I introduce the notion of American historicism as a tool to study written culture in the four principal American traditions of letters: Hispanic American, Brazilian, Haitian, and North American. I call attention to the rich collection of writing on the American republics. History was the predominant genre in republican libraries and the apogee of written representation in the first century following independence. I discuss the need to carry out research-oriented collections of American histories and argue for their critical study today. These republican histories still have not been studied in terms of their communalities: the shared need throughout the continent to narrate, describe, comment, and legitimate the new American republics. Only by critically studying republican libraries will we be able to appropriate the rich traditions of American writing. And only then will we have achieved a state of culture that has enough confidence to cite itself.