American Print Research Articles

Rewriting the Newspaper: The Storytelling Movement in American Print Journalism

Rewriting the Newspaper: The Storytelling Movement in American Print Journalism

“Dear Anglo”: Scrambling the Signs of Anglo-Modernity from New York to Lagos

AbstractThis essay reveals the surprising ties within an African American print franchise: the Anglo-African Magazine, the Weekly Anglo-African, and their various iterations between 1859 and 1865 and a Lagos journal also titled The Anglo-African (1863–65). The link was Robert Campbell, the West Indian editor of the Lagos paper and former contributor to the New York ones. I show how Campbell not only borrowed his title from his African American colleagues but also adapted their editorial models for hailing abolitionist publics and constituting interpretative communities. As these Anglo-African journals proliferated from New York to Lagos, “Anglo-African” became a racialized title associated with a particular kind of journal, rather than just a racial term. A salient feature of an “Anglo-African” type of journal was its scrambling of its titular term and its prefix Anglo. Thus, in the US papers, Anglo became a shorthand for a black publication, while their Nigerian counterpart inserted the US and African-America into the “Anglo” world of the Lagos Anglo-African. By decoupling “Anglo” from whiteness in one context, and from Britishness in the other, these editors forged a black Atlantic counterculture that worked at what Paul Gilroy has called the “hidden internal fissures” of modernity.

Railway Reading and the Late Victorian Literary Series

Railway Reading and the Late Victorian Literary Series

Richard Allen and Black Church Disciplines

ABSTRACTThis essay analyzes the 1817 Doctrines and Discipline of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, published by Richard Allen and Jacob Tapsico, to argue for the inclusion of church disciplines in American literary anthologies. Such anthologies currently privilege the genres of life writing and poetry when selecting African American literature. In contrast to this emphasis on works by a single author, the Doctrines and Discipline foregrounds a vibrant African American print culture, practices of collaborative authorship, and coalition-building in the early American republic. A close reading of the AME Doctrines and Discipline demonstrates both the political and the literary stakes of church disciplines. This particular church discipline enacts a revolutionary break with white institutions and constructs a new black national affiliation, and it also lays the foundation for black literary production through much of the nineteenth century.

Aping the Filipino Image

Early American visual culture has played a substantial role in advancing American Imperialism in the early 1900s. Using publication as an instrument of expansionism, America’s distribution of visual images depicting its conquered nations, has resulted in consequences that have perpetually categorized its once-dominated territories as inferior. The Philippines reveal the consequences of this classification. Seized by the United States in 1899, the Philippines was repeatedly a subject of American print culture. Primarily, editorial cartoons were used to illustrate recurring images of Filipinos to justify its annexation. Employing illusive and sensational tropes, these cartoons were widely distributed through magazines and periodicals, informing the American population of debasing assumptions to characterize the Filipino individual. As a result, the Philippines gained false attributions and stereotypes brought upon by their erroneous portrayal in early American media. This research argues that the deceptive representation of the Philippines in early American visual culture, has aided in creating false Filipino stereotypes, hence, sustaining the nation in the periphery. Visual codings used in editorial cartoons repeatedly exemplified the Filipino character as incompetent and inferior. Filtration of Filipino representation is, likewise, apparent. By exaggerating damaging visual tropes that painted the Filipino individual as primitive and savage, and eliminating its progressive and modern characteristics, editorial cartoons helped reinforce the supposed ‘benevolent assimilation’ America used in defending its colonialism. Such reinforcement produced lasting consequences that not only perpetuated false Filipino stereotypes in the global platform, but also encouraged the Philippines’ inadvertent participation to cultural imperialism in present society.

News, Programs, Publications, and Awards

News, Programs, Publications, and Awards

Maternal Bodies: Redefining Motherhood in Early America by Nora Doyle

Reviewed by: Maternal Bodies: Redefining Motherhood in Early America by Nora Doyle Shannon K. Withycombe (bio) Maternal Bodies: Redefining Motherhood in Early America nora doyle University of North Carolina Press, 2018 286 pp. At some point in my courses in history of women and history of reproduction I like to show students images of pregnancy from eighteenth-century medical anatomy texts. I ask my students to gaze at images from William Hunter or William Smellie, to think about how these illustrations of [End Page 276] disembodied pelvises, chopped-off limbs, and abdomens splayed open affected how doctors and others approached reproducing women. If a young man learned about childbirth from a dismembered torso, detached from a woman’s mind and voice, how could this shape his actions in the midst of a birthing scene? How could these illustrations influence understandings of women’s bodies or their reproductive activities, and limit women’s roles in determining medical care or their ability to be heard? Nora Doyle answers these questions and many more with her study of the maternal body in early America. Uncovering descriptions, images, and ideals of the maternal body in print culture between 1750 and 1850, Doyle examines popular narratives about women birthing and nursing children, but more compellingly compares these narratives to women’s personal writings about their reproducing bodies. Juggling this multiplicity of sources, Doyle is able to present an original, timely, and captivating history. While the histories of reproduction and motherhood are rich genres, historians have rarely placed the body so squarely in the center of a study. Bodies often show up on the margins, but usually remain background or context for learned medicine, female activism, and governmental policy. Doyle considers both bodies in their unruly corporeality—leaking breasts, aching backs, tearing flesh—and their culturally mediated discursive and visual representations; perhaps most importantly, she delves into how these aspects of the maternal body are indelibly intertwined. Doyle shows not only that bodies matter but also that we cannot understand the institution of motherhood without a deep analysis of understandings of the bodies involved. Beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century, two cultural transformations severely shaped the maternal body in American print culture. Following a similar movement in Europe, American medical men began to seek out the business of birthing women. These men instantly faced the social task of overturning the notion that entering a birthing room, sitting with a laboring woman, and examining how her labor was progressing (which usually included raising her skirts and looking directly at her vagina) was not something that a respectable man should be doing. As Doyle demonstrates, aspiring male-midwives, seeking to desexualize the experience, shifted the focus during birth from the woman to the uterus. Medical texts and advice manuals depicted the womb as an active agent in charge of expelling the child, and in illustrations as physically separated [End Page 277] from a woman with a voice, a will, or even complete legs. As male practitioners divided and dismembered the female body, women were essentially erased from the event; their maternal bodies became invisible and inactive. At the same time, Enlightenment projects crafted idealized womanhood as a mother focused on the emotional, moral, and spiritual nature of producing and raising children. Prescriptive literature, fiction and poetry, and images appearing in women’s magazines depicted an orderly, gentle, calm maternal body. Doyle highlights the presentation of breastfeeding in these narratives, the one physical activity that could be reconstructed as a moral, orderly pursuit. Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers could portray breastfeeding as a pleasurable emotional activity, unlike childbirth. The typified sentimental mother only received pleasure from her mothering; it was dangerous to acknowledge the pain, distress, and the supreme physicality of motherhood. To fulfill her goal of restoring the body “to its rightful place in the history of motherhood,” Doyle cannot rely only on the print culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (210). She also analyzes the impact of these genres by investigating the centrality of the body within women’s personal writings about pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing. Doyle discovers a range of women’s reflections on and reactions to their physical...

Introduction

Introduction Lucy Caplan (bio) and Kristen M. Turner (bio) In Panel 34 of Jacob Lawrence’s iconic Migration Series (1940–41), a man stands with his back to the viewer and his head cast down, immersed completely in what is before him. He is reading the newspaper. A woman sits near him, motionless and attentive: is he reading aloud to her? Is she waiting for her own chance to rifle through the pages? With characteristic understatement, Lawrence captions the panel simply: “The Negro press was also influential in urging the people to leave the South.” This influence is a theme he returns to elsewhere in the series: Panel 20, for example, features groups of readers, each clustered together around a single copy of a newspaper, accompanied by the heading, “In many of the communities the Negro press was read continually because of its attitude and its encouragement of the movement.” In Lawrence’s visual imaginary, the newspaper is made into a material sign of its historical moment, a locus of communal activity, and a forum for creativity. In their emphasis on the role of the Black press in catalyzing the Great Migration, Lawrence’s images convey the centrality of the press to African American life during the first half of the twentieth century. His caption emphasizes that the press was itself a historical actor: not simply a record of what was happening in Black America, but also an institution that itself shaped historical change. Further, as works of art, Lawrence’s images also speak to—and embody—the multifaceted nexus and mutually constitutive relationship between the press and the world of the arts during this era. As such, they invite a number of questions that are fundamental to this special issue. How did artists and the Black press interact with one another during the age of Jim Crow? How did the press function [End Page 5] as an agent of social and cultural change? How did artistic content in the Black press relate to the Black public sphere more broadly? The authors whose work is featured in this issue of American Studies answer these questions alongside other, even more expansive ones: in what ways did arts coverage in the Black press figure into transnational networks of intellectual exchange? How did this content interact with other types of African American and American print culture? How did it function as a site of racial formation, especially in conjunction with questions of class, gender, and sexuality? Significantly, the page that Lawrence’s central figure ponders in Panel 34 appears blank; Lawrence lets the viewer imagine what words, images, and ideas it might include. Perhaps it was a straightforward call to southerners to migrate north. Or perhaps it was something else entirely—a review of a concert, an illustration of an eminent person, or a work of speculative fiction. To peruse the pages of a Black magazine or newspaper was—and is—to encounter an astonishing variety of content related to the arts. Usually considered to have originated with the 1827 founding of Freedom’s Journal, the nation’s first Black-owned and -published newspaper, the Black press became a key site for political discourse in the post-emancipation era, from the landmark anti-lynching exposés of Ida Wells-Barnett to the mobilization of Black communities in opposition to racial segregation.1 Many of the earliest Black newspapers also featured fiction and poetry within their pages and facilitated vigorous debates about Black cultural production.2 As the press expanded, so did its coverage of and engagement with the arts. By the early twentieth century, specialty publications like the Negro Music Journal (est. 1902) and generalist literary magazines like the Colored American Magazine (est. 1900) offered extensive coverage of arts-related topics. For their part, newspapers featured cartoons, illustrations, fiction, poetry, arts criticism, and advertisements for upcoming cultural events. When the African American weekly newspaper emerged as a transformative cultural force around the turn of the twentieth century, Black journalists gained an unprecedented opportunity to reach a broad public. In 1890, there were between fifty and 150 Black newspapers in the country; most were small-scale, reaching fewer than 10,000 subscribers across limited...

The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States by Derrick R. Spires

Reviewed by: The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States by Derrick R. Spires Peter Wirzbicki (bio) Keywords Print culture, Citizenship, African American thinkers, Political theory, Literary analysis The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States. By Derrick R. Spires. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Pp. 314. Cloth, $49.95.) Derrick Spires, an associate professor of English at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, wrote The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States in part to respond to the sense that discussions about print culture, the public sphere, and democratic deliberation had left out black participants and visions. The resulting work, though, is far more interesting than if Spires simply had applied the theories of Jürgen Habermas or others to early African American literature. Instead he develops his own theory of how black thinkers and writers developed what he calls a "practice of citizenship." Scholars working on black radicalism, American print culture, and antebellum politics will find this a provocative and fruitful read. The book uses a rich diversity of sources, a wide array of theoretical perspectives from [End Page 379] contemporary critical theory, and close readings of both well-known and sometimes unfamiliar sources to establish that antebellum black thinkers were developing novel ways to think about power and citizenship through engagement with a literary public sphere. At the center of Spires's argument is a convincing and important re-theorization of citizenship. Black thinkers and activists in the antebellum period—men and women like Absalom Jones, Richard Allen, James McCune Smith, William J. Wilson, Francis Watkins Harper, and many others—conceived of citizenship, he argues, less as a formal legal right defined by the state and more as a practice, something that is produced through energetic and engaged political activism, especially through an assertive print culture. Black thinkers conceived of citizenship as what you do, in other words, not who you are or how the state sees you. By adding a valuable literary-studies perspective to such recent historiographical studies of the history of citizenship by legal historians like Barbara Welke and Martha Jones, Spires's work shows how the creation of citizenship was a cultural and literary project as much as a political one. The black press plays a central role in this construction of citizenship. Spires sees the emergence of a black print culture as a central "space" in which "black writers constituted community outside of the nation-state form" (9). It was in pamphlets, newspapers, and short fiction that black writers theorized these new practices of citizenship. He begins in the immediate post-revolutionary period with an analysis and discussion of the "neighborly" ethos that black Philadelphians preached in the wake of the famous yellow-fever epidemic of 1793. Spires argues that black Philadelphians sought to mobilize under the hegemonic banner of civil republicanism while simultaneously expanding this notion of civic virtue by incorporating "neighborliness," a trait that had a "more democratic ethos of equality and inclusion" than white thinkers tended to (56). The relatively restrained and deferential citizenship of Jones and Allen is soon supplanted by the more assertive "circulating" citizenship of the Colored Convention movement. Spires shows how accounts of these conventions were meant to be printed and published, "circulating" well beyond their immediate contexts. Historians may be interested in how Spires centers debates about state citizenship, in contrast to some historiographical interpretations that have tended to focus on the creation of [End Page 380] national citizenship. Black thinkers also increasingly engaged with questions about "economic citizenship." Spires discusses debates between William J. Wilson and James McCune Smith about "black aristocracy" and the "best average colored citizen" (143). Together, Spires shows that a rich and vibrant debate about the meaning of republicanism, market life, and economic citizenship occurred in the black press. Next, Spires turns his attention to "critical citizenship," especially as modeled by the briefly lived Anglo-African Magazine. For Spires, "critical citizenship" disrupts and unsettles otherwise fixed and unified norms of white supremacy and white citizenship. Critical citizenship is "intrusive"; it invades the settled spaces of white politics that seek to...

Western Art, Western History: Collected Essays by Ron Tyler

Reviewed by: Western Art, Western History: Collected Essays by Ron Tyler Brian W. Dippie Western Art, Western History: Collected Essays. By Ron Tyler. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019. Pp. 328. Illustrations, bibliography, index.) Ron Tyler's career as a student of western American art and nineteenth-century American printing has earned him an enviable scholarly reputation. He is known for his deep research and rigorous, close analyses. He has tackled a range of artists and printmakers and made substantial contributions to the literature in books and essays that span more than forty years. This collection of eight of his essays, all revised since their first publications and sumptuously produced, covers artists as relatively obscure as Louis Choris and Alfred E. Mathews and as well known as Karl Bodmer, Alfred Jacob Miller, John James Audubon, George Caleb Bingham, and Frederic Remington. Tyler's chapter on Choris opens this collection with the visual record of a Russian circumnavigation of the globe from 1818 to 1820, concentrating on Choris's original watercolors and the lithographs that illustrated his publication, from 1820 to 1822, of Voyage pittoresque autour du monde, showing the landscape and natives of California and Hawaii. The chapter serves as a reminder that western art, like American western history, has followed an east to west imperative, stretching from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific Ocean at the expense of the earlier south to north thrust of Spanish empire and the maritime explorations of the Pacific by Spain, Great Britain, and Russia, which produced a record of Indigenous cultures on the West Coast before overland explorations ever reached what was considered the Far West. All of Tyler's essays are informative and make good reading, but one stands out for me, the thematic chapter "'I Am Tired of All This Thing Called Science': Illustrated Government Publications Related to the American West, 1843–1863." This inventory establishes the paramount role of government patronage not only for artists, but also for American printers. Miller and Bodmer may have accompanied private patrons, and George Catlin, despite his persistent efforts to secure government patronage, had to rely on his own initiative when he ventured up the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers and onto the Southern Plains to paint Indians in the 1830s. In that respect, Catlin anticipated the iconic figure in frontier mythology, the rugged, self-sufficient individual. But government-sponsored expeditionary artists provided the bulk of widely disseminated images of the distant western territories in the years before the Civil War. Tyler's meticulous reconstruction of their partnerships with the government establishes his premise that visual documents are as valuable as written documents in understanding the past, a premise that guided the great historian of western exploration William H. Goetzmann, to whom Tyler dedicates this volume. [End Page 376] Tyler's discussion of George Caleb Bingham, quoting freely from contemporary reviews of his major paintings, acknowledges the issue of long-held eastern prejudices about western art. It is an art defined by its regional subject matter, of course. But because Bingham lived in Missouri, it is hard not to think of another St. Louis artist, Charles M. Russell, who would make Montana his home in 1880. There he discovered cowboys, just as Bingham had discovered fur trappers and river men situated at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers in the 1840s. Their subjects were types––footloose, carefree young men who pushed out of the urban centers like St. Louis to live the frontier dream. "The western boatmen are a peculiar class in most of their habits, dress and manners," the Daily Missouri Republican observed in 1847 (228). The same characterization could have been applied just as readily to Russell (or Remington) cowboys forty years later. Tellingly, Tyler contrasts the critical reception accorded Bingham's work in Missouri, where it was praised as a product of native genius, and in the East, where critics grumbled about the vulgarity of his subject matter and the crudity of his treatment of it––a regional divide that pertains to this day where western art is concerned. This fine book, published in the Charles M. Russell Center Series on Art and Photography of the American West, pays fitting...

Book Review: Thomas R. Schmidt, Rewriting the Newspaper: The Storytelling Movement in American Print Journalism

Book Review: Thomas R. Schmidt, <i>Rewriting the Newspaper: The Storytelling Movement in American Print Journalism</i>

Book Review: Rewriting the Newspaper: The Storytelling Movement in American Print Journalism by Thomas R. Schmidt

Book Review: <i>Rewriting the Newspaper: The Storytelling Movement in American Print Journalism</i> by Thomas R. Schmidt

Scientific Nature Faking: Experimental Life Sciences in American Print Media and Culture, 1900–1914

Scientific Nature Faking: Experimental Life Sciences in American Print Media and Culture, 1900–1914

Access to the Past and the Present: A History of the M. C. Migel Memorial Collection, American Printing House for the Blind

Access to the Past and the Present: A History of the M. C. Migel Memorial Collection, American Printing House for the Blind

Specifications of Cartographic Symbols for Indonesian Tactile Map

Visual impairment people require a means of information transfer which different from normal people, it needs to be touched or amplified by audio, including maps that apprise them of the objects and events occurring on Earth. Cartographic Sciences have developed tactile maps that offers touchable symbols for supporting blind and partially sighted people in recognizing the spatial distribution of geographical phenomena and their intercorrelation. Creating an informative tactile maps need a specific design of symbol, ancillary information, and map reproduction that meets the need and the capacity of its users. Unfortunately, there has been no international standardization for these map features that could be used as a foundation to build a standardization for our national tactile map. Therefore, this research adopted and modified the designs of tactile symbols published by the National Mapping Council of Australia, the Guidelines for Design of Tactile Graphics by American Printing House, the use of tactile variables by Vasconcellos, the Specifications of Topographic Elements Mapping by Bakosurtanal, and the application of visual variables of Bertin for cartographic mapping. The resultant symbol designs from the modification were applied to develop the tactile maps of Yogyakarta City on swell paper. Then, through interviews with map users (visually impaired people in the city), we evaluated these symbols from two aspects, comprehension of tactile variables and the types of the tactile maps required.

The Year's Work in American Humor Studies, 2017

The Year's Work in American Humor Studies, 2017

Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr., Letterpress, and Black American Print Culture

AbstractDespite his international reputation and storied career, the work of letterpress printer Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr. has never received sustained scholarly analysis. This article parses Kennedy’...

The African Burial Ground in New York City: Memory, Spirituality, and Space

The African Burial Ground in New York City: Memory, Spirituality, and Space

On Decimals, Catalogs, and Racial Imaginaries of Reading

Entering Howard University's Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, one still passes through the “catalog room,” an antechamber filled with rows of card drawers. Inaugurated in 1930 by the librarian Dorothy Porter, this catalog of the “Negro Collection” served for much of the twentieth century as one of the only portals to African American print culture. This article reconstructs the creation of that catalog in order to chart the relation between infrastructure and racial imaginaries of reading. Porter contravened the routine misfiling of blackness in prevailing information systems by rewriting Dewey decimals, creating new taxonomies for black print, and fielding research inquiries from across the African diaspora. She built public access to books “by and about the Negro” at a moment when most black readers were barred from libraries. In so doing, she fueled a broader sense of what a black archive—or what Porter called a “literary museum”—might afford.

Before The Brownies’ Book

Before The Brownies’ Book Brigitte Fielder (bio) Long before I was assigned any piece of African American literature in any classroom (in which Black writers would be few and far between for the first twenty years of my formal education), it was my own father who put Black literature into my hands.1 My experience is not unique, but representative of a long history of African American people’s attention to the study of Black people and Black writing, an interest that has always extended beyond the bounds of academic institutions and formal education. Black parents (and some nonblack parents of Black children) of every socioeconomic class have long sought out texts, images, and other media that would affirm and celebrate, rather than ignore or disparage, their children’s existence. As we celebrate the trajectory of African American children’s literature from The Brownies’ Book to #BlackLivesMatter, I want to contemplate the important place of Black children in the African American literary tradition more broadly. The importance of Black children extends beyond African American children’s literary studies, illustrating what we know in theory about the necessarily interdisciplinary work in this genre, but which still bears repeating: that children’s literary studies has much to gain from conversations with African American studies, and vice versa. For each of these fields, attending to Black children allows us to read more rigorously, as we consider racialized readers, perspectives, and methodologies for understanding the texts we study. The focus on Black children I suggest here is not meant to choose sides in the differences in disciplinary orientation between what Peter Hollindale has referred to as “book people” and “child people” (26). Rather, I mean to argue that even “book people” (in all fields of literary studies) need to pay closer attention to how questions of racialized readership affect our textual analyses. Moreover, to do this within African American children’s literary studies is not to explore new methodologies, but to better understand historical practices of authorship, editorship, and literary analysis. Attending to Black children allows us to [End Page 159] extend our readings toward readerships that are often ignored, allowing for more rigorous reading in and beyond children’s literary studies. Before The Brownies’ Book The Brownies’ Book represents not a beginning, but a continuation of Black print culture’s engagement with Black children. An important milestone in this longer tradition of African American literature that recognized and cared about Black children, The Brownies’ Book nevertheless employed familiar tactics to that of earlier Black cultural work. Technological developments in and Black access to the infrastructures of print and visual culture had long been turned toward various strategies of racial uplift. In this, they would often also be oriented toward Black futures, and thus toward the Black children who would occupy that future. As an early twentieth-century periodical, The Brownies’ Book was not the first Black periodical to have had (and acknowledged) a child readership. The children’s sections of early African American newspapers such as the Colored American and the Christian Recorder recognized the need to address Black children in the larger context of nineteenth-century African American print culture. Nazera Sadiq Wright shows how the selections published in the Children’s Department of the Colored American between 1840 and 1841 “demonstrate early evidence of a devoted black child readership in the early black press” (148). In this, only the second known African American newspaper to be published in the United States, child readers were already acknowledged and taken seriously. Wright’s and the other essays in Katherine Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane’s collection Who Writes for Black Children? show that, even in the earliest moments of the written record that would later be called “African American literature,” Black authors and editors considered Black children among their readers. When African American literature appeared in the Black press, newspapers included accounts of racial violence that children very well may have read as parts of the paper circulated among family members. Black child readers also encountered writing by white authors that was never intended for them but that was reframed by editors who placed this writing in the larger context of Black newspapers...