Books.

The cultural baggage of European immigrants to America included books reflecting the dominant literary trends of the age. Even the earliest settlers brought significant numbers of books with them, determined as they were to carry the best of their Old World culture into their New World homes. For some of them, books on law, history, and religion were deemed especially essential as they struggled to reconstitute society in the American wilderness. Books that instructed and uplifted, especially religious books, were most numerous. But learned political and theological works and belletristic literature could also be found in personal and college collections of the seventeenth century. As the eighteenth century progressed, institutional libraries grew in numbers and size, as did personal and family collections of books. In the English colonies the expansion of literacy gave rise to the phenomenon known as subscription libraries...