C19: America in the 19th Century

How does looking back to a time before institutionalization and medicalization affect how we think about disability today? What would it mean to "crip" the classics? These are some of the questions answered by Professors Benjamin Reiss (Emory University), Ellen Samuels (UW Madison) and Sari Altschuler (Northeastern University) as they speak with Ittai Orr (Yale University) about the study of what...

In February 2018, Mark H., then a Columbia MFA Directing Candidate, presented his production of William Wells Brown’s 1858 play, The Escape; or a Leap for Freedom to a full house at the Lenfest Center for the Arts in Harlem. In this episode of the podcast Brigitte Fielder and Jonathan Senchyne (University of Wisconsin-Madison) talk to Mark H. about being only the second director to stage this 150-...

May Alcott Nieriker is mostly remembered as a footnote in a famous family: the daughter of Bronson Alcott and the inspiration for Amy March in her sister Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. But Alcott Nieriker was a writer and an accomplished painter who studied in Paris and was described by John Ruskin as “the only artist worthy to copy Turner.” This episode emerges from the the conference “Recover...

The new issue of J19 is hot off the presses! Starting with the cover image of the 1833 Leonid meteor shower, J19 editors Elizabeth Duquette and Stacey Margolis share their process, advice, and what makes them excited about the ideas and conversations in this issue. Hear teasers about the articles that critically engage crows, notebooks, juvenile delinquents, comets, sin, and Indigenous newspapers....

Every week in 2018, Ivy Schweitzer and her team of students at Dartmouth College select several poems and letters written by Emily Dickinson in 1862, a year of creativity “at the White Heat,” and then frame them with a summary of the news of the time, literary culture, biographical events in the Dickinson circle, a brief survey of more recent critical responses and a personal reflection. This epis...

In our current moment there is an unmistakable need for people who are invested in the knowledge, methods, dispositions, and perspectives cultivated by the humanities. Our trade is nuance: sensitivity to the variability of meaning, a willingness to consider alternative social plots and coexisting answers to complex questions. Yet, in our own professional lives, it can become all too easy to treat...

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...

Why discuss poor whites when thinking about race and class in nineteenth-century America and beyond? In this dialogue between literary studies and history Matthew Teutsch (Auburn University) and Keri Leigh Merritt (Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South (Cambridge UP, 2017)) talk about how wealthy white landowners manipulated the antiblackness of poor whites in the antebel...

Today, we associate the theory of evolution with Charles Darwin. But in America in the nineteenth-century, and well into the twentieth, the evolutionary theory of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck were far more influential than Darwin's. In this episode, Kyla Schuller (Rutgers) and Britt Rusert (UMass Amherst) discuss the ways that Lamarckian thought influenced attitudes toward sentimentalism, child developme...

How is studying and teaching nineteenth-century U.S. literature different outside of the U.S.? Do British scholars have different horizons than their American counterparts? This episode of the C19 podcast provides scholars in the U.S. and the rest of the world with insight into scholarship, disciplinary practices, and current issues in British Higher Education. Join hosts Dr. Katie McGettigan (Roy...

Why should we care about a once famous, then forgotten woman writer? While conducting research in the Washington State archives, Laura Laffrado (Western Washington University) stumbled upon the twelve linear feet of the papers of forgotten Pacific Northwest author Ella Rhoads Higginson (1862?-1940) and set out to recover Higginson and her storied literary career. Celebrated prize-winning author an...

How do the recovered lives and work of Black writers find an audience? Over the last three decades, Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858-1932) has become central to nineteenth-century African American literary studies. Scholars have drawn attention to the subtlety, wit, and complexity of his stories, novels, and essays, which were once regarded as pandering and old-fashioned. Yet, despite the ongoing bo...

What do you do when you don't go looking for a book-- it comes and finds you instead? That's what happened to Jean Lee Cole (Loyola University Maryland) when she ran into the words of H.M.T. in the pages of the Christian Recorder. It took nearly ten years, but H.M.T. eventually got his way. The story behind Freedom's Witness: The Civil War Correspondence of Henry McNeal Turner (West Virginia UP, 2...

Can 19th-century approaches to slavery provide a map for thinking about 21st century trafficking? In this episode, Anna Mae Duane (UConn)leads a dialogue about how we can--and can’t--bring the nineteenth century to bear on the current phenomenon largely referred to as “Modern Slavery”--a term that is itself deeply controversial. The conversation centers around the edited collection, Child Slavery...

J19: The Journal of Nineteenth Century Americanists was launched in 2013. Published twice annually, the official publication of the C19 organization is dedicated to innovative research on, and analysis of, the long nineteenth century. In this episode members of the C19 Podcast team bring you an exclusive interview with the new co-editors of the journal, Elizabeth “Betsy” Duquette (Gettysburg Colle...

“Climate” is the theme and keyword for the Fifth Biennial C19 Conference located at Albuquerque, New Mexico on March 22-25 2018. For our inaugural episode, members of the C19 Podcast team interviewed the organizers of the upcoming conference. Hester Blum (Penn State), Jesse Aleman (UNM), and Carrie Bramen (SUNY Buffalo) share insights about the ideas behind the conference, as well as suggestions f...