York Tribune Research Articles

Jane Grey Swisshelm: An Unconventional Life, 1815-1884 (review)

Reviewed by: Jane Grey Swisshelm: An Unconventional Life, 1815-1884 Nancy Isenberg (bio) Jane Grey Swisshelm: An Unconventional Life, 1815-1884. By Sylvia D. Hoffert. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). Pp. 255. Illustrations. Cloth, $39.95.) Jane Swisshelm was one of the most important journalists of the nineteenth century. She wrote for the New York Tribune and the New York Times and edited several papers on her own: the Pittsburgh Saturday Visitor, the St. Cloud [Minnesota] Visitor, and The Reconstructionist, in Washington, DC. She is best known as an abolitionist and women's rights reformer, but her "unconventional life" included an unusual marriage, most of which she spent living apart from her husband while pursuing a career. Her Scottish Covenanter religious upbringing gave her a critical view of American society and politics, making her an uncompromising opponent of slavery and a vocal advocate for women's political and economic rights. Whether living in the nation's capital, or publishing a paper on the Minnesota frontier, she saw herself as a radical reformer and critic. Swisshelm remained deeply conscious of the need to preserve her respectability as she challenged social norms. She was not only a journalist, but a working woman as well. She charted new ground by entering a trade dominated by men: newspaper publishing. Sylvia D. Hoffert focuses on how Swisshelm developed a professional code of behavior for women that allowed them to work alongside men. As an editor, a Civil War nurse, and a government clerk, she had enough variety of experience to enable her to conceive of a way for women to succeed: they should be [End Page 513] careful to separate their professional identities from their feminine roles. For women to achieve recognition, they had to appear less like sexual beings. According to Swisshelm's understanding of the workplace, Hoffert writes, women had to leave their feminine ways at home and "separate their identities as workers from their identities as women" (88). Swisshelm was never afraid of entering the contentious world of partisan politics. She endorsed the Free Soil Party in 1848, advocating what she called "Free Democracy," and finally committed herself to the Republican Party. When she moved to St. Cloud, Minnesota, in 1857, to start the St. Cloud Visitor, she left her husband behind. Unable to steer clear of politics, she battled the Democratic Party boss, contributing to his electoral defeat. During the Civil War, she moved to Washington, where she received a patronage position in the federal government. There, in 1865, she started The Reconstructionist, which openly attacked President Andrew Johnson's policies. Hoffert does not sugarcoat Swisshelm's political career. While she remained an ardent abolitionist, supported equal educational opportunities for blacks, and defended the nascent women's rights movement, Swisshelm always saw herself first and foremost as a public critic. So she did not shy even from criticizing the very reformers she endorsed. As Elizabeth Cady Stanton remarked, "she is forever saying something we wish unsaid" (148). Living on the Minnesota frontier as the Civil War opened, Swisshelm developed views of Native Americans that were drastically changed by the Dakota wars of 1862. Initially espousing a kind of romantic racism, idealizing the proud Indian, she quickly took up a virulent kind of fear-mongering, seeking revenge for the murders of white settlers. She supported vigilantism and even the extermination of certain tribes. She wrote that Minnesotans should make sure that "three red skins shall die" for "every white person killed" and that hunting parties should collect scalps to intimidate Indian leaders (153). Her language was harsh, hyperbolic, and racist. Yet Swisshelm never recognized any similarity between her brand of racism and that of the white supremacists whom she ridiculed in antislavery editorials. Swisshelm's life was riddled with contradictions. She claimed that she was defending the institution of marriage, and yet she spent most of her own marriage living apart from her husband. She defended the right of southerners to secede from the Union in terms comparable to the ending of a business partnership or marriage: a state could leave if it "wants to get out," and a contract should be easily "dissolved by mutual consent" [End Page...

Dashing Dagos and Walloping Wops: Media Portrayal of Italian American Major Leaguers before World War II

Dashing Dagos and Walloping WopsMedia Portrayal of Italian American Major Leaguers before World War II Lawrence Baldassaro (bio) Imagine opening your latest issue of your favorite sports magazine and seeing a story entitled, "Watch Those Walloping Wops." Such language is inconceivable today, yet that story, by noted baseball writer Dan Daniel, appeared in 1938, at a time when terms such as "wop" and "dago" routinely appeared in coverage of Italian American ballplayers, even in such distinguished publications as The Sporting News and the New York Times. The use of such ethnic epithets was only the most obvious indication of the ambivalent media treatment in the twenties and thirties of Italian American ballplayers, who were then entering the Major Leagues in unprecedented numbers. Stories that claimed to celebrate the sudden surge of Italian players were sometimes written in a style that was at once patronizing and slightly derogatory. In other words, praise mingled easily with a barely masked smirk that was betrayed frequently by stereotypical depictions that suggested that these athletes, talented though they may be, were not yet fully assimilated Americans. While other players of eastern and southern European heritage, who were also entering the big leagues in unprecedented numbers, were subject to stereotypical portrayal, Italians were the most frequently targeted group. For example, in the 1936 edition of Who's Who in the Major Leagues, which provided a brief biographical sketch of each player, very few references are made to the ethnic background of any but the Italian players. Ernie Lombardi is "one of numerous Italians who won Major League renown." Joe DiMaggio is "a giant Italian," Lazzeri a "lanky Italian," Hank Coppola "a rangy Italian," and Mel Mazzera a "husky young Italian."1 Players of Italian descent received greater media attention because they represented a significant percentage of the newcomers, both in baseball and in society as a whole, and because their names made them more readily recognizable. Italian names, in fact, were often a source of curiosity and confusion for writers. [End Page 98] A story that appeared in Collier's magazine during Joe DiMaggio's rookie year of 1936 begins with the following exchange between sportswriters at spring training: "He says you pronounce it Dee-Mah-gee-o," one of the sports writers said gloomily.Another added, "That's a very tough name to pronounce and also tough to spell."One writer said in disgust, "DiMaggio sounds like something you put on a steak."2 Italian names posed a problem for writers from the time the first Italian American appeared in the majors. Ed Abbaticchio, who made his debut in 1897, was routinely referred to as "Abby" and "Batty." Some players chose to mask their ethnic identity completely, presumably to avoid discrimination. Francesco Pezzuolo played as Ping Bodie, Eugene Mercantelli became Gene Rye, and Louis Bevilacqua became Lou Bevil, to name a few. Some players shortened their names to accommodate writers and typesetters. Rinaldo Paolinelli became Babe Pinelli, while Michael Pasquariello played as Mike Pasquella. Others anglicized or changed their first names. Sabato Mele became Sam Mele. Phil Rizzuto's given first name was Fiero. "I just took Phil because it sounded more American," he said. "A ball player has to be as American as the Statue of Liberty, is the way I figure."3 The bias against "odd" names was so blatant that in a story that appeared on May 12, 1918, New York Tribune reporter Wood Ballard could write of Bodie: "Ping needs a stage name. Pezzolo wouldn't look well in a box score." "Benign" Stereotypes The sudden increase of Italian American ballplayers in the 1930s led to more extensive media coverage, but stereotypical portrayal was nothing new. From the time the first Italian American appeared in the Major Leagues, sportswriters adopted catchy ethnic epithets. In a New York World article in 1908, Ed Abbaticchio was identified as "the son of Caesar," a title that would be bestowed on several other players over the years.4 In one of the most overworked cliches in the history of baseball journalism, Italian American ballplayers were routinely described as the "sons of sunny Italy." In fact, there was apparently an unwritten journalistic rule that anytime...

Horace Greeley on Immigrant Quality

Population and Development ReviewVolume 31, Issue 2 p. 369-371 Horace Greeley on Immigrant Quality First published: 06 July 2005 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1728-4457.2005.00070.xAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Abstract Immigration to the United States increased steeply through the middle decades of the nineteenth century: on a population of 17 million in 1840, immigrant numbers totaled 1.7 million in the 1840s, 2.6 million in the 1850s, and, notwithstanding civil war, 2.3 million in the 1860s. Coinciding with this mass inflow was a rise in anti-immigrant sentiment, manifested in a nativist political movement (the Know Nothing party). Migrants of particular national origins were singled out for denigration, such as Germans and Irish and later (on the West coast) Chinese. In an 1870 essay simply titled “Immigration,” Horace Greeley, an ardent protectionist, broadly welcomed migrants of any nationality. “That population is a main element of national strength… can scarcely need demonstration,” he begins, and ends, in high rhetorical flight: “our immigration in the future [will] wholly eclipse and belittle the grandest realizations of the past.” But beyond sheer numbers he points to the significance of migrant quality. There are those whose “coming would add largely to our numbers, but nothing at all to our strength, our worth, or our happiness.” At a minimum, settlers must show willingness to work; artisans and mechanics are better acquisitions. Most valuable of all are those rare persons displaying high entrepreneurial skill and inventiveness. Horace Greeley (1811–1872) was the founder (in 1841) and for 30 years the editor of the New York Tribune, the first nationally distributed newspaper in the United States. His editorials, written in a clear and vigorous style, brought wide attention to his views on the causes he espoused—anti-slavery, labor unions, tariff protection, women's rights, and many others. His generally reformist positions on social and economic policy are expounded in a late work, Essays Designed to Elucidate the Science of Political Economy (Boston: Fields, Osgood, & Co., 1870), in which the piece on immigration appeared. The excerpt below is from pp. 317–320. Volume31, Issue2June 2005Pages 369-371 RelatedInformation

"Irrespective of Race, Color or Sex:" Susan B. Anthony and the New York State Constitutional Convention of 1867

In the spring and summer of 1867, delegates to New York's fourth constitutional convention debated their state's policy on one ofthe most controversial questions ofthe day. Should blacks and women be granted the same voting rights as white men? In this letter, long time abolitionist and womeris rights activist Susan B. Anthony updates New York Republican State Senator and convention delegate Charles fames Folger on the campaign to make the state's constitution gender neutral on suffrage. Like many of Anthony's earlier and future political efforts, this one involved a painstaking door-to-door petition drive. At the convention, Anthony spoke out with her characteristic passion on the questions of black and female suffrage. When she was challenged by delegate Horace Greeley, influential editor ofthe New York Tribune, Anthony told him, My right as a human being is as good as any other human being. If you have a right to vote at 21 years, then I have. All we ask is that you should let down the bars, and let us women and Negroes in . Greeley's own newspaper reported that Anthony's declaration brought loud and prolonged applause. The suffrage debate at the New York constitutional convention hap pened at a time of national uproar over the same issue. The years af ter the Civil War were an era of bitter and often violent disagreements about how the U.S. would reconstitute itself economically, socially, and politically, and, in particular, what the relationship between the four million emancipated slaves and the nation would be. Emancipation did not lead easily or inevitably to voting rights. Black suffrage faced intense opposition from white southerners, and, indeed, from many white northerners. Even some of those who had been staunchly antislavery felt that black voting would be a far too radical change in the racial and

Subjective Vision, Romantic History, and the Return of the "Real": The Case of Margaret Fuller and the Roman Republic

Sarah Margaret Fuller (1810-1850), famous American writer and journalist, forerunner of the feminist movement, was one of the most important personages of the Roman Republic. Fervent supporter of Giuseppe Mazzini's ideas, she contributed, as a correspondent of the New York Tribune to create a wide support for the Italian cause among the American public opinion. In 1 847 she settled in Rome and married a supporter of Mazzini, Marquis Angelo Ossoli, with whom she had a son. In 1849, during the siege of Rome, while her husband was fighting with Garibaldi's troops, she engaged herself in the resistance with absolute devotion, organizing the assistance of the wounded soldiers in the hospitals. After the fall of the Republic, Margaret Fuller decided to return to the United States, but the ship

Kate Field and the New York Tribune

novel The Portrait of a Lady. 2 Though she never held a salaried position with the paper, never was a regular correspondent for the paper but always an occasional one, Field published between 1866 and 1889 over a hundred commissioned and freelance articles, editorials, and letters in the New York Tribune, nicknamed not entirely facetiously the Great Moral Organ; and she regarded her success as a contributor to the Tribune the benchmark of her achievements as a journalist. How- ever, she is not mentioned in any of the various histories of the Tribune, the most significant, reliable, and respected paper in the country, with a daily circulation of between thirty to forty thousand copies. Like many prominent nineteenth-century women, Field has been virtually erased from the modern historical record even as her critical recovery may illustrate her repudiation of traditional gender roles and her struggle to forge a professional career.

'While I waggled my small feet': Henry James's Return to Paris

ABSTRACT Paris is crucial to the sense of place, response, and record spanning Henry James's career over America, England, and 'Europe'. The early essays Parisian Sketches and A Little Tour in France reach towards The American Scene and A Small Boy and Others in exploring 'the personal history [] of an imagination' like Strether's in The Ambassadors: the 'inside-out' experience achieved through return, which goes beyond the personal. ********** Place, response, and record span and short-circuit Henry James's writing career, from infancy to autobiographical maturity. Crucial to this triangulation, linking America, England, and 'Europe', is Paris. In A Small Boy and Others James notes through a double return how from the perspective of his boyhood in Albany and New York he recalled an even earlier awareness. (1) He knew already that he 'had somehow waked early to a perception of Paris' (p. 57): the old man's recollection of the child's consciousness formed by remembered experience: 'Conveyed along the Rue St-Honore while I waggled my small feet, as I definitely remember doing, under my flowing robe, I had crossed the Rue de Castiglione and taken in, for all my time, the admirable aspect of the Place and the Colonne Vendome' (p. 58). This vigorous 'backward reach' of memory is informed by a positively physical resonance: 'a vibration of my very most infantine sensibility', trailing long clothes and waggling toes amidst the glories of the great city. The immediacy of sensation is both contained and fast-tracked to the present by its encasing pluperfect tense. Knowledge is always already found. James recovers a fresh awareness of this as he returns to Paris repeatedly, both in person and writing, by proxy in fiction or in pedestrian fact, from the moment of this 'infantine' visit to the time he recorded it, over pretty much the length of his conscious existence. The congruence between travel writing and the explorations, whether autobiographical, critical, or novelistic, of consciousness inscribed in record, in recall, in memory, constitutes for him both an intimate affair and a public communication. Parisian Sketches: Letters to the New York Tribune 1875-76 (2) and A Little Tour in France (3) provide a nineteenth-century travel writing focus for this essay. But for James experience is 'never limited and it is never complete.' (4) These early French essays take their place in a corpus including the novels and tales, and reaching forwards (or back) to The American Scene of 1904 which falls outside our period but is rooted there, and A Small Boy and Others (1913) which complements it. Sketching 'the personal history, as it were, of an imagination', James uses travel writing, like autobiography, with increasing intensity, abstraction, metaphorical vigour, and sensual exactitude, as a field of operation rather than an objective, since, in order to find his centre of interest, 'I had in a word to draw him forth from within rather than meet him in the world before me, the more convenient sphere of the objective, and to make him objective, in short, had to turn nothing less than myself inside out.' (5) Exploring the Sketches and A Little Tour is a route towards James himself as much as Paris or France; but the personal self stands equally for a cultural, historical, even a philosophical construct. The interest is in the nature of his experience. Sir Thomas Browne claimed, 'We carry with us the wonders we seek without us: there is all Africa and her prodigies in us'. (6) Under the professional byline of 'A Regular Correspondent of the Tribune', though only in his second dispatch, James wrote from Paris that for the sculptor Barye, 'The Jardin des Plantes was his Africa and his Asia. Though he spent half his life in modeling wild beasts, he was a Parisian of Parisians, and he never had the curiosity or the energy to take a look at the veritable East' (Parisian Sketches, pp. 15-16). Yet for the young writer, the hobbled observer can figure as a culturally grounded example, actually enabled by the apparent limitations of the centred self: 'He perhaps felt the force of that truth (which is by no means the paradox it seems) that for artistic purposes there is such a thing as knowing too much about your subject. …

Film Chronicles in Montréal's La Presse, 1906-1908

Les annonces de journaux ont depuis longtemps servi de ressources principales pour les historiens qui s'intéressent au cinéma des premiers temps à Montréal. Mais on a rarement étudié les stratégies discursives de ces textes jounalistiques. Ces stratégies reflètent, entre autres, les limites de l'industrie cinématographique de l'époque, la compétition entre le cinéma et le théâtre, et les tensions culturelles qui ont résulté de la croissance économique et démographique de la ville. Cet article porte un regard analytique sur les annonces parues dans l'un des plus importants journaux francophones montréalais au cours des années qui allaient mener à l'établissement des premiers palais du cinéma.

"I Guess I Forgot to Duck": On-Field Player Fatalities in the Minor Leagues

On August 18, 1920—a day after the death of Cleveland second baseman Ray Chapman at the hands of Yankees pitcher Carl Mays—the New York Tribune had this to say about the dangers of baseball:

The New York Tribune at Harper's Ferry: “Horace Greeley on Trial”

The New York Tribune's role in the Harper's Ferry raid provides a case study of antebellum press partisanship and reveals Horace Greeley's ties to the abolitionist movement. The primary documents cited in this study include excerpts from the Tribune, supporting Republican newspapers, published accounts of court proceedings, and the responses of anti-abolitionist editors and readers. This particular examination of the relationship between Brown and Greeley is significant for press historians because it links the Tribune to an alleged conspiracy that fueled backlash against a powerful editorial voice. The study also provides a sample of political alliances in the press prior to the 1860 elections.

"The animating influences of Discord": Margaret Fuller in 1844

On 20 December 1844, readers the New York Tribune, engaged by the usual miscellany a newspaper--an article on prison reform by Lydia Maria Child, news anti-slavery activities in Kentucky, and notices about lectures and amusements--would have also noticed two items, appearing side by side in columns on page two. In column appears an indignant letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson protesting what he saw as the Tribune's inadequate coverage Massachusetts Judge Samuel Hoar's expulsion from South Carolina. Hoar, an emissary sent by the Massachusetts government, had failed in his efforts to lobby the South Carolina legislature to stop the practice imprisoning free black sailors aboard ships from Massachusetts and then selling them into slavery. Emerson and others from Massachusetts were incensed by Hoar's treatment in South Carolina and unhappy with the initial coverage in the Tribune. In the next column appears Margaret Fuller's enthusiastic review the New York performance Niagara by the popular Norwegian violinist and composer, Ole Bornemann Bull, then completing a tour the United States. The juxtaposition the two columns is a suggestive moment in the histories the intellectual lives both Emerson and Fuller and raises important questions about their emerging and differing interests in social reform. Emerson, the scholar writing from his home in Concord, was deeply committed to self-reliance and suspicious reform movements. Here he publicly supports organized protest and offers a spirited defense Hoar, whom he perceived as taking heroic action against a slave state. Fuller, in her new position as an editor for the New-York Tribune, was on the verge embracing the social causes that would become her central concern in both New York and Europe. At this moment, however, she is deeply involved in writing a series articles on literature and culture. What professional experiences Fuller's in 1844 shaped the writing this and other articles? What does her correspondence, especially with Emerson, reveal about her intellectual concerns during the year? In this essay, I argue that Fuller's primary preoccupation during this crucial year in her life was in defining the proper role the scholar in a society in need reform. In her journal, her letters to Emerson and others and eventually in her articles for the New-York Tribune, Fuller tests a variety propositions and positions that pave the way for the sophisticated social critic she would eventually--but not immediately--become. A study her journal, letters, and articles during this year also reveals new insights into the vexed question when and how Fuller became interested in the most pressing reform issue the day: abolition. THE ESPECIAL IMPORTANCE OF 1844 Scholars have increasingly regarded the year 1844 as a transformative moment for Fuller, often seeing it as an annus mirabilis, a time spiritual and conversion, as well as a time deep personal disappointment about the men in her life. (1) Jeffrey Steele, for example, sees the late spring 1844 as a crisis for Fuller in terms her life as a woman. That three the important women in her life gave birth, he suggests, reminded her of the personal expense the unconventional lifestyle she had chosen for (170). In addition, 1844 marked the end the most intense years the friendship between Fuller and Emerson; afterwards, she and Emerson would see another less and exchange far fewer letters. At the same time, Fuller clearly gloried in many aspects her life, especially in her freedom as she contemplated the difficulties a number the marriages her friends and especially that her sister. Fuller herself noted in her journal for 1844 that she felt this time her life was one especial importance (J 56). (2) In our efforts, however, to mark particular moments in Fuller's life as pivotal and especially to respond to the recent push to convert her swiftly from Transcendentalist to sophisticated social critic, scholars may be smoothing over the complexities and fluctuations Fuller's intellectual development, especially during this important year. …

An American poet in Paris: Pauline Avery Crawford and the Herald Tribune

An American Poet in is a literary biography of Pauline Avery Crawford, a remarkable American expatriate who wrote for the Paris edition of the New York Tribune in the 1930s and 1940s. Interspersed in the biography are numerous quotations from Crawford's poetry and letters, along with an account of her fascinating life in Paris, a life that included the turbulent years before, during, and after World War II.Crawford was reared in the frontier town of Fort Collins, Colorado, went east to attend college, and then became a faculty wife. Her early happiness was marred by tragedy when her husband committed suicide, leaving her with two small boys, and her sister, whom she had joined in Paris, died of tuberculosis. Crawford contracted acute articular rheumatism and had to spend two long, painful years in the American Hospital in Neuilly. Despite the loss of a leg, this widow with two young children carved out a new life for herself in the pages of the Paris Herald Tribune. Therein she recorded the events of those dramatic pre- and postwar years in both poetry and prose.As a constant contributor to the Mailbag, the column of letters to the editor, Crawford became a celebrity in the Anglo-American community even though she advocated American intervention in the war in a newspaper whose readership was largely isolationist. In the postwar years, the editor asked her to create a column that he dubbed Our Times in Rhyme. In this column, which she wrote until shortly before her death in 1952, she provided an amusing, sometimes sarcastic, and often cheering commentary on world events and life in Paris, leavened with some of the more serious sonnets she had always loved to write.Well informed and well written, An American Poet in throws light on a particular time and place as seen through the eyes of one extraordinary woman, in an unusual and pioneering American newspaper. Crawford's poetry and wit still sparkle, the controversies in which she indulged remain of interest, and her detailed description of life in occupied Paris is especially compelling.

A Sheaf of Uncollected Nineteenth-Century Whitman Notices and Reviews

Lists and quotes relevant parts of "eight items in nineteenth-century magazines and newspapers that have been hitherto lost to Whitman scholarship," including mentions in 1841 and 1842 of Whitman's early fiction in the New York Tribune, an 1856 review of Leaves of Grass in Dublin Review, 1865 reviews of Drum-Taps in the Independent and San Francisco Bulletin, an 1882 review of Leaves in Boston Sunday Globe, and 1882 reviews of Specimen Days in the New York Sun and the Philadelphia Press.

"He is Amusing but Not Inherently a Gentleman": The Vexed Relations of Kate Field and Samuel Clemens

Though she has virtually disappeared from history of American journalism, Kate Field (1838-1896) was a forerunner of such famous turn-of-the-century women reporters as Nellie Bly Dorothy Dix. According to her obituary in New York Tribune, she was one of best-known women in at height of her career Field Dead). A member of expatriate community in Florence in late 1850s, she befriended Brownings, Trollopes, Walter Savage Landor while still in her early twenties. One of first women to contribute to Atlantic Monthly,(1) a prolific travel writer theatre reviewer for New York Tribune, she was also, I believe, model for character of Henrietta Stackpole in Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady. (2) She first won fame for her dispatches about Charles Dickens's final visit to United States, or, as Clemens later reminisced, she made a wide, spasmodic notoriety in 1867 by some letters which she sent from Boston--by telegraph--to Trib une about Dickens's readings there in beginning of his triumphant American tour. At time the idea of telegraphing a newspaper letter was new astonishing, he explained, and wonder of it was in every one's mouth. Kate Field became a celebrity at (Twain, Mark Twain's Autobiography 1:157). She soon revised these dispatches into a book, Pen Photographs of Charles Dickens's Readings (1868), that passed through two editions that remains an extremely valuable reference resource about style manner of Dickens's stage performances. She later published two popular travel books, Hap-Hazard (1873) Ten Days in Spain (1875). Many of her pieces collected in former volume are written in a breezy style reminiscent of Clemens's The Innocents Abroad (1869). For example, she opened a travel letter from Ems, Germany, originally contributed to Paris American Register in June 1872, as follows: I am requested to say something about Americans abroad. Well, I am sorry to make confession, but either there are a great many fools in America, or all fools in America visit Europe. I have not yet arrived at a definite conclusion on subject, for truth is said to lie in a well, a great deal of rope is required to get at it; but judging from fact that I never met such peculiar specimens at home as I meet or hear of abroad, I am inclined to believe that a large proportions of our idiots seek an asylum on this side of Atlantic. Perhaps this is retort courteous we make to Europe for sending us her adventurers, thieves, burglars. (172) In late 1870s, moreover, Field worked as a publicist for Alexander Graham Bell, once even singing Irish folk songs over telephone to Queen Victoria, she was instrumental in founding of Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford John Brown Memorial in Adirondacks. Between 1890 1895 she edited published her own weekly paper, Kate Field's Washington, to which Charlotte Perkins Gilman contributed thirty of her earliest essays, stories, poems (Scharnhorst 5, 6, 8, passim). Nevertheless, Field struggled for a livelihood throughout her career. Two years after she covered Dickens's tour for Tribune, she turned to more lucrative lecture platform. In effect, she began to trade on her celebrity. As she asked Whitelaw Reid, managing editor of Tribune, in June 1869, Do you expect Hood, Charles Lamb George Alfred Townsend [to write] for $15 per column? (Letter to Whitlaw Reid). She explained to actor Noah Miller Ludlow next month, I've gone into because it pays better than anything else, I am tired of grubbing along.... There is no more reason why a woman should not lecture than that she should not sing or act. At least I shall try to make lecturing fashionable as well as profitable (Kate Field: Selected Letters 48). She debuted in Boston, Brooklyn, New York in spring of 1869 with a defense of Woman in Lyceum before audiences that included Edwin P. …

Bess Furman

Front page girl Bobbie O'Dare of the Omaha Daily News, wearing bobbed hair and driving a Model T Ford, went anywhere and saw everything for stories that opened with rhymes. She debuted in the Omaha Daily News' Sunday Rotogravure Magazine with a bylined story in December 1923, introducing a ward-by-ward survey of the city to find every eligible man in time for the coming leap year. Her article attracted enough reaction to merit a page one follow up the next week. When Bobbie O'Dare's byline first graced the Omaha Daily News, tabloid-style newspapers had just appeared in New York City.1 The tabloids jolted journalism around the country. They featured an unusual format, composite photographs, and stunts. They also employed more reporters-more girls were welcomed into the warmth of newspaper city rooms. Out in the Midwest, Bobbie O'Dare was one of those girls.2 Bobbie O'Dare was the alter ego of Bess Furman, a native Nebraskan whose father ran a weekly newspaper in the southwestern part of the state. Hired by the Omaha Daily News at age twenty-five, Forman had already experinced a lifetime in newspapering. She soaked it up as a child and adopted it as her career. Her childhood, early journalistic experiences, and her work at the Omaha Daily News serve as a microcosm of the woman reporter's experience in the early part of the twentieth century. Scholars such as Bonnie Brennen have criticized journalism histories for their representations of women. These histories have tended to present descriptions of who stood apart and were exceptional cases. They have not treated the actual problems of reporters as a class of workers. This research takes a year-to-year look at a woman journalist's life and work. It covers specifically Forman's early years. She came from humble, small-town origins, worked first as a teacher and then broke into newspaper work in 1917 as the summer editor of her teachers' college newspaper. She eventually left teaching and worked for both a small town daily and a metropolitan daily before being hired as a reporter for Associated Press in 1929. Forman did not treat these early years in her autobiography, and researchers apparently have not traced her life's story. However, a study of her clippings and the newspapers she worked for reveals a picture of her rise from a school newspaper editor to a front-page girl to a reporter with a solid reputation for good journalism.3 Bess Furman worked in other journalism-a journalism for, about, and by women. In Furman's day, the definition of women's news exemplified long-standing attitudes toward women, both as readers and writers, and toward what produced for the mass media. Women have always been prolific writers and readers, yet men's view about differences between what men and could write and what men and would read undermined women's status in the publications world. This view has a long heritage. According to historian Emily Stipes Watts, after the Revolutionary War, poets were relegated secondary status because sales of men's verse fell behind the sales of women's verse. A school of criticism emerged to deal with women's poems, which were too public and too popular. Men's poems, on the hand, were private, and they attempted to resolve past and present conflicts with a different language that readers must learn.4 Nevertheless, publishers gathered women's poems in anthologies that enjoyed wide distribution and popularity. Despite criticism, went on writing. They wrote poetry and novels, and they joined publication staffs or contributed to newspapers and magazines. They wrote for the popular magazines such as Godey's Lady's Book, Grahams 'Magazine and the Lady's Wreath and for newspapers such as the New York Ledger and the New York Tribune, to name a few. Male authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne derided the mob of scribbling women whose trash prevented them from success. …

The Two American Presidents: A Dual Biography of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis (review)

BOOK REVIEWS63 checkmate the CSS Virginia. The United States Military Academy at West Point continued to function as an officer school. Leading newspaper persons Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune and James Gordon Bennett of the New York Harold created and led public opinion. Generals Philip Henry Sheridan, Daniel Edgar Sides, Fitz-John Porter, Emory Upton, Joseph Jackson Barlett, and Daniel Butterfield were some of the more noted New Yorkers military leaders. The Union Preserved provides information about the battlefronts and home front including New York City and Troy draft riots of July 1863 and New York genealogical resources. NewYork was the last state to organize an archive ( 1978). One of the most interesting accounts in the guide is the initial success of Chief of the Bureau of Military Statistics, Lockwood Lyon Doty, who gather a large amount of war documents. Researchers today wish that the Doty collection of lost and scattered Civil War-related resources still exist. However, it is an accomplishment that an identifying guide to the remaining Civil War items and collections are now available. The collected effort of the New York State Archives, New York State Library, New York State Division of Military and Naval Affairs, and the New York State Museum is a commendable achievement. Eleven appendices ranging from "Conducting Genealogical and Local History research in Civil WarRecords" to "Where the Men Came From," will be popular reference sections. Not dted in this guide is Frederick Porter Todd's American Military Equipage, 1851-1872, Vol. 2: State Forces (1983). Chapter 45 covers New York Civil War arms, equipment and clothing by military organizations are from National Archives and New York State Archives documents. However, most researchers will be eager to consult the guide for years to come. Harold Hölzer, Abraham Lincoln and Civil War-illustration expert, and Daniel Lorello, Associate Archivist at the New York State Archives, are good choices. They teamed up to edit and compile a well organized, well written and beautifully illustrated reference book. The Union Preserved will be a desirable source for exploring the eastern theater of the war and the Union army. Alan Aimone U.S. Military Academy Library The Two American Presidents: A Dual Biography ofAbraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis. By Bruce Chadwick. (Secaucus, N.J.: Birch Lane Press/Carol Publishing Group, 1999. Pp. vii, 490. $29.95.) Bruce Chadwick draws upon memoirs, campaign speeches, letters, and congressional reports to sketch how the personalities of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis reflected American society and shaped the outcome of the Civil War. Union armies ultimately won, according to Chadwick, because Lincoln's personal skills made him a superior political and military leader. While armies fought on battlefields, an equally importantcontest to sustain civilian morale raged in legislative chambers and newspapers. Warm and charismatic, 64CIVIL WAR HISTORY Lincoln unified the shaky Republican Party, won over a fractious Northern electorate , and earned the respect and often the political support ofhis most vitriolic opponents. Amiable Abraham Lincoln weathered withering military losses and searing political dissent without castigating his critics publicly. Thus Lincoln sustained the Northern war effort through dark days and revolutionized national public policy by charming Republicans, ignoring personal criticism, and earning the deferential respect of his generals. Because of Lincoln's political skills, support for the war among Northerners remained solid, even when Union armies stalled within the South. Davis, by contrast, floundered politically. The absence of a party system exposed Davis to intense criticism, especially when Confederate armies lost. Personal attacks placed considerable pressure on Davis to float above politics, but his personality doomed him to failure. Neurotic and paranoid, Davis confused dissent with treason. Unable and unwilling to share power, Davis alienated government administrators, cabinet members, state legislatures and governors, military leaders (save Robert E. Lee), and states-rights ideologues. Instead of unifying the rebellion, Davis became a hated figure who embodied all that had gone awry. The Confederacy unraveled internally due to the leadership of the caustic and belligerent Davis, and military defeat swiftly followed. Union victory was never assured, Chadwick concludes. The outcome hinged on presidential leadership, and the charming Lincoln politically overpowered the dour Davis. The use of biography to explain the Union victory...

"The Very Happiest Tiding": Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Correspondence with Arkansas Spiritualists

THE SPIRITUALIST MOVEMENT BEGAN DURING the wee hours of April 1, 1848, in the village of Hydesville, New York. On that April Fools' Day morning, two teenaged sisters, Margaret and Kate Fox, had what to observers appeared to be communications with a ghost who claimed to have been murdered at the house years before their family moved in. Mysterious knocks emanated from the walls of the Fox's house. A neighbor-not the girls-suggested they might be spelling out a message: one knock for a, two knocks for b, and so forth. Laboriously rendering each word in knocks, the spirit provided details about the manner of its murder and subsequent burial in the cellar of the Fox home. News of this event was picked up first by the New York Tribune and subsequently by other newspapers. Margaret and Kate Fox promptly became famous. On the heels of this story, thousands of men and women across the United States discovered their own ability to function as mediums, and spiritualism suddenly was all the rage. Everyone, it seemed, was either experimenting with it or sharply criticizing it. For some of its participants, spiritualism was no more than a pleasant group diversion for long, dreary afternoons spent in the parlor. For people grieving the loss of a loved one, however, it offered solace and a feeling of re-connection with the departed. Others, including prominent intellectuals and reformers, were drawn to the movement by a desire to discover truth or to understand better the mysteries of the universe. Spiritualism quickly established itself on the American and European continents. It has been estimated that within seven years of the April Fools' Day incident at the Fox house there were two million spiritualists in the United States.1 Arkansas was not left out of the phenomenon. In April 1872, Claire Robertson advertised her demonstrations of psychic manifestations in the Arkansas Gazette. On February 16, 1877, the newspaper stated there were one hundred and fifty members of the Spiritualist sect living in the city of Little Rock. During 1879, numerous reports of spirit apparitions appeared in the Gazette.2 Through the following century, a number of prominent Arkansans professed their belief in spiritualism. William Grant Still, a composer of orchestral music, and his wife, Verna Arvey, a concert pianist and journalist, consulted spiritualist mediums for years.3 Well-known Arkansas author Bernie Babcock was also a spiritualist.4 Mrs. Babcock founded and was the first curator of the Arkansas Museum of Science and History in Little Rock. Housed in the old Tower Building, the museum's quarters were originally a Civil War arsenal where many soldiers suffered and died. Since its inception there have been reports by its staff of a variety of apparitions. A 1995 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette article identified this MacArthur Park building as one of the most haunted structures in the South.5 Perhaps the most prominent spiritualist in Arkansas history was the author, editor, journalist, and clubwoman, Lessie Stringfellow Read. Read moved to Fayetteville with her adoptive parents in 1911. Her adoptive father, Henry Martyn Stringfellow, was an internationally acclaimed horticulturist whose biography and own spiritualist affiliations were noted in Who's Who in America.7 Miss Lessie, as she came to be known around Fayetteville, was active in the Red Cross, the women's suffrage movement, the establishment of Fayetteville's first public library, and many other civic affairs. Beginning her career as a journalist, Lessie Read rose to the editorship of the local newspaper, the Fayetteville Democrat, after her boss resigned from the post to volunteer during World War I. In addition to editing the Fayetteville newspaper for twenty-eight years, Lessie handled all publicity and edited the monthly news bulletin for the General Federation of Women's Clubs, which was at that time the largest women's organization in the world. …

Henry James: The Contemporary Reviews

Reviewed by: Henry James: The Contemporary Reviews Sheila Teahan Kevin J. Hayes, ed. Henry James: The Contemporary Reviews. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. 477 pp. $95.00 (cloth). This recent volume in the American Critical Archives series offers the most complete collection yet published of contemporary British and American magazine and newspaper reviews of James’s writings. The reviews cover twenty-two works, including the major novels, as well as The Reverberator, The Other House, The Two Magics (comprising The Turn of the Screw and Covering End), and The American Scene. They are chronologically arranged by work and then in order of appearance, and each chapter is followed by a checklist of additional reviews. Hayes’s selection underlines some striking differences between British and American responses to certain works. Especially in reviews of the early novels, American critics tend to be either defensive or complacent about the assumed typicality of James’s American characters. Judging from this volume, for example, The American appears to have been received more positively in Britain than in the U.S. Some American reviewers are offended by what they perceive as Christopher Newman’s implied representativeness; one complains, If Mr. James had chosen to write his novel with Newman for hero, and to call it by his name, or Mme. de Cintré’s, or any other, and to let Newman go as a representative of a certain kind of American who gets rich in California, very well; but to have an American hold this man up to the world as the American is not highly satisfactory. (35–36) Eclectic Magazine finds that the Wentworths inspire “the reader to feel a sort of conscious pride in being an American” (57); Atlantic Monthly “cannot help wishing that our native authors would have done with this incessant drawing of comparisons between ourselves and the folk in Europe, and our respective ways of living, thinking, and talking” (63). A less literal-minded British reviewer hails The Europeans as “perhaps the purest piece of realism ever done” and predicts that James might become “one of the most renowned novelists of his epoch” (49). Students of James are familiar with his distress over his steadily waning popularity and depression about the commercial failure of the New York Edition. Those who have not read widely among contemporary reviews of his work may expect to find predominately obtuse or hostile responses to James’s genre-changing technical and stylistic innovations. Such responses are here, but they are balanced, if not always outweighed, by an abundance of astute and sympathetic readings. The Portrait of a Lady is almost universally recognized as James’s most [End Page 100] significant and fully achieved work to date. W. C. Brownell in Nation calls Portrait “the most eminent example we have thus far had of realistic art in fiction” (148), while a New York Tribune reviewer finds it “properly to be compared . . . with the gravest and most serious works of imagination which have been devoted to the study of the social conditions of the age and the moral aspects of our civilization” (136). Some reviewers are quick to grasp James’s privileging of interiority; Brownell refers to his “attempt to dispense with all the ordinary machinery of the novelist except the study of the subtle shades of character” (146). The Pall Mall Gazette praises Daisy Miller for James’s innovative use of limited third-person narrative (74). Of The Bostonians, one reviewer observes that under James’s influence the novel “has become so far revolutionized that it is no longer a story” (155); another approvingly announces James’s and Howells’s establishment of the “analytical school of novel writers” (159). Of course, the critical reception of The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima was mixed. Reviews of The Bostonians range from the Independent’s complaint that it is “not worth writing” and “unreadable” (167) to the Boston Beacon’s prediction that “the literary mastership of the Bostonians [sic], will be prized and praised after the fault-finders of today are forgotten” (160). The Princess Casamassima is faulted by the New York Times for its “decadence” and “want of virility” (181, 179), yet found by Saturday Review to be “worth a...

Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 5, 1872–1873 ed. by Lin Salamo, Harriet Elinor Smith, and: Mark Twain by Peter Messent

BOOK REVIEWS 4 2 9 Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 5, 1872-1873. Edited by Lin Salamo and Harriet Elinor Smith. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. 939 pages, $60.00. Mark Twain. By Peter Messent. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997. 235 pages, $29.95. Reviewed by Gary Scharnhorst University of New Mexico W. D. Howells called him “the Lincoln of our literature,” a comparison which evokes his common western origin with Honest Abe. Simply put, no other American writer with the possible exception of Ernest Hemingway enjoys so privileged a critical and popular reputation as Mark Twain. Whether his celebrity is measured in column-inches of citations in the MLA Bibliography or the frequency with which his words and image are appropriated by Madison Avenue, Twain often seems to bubble to the sur­ face of public consciousness. Fortunately, in the midst of a canon reforma­ tion whose most radical protestants proclaim the “death of the author,” most Twain scholarship remains historically and biographically contextualized (and so, in my opinion, it is reasonably assessable). For better or worse (the former, I believe), the ostensible “cult of personality” that surrounds Twain prevents his disappearance down the poststructuralist rabbit hole. I daresay that more ink has been spilled over his life and writings than any other nineteenth-century American author, and he seems to many of us as familiar as an eccentric neighbor. Not that we know all our neighbors as well as we should. The fifth volume in the definitive edition of Twain’s correspondence contains 309 letters, well over half of them never before published, all of them thoroughly annotated. A model of documentary editing, the volume opens with Twain on a lecture tour in the Midwest in January 1872 and closes after he has delivered a series of lectures in London in December 1873. This truest type of biogra­ phy describes in inimitable detail the prosperity he enjoyed in the wake of the sales success of Roughing It, his repeated visits to England to work on a travel book he eventually abandoned, the birth of his daughter Susy and the death of his son Langdon, his collaboration with his Hartford neighbor Charles Dudley Warner on their novel The Gilded Age, and his oft-vexed asso­ ciations with such figures as Whitelaw Reid, editor of the New York Tribune; Bret Harte, his old friend from California and erstwhile literary rival; Howells, the editor of the Atlantic Monthly; and Kate Field, a popular lecturer and journalist. Editors Salamo and Smith append genealogical charts of the Clemens and Langdon families, transcriptions of the journals Twain kept during his 1872 trip to England and of the contracts he signed with publishers during these years, as well as a veritable family album of photographs and a sheaf of eleven newly discovered letters written between 1865 and 1871. 4 3 0 W A L 3 3 ( 4 ) W INTER 1 9 9 9 To be sure, there are no bombshells here, nothing that fundamentally alters our view of Twain’s career, though the annotations alone should be grist for a few dissertations. For example, Twain’s brief letter to Elisha Bliss, the president of the American Publishing Company, dated November 5, 1873, which consists of little more than the names of people he wished to receive copies of The Gilded Age, is followed by over seven pages of notes. Only in one minor respect would I fault the documentation: the “F. B. P.” whose column Twain mentions in a letter to the editor of the Boston Literary World in December 1872, who is otherwise unidentified, was undoubtedly the Boston librarian Frederick Beecher Perkins, best-known today (if at all) as the father of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. One of the joys of teaching literature—I assert without apology— is that we get to read other people’s mail, occasionally even letters that are explicitly proscribed. “Please don’t let a word of this letter get into print— these things are from private conversations &. the footprints must be all covered up carefully before they see the light,” Twain wrote Mary Mason Fairbanks from London in November 1872 (206). If there are no sensational revelations here, there are...

Silas Watson Ford: A Major But Little-Known Contributor to the Cambrian Paleontology of North America

Silas Watson Ford (1848-1895), telegrapher and paleontologist born in Glenville, New York, in 1848, made significant contributions to Cambrian paleontology from 1871 to 1888. The focus of his work was the allochthonous Taconic rock that lies east of the Hudson River in easternmost New York. His discovery of a ‘Primordial’ fauna in this region was instrumental in helping to resolve the uncertainty surrounding the age of this older portion of the Taconics. While most of his papers were published in the American Journal of Science, a series of seven papers on the ‘Silurian Age’ was published by the New York Tribune in 1879. For this work he was subsequently awarded an honorary master's degree by Union College.Ford was hired by his contemporary, Charles Doolittle Walcott (1850-1927), to work for the U.S. Geological Survey from 1884 to 1885. Highly regarded by James Hall (1811-1898), James Dwight Dana (1813-1895), Joachim Barrande (1799-1883), and many other prominent geologists of the time, he was often consulted for his expertise in collecting and describing Cambrian-age fossils.While Walcott's career continued to flourish, Ford faded into obscurity after 1888. Plagued by personal problems, he was forced to give up his personal library, his fossil collection, and finally, his career. He died in 1895 at the age of 47, with his passing virtually unnoticed by his professional colleagues.