Reviews of Books

Finding Colonial Americas: Essays Honoring J. A. Leo Lemay. Edited by CARLA MULFORD and DAVID S. SHIELDS. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001 . Pp. 481 . $ 59.50.)

Reviewed by Dennis D. Moore, Florida State University

In our time," Robert Micklus remarks in Finding Colonial Americas, "the acquisition of knowledge has become a solitary act, and we have increasingly become clubs of one" (p. 178). That observation comes appropriately in an essay on the Tuesday Club of Annapolis, Maryland, a mid-eighteenth-century association of cosmopolitan gentlemen who gathered together to share a love of belles lettres in an atmosphere of conviviality and candor and kept a lively record of their proceedings ("The Reception of Dr. Alexander Hamilton's History of the Tuesday Club, Ten Years After"). Such exchanges were expressions of a culture very different from our own, but they do provoke reflection on the character of intellectual life in the contemporary academy, even in the small world of early American studies. Do historians and literary scholars talk to or simply past each other? One setting in which we might hope for dialogue rather than simultaneous monologues is the interdisciplinary field of American studies, under whose auspices scholarship on the eighteenth-century Atlantic world is currently flourishing. One measure of that activity is The World Turned Upside Down, a collection of essays chiefly by historians that seeks to represent and assess, as the subtitle states, "The State of Eighteenth-Century American Studies at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century." A similar purpose informs Finding Colonial Americas, a festschrift honoring the pioneering scholar of early American literature J. A. Leo Lemay and featuring essays by prominent figures in the intellectual realm Lemay has done so much to sustain. Both of these collections share a Janus-like quality, offering a retrospect of recent scholarly interest in the eighteenth century and a prospect of emerging themes. Taken together, the volumes suggest the possibilities for renewed dialogue across disciplinary boundaries, as the interests of various specialists in eighteenth-century history and culture converge. While this developing community is no Tuesday Club, it is carrying on a lively conversation about the large, transatlantic world in which those Annapolis gentleman played their small part.

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