Overland Monthly Research Articles

The Fateful Lightning: Civil War Stories and the Magazine Marketplace, 1861–1876 by Kathleen Diffley

Reviewed by: The Fateful Lightning: Civil War Stories and the Magazine Marketplace, 1861–1876 by Kathleen Diffley Catherine V. Bateson (bio) The Fateful Lightning: Civil War Stories and the Magazine Marketplace, 1861–1876. By Kathleen Diffley. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2021. Pp. 268. Paper, $36.95.) Second-book syndrome is a mountain to overcome and doubly hard when the second book in question comes in the middle of a proposed trilogy assessing American Civil War and Reconstruction magazine fiction. That is the task Kathleen Diffley sets with The Fateful Lightning, a follow-up to Where My Heart Is Turning Ever: Civil War Stories and Constitutional Reform, 1861–1876 (1992). Previously, Diffley focused on [End Page 263] how northeastern periodicals expanded expressions about citizenship and liberty. The Fateful Lightning covers the same comparable period, following on from its predecessor while standing alone (you can read this book without reading the first). By marrying national context with divergent country-wide perspectives, the fictional Civil War stories examined in The Fateful Lightning “helped engineer a master narrative that was nonetheless open to regional challenges” (3–4). While maintaining an urban focus, Diffley notes how distinctive cultures “magazine by magazine” emerged around the country; the “four periodicals and the cities in which they arose” covered in this book offer “varying gauges of continued political unrest, emerging social opportunity, and dickering regional agendas as Reconstruction first unfolded” (6). “A latticework of intersecting print culture concerns materializes,” Diffley argues, that highlights how postwar memory making and emancipation reflections were prominent in areas beyond Washington, D.C., and the South (19). The Fateful Lightning’s four central chapters tour the print culture of midcentury periodicals, from Baltimore’s Southern Magazine (1886–75) and Charlotte’s The Land We Love (1866–69) to Chicago’s Lakeside Monthly and San Francisco’s Overland Monthly. Each of the four main chapters is divided into three sections. The first is an opening contextual discussion that lays the groundwork for the periodical being examined, its editorial focus, city (and region) of publication, and central wartime and Reconstruction story themes. This section includes snippets of article outlines and comparisons to the other magazines. The second section is a full short story complete with contemporary two-column-style periodical presentation. The brief third section critically analyses the short story’s meaning. The railroad runs like a literal and imagined metaphor across the whole book. “In magazine after magazine, story after story . . . the fictional platforms from which local heroes depart . . . were almost always cast as hurried and heterogeneous, crammed . . . with a hodgepodge of strangers” (103), who would meet in carriages, waiting rooms, and depots and share their stories of the civil conflict with messages for the Reconstruction present. The four main terminus/starting points reveal examples of how the lines between public and private blurred in mid-nineteenth-century cultural outputs. National changes and encroaching modernity come to the fore: “the medium was the message, and, thanks to federally funded postal routes [and ever-growing railways], the message spread” beyond the parlor into the zeitgeist (65). Yet the message was not necessarily about progress. Diffley develops a theme in chapter 4 that regards photography and the advent of thinking [End Page 264] stereoscopically in terms of wartime images and memory. This interesting framing works well for the entire study. By taking an enhanced look into the wider realm of Civil War–and Reconstruction-era historical scholarship, Diffley delves into how the nation’s competing immediate wartime memories evolved before Reconstruction ended. Take The Land We Love covered in chapter 2; its very name is revealing. The “land” stresses the moonshine and magnolia image of the Old South; unsurprisingly, Diffley notes that “in the immediate aftermath of defeat, [the periodical] would also become the magazine forum of choice for chronicling Confederate military action and kindling a fleeting nation’s Lost Cause” (63). This study shows that “during the 1860s and 1870s, the fraught terrain of postmemory coalesced almost immediately” to sanitize a vanished southern (and national) image before the Lost Cause became embedded (80). Drawing on David Blight’s Civil War memory and Marianne Hirsch’s postmemory scholarship, Diffley makes this point well. Indeed, she...

The Fateful Lightning: Civil War Stories and the Magazine Marketplace, 1861–1876 by Kathleen Diffley

Reviewed by: The Fateful Lightning: Civil War Stories and the Magazine Marketplace, 1861–1876 by Kathleen Diffley Cynthia Patterson The Fateful Lightning: Civil War Stories and the Magazine Marketplace, 1861–1876. By Kathleen Diffley. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2021. Pp. xviii, 249. Paper, $36.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-6065-2.) In The Fateful Lightning: Civil War Stories and the Magazine Marketplace, 1861–1876, the second installment of a planned three-volume series on Civil War magazine fiction, Kathleen Diffley extends her analysis both geographically and thematically to lesser-known periodicals published in cities radiating outward from the established East Coast publishing centers of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. In doing so, she highlights sectional differences in how people understood the war and its aftermath by examining Baltimore’s Southern Magazine, Charlotte’s The Land We Love, Chicago’s Lakeside Monthly, and San Francisco’s Overland Monthly. The book includes an introduction, four identically organized chapters— each treating one of the aforementioned magazines—forty-three illustrations, and a coda. Each chapter is broken down into three discrete sections: the first [End Page 369] provides the publication history of the periodical and historical background contextualizing the geographical and political idiosyncrasies of the respective cities of publication; the second reproduces a Civil War–themed short story published in that periodical; the third section, in Diffley’s words, takes “a closer look at the traces of one magazine’s agenda, its dodges, and its positioning in a larger literary marketplace” (p. 19). As the author asserts, “The Fateful Lightning examines the narrative innovations and colloquial vitality that early Civil War stories also provoked in American letters” (p. 1). The introduction, subtitled “Dépôt Culture,” references the Old French word depost and alludes to changes in U.S. mail delivery that relied on America’s expanding rail system and the “urban terminals and country stations” where eager citizens claimed arriving periodicals (p. 15). The opening sentence of this introduction ties the rail motif to the book’s title, The Fateful Lightning, by noting that the author of what would become known as the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Julia Ward Howe, arrived in Washington, D.C., in November 1861 by train to attend a meeting of the U.S. Sanitary Commission with her husband. Subsequent chapters imagine the rail system radiating outward from the nation’s capital to four cities: Baltimore, Charlotte, Chicago, and San Francisco. Each chapter links the magazine under examination with one of four “key developments” that impacted magazine production, distribution, and consumption (p. 2). Chapter 1, “Potshots,” highlights how changes to copyright laws impacted the work of writers, editors, and publishers of periodicals such as Baltimore’s Southern Magazine. In chapter 2, “Old Times There,” Diffley examines the impact of the reorganization of the nation’s postal system on magazines such as Charlotte’s The Land We Love. In the third chapter, “Railroaded,” the author traces the impact of “railroad sprawl” on western regions of the war, as depicted in Chicago’s Lakeside Monthly (p. 102). Chapter 4, “Emancipation and Grizzly Reckoning,” treats the impact of photography on depictions of battle scenes, and the “doubling” effect produced by the new “stereoscope” on the magazine literature of San Francisco’s Overland Monthly (p. 159). The coda, titled “Depot, Culture, 1876,” reengages and weaves together earlier threads to examine how the “glory” imagined in Howe’s earlier “Battle Hymn” and imaged in coverage of the 1876 Centennial Exhibition held in Philadelphia belied a fading of American aspirations in the wake of Reconstruction. While the volume is copiously illustrated, readers might wish for the “magnifying glass” that Civil War–era gallery visitors used while examining battlefield photography on display (p. 153). The reproduction of many of the illustrations challenges an otherwise engaged reader to decipher the images, even when provided with the author’s detailed descriptions. And though it is “beautifully written” as a back-cover note avers, Diffley’s book will best be enjoyed by advanced graduate students and scholars in the field, unless one particularly enjoys parsing out difficult sentences with undergraduate students. That said, Diffley’s work continues to make vital contributions to our understanding of Civil War...

Review: Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer, by Iris Jamahl Dunkle

Review: <i>Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer</i>, by Iris Jamahl Dunkle

“Young America” and the Anti-Emersonian Western: John Williams’s Butcher’s Crossing

“Young America” and the Anti-Emersonian WesternJohn Williams’s Butcher’s Crossing Anthony Hutchison (bio) In October 1870 Bret Harte published a review of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s latest essay collection Society and Solitude in Overland Monthly, the lively new San Francisco-based literary magazine already being lauded in the East for its “Far Western flavor” and “Pacific freshness” (qtd. in Tarnoff 159). Overall, Harte was content to defer to the celebrated “Sage of Concord,” effectively using the occasion to endorse the idea of Emerson as an authentically national figure wholly worthy of the cultural esteem bestowed upon him by his fellow American citizens. “There remains to Mr. Emerson, we think,” the piece concludes, “the praise of doing more than any other American thinker to voice the best philosophic conclusions of American life and experience” (387). Harte’s forerunning judgment nonetheless sounded a few more equivocal notes. Notably, given his own relatively recent success producing fiction depicting the pioneer mining communities of California, Harte took issue with Emerson’s portrayal of the American West.1 This was presented in the “Civilization” chapter of Society and Solitude where the region is interpreted as a benign domain in which powerful forces of culture and intellect fuse spectacularly with equally formidable currents associated with nature and will. It is in the crucible of this dynamic, Emerson proposes, in typically unrestrained fashion, that a new and substantive national character will be forged: ’Tis wonderful how soon a piano gets into a log-hut on the frontier. You would think they found it under a pine-stump. With it comes a Latin grammar, and one of those tow-head boys has [End Page 237] written a hymn on Sunday. Now let colleges, now let senates take heed! for here is one, who, opening these fine tastes on the basis of the pioneer’s iron constitution, will gather all their laurels in his strong hands. (10) As admiring as he was of Emerson, such Eastern exuberance proved too much for the adopted Westerner Harte.2 This was not the West of hard, empirical observation, he lamented, but a fantasy abstracted from the “moral consciousness” of the philosopher. Any extended experience with the region, Harte wrote, would reveal that “the piano appears first in the saloon and gambling-house . . . [and] . . . that the elegancies and refinements of civilization are brought into barbarism with the first civilized idlers, who are generally vicious” (386). The young frontiersman Emerson invests with such potential is far more likely to “be found holding out against pianos and Latin grammars until he is obliged to emigrate” (386). Harte concludes with the claim that there is something deeply resistant to such idealist modes of projection within the culture of the West. The nature-civilization dialectic posited by the Transcendentalist is almost comically misconceived in its detachment from the lived experience of the region: Romance like this would undoubtedly provoke the applause of lyceum-halls in the wild fastnesses of Roxbury (Mass.), or on the savage frontiers of Brooklyn (N.Y.), but a philosopher ought to know that, usually, only civilization begets civilization, and that the pioneer is apt to be always the pioneer. (386) As Kris Fresonke has detailed, the bearing of Emerson’s projections goes beyond conventional scholarly understandings of American Transcendentalism that geographically limit its conception of Nature to long settled, tranquil New England locales. Emerson should be read, rather, more attentively as a seer-poet of the Louisiana Purchase and US–Mexican War annexations. His thought is inspired by exploration narratives as well as both infused and critically engaged with the secular-political expression given to the idea of “design” in Nature transmitted via “manifest destiny” ideology. Fresonke notes that the nineteenth-century West, not least in the incipient federal state’s and cultural producers’ [End Page 238] relentless efforts to map, navigate, and reconfigure its contours, presented an “epistemological problem” to which thinkers such as Emerson sought to provide a metaphysical solution. Once “idealized into a matter of spirit,” however, they found that “nature itself, especially in the American West, didn’t so easily renounce its materiality” (126). Harte’s barbed rebuttal to Emerson’s post-Puritan, providential image of...

The Evolving Artistic Representation of Jack London

The Evolving Artistic Representation of Jack London Steven Bembridge (bio) November 2016 saw the centenary of Jack London's death, and the media on both sides of the Atlantic recognised the event. The Guardian (United Kingdom) provided a balanced account of London's life and described him as an author who "walked the walk and talked the talk" (Jordison), and SFGate—associated with the San Francisco Chronicle—referred to London as "one of the great-grandfathers of 20th century Californian literature" (Raskin). Frankfurter Allgemeine entitled its article about London with the far more contentious "Sozialismus im Mund und Rassismus im Kopf" (Socialism in the Mouth, Racism in the Head), and it also highlighted the "amoral cruelty of nature and the equally moral-free survival of the fittest" as "the great themes of Jack London" (Von Koppenfels). Regardless of the interpretations that these articles brought to London's life, they each saw fit to mark the death of the Californian naturalist—they each agreed that London and his work have an enduring cultural importance. Earle Labor has recently addressed the legacy of Jack London: "at worst [London] has been portrayed as a rowdy hack who produced some popular adventures" and who "drugged and drank himself into oblivion at the age of forty" (ix). He also suggests that the most popular image of London to emerge has been one of "Jack London, Tough Guy" (x). Indeed, the image of London the tough guy has almost become synonymous with London's own explorations of the Nietzschean Übermensch, or superman, in works such as The Sea-Wolf (1904) and The Iron Heel (1908). Throughout the last century, then, artists who have responded to the legacy of London in their work have tended to create an image of London the superman, which has also encompassed a number of other qualities that include physical allure, health, and moral fortitude—qualities that London and his [End Page 69] fiction perpetuated in his own lifetime (Stasz, "Family" 40; Auerbach 41). Cultural attitudes change, though, and the image of Jack London as superman is not as secure as it once was. The centenary of London's death may have passed, but the artistic representation of London thrives and evolves in a society that is now more willing to reassess who London was and—informed by scholarly accounts of London's life—to reimagine the image of London the superman as a fallible everyman for a modern public. But the change is not absolute, nor should we expect it to be. London's brand has always been an evolving cultural legacy that has inspired—and continues to inspire—moviemakers, sculptors, cartoonists, authors, and digital entrepreneurs. I. The Rise of the Superman By the time he met Ninetta Eames in 1901 to pose for a series of photographs, London had already begun his writing career with a string of magazine articles and a collection of short stories entitled The Son of the Wolf (1900). Eames—editor of the Overland Monthly and aunt of Charmian Kitteridge (who would become Charmian London in 1905)—had decided that it was time to introduce London to the readers of the magazine, which, by this time, had published eight of his Klondike stories (Eames). What better way to do this, then, than to represent London dressed for a Yukon winter? Charmian even cites Eames's plans to meet with London in her biography, The Book of Jack London (1921)—"I'm to meet him at the museum in the Ferry Building, to pose him for a picture in Alaskan furs, to illustrate my article" (3).1 However, the period also marked the moment that London began to invest seriously in his own image as the masculine Klondike adventurer. He took the then unusual approach of viewing himself as a trademark and an agent in the expression of his own commercialisation and growing brand—London himself orchestrated his photographs and interview with Eames (Auerbach 25, 39). Indeed, Cecelia Tichi argues that "his signature style was crafted" for a readership "eager for every title that bannered the Jack London brand" (35), and Joseph McAleer further suggests that London "became a marketable 'brand'" as "readers looked forward to 'the...

Far More Than Dutiful Daughter: Milicent Shinn's Child Study and Education Advocacy After 1898

Previous scholarship on the life of psychologist Milicent Shinn (E. Scarborough & L. Furumoto, 1987) emphasized Shinn's failure to pursue an academic career in psychology following her PhD in 1898. Scarborough and Furumoto used Shinn as an example of “the family claim”—the career limitations women faced in terms of their family obligations. This narrative, however, obscured Shinn's continued engagement with child study before and after her years in graduate school, as a recent article documenting Shinn's leadership of network of home-based observers of infant development makes clear (C. von Oertzen, 2013). This article challenges the traditional retelling of Shinn's story still further, by exploring how Shinn used her professional contacts from her previous role as editor of the Overland Monthly to promote a wide range of causes related to child study and education. Following G. Lerner (1979), the author attends to Shinn's own values, such as her love of California, education, and her family. These values suggest a much more positive evaluation of Shinn's life work and the domestic environment in which she conducted her research and advocacy work.

The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature

The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature

&lt;i&gt;Reading for Liberalism: The Overland Monthly and the Writing of the Modern American West&lt;/i&gt;, by Stephen J. Mexal (pp 477-479)

&lt;i&gt;Reading for Liberalism: The Overland Monthly and the Writing of the Modern American West&lt;/i&gt;, by Stephen J. Mexal (pp 477-479)

Reading for Liberalism: The Overland Monthly and the Writing of the Modern American West by Stephen J. Mexal (review)

Reading for Liberalism: The Overland Monthly and the Writing of the Modern American West by Stephen J. Mexal (review)

Book Review: Mexal, Reading for Liberalism: The Overland Monthly and the Writing of the Modern American West, by David Hickman

Book Review: Mexal, Reading for Liberalism: The Overland Monthly and the Writing of the Modern American West, by David Hickman

Reading for Liberalism: The “Overland Monthly” and the Writing of the Modern American West

Reading for Liberalism: The “Overland Monthly” and the Writing of the Modern American West

Reading for Liberalism: The Overland Monthly and the Writing of the Modern American West by Stephen J. Mexal (review)

Reading for Liberalism: The Overland Monthly and the Writing of the Modern American West by Stephen J. Mexal (review)

Reading for Liberalism: The Overland Monthly and the Writing of the Modern American West by Stephen J. Mexal (review)

Reading for Liberalism: The Overland Monthly and the Writing of the Modern American West by Stephen J. Mexal (review)

Reading for liberalism: the Overland monthly and the writing of the modern American West

Reading for liberalism: the Overland monthly and the writing of the modern American West

Teasing Out Clues, Not Kooks

Teasing Out Clues, Not Kooks

The Chinese in Bret Harte's Overland : A Context for Truthful James

The Chinese in Bret Harte's Overland:A Context for Truthful James Tara Penry Which I wish to remark— And my language is plain— That for ways that are dark And for tricks that are vain,The heathen Chinee is peculiar. Which the same I would rise to explain.1 When these lines by Bret Harte appeared in the San Francisco Overland Monthly in September 1870 under the title "Plain Language from Truthful James," they were not the first statement of the magazine on the Chinese in California. For the first two years of its existence, the Overland displayed at least as much interest in Chinese culture as in any other single subject, if we can judge from the quantity of articles devoted to the topic. In the magazine's first twenty-four numbers, under the editorial guidance of Harte himself, fifteen substantial articles were published on the language, folkways, and industries of the Chinese or on political questions concerning their presence in California. By the time that Harte's "Plain Language" appeared in volume five, the magazine and its contributors seem to have exhausted what they had to say about the Chinese, offering no new articles in that volume. Lacking the context of such articles, new readers of the Overland nonetheless would have found a few cues directing them to a satiric reading of the poem; with the help of the earlier articles, established readers could hardly have missed Harte's intended tone. In "Plain Language from Truthful James," two miners hope to cheat the Chinese character Ah Sin in a card game, only to find that he turns the tables and bests them both by holding spare cards of his own inside capacious sleeves. Nearly everyone who comments on the poem has something to say about its widespread cultural influence; despite Harte's relative sympathy with the Chinese, the poem's characters and language helped Americans argue in favor of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. As the poem took on a life of its own, the prejudiced, cheating, and violent Bill Nye became a symbol of decent working men—"the 'hard-working' 'Bill [End Page 74] Nyes' of the Pacific Coast," according to one eastern periodical2—and the ungrammatical and biased statements of narrator Truthful James were accepted as truthful characterizations of the Chinese. Illustrated editions of the poem issued shortly after its first appearance in the Overland exaggerated Bill Nye's violence against Ah Sin and encouraged readers to view the Chinese character, as Truthful James did, as "dark" and "peculiar."3 The literal or anti-Chinese interpretation of the poem was not a reading encouraged by the Overland itself. In its coverage of Chinese topics during Bret Harte's term as editor, the Overland provides an illustration of the way periodicals can influence textual meaning. As Nancy Glazener has observed, "Different periodicals invite different ways of being read. Through page layouts, announcements and advertisements, illustrations and typography, addresses to readers, and a variety of other signals, a periodical provokes certain kinds of attention and creates certain interpellating identifications for its readers."4 By September 1870, when Harte's poem appeared, the Overland Monthly had declared itself on the employers' side of local debates about the competitive pressure of Chinese men on California wages—welcoming Chinese labor. The magazine had also established a selectively sympathetic tone toward Chinese culture, a habit of reticence and skepticism with respect to dialect writing, and a voice of gentility quite at odds with the voice of "Truthful" James. Harte's own distaste for western racial prejudice has long been clear to scholars.5 By examining related contents of the Overland and the biographies of significant contributors, we find strong evidence that the magazine itself "invited"—in Glazener's language—a reading of "Plain Language from Truthful James" consistent with the author's satiric intentions. For those who happened to pick up the Overland Monthly for the first time in September 1870, "Plain Language from Truthful James" would have seemed an anomaly in a magazine whose predominant tone was genteel, whose diction was polished, and whose perspective was cosmopolitan and liberal. The first-person vernacular speaker of Harte's poem...

Fiction Worth More than a “Summary Statement”: Three Women Authors of the Early Overland Monthly

Fiction Worth More than a “Summary Statement”: Three Women Authors of the Early <i>Overland Monthly</i>

Fiction Worth More than a "Summary Statement": Three Women Authors of the Early Overland Monthly

Fiction Worth More than a "Summary Statement": Three Women Authors of the Early Overland Monthly

Domesticating the Aliens Within: Sentimental Benevolence in Late-Nineteenth-Century California Magazines

This essay analyzes the workings of romantic love and its legal institution, marriage, as signs of universal humanity in fictional representation of Chinese immigrant women in two important California magazines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Overland Monthly and the Land of Sunshine , including short stories written by Asian American/Eurasian writer Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton. Reading these fictional narratives in the contexts of the period's prevailing trope of "yellow slavery," antimiscegenation legislation that codified white heteronormativity, and the magazines' expansionist rhetoric, I argue that these narratives constitute a "culture of benevolence"-sentimental emancipatory discourse shaped by U.S. women's reform movements-which has been integral to the racial projects of the U.S. nation and empire. By tracing the tension between the trope of "yellow slavery" and marriage, I situate my analysis within the broader shared ideological structure and connected histories that racialized African Americans and Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth century all the while foregrounding how heteronormative narratives about Chinese immigrant labor produced the period's shifting boundaries between the domestic and the foreign. I argue that while sentimental narratives attempt to address injustices by "humanizing" the Chinese, that is, by imagining their inclusion in universal humanity through heteronormative love and marriage, the very terms of heteronormativity paradoxically rationalize the logic of exclusionary laws, obscure imperial historic power relations, and undermine the eligibility of the Chinese for citizenship, socially, culturally, and politically. These narratives thus expose the limits of emancipatory discourses that posit heteronormative love and marriage as the passages to full membership within U.S. capitalist and imperial relations.

SOUTH ASIAN AMERICAN THEATRE: (UN/RE-)PAINTING THE TOWN BROWN

In his second year at the University of California, Berkeley, Arthur William Ryder (1877–1938), the Ohio-born Harvard scholar of Sanskrit language and literature, collaborated with the campus English Club and Garnet Holme, an English actor, to stage Ryder's translation of the Sanskrit classic Mrichchhakatikam, by Shudraka, as The Little Clay Cart. The 1907 production was described as “presented in true Hindu style. Under the direction of Garnet Holme, who … studied with Swamis of San Francisco … [and] the assistance of many Indian students of the university.” However, in the twenty-five-plus cast, there was not a single Indian actor with a speaking part. The intended objective was grandeur, and the production achieved that with elaborate sets and costumes, two live zebras, and elephants. Seven years later, the Ryder–Holme team returned with Ryder's translation of Kalidasa's Shakuntala, “bear cubs, a fawn, peacocks, and an onstage lotus pool with two real waterfalls.” While the archival materials do not indicate the involvement of any Indian actors (barring one Gobind B. Lal, who enacted the Prologue), its importance is evinced by the coverage it received in the Oakland Tribune, the Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times.