C19: America in the 19th Century

This episode investigates two incidents from America’s dramatic past: the 1831 touring performance of the melodrama Metamora starring Edwin Forrest and the 2021-2022 national tour of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! By putting the historical context of their creation and the various receptions to their performance in conversation, Lauren Bellatti and I. B. Hopkins explore the ways these plays res...

For this episode, Sarah Buchmeier (Visiting Lecturer at the University of Illinois at Chicago) and Karah Mitchell (Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Missouri at Columbia) moderated a live recorded conversation at C19’s 2026 conference in Cincinnati, OH with four experts whose work actively engages various publics: Nan Wolverton, Vice President for Academic and Public Programs at th...

Welcome to a 2-part series on Robert Morris, who was a force for justice in nineteenth-century Boston. He championed school desegregation, defended fugitives from slavery, supported equal rights for women, and advocated for Irish immigrants. Morris, his wife Catherine, and their son Robert Jr. were also early major donors and multifaceted supporters of Boston College in its earliest most fledgling...

Welcome to a 2-part series on Robert Morris, who was a force for justice in nineteenth-century Boston. He championed school desegregation, defended fugitives from slavery, supported equal rights for women, and advocated for Irish immigrants. Morris, his wife Catherine, and their son Robert Jr. were also early major donors and multifaceted supporters of Boston College in its earliest most fledgling...

In this episode, podcast co-chairs Stefan Schöberlein and Jess Van Gilder talk with guests about the upcoming C19 Conference in Cincinnati (2026). The episode features historical spotlights, tips for attendees, and background on Cincinnati provided by Martha Schoolman, RJ Boutelle, Christina Hartlieb, Dan Farbman, Anne Delano Steinert, Ashley Glassburn, Eric Gardner, Courtney Murray Ross, Jack Lov...

This episode features a conversation between Alex Alston, Assistant Professor of Literatures in English at Bryn Mawr College, and Maurice O. Wallace, Professor of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, revolving primarily around the presence of nonhuman animals in nineteenth-century Antebellum slave narratives and related literature. The discussants explore the evolution of Frederick Dougla...

On this episode, Aíne Norris (Old Dominion University), guides us through one story of an age-old accusation levied against women throughout colonial and early American history: witchcraft. In 1891, newspapers across America printed a story about known witches in the Appalachian Mountains and their supernatural powers. “Sally Friddly” of Potts Creek, Alleghany County, Virginia, was among those nam...

In 1888, James Chesser and Georgianna Holly married in the growing city of Fort Smith, Arkansas. A few months later during James's arrest, courts argued that Georgianna was legally a man. Legal and social structures at the time struggled for language to define this mixed-race couple in a time before rampant anti-sodomy and anti-miscegenation laws. In this episode, Rachel Trusty (Bucknell Universit...

This episode addresses the elephant slouching on its phone in the corner of many literature classrooms. Mary Isbell (University of New Haven) describes her search for a solution to the student reading crisis, incorporating conversations recorded as she was writing Searching for Wonder: Teaching Literature with Student-Selected Texts. These conversations reveal the many reasons faculty may be hesit...

In this episode, Christopher Douglas (Jacksonville State University) leads Ashley Rattner (Jacksonville State University) through some of the most popular late 18th and early 19th-century content available on YouTube: period cooking recreation. If one were to search "18th century America" or "early America" on YouTube, the top results are short videos of people making food in recreation settings....

In this episode, Marlene L. Daut (Yale University) and Grégory Pierrot (UConn-Stamford) revisit Ridley Scott's big-budget 2023 biopic, Napoleon, out of Apple Studios. The film’s writers promised to tell the story of France’s first emperor, Napoléon Bonaparte, in a novel way. Designed to focus on his relationship with his wife Joséphine de Beauharnais, the film instead harnessed much of its energy...

In this episode, Jean Pfaelzer (Prof. Emerita, University of Delaware) describes the untold history of slavery, slave revolts, and resistance in California, based on her award-winning book California, A Slave State. Interviewed by Karen Clopton, JD, Chair of the San Francisco Human Rights Commission and Harvard University Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow, Pfaelzer looks West to upend the noti...

In this episode, Fiona Maxwell (University of Chicago) highlights the presence and power of youth voices in the collaborative print culture of Progressive Era Club Newspapers. Through a close look at Northwestern University Settlement House, Fiona illustrates the varied, and often fun, ways in which children and youth from marginalized communities utilized the power of collective imagination to re...

“The Time and Place of Performance” looks at the vast circuits of nineteenth-century performance. Amy Huang (Bates College) and Kellen Hoxworth (University at Buffalo, SUNY) consider how nineteenth-century performances move backward and forward, citing past moments, and themselves undergoing processes of recycling and re-presentation to move into the future and challenge the framework of the natio...

Generally associated with postbellum regionalism, mutinous heroines feigning New England propriety, and consumable literature for the urban elites, recent re-readings of Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman’s fiction have uncovered its nuanced, surreptitious, and explosive quality. Much of this disquiet is concentrated in the bodies of barely domesticated animals. Contributors to this episode – Elena Furl...

Since May 2021, G19: The Graduate Student Collective of C19 has produced and published The New Book Forum, an online interview series that facilitates conversations between graduate students and the author of a recent book in the field of 19th-century American literature. This episode is hosted by the forum’s founders, Rachael DeWitt (Columbia University), Max Chapnick (Northeastern University), a...

In this episode, Kassie Jo Baron (University of Tennessee at Martin) and Karah M. Mitchell (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) investigate the popularity and representation of “sagacious” Newfoundland dogs in nineteenth-century American literature. The episode begins with an overview of animal studies as a theoretical framework for analyzing the relationship between animals, history, and...

In this episode, Paul Fess (LaGuardia Community College) explores the connections between Martin Delany and the songwriters Joshua McCarter Simpson and Stephen Foster. Embedded in the mix of Delany’s novel Blake; or, The Huts of America are several songs that invoke some of Foster’s most familiar melodies, such as those associated with the songs “Oh! Susanna” and “Uncle Ned.” Digging through the a...

In this episode, we look forward to the upcoming C19 Conference, to be held March 14-16 in Pasadena, California. Jessica Van Gilder (University of Kentucky) interviews Chair of the C19 Program Committee Lara Langer Cohen (Swarthmore College) and G19 leader and editor Courtney Murray (Pennsylvania State University) to discuss the theme and location of the conference and offer practical advice for f...

In this episode, Eagan Dean (Rutgers University, New Brunswick) makes the case that trans studies is an important new area for nineteenth century cultural history and that the stakes of this scholarship are higher than ever. Featuring author Peyton Thomas and scholars Rebekkah Mulholland (California State University, Sacramento) and Jen Manion (Amherst College), Eagan Dean gives an overview of cur...

How does an enslaved woman's song from 1830s in Georgia end up on a 1950s radio program in South Africa and in a modern singing class? This is the surprising story of an African-born woman named Tena, whose music has echoed for generations across continents, airwaves, and even college classrooms. Mary Caton Lingold (Virginia Commonwealth University) first encountered Tena’s song in a book of sheet...

Over the last few years, academia has seen a wave of labor action, especially by graduate workers. In this episode, Max Chapnick (Boston University) and Lawrence Lorraine Mullen (University at Buffalo), expand on their MLA 2023 panel on graduate worker labor organizing, exploring the relationship between labor unions, graduate student research, and pedagogy. Chapnick and Mullen start by revisiting...

In the last two decades of the 19th  century, newspaper readers across the U.S. were familiar with the work of California writer Yda H. Addis (c. 1857-1941). Her original, adapted, and translated short fiction appeared in newspapers from coast to coast, and her bilingual journalism appeared in U.S. and Mexican periodicals. But by 1900 her career was in tatters after a nasty divorce, a stint in jai...

In this episode, Susannah Sharpless (Cornell University) and Charline Jao (Cornell University) propose gossip as a scholarly approach and indulge their desire to talk about other people. Our hosts connect juicy tidbits from the lives of nineteenth-century women writers to questions about the role of biography, identification, and inference in scholarship more broadly. Jao explores the life of Rose...

Certain texts and writers have been allotted attention and resources in the study of American literature, while others remain understudied and sometimes even unknown. The efforts of literary recovery seek to make available lesser-known texts by exploring the archives and doing different kinds of editorial work. How might such recovery efforts materialize in the form of book editions, anthologies,...