Throughout Reading History in Britain and America, c. 1750–c. 1840 Mark Towsey's fluency as a reader of marginalia is evident in his careful sifting of the traces left by readers of history books in the second half of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth, including even juvenile insults bandied between users of the books. But this is more than a virtuoso demonstration of how to find and interpret evidence of reading. For Towsey shows how active readers applied their reading to the big issues of the day–including the threat of France, the relationship between the Church of England and the Roman Catholic church, the balance of power between Crown and Parliament, empire, colonialism, slavery and the American Revolution—and how they sometimes used these history books to mean the opposite of what the authors intended.
Towsey's stated aim is to use the methods of the history of...
