Flush Fred

I've just returned from a research trip to St. Louis, Hannibal, New Orleans and New York. I'll be posting some press clippings of the first part of the trip later. First, however, I'm posting some of the fruits of the New Orleans leg. As preparation for my forthcoming anthology of nineteenth century gambling stories from the Mississippi River (Louisiana State University Press), I travelled to Tulane University to take a look at one of the last remaining copies of Edward Willett's Flush Fred's Full Hand, published in 1884 by Beadle & Adams, New York. This classic story of heroic riverboat gambler Flush Fred wasn't in good shape, so it seemed like a good idea to preserve it digitally. Below, I've put together a flickr set of page photos, cover to cover.


Publication information, as well as details of Flush Fred's other appearances, can be found here.

Signing & Symposium

I'm travelling to the US this week, and whilst there I'll be appearing at two events. First, I'll be attending a book signing for River of Dreams: Imagining the Mississippi Before Mark Twain in St. Louis, co-sponsored by Main Street Books and the Kirkwood Public Library - Thursday 17th July, 7.30pm.

Then, on Sunday 19th July, I'll be giving the keynote address at a symposium on Mark Twain and the Mississippi River at the Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum in Hannibal, Missouri. More information is available below - click on the pictures for bigger images.

Conference: Understanding the South

I'll be giving a paper at the forthcoming Understanding the South, Understanding Modern America: The American South in Regional, National and Global Perspectives, hosted by the University of Manchester (May 22-24). You can read an abstract of my paper, "Bring Our Country Back: Country Music, The Southern Strategy and the 1968 Presidential Election", here.

Journal of Illinois History

River of Dreams has been reviewed in the Journal of Illinois History by James Hurt. Hurt says:

River of Dreams is an impressive achievement that will interest not only students of the American landscape (or riverscape) and the cultural uses to which it has been put but also "general readers" [...] the book as it stands is an intelligent, original, and imaginative contribution to American cultural studies.

BAAS 2008

At this year's British Association for American Studies Conference, held at Edinburgh University, I'll be speaking about: '"A Colossal White Elephant": New Orleans, the New South, and the Cotton Centennial Exposition, 1884-5.' It's a small part of my larger, ongoing research into New Orleans' social and cultural history.

Future Radio: New Orleans Jazz

Following on from last August's appearance on Future Radio (96.9 FM), this Sunday (March 16th) I'll be appearing on Tony Cleary's show to talk about the beginnings of New Orleans jazz.

Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies

River of Dreams has been reviewed by Luther Brown in Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies. He writes: "This is a valuable book and should be in the collections of anyone concerned with re-presenting place, early Americana, The River, and certainly Mark Twain."

Click for bigger images:

American Literature

River of Dreams has received mention in American Literature:

Future Radio: New Orleans Jazz

Following on from last August's appearance on Future Radio (96.9 FM), this Sunday (March 16th) I'll be appearing on Tony Cleary's show to talk about the beginnings of New Orleans jazz.

Conference: 1968, The Year of Living Dangerously

This Sunday, I'll be presenting a paper at the American Studies Network conference at the University of East Anglia: ""Bring Our Country Back": Reaction, Revolution and Country Music, 1968." Above, the Byrds playing at the Grand Ole Opry in 1968.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

My entry on Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is now up at the Literary Encyclopedia. An extract:

Mark Twain’s most famous novel, perhaps the most famous American novel ever published, begins with a series of warnings: “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot” (xxv). In all the long years since its publication in 1884, Twain’s disingenuous threat has availed little: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been dissected and discussed in extraordinary detail, and praised and blamed accordingly. Thus far at least, this disarmingly – or deceptively – simple tale of an outcast young boy attempting to help a runaway slave escape to freedom seems capable of bearing the weight of criticism heaped upon it. The book, its characters, and its themes and symbols retain a mythic (albeit controversial) place in the American canon – even in the American psyche.

Mississippi Quarterly

My article on the John A. Murrell conspiracy and the Lynching of the Vicksburg gamblers on Independence Day, 1835, has now been officially published in the Mississippi Quarterly (59:1-2 (Winter-Spring 2006), 129-160).

UPDATE: Interestingly enough, this article is now available for download via Amazon.com.

Future Radio: The Roots of Jazz

This Sunday (August 26, 1-2pm), I'll be appearing on Norwich's Future Radio (96.9 FM) talking to Tony Cleary about early black American music and the roots of jazz. If you can't receive Future Radio, you can listen live via the internet.

Booklist Review

Writing in Booklist (May 1, 2007), the publication of the American Library Association, George Cohen described River of Dreams as "a lively and wide-ranging account of this majestic body of water."

River of Dreams - Update

As the release date for River of Dreams approaches, a preview of the dust jacket (click a section for a larger image):

Plus, some advance praise for the book. The first comes from Louis J. Budd:

"River of Dreams pulled me along as irresistibly as the Mississippi itself, deep into the South's past. Mark Twain, I think, would have read it as closely as he read and enjoyed the actual river in his piloting days. Though this book deserves rapt (not raft) attention for its own insights and appreciativeness, explicators of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn should absorb it before traveling further with or into Huck, on the river or on shore."

The next, from John Seelye:

"I read Thomas Ruys Smith's book in one day's sitting (with a two hour break) a testimony to the author's graceful and lucid style, yet what he has given us is a detailed anatomy of writing inspired by North America's greatest river and the crowded scene of humanity in all its nefarious forms associated with the Mississippi during the first century of the republic. Smith's canvass starts with the post-Revolutionary period and ends with the years immediately following the Civil War. What emerges from his account is an iconography dominated by a heavy chiarasco, at the center of which is his lengthy account of gamblers, swindlers, and river pirates that gave such dark coloration to the river's chronicles: 'crooked letter, crooked letter' indeed.

"At the start, Jefferson associated the Mississippi with national unity, progress, and prosperity, but Britain's John Law had already given its name to a monstrous bubble of stock manipulation. It figured large in the obscure imperial schemes of General Wilkinson and Aaron Burr and later became associated with the horrific explosions of the steamboats that were Robert Fulton's gift to American progress. Travelers like Frances Trollope associated it with the intolerably boorish aspects of democracy, Harriet Stowe associated it with the horrors of slavery, and eastern hack writers created a mythical Davy Crockett whose crude energies seemed the river incarnate rising up as a buckskin-clad grotesque giving form to the perceived threat of Jacksonian democracy.

"Samuel L. Clemens, a.k.a. Mark Twain, whose boyhood experiences in Hannibal gave us Tom Sawyer and whose apprenticeship to southwestern humor gave us Huck Finn, receives his due but this books' chief value is as a mural approximating those three miles of canvas rolled out as panoramas before the wondering gaze of audiences who knew a lot more about the Mississippi River after the show was over. And so will you."

River of Dreams - Update

Release date for River of Dreams: Imagining the Mississippi Before Mark Twain has been slated for June 2007. As you can see from the sidebar, it's already available for pre-order on Amazon.com - and numerous other reputable bookstores around the internet.

LSUP has also released its publication list for Spring 2007, which means that River of Dreams now has its own website here.

ISBN: 0-8071-3233-0 cloth
ISBN13: 978-0-8071-3233-3
272 pages, 26 Halftones, 1 Map, 6 x 9

River of Dreams - A First Glimpse

A first glimpse of the cover of River of Dreams: Imagining the Mississippi Before Mark Twain (Louisiana State University Press, Spring 2007). This is a first draft and subject to change before publication, but it gives a hint of what's to come. The background is a detail from Herzog Friedrich Paul Wilhelm von Württemberg's lithograph, Die Balize an der Mündung des Missisippi (1828-1835).

And to go along with the cover, here's the promotional copy for the book, soon to appear in the LSU Press Spring 2007 catalogue:

River of Dreams: Imagining the Mississippi before Mark Twain
Thomas Ruys Smith

The Mississippi River’s cultural role in antebellum America

Even in the decades before Mark Twain enthralled the world with his evocative representations of the Mississippi, the river played an essential role in American culture and consciousness. Throughout the antebellum era, the Mississippi acted as a powerful symbol of America’s conception of itself - and the world’s conception of America. As Twain understood, “The Mississippi is well worth reading about.” Thomas Ruys Smith’s River of Dreams is an examination of the Mississippi’s role in the imagination of the times, and explores its cultural position in antebellum literature, art, thought, and national life.

Presidents, politicians, authors, poets, painters, and international celebrities of every variety experienced the Mississippi in its Golden Age. They left an extraordinary collection of representations of the river in their wake, images which developed as America itself changed. From Thomas Jefferson’s vision for the Mississippi to Andrew Jackson and the rowdy river culture of the early nineteenth century, Smith charts the Mississippi’s shifting importance in the making of the nation. In contrast, he examines the accounts of European travelers, including Frances Trollope, Charles Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackeray, whose notorious views of the river were heavily influenced by the world of the steamboat and plantation slavery.

As the antebellum period progresses, Smith discusses the importance of visual representations of the Mississippi, exploring the ways in which views of the river, particularly giant moving panoramas that toured the world, echoed notions of manifest destiny and the westward movement. He evokes the river in the late antebellum years as a place of crime and mystery, especially in popular writing, and most notably in Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man. An epilogue discusses the Mississippi during the Civil War, when possession of the river became vital, symbolically as well as militarily. The epilogue also provides an introduction to Mark Twain, a product of the antebellum river world who was to resurrect its imaginative potential for a post-war nation and produce an iconic Mississippi that still flows through a wide and fertile floodplain in American literature.

From empire building in the Louisiana Purchase to the trauma of the Civil War, the Mississippi’s dominant symbolic meanings tracked the essential forces operating within the nation. As Smith shows in this groundbreaking work, the story of the imagined Mississippi River is the story of antebellum America itself.

Thomas Ruys Smith is a lecturer in American literature and culture at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom.

Big Muddy 6.1

My review of Jay Feldman's When The Mississippi Ran Backwards is about to appear in issue 6.1 of Big Muddy: A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley. It's a smart looking publication mostly devoted to new fiction and poetry.

Revue Française d'Études Américaines

Margaret Hall, Frances Trollope, Harriet Martineau

My article, ''The river now began to bear on our imaginations': Margaret Hall, Frances Trollope, Harriet Martineau and the Problem of the Antebellum Mississippi', is available for sale and download here and here. The special issue of the Revue Française d'Études Américaines dedicated to the Mississippi is available from Amazon France.


Update: Full text PDF available for free here.

Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing

'The Shanty-Boat' (from Willard Glazier's Down the Great River, 1887)

The Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing - featuring my chapter on the Mississippi: 'The Essence of America: The Mississippi River as Site and Symbol' - now has its own websites on the Cambridge University Press website:

Hardback; Paperback

More information as it emerges.