecting them. Making a bold case for the importance of printing and paper technology in the study of early American literature, Jonathan Senchyne presents archival evidence of the effects of this very visible process on American writers, such as Anne Bradstreet, Herman Melville, Lydia Sigourney, William Wells Brown, and other lesser-known figures. The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature reveals that book history and literary studies are mutually constitutive and proposes a new literary periodization based on materiality and paper production. In unpacking this history and connecting it to cultural and literary representations, Senchyne also explores how the textuality of paper has been used to make social and political claims about gender, labor, and race.