| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Carl Ostrowski. Books, Maps, and Politics: A Cultural History of the Library of Congress, 1783–1861. (Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book.) Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 2004. Pp. x, 261. $39.95.
In this cultural history of the Library of Congress, Carl Ostrowski demonstrates that the library was "a site where competing visions of the national character met and played out" (p. 2) during the period from independence to the Civil War. He does this largely—although hardly exclusively—through a detailed examination of the collections, and of the debates over those collections, as is reflected in the title. In so doing, he not only illustrates how the Library of Congress reflected Congress's political or cultural concerns, but he sheds light on the development of the library in relation to the nation's print culture and on the development of the Library of Congress and of libraries generally as institutions within a democratic society.	1
Within a chronological arrangement that starts with proposals for a library to serve the young Congress and moves through the early years of the republic into the Jacksonian era and then into the immediate antebellum period, Ostrowski looks at the collections, the users of the collections, and the physical facilities, and frames them within the discourses of the developing nation. One of the book's great virtues is a clear organization with threads of Ostrowski's arguments drawn from one period of the library's development to another. Although at times the sight of many book titles on a page might tempt one to skip paragraphs, Ostrowski manages to utilize this specific evidence of the interests of Congress and how the purposes of the Library of Congress differed from other libraries of the time, such as Benjamin Franklin's Library Company of Philadelphia, without bogging down. In fact, the contrasts and comparisons with other libraries provide a unique perspective on the knowledge deemed important by those crafting the United States' foundations.	. . .

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