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Dissertation Information for Ellen Detlefsen

NAME:
- Ellen Detlefsen
- (Alias) Ellen Gay Detlefsen

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- Library and Information Science

SCHOOL:
- Columbia University (USA) (1975)

ADVISORS:
- Oliver L. Lilley
- Eric L. McKitrick

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- None

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: Printing in the Confederacy, 1861-1865: a Southern industry in wartime

Abstract: This dissertation deals With aspects of the history of
the printing industry in the southern United States during the
American Civil Var, With chapters on labor, presses, type, paper,
ink, and the collateral industries of binding, and engraving and
lithography. It is nessarilly the history of both a technology
and the society in which the techonology at first flourished, then
merely survived, and finally died. The evidence presented comes
from both primary and secondary sources, With an emphasis on
reports emanating from the industry itself-from contemporary
articles, editorials, book reviews, and classified advertising
in Confederate newspapers, as well as from the books printed by
the industry. Some evidence is found in the few manuscripts left
by firms or individuals involved With the industry, While the secondary
materials provide both eyewitness descriptions and post-war
reminiscences.

What emerges from this evidence is the narrative history
of an industry that felt keenly both a responsibility for communicating
Confederate news and taste, and a patriotiC desire to support
the Southern war effort. The printing industry knew many war-related
shortages--in both personnel and supplies--and these shortages often
meant bankruptcy or dissolution for printing shops and job offices,
particularly small and rural ones. The work force, too, fluctuated
With the conscription laws and with the approach of the Union
armies. The printing industry and its companion industries of book
book binding and engraving and lithography thus mirrored many
or the larger social problems and issues or of life in the Confederacy:

shortages in supply, the diminishing manpower, a precarious
existence in blockaded cities, a seriously inflated economy, and
poor quality production.

Specific firms and individuals, end their particular problems, are

documented. Among these are the Memphos Appeal printing shop, the

South Carolina partnership of Evens and Cogswll, the Southern
Illustrated News enterprises in Richmond, Virginia, the Superintendent
or Public Printing far the Confederate States, the engraver Blanton
Duncan, the Richmond, Virginia, and Charleston, South Carolina,
Typographical Societies, and the editor/publisher or the Vicksburg,
Mississippi, Daily Evening Citizen.

Throughout tbe narrative, the theme of survival is dominant -- the

survival of a few against the odds that brought many involoved with the

printing industry to complete failure. It is remearkable that any
portion or the industry was able to continue printing when paper was
nearly non-existent, when trained printers were unavailable, when ink
and presses and type were missing or broken beyond repair, and When the

military events or the period impinged upon printing shops across the

Confederecy.

Some period photographs and reproductions from the Conferederate

imprints themselves are used to illustrate the dissertation. A

classified bibliography of materials about this part of nineteenth

century American is the final part of the work.

MPACT Scores for Ellen Detlefsen

A = 27
C = 62
A+C = 89
T = 31
G = 2
W = 27
TD = 29
TA = 1
calculated 2012-07-31 16:16:26

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