1846: Inventing Americana at the John Carter Brown Library

In 1846 John Carter Brown, already a bibliophile, received the first substantial shipment of books that would form the core of his library. From a New England family of many generations, in a century when the United States was both asserting itself and struggling to define itself as a nation, Brown looked to a geographically capacious definition of Americana to characterize his collection. The first inventories of that first major shipment, which included priceless incunabula about the Spanish colonization of the Americas alongside rare publications focused on the Portuguese, British, French, Dutch, and Scottish imperial projects, are dated within weeks of the US declaration of war on Mexico.

Discernible in the invoice, John Carter Brown’s library reflected a 19th-century view of the colonial past that constructed the American hemisphere as separated from yet connected to Europe and Africa by the Atlantic Ocean, a global maritime vision that had deep resonances with the Rhode Island Brown family itself. The navigational tracts, products of the knowledge gained from early trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific voyages, as well as the earliest European narrative accounts of their imagined new world, thus assumed a pivotal place in John Carter Brown’s collections from the very beginning.

In 1846 John Carter Brown, like other 19th-century collectors, was reflecting and shaping a view of the colonial Americas. The earliest narratives of the European colonies in the Americas served several functions. One was describing unfamiliar natural wonders and compiling observations about Indigenous peoples; another was weaving the stories about imagined European successes and fearsome losses, often at the hands of specific adversaries who included Indigenous defenders of tribal territory as well as European competitors. The authors of these works also laid the groundwork for further colonization, offering guidance to would-be colonizers and state authorities, always imagining possibilities for expansion.

In his residence on Benefit Street, only four blocks from the Library building, John Carter Brown unpacked, reviewed and shelved box after box of books, reveling in their bindings, papers, typography, maps, and illustrations. Almost half were printed in English, and large portions were in Spanish, French, and Latin. But from the beginning of his collecting, he also focused on a smaller group of titles, equally reflective of the history of colonialism, printed in Indigenous languages. These grammars, lexicons, and introductions to Christianity are in transcribed languages of Indigenous peoples who lived in the lands from the furthest north to the furthest south, from places the Europeans called Greenland to Patagonia

As stand-ins for observation and experience, woodcuts and engravings were key components of ethnographic and natural history treatises, and eagerly sought after by book collectors. Mid-nineteenth-century collectors like John Carter Brown did not acquire separate maps because they did not view them as primary sources of colonial history. Extraordinary maps still entered collections, however, when John Carter Brown acquired the books in which the maps were originally issued.