The Antebellum Library of John Richard Edmunds

by Haywood, Mary L.

This study in historical literacy investigates the reading of John Richard Edmunds (1807- 1873), a lawyer, legislator, and planter who lived in Halifax County, Virginia. The researcher has done a cross-disciplinary study in order to understand what Edmunds was likely to have read and what his library was likely to have contained. The paper summarizes some of the ideologies associated with the antebellum South such as Stoicism and Romanticism. It also gives a brief history of the printing industry and of periodicals in the South during this time period.