Nineteenth-century Newspapers Research Articles

Solid Mass And Plain Exterior: The Ecclesiastical Architecture Of William Wardell In Victoria

ABSTRACT William Wilkinson Wardell was one of the most important architects of colonial Australia. A Catholic convert who had already extensive experience in working for the Catholic Church in England, Wardell relocated to Melbourne in 1858 with a large number of architectural drawings for ecclesiastical structures proving he was a distinguished Gothic revivalist. In Victoria, he established an extraordinary partnership with the first Catholic Bishop of Melbourne, James Goold, and despite being busily engaged at the Public Works Department, for over ten years he also maintained a successful private practice working on more than a dozen church commissions in the Gothic Revival style. Drawing on archival research including surviving architectural drawings, diocesan correspondence, and nineteenth century newspapers, the article reveals Wardell’s ability in blending English, Irish and French medieval Gothic elements that appealed to the local congregations for his Australian church designs. Furthermore, it demonstrates that his substantial parish churches manifested the strength and permanence of Catholic religious tradition, ultimately helping Bishop James Goold to lay strong foundations in the establishment of the Catholic Church in Victoria.

What We Didn’t Know a Recipe Could Be: Political Commentary, Machine Learning Models, and the Fluidity of Form in Nineteenth-Century Newspaper Recipes

In this article, I use document embedding models and a training set of nineteenth-century American recipes to build a pipeline classifier for identifying recipes in the broader nineteenth-century newspaper press. The model reveals a much more expansive understanding of the recipe form, which primarily centers around measurement words and prescriptive language rather than a heavily reliance upon the culinary. This fluidity of form allows nineteenth-century writers to harness the recipe form as a tool for political commentary all while no appearing to disrupt the careful divides between the public and domestic spheres. These recipe-adjacent texts, which are both recipe and not, offer a broader picture of short-form political commentary in the nineteenth century which can include genres and forms once thought unable to gestured beyond the confines of the kitchen.

Dissection, media portrayals, and reaction: Black bodies and medical education in nineteenth-century newspapers.

Throughout the nineteenth century, medical schools in both the Northern and Southern regions of the United States required a regular supply of bodies for medical study and experimentation. Physicians and medical students targeted the bodies of African Americans, both freedmen and the enslaved, to meet this demand. Simultaneously, the nation's booming newspaper market became a stage on which debates about the cruelty of slavery and the social consequences of pursuing medical knowledge played out in articles about the dissection of Black bodies. Such stories increased fears about dissection and mistrust towards the medical profession among African American communities, which manifested in riots against physicians, vandalism against medical schools, and corrective responses from African American newspaper editors and journalists. Through an extensive examination of nineteenth-century U.S. newspapers, this article identifies themes evident in the coverage of dissection during this period. Southern newspapers crafted stories of dissection that served the dual purpose of entertaining White readers and humiliating African Americans. This public humiliation fostered what became a popular genre of derogatory and vile humor that reinforced negative and inaccurate racialized stereotypes as well as racist science. Ultimately, such newspaper coverage provoked reactions within Black communities and among antislavery advocates that showcase how people often excluded from practicing medicine themselves viewed issues like medical education. Newspaper rhetoric around these themes amplified tensions between religious and scientific perspectives, reflected differences and similarities between the northern and southern areas of the United States, and fortified racist views in both cultural and scientific contexts.

Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life

Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life

Una historia de la emancipación negra: Esclavitud y abolición en la Argentina

The abolition of Latin American slavery has long been recognized as a complex and contentious process stretching over several decades. Historians who study that process face the challenge of incorporating into their stories multiple actors: state officials, lawyers, journalists, activists, and, not least, enslaved people actively seeking freedom. That approach has generated a rich historiography, ranging from early work by Emília Viotti da Costa, Robert Conrad, Rebecca Scott, and others up through recent books by scholars such as Jeffrey Needell, Angela Alonso, and Yesenia Barragan. Based on deep and meticulous research and clearly and effectively written, Magdalena Candioti's Una historia de la emancipación negra is a worthy addition to that literature.Candioti begins her story with the profoundly destabilizing impacts of national independence on the institution of slavery. Revolutionary rhetoric that compared Spanish rule to enslavement and that promised to strike off the chains of colonial rule inevitably raised the question of whether that promise included the chains of slavery. Since many, and probably most, independence leaders were themselves slave owners, this question struck uncomfortably close to home. The contradiction between national freedom and continuing enslavement produced first the abolition of the African slave trade in 1812 and then the Free Womb Law (Ley de Libertad de Vientres) the following year. The law decreed that children of enslaved mothers would continue to serve their mothers' enslavers until reaching the age of majority (16 for females, 20 for males), at which point they would achieve full freedom.One ambiguity of the new law was whether children of enslaved mothers were born free (and were therefore ingenuos) or whether they were born enslaved and then immediately freed (and were therefore libertos). The Reglamento de Libertos, approved a month after the initial law, settled that question and laid out the regulations governing this new class of persons. In 1840, a court in Tucumán found that “los derechos y obligaciones que tiene el patrono [enslaver of the child's mother] respecto del liberto son los mismos que tiene un amo respecto de un esclavo; . . . ambos tienen el derecho de servirse y sacar del liberto y esclavo una justa utilidad” (p. 88; emphasis in original). Patronos were also free to sell their libertos (after the age of two) to other owners, and Candioti finds many instances of slave parents going to the police to request assistance in getting their children back, “con suerte dispar” (p. 86).Meanwhile, those Africans and Afro-Argentines who had been enslaved at the time of the Free Womb Law's passage remained enslaved. They continued to pursue freedom in the same ways that they had pursued it under colonial rule, through negotiating with their enslavers and accumulating the savings with which to buy their freedom. Candioti finds that the same system of coartación (enslaver and enslaved person agreeing in advance on a fixed purchase price) that existed in Cuba, Peru, and other countries operated in Argentina as well, and that, as in other countries, women were clearly favored over men in grants of manumission (pp. 111–12).Independence further undermined slavery by opening another route to freedom, through military service. Several thousand slaves were conscripted into rebel armies and then into provincial forces during the civil wars that followed independence. Slaves could also volunteer for service, and many did so. Conscription was no guarantee of freedom, however, since many draftees died or returned from service broken in health.With no new slaves being born or imported from Africa, by the 1840s slavery's days in Argentina were clearly numbered. Reviewing the debates in the constitutional assembly of 1852–53, Candioti finds that Article 15, which abolished slavery, was approved with zero discussion, no voices speaking either for or against the measure. The constitution made no provision for compensation to former enslavers, but several provinces did institute programs that compensated owners for their liberated property.Throughout her book, Candioti stresses the tensions and disconnects between legal principles and daily lived reality, and the constant process of negotiation among enslaved persons, libertos, enslavers, and state officials. She has dug deep into administrative, judicial, and church archives and into nineteenth-century newspapers, and has made excellent use of the outpouring of research in recent years on Black and subaltern history in Argentina. Finally, rather than confining herself to Buenos Aires, she surveys conditions and practices throughout Argentina while simultaneously calling for further research on those provinces. All these aspects make the book a signal achievement and the obligatory reference for how slavery came to an end in Argentina.

Bury Me in the Sunshine: The Yellow Fever Epidemics of Memphis by John Vidmar, O.P

Reviewed by: Bury Me in the Sunshine: The Yellow Fever Epidemics of Memphis by John Vidmar, O.P Robert Wilson Bury Me in the Sunshine: The Yellow Fever Epidemics of Memphis. By John Vidmar, O.P. (Providence, R.I.: Cluny Media, 2020. Pp. [xiv], 311. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 978-1-952826-38-2.) The nineteenth-century yellow fever epidemics that afflicted southern cities have been chronicled many times by historians, but John Vidmar takes a different approach to the subject in his book, Bury Me in the Sunshine: The Yellow Fever Epidemics of Memphis. He has uncovered an interesting new primary source: the diary of Father Joseph Augustine Kelly, a Roman Catholic priest in Memphis who survived three major epidemics in the region. The main goal of Vidmar’s project is to address Catholic contributions during the epidemic, but the author also provides a glimpse of the triumphs and trials of many Memphis residents. The book provides a brief history of Memphis and the yellow fever virus, and it does a nice job of describing life during the epidemics of 1873, 1878, and 1879. The contributions of the Catholic Church have often been left out of nineteenth-century stories of a growing nation, and Vidmar’s work hopes to remedy this narrative of exclusion. The author has written an entire chapter on the leadership of Father Kelly before the epidemic, and also shares the heroic accomplishments of the many priests and nuns who stayed to help relieve the suffering of Memphians who could not get out of the city. Vidmar argues that, in part, “the Catholic clergy had to stay because of their commitment to the Sacrament of Extreme Unction” (p. 228). The challenges both Protestant and Catholic churches faced during the epidemics are discussed, but the large number of Catholic priests and nuns who went to Memphis to help in any way possible and died as a result stands out. The strength of the book lies in the information Vidmar has gained from his analysis of Memphis newspapers. He does an excellent job of explaining the delicate balance journalists struck as they reported on the epidemic, while also attempting to prevent human panic and financial ruin to the city’s economy. The job of a nineteenth-century newspaper editor often included promoting and supporting a city, and Vidmar explains how the papers “regarded themselves as watchdogs for the public good” (p. 218). Through the numerous newspaper headlines and editorials found in his research, he provides a glimpse of the confusion citizens must have felt until it was too late to avoid the epidemic. Vidmar even brings this point back to the contemporary story of the COVID-19 pandemic. He argues that things have changed little in this regard, as “countries and cities want to protect their reputation, their tourist industry, their economy—at all costs, even of human life” (p. 203). It is often easy to look back at people who lived in the past and judge them through a contemporary lens, but the author finds parallels in human behavior both past and present. [End Page 173] Bury Me in the Sunshine is a popular history of yellow fever in Memphis and the contributions made by the Catholic Church during the epidemics of the 1870s. The book provides new access to a diary of a man who not only survived three major epidemics but also risked his life to help those in need. The book is not a comprehensive story of yellow fever in southern cities, but in addition to the experiences of Catholic clergy, it does examine interesting topics including quarantine, sanitation, the disease’s connection to cholera, the Howard Association, and nineteenth-century medical care. Robert Wilson University of Missouri–St. Louis Copyright © 2023 The Southern Historical Association

Zeit/Schrift 1813–1815 oder: Chronopoetik des "Unregelmäßigen." by David Brehm et al.

Reviewed by: Zeit/Schrift 1813–1815 oder: Chronopoetik des "Unregelmäßigen." by David Brehm et al. Jake Fraser David Brehm, Nicola Kaminski, Volker Mergenthaler, Nora Ramtke, and Sven Schöpf. Zeit/Schrift 1813–1815 oder: Chronopoetik des "Unregelmäßigen." Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2022. xviii + 377 pp., 47 illustrations. In the last several decades, Anglophone scholars of print periodicals have often cited Benedict Anderson's assertion that the temporality of the nineteenth-century newspaper is characterized by "the steady onward clocking of homogeneous, empty time." The volume under review here, the latest product of a multiyear research group on "Journal Literature" sponsored by the federally funded German Research Foundation (DFG), challenges each and every one of Anderson's descriptors. The gauntlet is cast in the work's subtitle, which invokes a "chronopoetics of the irregular." While the time signature or characteristic temporality of print serials has traditionally been understood with reference to their periodicity, that is, their appearance at regular intervals, Zeit/Schrift 1813–1815 takes as its object of study a number of journals published early in the nineteenth century which declared in advance that they would appear at irregular intervals. In refusing to abide by the norms of periodicity, these publications become, in the eyes of the "Journal Literature" research group, veritable "chronopoetic laboratories, in which experiments with time are carried out." These medial experiments generate forms of time that are not homogeneous but instead remarkably diverse. Through astonishingly careful readings, informed by contemporary approaches in media theory, material philology, and book history, the authors of this work present to the reader a fascinating archive in which the time of news does not clock steadily onward but instead lurches forward, forks, or doubles back on itself. In perhaps the book's most striking example of this "chronopoetics of the irregular," Nicola Kaminski has uncovered a newspaper that temporarily abandoned the present to print new issues concerning past days, such that numbers 7 and 11 of the same periodical are both dated October 21, 1813, albeit with different news! However, if these journals work to defamiliarize the conventions of print periodicals, it is not as a consequence of the avant-garde literary sensibilities of their publishers. Instead, the irregularity of the journals under consideration here is a sign of their times. As the title suggests, Zeit/Schrift 1813–1815 is concerned exclusively with issues of journals (Zeitschriften) published from 1813 to 1815, during the final stage of the Napoleonic wars known in German as the Wars of Liberation. Picking up in the spring of 1813, when the failure of Napoleon's Russian campaign encouraged the Prussian army to declare open revolt against the French, the volume traces the fates of numerous German journalistic ventures that sought to document this period of intense struggle against Napoleon's [End Page 181] forces. Indeed, the war itself could plausibly be said to be not just the object of much of the reporting studied here but also its subject; the ongoing conflict between the Grande Armée and the opposing troops of the Sixth and Seventh Coalitions shapes both the form and content of nearly every journal studied. Although the authors' pun in their introduction on the ambiguity of Zeit/Schrift (time-writing), in which it is either time which writes or which is written, the same logic might have been extended to Kriegs/Zeit/Schrift as war/time/writing. The fighting raging across the continent determined in manifold ways the conditions under which papers emerged, flourished, and folded. In several instances, these conditions were nakedly political: the need to mobilize the German-speaking masses, both logistically and ideologically, led to a relaxation of censorship laws for friendly papers, which were often commanded into being by military edict and folded once a given campaign had come to a conclusion. Similarly, many of the journalists studied here were concerned to unmask what they perceived to be the concerted propaganda operations of the French press, which exaggerated victories and concealed or misreported defeats. In other cases, the effects of the war on the press were less direct but no less influential. One of the recurring themes of Zeit/Schrift 1813–1815 is the relationship between space, time...

The Nineteenth-Century Hawaiian Newspaper Archive

The Nineteenth-Century Hawaiian Newspaper Archive

The Denglish Press? Reprinting and Code-Switching in Nineteenth-Century German-American Newspapers

The Denglish Press? Reprinting and Code-Switching in Nineteenth-Century German-American Newspapers

Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield's Mid-to-Late Career, Philanthropy, and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America

Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield's Mid-to-Late Career, Philanthropy, and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America

Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition by Hollis Robbins

Reviewed by: Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition by Hollis Robbins Peter Howarth Hollis Robbins. Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2020. 264 pp. $32.95. In 2018, Hollis Robbins went to hear poet Natasha Trethewey give a prestigious lecture. Trethewey spoke about her mixed-race family, the "racial determinism" of her Southern upbringing, and her fondness for the sonnet, a "received European form" (2). Preempting the inevitable criticism that such forms are endemically white, privileged and male, Trethewey quoted Audre Lorde's warning that the master's tools could be never used to dismantle the master's house, but then added that in her own writing life, "I have turned to such forms to contain the subject-matter necessary to challenge the master narrative." After the applause, Robbins asked a question: "How many sonnets have to be written before someone says she received the form from a Black poet?" (2). Trethewey was silent, and then acknowledged that for her, the sonnet had indeed come from Gwendolyn Brooks, not from Europe. Forms of Contention argues that this has been true for a good while. The sonnet is no longer a form borrowed from Europe or white America but is instead one Black writers now own themselves, given the superb sonnets and sequences written by Brooks, Margaret Walker, Robert Hayden, Terrance Hayes, Marilyn Nelson and Trethewey herself. It also maintains that a distinct Black sonnet-writing tradition has been there all along but has been lost by the nineteenth-century newspaper, the anthologies of the twentieth century, and the late modernism of the Black Arts movement. The result is that a sonnet like Claude McKay's "If We Must Die" is never considered "representative" of influential Black poetry the way Langston Hughes is, and the great number of Black sonnets in newspapers and anthologies are overlooked as inauthentic and genteel. "Too many ancestors have been forgotten," Robbins writes, "too much nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry was banished from the Black poetry canon in the 1960s because it was too 'traditional'" (2). Forms of Contention aims to correct this act of selective memory on both counts. It wants to recover the Black sonneteers from the eighteenth-century onward, and to show that their work forms an authentic tradition of influences, inheritances and rewritings, a multigenerational chain of sonnets. It succeeds admirably at the first task, but to find a "distinct genre" (118) of the African American sonnet is harder work, historically. This is not because Black poets have not brilliantly wrested the form into shapes that express distinctly African American situations and struggles. Robert Hayden's boundary-bursting sonnet "To Frederick Douglass" or Gwendolyn Brooks's "Gay Chaps" sequence about the US Navy officers penned below decks and their fiancées hemmed in at home are among the best sonnets ever written, without doubt. But the act of adapting the sonnet's pleading to new causes is also part of its tradition. Petrarch made the sonnet famous with his addresses of sexual desire and thwarted ambition, but those appeals were soon transformed into wrestlings with God, or demands for political honor to be restored, or from Milton onward, for both. Wordsworth and Southey took over Milton's enjambed lines and used them to thunder against slavery itself. In that sense, African American poets have been fully traditional from the start, Phillis Wheatley's 1768 appeal to King George: Great God, direct, and guard him from on high,And from his head let every evil fly!And may each clime with equal gladness seeA monarch's smile can set his subjects free! [End Page 242] Scholars debate the degree to which her blessing of the King for repealing the hugely unpopular Stamp Act (a tax paying for British troops in the colonies) contains a plea for other kinds of freedom. But given Wheatley's captive status, to write a sonnet to God and the sovereign at all gave the genre new vigor by giving it a new range of causes to plead. The trickier task that Forms of Contention has set itself, though, is to find a self-aware...

William Booth: The Man and His Mission, The Life and Legacy of William Booth, Part I: 1829–1878 and William Booth: The General and His Army, The Life and Legacy of William Booth, Part II: 1878–2015

William Booth (1829–1912), founder and first General of the Salvation Army, left an indelible mark on the religious and social life of the late nineteenth century. Born in 1829 in Sneinton, near Nottingham, Booth became a Wesleyan Methodist local preacher in his teens, an evangelist with the Wesleyan Reformers in his early twenties, and then a minister of the Methodist New Connexion for eight years before resigning in 1862 to pursue the calling of a freelance revivalist with his wife and fellow preacher Catherine, née Mumford (1829–90). From 1865 the Booths were based in the East End of London, seeking to reach the unchurched urban masses with a forceful gospel message. Their East London Revival Society evolved by stages into the Salvation Army, launched in 1878, with its flags, its uniforms, its brass bands, and its military terminology—and its deliberate eschewing of ecclesiastical language, structures, and sacraments. Over the next three decades Booth saw the Army become an international movement, with a strong presence in North America and Australasia, as well as Continental Europe. After years of strenuous opposition from local authorities and from the ‘Skeleton Army’ of urban ne'er-do-wells, Booth attained the status of a celebrity, visiting Buckingham Palace, conversing with the Emperor of Japan, leading prayers in the United States Senate, and receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford. His methods were discussed in the Contemporary Review in 1882 by Randall Davidson and Cardinal Henry Edward Manning, and his proposals for social reform, set out in his In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890), were debated by public intellectuals like H. M. Hyndman and T. H. Huxley. When he died, Booth lay in state for four days before a funeral service at Olympia attended by an estimated 35,000 people and a procession to Abney Park cemetery headed by thirty-six bands. The General's absolute control over the Salvation Army was demonstrated by his bequest of leadership to his eldest son Bramwell; seventeen years later the Army's High Council removed the ailing Bramwell from office, although members of the Booth family remained in senior leadership for many decades thereafter.Gordon Taylor served for twenty-three years with the Salvation Army's International Heritage Centre, and was senior researcher, archivist, and associate director there. His unrivalled knowledge of the Salvation Army's archives and his indefatigable trawling through nineteenth-century newspapers have produced a monumental study of William Booth's long life, falling only just short of 1,000 pages. As a narrative, the biography is hugely informative, highly readable, and enhanced by well-produced photographs of the Booth family and significant places in the story. As indicated by the title of the second volume, Taylor continues the narrative into the twenty-first century, describing anniversary commemorations and biographies by Harold Begbie, St John Ervine, Roy Hattersley, and David Bennett. Taylor even notes the naming of a peak near Alberta, Canada, Mount William Booth in 1966.In terms of descriptive detail and thoroughness, this biography offers all that the reader might desire and more. This reviewer was intrigued to find the Booths' work endorsed by such Wesleyan luminaries as George Osborn, J. H. Rigg, and T. P. Bunting, as well as Hugh Price Hughes and Henry Lunn. Financial support came from Henry Reed, a lay Wesleyan who made a fortune in Tasmania, and from William Shepherd Allen, member of Parliament and scourge of theological liberalism. There are questions still to be explored: for example, why revivalism polarized opinion in most of the Methodist denominations in the mid- nineteenth century, so that the Wesleyans, the New Connexion, and the Primitive Methodists closed their pulpits to freelance revivalists; why the Salvation Army provoked such ferocious opposition, not only in the East End of London, but also in provincial towns like Basingstoke and Northampton; and to what extent the Army succeeded in its aim of reaching the ‘submerged tenth’ of the urban population. Likewise, the Booths' debt to Methodism, whether to John Wesley or to later iterations of Wesleyan theology and practice, both British and North American, continues to invite investigation. These issues are not discussed in any detail here, but Gordon Taylor has provided a rich and comprehensively annotated biographical resource that will place scholars of Victorian religion in his debt for many years to come.

Lover's Leap Legends: From Sappho of Lesbos to Wah-Wah-Tee of Waco

Lover's Leap tales in the American Midwest exist in areas with the appropriate geographical features (tall cliffs or waterfalls) and local communities to populate the story's cast of characters. Leland Payton and Crystal Payton have been photographing the Ozark Mountain region for at least 50 years, documenting a range of Lover's Leaps, along with their other interests, within the local natural environment. The research for this book grew out of their larger interest in the connections between regional history and the environment as a way for them to contextualize patterns they had found within the collected stories and ephemera. The authors wanted their book to demonstrate not only the dissemination of the tales from their original Romantic European origins, but also how these stories could be used to discuss American geography.The book is divided into chapters, predominantly organized by geographical region. The narrative starts along the Mississippi. This region provides many locations ideal for the emergence of a Lover's Leap tale, and the regional commentaries provided by Mark Twain offer a balance of detail and cynicism that Payton and Payton embrace. The authors frequently return to stories collected along the Mississippi while contrasting them with those associated with the American South, Midwest, West, and New England—focusing especially on places, such as Niagara Falls, where the local tourism provides vibrant elaborations on the theme. While most of the characters within the Lover's Leap stories are Native American, the authors are quick to clarify that they are not trying to make a statement about Native American cultures.Payton and Payton's research materials came from three sources: the photographs they took themselves of the geographic phenomena; the ephemera, photographs, and souvenirs gathered over many years of exploring flea markets and auctions; and the written texts—published and archival—that retell and disseminate local stories. The authors acknowledge that the majority of their sources (both narrative and pictorial) were produced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by white men, and that the tales themselves match stories from Western Europe more so than any Native American source. However, their choice to reproduce the original authors’ texts without conducting additional ethnographic research or independent analysis remains problematic. The racial and gender-based stereotyped language that was prevalent when these texts were written needs to be contextualized. Payton and Payton do not choose to situate the terminology they perpetuate within its historical context, nor do they provide acknowledgment that the language used has had derogatory meanings throughout history. The book would also benefit greatly from the application of some theories of story transmission developed by folklorists and from a stronger acknowledgment of how the original texts essentialize the cultures described.The final chapter, “An Edgy Mythos,” connects some of the recurring tropes and motifs found in the variants to the relevant geographical features. Payton and Payton finally apply their own analysis to support their argument alluded to earlier, that the Lover's Leap stories convey cultural knowledge about the interaction between white settlers and their environment, framed as a description of a spurious local Native American culture. The result is still the oversimplification of Indigenous people and their motives, but with additional context to allow the reader to develop their own conclusions. This final chapter demonstrates the level of analysis the authors could have achieved with more investigation of individual themes rather than the desire to reproduce the vast volume of available sources.The strength of this book arises from the photographs (original and reproduced), ephemera, and other visuals provided on nearly every page. Payton and Payton are experienced photographers and material-culture collectors, and the care they put into the curation of their collection is evident. However, the sheer volume of the visuals sometimes diminishes the argument that the images are intended to support because the captions do not always parallel the written text. The book would have benefitted from a more thorough analysis of this visual record, perhaps with more detailed connections, support, and context—and fewer repetitive textual examples.The volume itself is beautifully formatted, and the collection of photographs and ephemera deserves further study. Payton and Payton intentionally and explicitly avoid cultural theory in order to keep their text accessible to those readers without an academic background. However, their open disdain for “those who ‘theory’ for a living” (p. 109) results in apathy toward some of the scholarly work—both great and humble—that could have helped shape this extensive but somewhat disconnected assortment of ephemera and nineteenth-century newspaper articles into a solid exploration of local history and folklore.

Making News:

Produced between 1861 and 1866, the Penfield Extra resembles many nineteenth-century newspapers, with a notable exception. Nellie Williams, the paper’s founder and editor, began publishing her hometown weekly newspaper at the age of twelve. While her paper incorporates conventional modes of nineteenth-century journalism, it also disrupts this association through its indicators of a child’s gender, age, and self-expression. The resulting juxtapositions and fissures—between the editor embracing mainstream journalism and foregrounding her creative agency as a child—present a compelling window on child authorship during a tumultuous time in American history. This tension, moreover, exemplifies the ways by which children’s acts of authorship can dramatically unsettle cultural attitudes regarding children’s innocence and separateness from adult culture. The fact that Williams wrote and published amidst the culture-exploding Civil War was not coincidental. Drawing on established discourses and journalistic conventions while emphasising her free play as child author and newsmaker, Nellie’s Extra mimics cultural conventions and literary discourses requiring children’s obedience and innocence while also modeling the importance of children’s independent political engagement and their capacity to talk back to power.

Echoes of Protest: Barbauld’s Anti-War Afterlife

ABSTRACT This essay examines Anna Barbauld’s public protest through her antiwar afterlife and her contemporaneous reception, including accounts of her support for the French Revolution in the Belfast News-Letter. The essay identifies heretofore unknown reprintings of Barbauld’s antiwar rhetoric from Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation in a range of sources, from nineteenth-century British newspapers to nineteenth-century American schoolbooks to an early twentieth-century journal in Newfoundland to a Vermont newspaper in 1918, among others. Included in this “afterlife” is a work heretofore not addressed in scholarship. The piece is called “The Contrast: Or Peace and War,” published in The Athenaeum (1807). Barbauld’s “The Contrast,” the first prose poem in English, betrays an increasing pessimism that would find its profoundest expression in Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812). The essay contends that the Biblical cadences and pedagogical style of Barbauld’s landmark Hymns in Prose for Children (1781) represent a formal underpinning for the unsentimental expressions of “The Contrast.” Scholars must pursue with renewed vigor efforts to “uncover” or “unmask” evidence of women’s protest writing that became anonymously excerpted for a public readership. Despite the odds, Barbauld’s protests nevertheless persisted.

W.T. Stead: Nonconformist and Newspaper Prophet by Stewart J. Brown

Reviewed by: W.T. Stead: Nonconformist and Newspaper Prophet by Stewart J. Brown Timothy Grieve-Carlson William Thomas Stead, Victorian Britain, spiritualism, puritanism, media, paranormal, mediumship, psychical research stewart j. brown. W.T. Stead: Nonconformist and Newspaper Prophet. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. 257. A few months ago, after stumbling upon a remarkably early description of telepathy in a primary document, I wrote to a senior scholar in the area who is much more knowledgeable in the field than I am. "What is the best history of psychic phenomena?" I wrote greedily. "Not a history of the Society for Psychical Research, or Mesmerism, or the Rhine lab, but a holistic cultural history of psychic phenomena?" His response suggests the critical need for more studies like Stewart J. Brown's 2019 book W. T. Stead: Nonconformist and Newspaper Prophet. "I sincerely doubt that we have such a history," he replied. Brown's book is, of course, not the history I was asking for. We remain a long way from that history, and Brown's biography of William Thomas Stead, "newspaper editor, author, social reformer, women's rights advocate, peace campaigner, and spiritualist" (vii), shows how such a history will be intimately entangled in the histories of media, religion, literature, and politics. As an entry in Oxford University Press's Spiritual Lives series of religious [End Page 117] biographies, Brown's study of the British newspaper editor and journalist is a succinct and readable account of a man who is not always remembered as a religious figure. Brown's study capably demonstrates Stead's dual role: as a journalist with a Puritan moralizing voice and as a popularizer of psychical phenomena for a Victorian readership beyond the pages of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. Brown's biography cuts across many of the most significant cultural transformations of the Victorian period. As the son of devout Congregationalists, Stead's early life was shaped by Puritan ideals within the broader community of British Nonconformists. With his first major journalistic appointment as the editor of the Nonconformist Northern Echo in 1870, Stead found the bully pulpit that would shape his religious philosophy and his sense of journalism as a moral force in a secularizing world. As Brown writes, Stead's "late nineteenth-century newspaper took on certain roles previously filled by the church, proclaiming a high social ethics, exposing and denouncing sin . . . and forming participatory networks of readers for moral action" (ix). Stead himself put it in even grander terms—for him, the role of editor "combine[s] the function of Hebrew prophet and Roman tribune with that of Greek teacher" (41). The first part of Brown's biography is devoted to Stead's journalism, and, in particular, to the kind of moralizing and sensational press campaigns that he pioneered and for which he is remembered today. Readers with an interest in media studies will find a great deal of useful material throughout this biography. For a person who conceptualized his journalistic role in terms of the ancient functions quoted above, Stead's journalism was strikingly modern in practice. In Stead's editorializing, the newspaper was a place to establish social networks of social justice, drawing attention to the destitute people and places that went ignored by both church and state. The parallels between Stead's editorial voice and the contemporary role of the journalist and of new media social justice movements is on vivid display in Brown's study. For Stead, the newspaper was above all a civic instrument of tremendous power and responsibility, which he envisioned overtaking the functions of church and state in the future. The hubristic appraisals of the political value of new media will also remind readers of the contemporary moment. Indeed, Brown's Newspaper Prophet shows how little has actually changed politically over the past century. For example, Stead worried on the page that working people of the world are under "a constant preoccupation with the question, 'Shall I get enough to eat to keep my body and soul together.' "(125). For all the social power of the newspaper, the social landscape that Stead looked out over has largely resisted popular efforts at reform. Transformation...

The Portrait's Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States by Sarah Blackwood

Reviewed by: The Portrait's Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States by Sarah Blackwood E. Thomas Finan Sarah Blackwood. The Portrait's Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States. U of North Carolina P, 2019. xi + 201 pp. $27.95 (Paperback). Sarah Blackwood'sThe Portrait's Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States is a study of tensions—between invention and discovery, between inner and outer, and between mind and body. Blackwood surveys how various modes of portraiture (broadly understood) both responded to and influenced evolving notions of selfhood in the United States during the nineteenth century. This cross-disciplinary volume attends to a number of types of portraits: the literary portrait, the printed icon, the photograph, the painted picture, and the X-ray. As Blackwood notes, the relationship between photography and the self has preoccupied many critics, including Walter Benjamin in the twentieth century and the photographer and scholar Shawn Michelle Smith today. Smith's work also explores the role of narratives of gender and race for portraiture, a major theme of Blackwood's own study. Blackwood's expansive approach to portraiture—considering it as a mode across genres—illuminates the stakes of portraiture in the nineteenth century. Incorporating multiple genres strengthens her argument about the intellectual-historical stakes of portraiture. One of the conceptual motifs of The Portrait's Subject is the historical contingency of the "psychological." Rather than taking "psychology" as a timeless given, Blackwood instead offers it as an invented "form of inner life" drawing from trends in literature, art, philosophy, and science in the nineteenth century (10). In examining evolving accounts of inner life, Blackwood discusses a variety of writers and artists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Thomas Eakins, and Henry James. For a book about the anatomy of inner life, it is perhaps appropriate that the chapters themselves should trace an anatomy of a person, with each chapter organized around a different part (face, head, limbs, mind/brain, and bones, respectively). In a brief introduction, Blackwood outlines the importance of historical and aesthetic analysis. The historical contingency of the inner life runs throughout this book, but the aesthetic also plays a role; the subjects of this book "believed that selves, like [End Page E-1] E-2 portraits, are aesthetic objects" (15). Examining the historical inflections of certain concepts is a popular scholarly method in contemporary literary studies, as seen in Christopher Castiglia's historical interrogation of interiority in Interior States: Institutional Consciousness and the Inner Life of Democracy in the Antebellum United States. Blackwood complements this mode of analysis by continually returning to aesthetic texture. Historical narrative and attention to form reinforce each other. The first chapter uses Hawthorne as a "case study" for revealing the evolving notions of portraiture and selfhood in the 1840s and 1850s. Blackwood observes that these years saw an explosion in portrait technologies, to which Hawthorne's work responded. Examining actual portraits of Hawthorne as well as his reflections on portraits in his works, Blackwood offers Hawthorne as a key pioneer for imagining literary portraiture as a mode of exploring the "inner life" of a subject. Hawthorne's portrayals of these portraits are conflicted, befitting fraught narratives of portraiture during this time period: "these tales that indulge dramas about finding a true, inner self are always … also engaged in making the sorts of selves they purport to find" (42). The second chapter further complicates the tensions of portraiture by turning to the intersection of race and portraiture. African American writers faced a powerful duality for portraiture, which could be a vehicle for situating black Americans within an oppressive racial hierarchy but could also be a vehicle for expressing self-ownership and inner depths. Thus portraiture could both reinforce derogatory racial stereotypes and afford a means of rebuking reductionist racial narratives. To explore these complexities, Blackwood examines nineteenth-century newspapers, Frederick Douglass's reflections on portraiture, and works by Harriet Jacobs, Hannah Crafts, and Frank J. Webb. Blackwood notes the pervasiveness of portraiture in nineteenth-century texts by African Americans, and she reveals how portraiture in these texts can serve multiple (and sometimes competing) purposes. For...

‘The hardness of the times and the dearness of all the necessaries of life’: class and consumption in bilingual nineteenth-century newspapers

ABSTRACT Although the nineteenth-century black press has functioned as a useful resource in understanding the political organizations and associations created by southern Africa’s educated elite, rarely is it used to think about this elite’s consumption patterns. Consumption is often assumed to be a frivolous activity unworthy of consideration in the historiography of the kholwa (the converted Africans). Yet, the language and tone of the bilingual newspapers, created and edited by this kholwa elite, suggest a different relationship between social status and the Christian lifestyles introduced by religious conversion. Although these newspaper men continued to exemplify the sobriety, modesty and industriousness preached to them, they also escaped missionary edicts through luxurious sartorial and consumption choices. Christianity and consumption jostled for space on newspaper pages, constituting what may be termed a grammar of consumption and advertising that involved the translation and transplantation of foreign objects into an indigenous idiom. The interpellation of these newspaper readers through the language of consumption challenges assumptions about the supposedly precarious position of the African bourgeoisie. This article considers the kholwa as consumers – both of secular and religious items – and argues for a more nuanced reading of advertisements in the bilingual newspapers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Surfacing black and brown bodies in the digital archive: domestic workers in late nineteenth-century Australia

This paper examines the potential for the digital turn, particularly the extensive and ongoing digitisation of nineteenth-century newspapers, to enable scholars to rethink the experiences of individuals previously marginalised and hard to find in historical sources. The rapid digital turn in historical research has prompted scholars to argue for conversations in which to consider the implications of digital technologies in historical research practices. Yet in historical geography, though scholars work with and make digital data in a multitude of ways, there has been little formal reflection on the concerns, challenges or methodological opportunities presented by the formation of digital archives. To do so this paper takes as its focus ‘coloured’ workers employed in forms of domestic service at the end of the nineteenth century in Australia. Firstly, by resurfacing ‘coloured’ workers through their presence in newspaper advertisements the paper illustrates that digital methodologies enable the identification of individuals missed through previous forms of data analysis. Secondly, the paper seeks to illustrate how their reappearance can frame a rethinking of domestic labour and colonial identities, gender roles and the ethnic complexities of ‘coloured’ labour in the British Empire. The paper argues that though newspaper advertisements for employment are brief and impersonal, and their meanings, as mediated through form and time, are at times hard to decipher, gathering them together into a new archive supports a more complex reading of diversity across national, regional, local and imperial geographies.

From Weekly to Daily: Computational Analysis of Periodical Time Cycles

ABSTRACT In this article we examine the differences between weekly and daily time cycles in the nineteenth-century Hebrew newspaper HaTzfira. This newspaper changed its publication format in 1886 from weekly to daily. We use this case study to identify the meanings and implications of time cycles in the discourse constructed in each format, and most specifically the different constructions of the “present” in each. We do this by using the computational tool of topic modeling. Through analysis of the topics in the three years prior to the change (1883–1885) and the three years after the change (1886–1888), we show the different patterns of topic changes within the journal.