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From the New York Times: "The astonishing stories in Shipwrecked ... [offer] a fresh perspective on the mess of pitched emotions and politics in a nation at war over slavery." Historian Jonathan W. White tells the riveting story of Appleton Oaksmith, a swashbuckling sea captain whose life intersected with some of the most important moments, movements, and individuals of the mid-19th century, from the California Gold Rush, filibustering schemes in Nicaragua, Cuban liberation, and the Civil War and Reconstruction. Most importantly, the book depicts the extraordinary lengths the Lincoln Administration went to destroy the illegal trans-Atlantic slave trade. Using Oaksmith’s case as a lens, Whi...
Scholarly volumes have been written about the causes of the war, presenting plausible reasons for the bloodbath of the 1860s. The arguments are endless and fascinating. Every generation finds new insight into the times. What has largely been ignored is the role of songs in America’s Civil War. This book chronicles the war’s social history in terms of its seldom discussed musical side, and is told from the perspective of the South. Outmanned and outgunned during the War, the South was certainly not musically bested.
In the wake of the Civil War, Constance Fenimore Woolson became one of the first northern observers to linger in the defeated states from Virginia to Florida. Born in New Hampshire in 1840 and raised in Ohio, she was the grandniece of James Fenimore Cooper and was gaining success as a writer when she departed in 1873 for St. Augustine. During the next six years, she made her way across the South and reported what she saw, first in illustrated travel accounts and then in the poetry, stories, and serialized novels that brought unsettled social relations to the pages of Harper's Monthly, the Atlantic, Scribner's Monthly, Appletons' Journal, and the Galaxy. In the midst of Reconstruction and in ...
This is the story of John Draper, Andrew White, and the conflict thesis: a centuries-old misconception that religion and science are at odds with one another. Renowned scientist John William Draper (1811-1882) and celebrated historian-politician Andrew Dickson White (1832-1918) were certain that Enlightened Science and Dogmatic Christianity were mortal enemies--and they said as much to anyone who would listen. More than a century later, their grand and sweeping version of history dominates our landscape; Draper and White's conflict thesis is still found in countless textbooks, lecture series, movies, novels, and more. Yet, as it would later be discovered, they were mistaken. Their work has b...
Drawing examples from over 200 English-language and Spanish-language newspapers and periodicals published between January 1855 and October 1901, Paratextuality in Anglophone and Hispanophone Poems in the US Press, 1855-1901 argues that nineteenth-century newspaper poems are inherently paratextual. The paratextual situation of many newspaper poems (their links to surrounding textual items and discourses), their editorialisation through circulation (the way poems were altered from newspaper to newspaper) and their association and disassociation with certain celebrity bylines, editors and newspaper titles enabled contemporaneous poetic value and taste that, in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, were not only sentimental, Romantic and/or genteel. In addition to these important categories for determining a good and bad poem, poetic taste and value were determined, Bonifacio argues, via arbitrary consequences of circulation, paratextualisation, typesetter error and editorial convenience.
This is a study of some of the central questions in literary publishing in mid-nineteenth-century North America and Britain, addressed through examination of the unusually rich archives of a unique publishing firm. Boston-based Ticknor and Fields, one of the pre-eminent literary publishers of its time, enjoyed close links with Britain, and also developed new production, distribution, and marketing skills as the settlement of North America pushed ever further west. Michael Winship has studied the firm's business records and publications in detail: he reveals what Ticknor and Fields published, its costs of production, the ways it marketed and distributed its books, and the profits it made. Winship goes on to explore the implications of the firm's work for the book trade in general, and to show how an investigation of Ticknor and Fields enriches our understanding of the literary and cultural history of Britain and North America.
Examines Abraham Lincoln's relationship with the press, arguing that he used such intimidation and manipulation techniques as closing down dissenting newspapers, pampering favoring newspaper men, and physically moving official telegraph lines.
Andrews presents the drama of the Civil War as seen through the eyes of reporters’ own diaries, dispatches, and printed news stories.
Stella Brewer Brookes's study of the life and work of Joel Chandler Harris was published in 1950. Brookes examines how Harris drew on his extensive knowledge of African American folklore and culture to create the characters in his work. Brookes classifies the Uncle Remus books under seven major categories: trickster tales, other "creeturs," myths, supernatural tales, proverbs, dialect, and songs.
Apples and Ashes offers the first literary history of the Civil War South. The product of extensive archival research, it tells an expansive story about a nation struggling to write itself into existence. Confederate literature was in intimate conversation with other contemporary literary cultures, especially those of the United States and Britain. Thus, Coleman Hutchison argues, it has profound implications for our understanding of American literary nationalism and the relationship between literature and nationalism more broadly. Apples and Ashes is organized by genre, with each chapter using a single text or a small set of texts to limn a broader aspect of Confederate literary culture. Hut...