Purifying America

James Sullivan presents a brief history of American poetry broadsides from the seventeenth through twentieth centuries. He then explores the extensive use of the broadside during one era, the 1960s, showing how it refigured the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, and others and situating it for specific cultural uses within the social and political struggles of the times.

Sullivan's introduction lays out the project's theoretical groundwork in the cultural studies movement and surveys the history of the broadside in North America since the advent of printing.