“The Production of a Female Pen”: Anna Larpent’s Account of the Duchess of Kingston’s Bigamy Trial of 1776 Kinservik, Matthew New Haven:
The Lewis Walpole Library,
2004.
On 15 April 1776 the House of Lords convened as a jury in Westminster Hall to try the Duchess of Kingston for bigamy. The Hall was transformed into a theater-in-the-round for the four thousand spectators, making the five-day trial a notorious event of that London season. The diarist Anna Larpent, then an unmarried girl of eighteen, was among the crowd. She wrote thirty-eight pages recording her informed observations with immediacy and in vibrant detail. Recently rediscovered at The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, her manuscript is reproduced here in its entirety. The text is introduced and transcribed by Matthew J. Kinservik and illustrated with works from The Lewis Walpole Library. A Deed to the Light Walker, Jeanne Urbana, IL and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press,
2004.
"Underlying the overall intensity of the collection is... the startling juxtapositions of images and sudden metaphors which surprise the reader again and again. For her past work Walker has received numerous fellowships, from the NEA and the Pew Foundation, and her plays have been produced in such major cities as Chicago, Boston, and London. But she never loses the familiar touch, the honest voice." --The Midwest Quarterly  A Delaware Album, 1900-1930 Miller, George Newark, DE:
University of Delaware Press,
2011.
The Album reproduces more than 300 photographs taken during the period from 1900 to 1930 and printed on postcards. Readers can witness the development of Delaware agriculture and fisheries, the expansion of the railroad into southern Delaware, the declining days of steamship service on Delaware rivers and creeks, the unsuccessful campaign against “King Alcohol,” the summer visits to local amusement parks and beaches. Each photograph is accompanied by an essay caption and the images are arranged by the subjects depicted in the image, including views of cities and towns, Delaware beaches, amusements, agriculture and industry, transportation, schools, religion, and businesses. An appendix discusses the popularization of photography achieved through Kodak’s 3A postcard camera and the Velox postal and why the photographic record of small-town America during this period exists almost entirely in postcard images.  A Nation Within a Nation: Organizing African-American Communities Before the Civil War Ernest, John Lanham, MD:
Ivan R. Dee,
2011.
Ernest focuses on the decades from the late 18th century up to the Civil War in the North. He examines the powers of African American organizations and networks, showing the context beyond slavery through which blacks found self-definition. --Library Journal
Thorough, lucid, and learned, A Nation Within a Nation reveals the processes by which nineteenth-century African Americans fashioned religious, social, cultural, and educational institutions to create community. This consistently informative book further buttresses Ernest’s well-deserved prominence among leading intellectual and cultural historians of nineteenth-century black America. --William Andrews, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
John Ernest’s elegant A Nation Within a Nation offers the best short introduction to African American community formation during the pre-Civil War period. Ranging through religious, educational, political, literary, and social reform organizations, Ernest shows how African Americans conceptualized and practiced—indeed “performed”—black group identity in response to whites’ antiblack racism. An essential study that illuminates the historical origins of the community-building work of Barack Obama and other twentieth- and twenty-first-century African American leaders. --Robert S. Levine, author of Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity
For most of the 19th century, African American people—their culture, potential, and possibilities—were largely defined by non-African Americans. Despite efforts, at times dangerous and even illegal, to define themselves as a community, cultural cues were being written by whites and the African American community had no way of distinguishing itself or dispelling persistent stereotypes. Writing in a straightforward style, Ernest (Chaotic Justice) parses a great deal of historical material about African-American organizing around the Civil War, when the community sought to define itself with fraternal organizations, churches, mutual aid societies, educational groups, and newspapers. Ernest presents a meticulous history that shows the depth of community organization efforts, both in the North and the South, long before emancipation, which will likely surprise readers whose ideas about community organizing were formed during the last election, when Barack Obama made the phrase part of the American vernacular. --Publishers Weekly
About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made Yagoda, Ben New York:
Scribner,
2000.
Yagoda tells the story of the tiny journal that grew into a literary enterprise of epic proportions. Incorporating interviews with more than fifty former and current New Yorker writers, including the late Joseph Mitchell, Roger Angell, the late Pauline Kael, Calvin Trillin, and Ann Beattie, Yagoda is the first author to make extensive use of the New Yorker's archives.  American Literary Cartographies: Spatial Practice and Cultural Production, 1500-1900 Brueckner, Martin; Hsuan L. Hsu Newark, DE:
University of Delaware Press,
2007.
This interdisciplinary collection of essays explores intersections between geography and American literary history from the earliest geographic chronicles of the New World to the massive geopolitical imaginings of the 1890s. By foregrounding the unsteady nature of geographical boundaries, the physical and imaginary migrations that coexisted with literary nationalism, and the changing attitudes toward geographical settings, the essays in American Literary Geographies present textual, theoretical, and contextual alternatives to existing exceptionalist accounts of U.S. culture. Beginning with studies of the establishment of names, borders, and jurisdictions, the collection builds toward materialist readings of literary settings illuminated by maps, surveying tracts, travelogues, sailors' epitaphs, and various forms of racialized or gendered mobility. The focus on the literary and geographical discourse addresses more than social and political developments like imperialism, regionalism, and tourism; rather, this volume seeks to supplement literary histories by emphasizing spatial over temporal strategies as the organizing principle for telling the story of American literature.
Names of contributors in the project:
- Ralph Bauer, University of Maryland, College Park
- Eric Slauter, University of Chicago
- Anne Baker, North Carolina State University
- Tom Conley, Harvard University
- Alex Hunt, West Texas A&M University
- Hester Blum, Pennsylvania State University
- Leigh Ann Litwiller Berte, Spring Hill College
- Yvonne Elizabeth Pelletier, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
- Anna Brickhouse, University of Virginia
- Ian Finseth, University of Michigan-Dearborn
- Martha Schoolman, Miami University, Ohio
- Susan L. Roberson, Texas A&M University-Kingsville
- Edlie L. Wong, Rutgers University, New Brunswick
 Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History Ernest, John Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina,
2009.
This book will interest students and scholars of history as well as literature.... Recommended. --Choice
Capturing and unveiling the complexity of race requires a vast knowledge of both history and literature, a knowledge that cannot be acquired easily or quickly. There are few critics... who can match Ernest's grasp of the period. --American Quarterly
[A] thoughtful study.... Importantly affirms the continuing need, in courses and in scholarship, for work focused specifically on the African American tradition. --Journal of American History
One of the most eloquent, thought-provoking, learned, theoretically innovative (Ernest not only draws from chaos theory but also from choreography!) and consequently, at least potentially, interesting attempts to counter the idea that we need to move beyond race. --Ethnic and Racial Studies
Illuminates a world of unseen material.... Ernest reads a wide array of African American literary texts through his vision of racial chaos, finding new ways to account for some of the familiar problems and irregularities in nineteenth-century African American literary history and criticism. --Journal of Southern History
A much needed work in African American literary studies and one that should be read by anyone who considers working in the field. --Louisiana History
 Chinese Connections: Critical Perspectives on Film, Identity, and Diaspora Feng, Peter X; Tan See-Kam and Gina Marchetti, ed. Philadelphia, PA:
Temple University Press,
2009.
Chinese Connections is a valuable new anthology that provides a prismatic look at the cross-fertilization between Chinese film and global popular culture. Leading film scholars consider the influence of world cinema on China-related and Chinese-related cinema over the last five decades. Highlighting the neglected connections between Chinese films and American and European cinema, the editors and contributors examine popular works such as Ang Lee’s The Hulk and Olivier Assayas’ Irma Vep to show the nexus of international film production and how national, political, social and sexual identities are represented in the Chinese diaspora.
With talent flowing back and forth between East and West, Chinese Connections explores how issues of immigration, class, race and economic displacement are viewed on a global level, ultimately providing a greater understanding of the impact of Chinese filmmaking at home and abroad.  Disciplining Satire: The Censorship of Satiric Comedy on the Eighteenth-Century London Stage Kinservik, Matthew Lewisburg, PA:
Bucknell University Press,
2002.
This book examines the effects of the Stage Licensing Act of 1737 on its main target, satiric comedy. The Licensing Act is generally considered to have been a significant and repressive censorship law (it was not repealed until 1968), but very little is known about how it actually worked and what effects it had on satiric comedy. Focusing on the playwriting careers of Henry Fieldling, Samuel Foote, and Charles Macklin, the three most controversial and heavily censored satiric dramatists of the century, Disciplining Satire pays particular attention to what type of satiric expression the law encouraged, not just what it prohibited. As the title of this book suggests, the Licensing Act was a disciplinary instrument that was seldom used to punish playwrights or prohibit plays; rather, the censorship had a more productive effect, training authors to write and audiences to consume a particular type of satiric comedy.  Early American Cartographies Brueckner, Martin Chapel Hill, NC:
Univ. of North Carolina Press,
2011.
The fourteen essays in Early American Cartographies examine indigenous and European peoples' creation and use of maps to better represent and understand the world they inhabited.
Drawing from both current historical interpretations and new interdisciplinary perspectives, this collection provides diverse approaches to understanding the multilayered exchanges that went into creating cartographic knowledge in and about the Americas. In the introduction, editor Martin Brückner provides a critical assessment of the concept of cartography and of the historiography of maps. The individual essays, then, range widely over space and place, from the imperial reach of Iberian and British cartography to indigenous conceptualizations, including "dirty," ephemeral maps and star charts, to demonstrate that pre-nineteenth-century American cartography was at once a multiform and multicultural affair.
This volume not only highlights the collaborative genesis of cartographic knowledge about the early Americas; the essays also bring to light original archives and innovative methodologies for investigating spatial relations among peoples in the western hemisphere. Taken together, the authors reveal the roles of early American cartographies in shaping popular notions of national space, informing visual perception, animating literary imagination, and structuring the political history of Anglo- and Ibero-America.
Names of contributors in the project:
- Martin Brückner, University of Delaware
- Michael J. Drexler, Bucknell University
- Matthew H. Edney, University of Southern Maine
- Jess Edwards, Manchester Metropolitan University
- Júnia Ferreira Furtado, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil
- William Gustav Gartner, University of Wisconsin Madison
- Gavin Hollis, Hunter College of the City University of New York
- Scott Lehman, independent scholar
- Ken MacMillan, University of Calgary
- Barbara E. Mundy, Fordham University
- Andrew Newman, Stony Brook University
- Ricardo Padrón, University of Virginia
- Judith Ridner, Mississippi State University
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