Collective biographies have played a major role in African American historical writing since the early nineteenth century. The essay explores two of the many African American collective biographies published in the last decades of the century: Men of Mark (1887) and Progress of a Race (1897). Produced during what Rayford Logan has called the “nadir” of race relations, they aimed at showcasing the achievements of African Americans and inspiring pride and emulation in black audiences. Their authors also vigorously denounced the current degraded situation of African Americans. Unlike Men of Mark, which clearly targeted a black readership, Progress of a Race, signed by two authors, one black, one white, attempted to reach a double audience of blacks and whites. The second part of the essay looks into the publishing history of the works, both of which were issued by white subscription houses, and examines the way they were promoted, marketed, and received. It raises intriguing questions as to the marketability and audience of works primarily aimed at an African American readership.

In 2008, the First Sounds project digitally scanned and converted the paper tracings of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s phonautograph, recreating sounds that hadn’t been heard since the middle of the nineteenth century. Never intended to be played back, Scott’s phonautograms belong to a world in which writing was the universal standard for other media and literature was often the test case for new media technologies. But even by the time of Thomas Edison’s tinfoil phonograph in the late 1870s, that orientation was changing. This book analyzes the relationships of print literature to other media in the late nineteenth century, a time when an astonishing array of new media technologies were imagined, invented, and adopted. It argues that writers became vernacular media theorists as they traced systematic relationships between different forms of print and nonprint media, and it brings the history of books and printed writing into closer contact with the interdisciplinary field of media archaeology.