Entry #8

• Glynn, Tom.  (2005)  "The New York Society Library: books, authority, and public in colonial and early republican New York."  Libraries & Culture, 40 (4), 493-529.
• A "Dig Deeper" article from Modern Libraries
• Accessible online at http://bit.ly/2mgtWvz

I love learning about Colonial & Revolutionary Era America.  Ergo, this article's addition to my history log.

As America struggled to find its political footing, from republicanism to democracy, it would have an effect on the New York Library, evolving it from a patriarchal library that collected materials based on their worth to the "commonweal" to a more egalitarian public institution.  But even before the Revolution, the "founding of the New York Society Library reflected and was part of pre-revolutionary colonial politics" between the Whigs and Tories.  The founding of the library was in fact an attempt to counteract the Anglican/Crown influence that was coming out of King's College.

As a huge fan of the musical Hamilton, I had a laugh reading about the "contested election of 1825," in which the library board was almost completely replaced after an unprecedented level of votes came in.  A theory going around at the time was that the takeover would have turned the library into a bank.  Glynn points out that there is no evidence of this, but I thought back to reading Ron Chernow's Hamilton biography and the common belief that bankers were scamming the public with their stocks.  (Which is why Jefferson and Hamilton butted heads so much, and this fear of stocks led the private  investigation into Hamilton's relationship with James Reynolds, which then exploded into the very public sex scandal with Maria Reynolds.)