On Tour

Throughout February I'm embarking on what has turned out to be something of a micro-tour.

♠ On February 6th I'll speaking about Joseph Thompson Hare and other Transatlantic outlaws at Oxford University's new Transatlantic Literature in Context seminar series. English Faculty Seminar Room B, 5-6.30pm.

♠ On February 13th I'll be speaking at the University of Hertfordshire, about Mark Twain, the Mississippi, and other river writings in the decade after the Civil War. Details to follow.

♠ And on February 20th, I'll be talking about Twain again, this time at the University of Birmingham. Details are available here - Arts Building, Room 439, 4pm.

If you're attached to, or in the vicinity of, any of those institutions, come and say hello. Looking forward to it.

BBC History Magazine Travel Special: New Orleans

BBC History Magazine kindly asked me to contribute to the history travel supplement that comes with this month's issue (January 2013). I was very happy to oblige - and, unsurprisingly, picked New Orleans as my historical destination of choice. A few scans below:

UEA Christmas Lectures for Children 2012

(Tickets available here)

I'm very excited to be giving one of the University of East Anglia Christmas Lectures for Children this year.

Out Now: Must Read: Rediscovering American Bestsellers from Charlotte Temple to The Da Vinci Code

I'm happy to say that Must Read: Rediscovering American Bestsellers from Charlotte Temple to The Da Vinci Code (Continuum: 2012) is out now in all formats, including Kindle. Here it is on the Continuum website, Amazon US and Amazon UK. You can read early reviews here.

You can also get a taster of the book on the Bloomsbury Literary Studies blog, who posted an edited extract from Ardis Cameron's great chapter on Peyton Place, here. Enjoy.

Happy Halloween

This October, over on my nineteenth-century popular-culture blog American Scrapbook, I've been taking part in the annual Countdown to Halloween blogging marathon, looking for traces of Halloween in centuries past. I've distilled the essence of those investigations into a guest-post for the I. B. Tauris blog, available here. Enjoy, and Happy Halloween.

Review: American Literary Scholarship

Blacklegs, Card Sharps and Confidence Men has received a nice mention in Alan Gribben's chapter on Mark Twain in the 2010 edition of American Literary Scholarship. He writes:

America Changed Through Music: Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music at 60 - press coverage

America Changed Through Music: Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music at 60 - the one day conference and musical extravaganza that I've been organising along with my UEA colleague Ross Hair - took place yesterday, and we couldn't be more delighted with the way it went. There should be some video of the musical performances available on the official website at some point in the not too distant future.

In the run-up to the conference, we were also delighted with the amount of media coverage that the event, and the 60th anniversary of the Anthology, received. I was interviewed for a great article in the Financial Times, "Where the Weird Things Are", by Richard Clayton, which is available here.

"Where the weird things are"

And last weekend I was in-studio with Cerys Matthews on her BBC 6Music show. The audio of that interview is available below. Huge thanks to everyone who helped those things come together, as well as everyone who came along, spoke or performed on the day itself.

Must Read: Rediscovering American Bestsellers - More Advance Praise

I'm pleased to say that Must Read: Rediscovering American Bestsellers from Charlotte Temple to The Da Vinci Code has garnered some more advance praise. The first comes from Leon Jackson, author of the brilliant The Business of Letters: Authorial Economies in Antebellum America:

Must Read breathes new life into the study of best-sellers, rescuing them from not only the enormous condescension of posterity but also from the flattering but often reductive readings of modern academics. With its artful blend of textual analysis, historicization, and theoretical speculation, the contributors challenge us to reread and rethink a host of works, ranging from short stories and sentimental novellas to advice manuals and modern blockbusters. For anyone with an interest in the contours of American print culture from the eighteenth century to the present, Must Read is itself a must read work.

The second comes from Lisa Botshon, co-editor of the essential Middlebrow Moderns: Popular American Women Writers of the 1920s:

This pathbreaking collection provides a unique contribution to the study of American literature, bringing to the fore a broad survey of popular literature from a variety of eras and genres, and bringing to our attention a number of previously neglected yet essential bestselling works. A valuable addition to literary and cultural studies, Must Read is a must read for students and scholars of American popular culture and American literature more generally.

More updates soon.

America Changed Through Music: Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music at 60

I'm currently co-organising a one day event to mark the 60th anniversary of Harry Smith's ridiculously seminal Anthology of American Folk Music. The deadline for paper submissions has just ended and we're very excited about the programme of speakers and subjects that's coming together. Above, you can see the original conference artwork by the genius artist and animator Drew Christie. And on the day, we're going to have some free musical performances by modern musicians breathing new life into some of the songs from the Anthology. To find out more please visit the conference website, americachangedthroughmusic.com. September 15th, UEA London - make sure to save the date!

Advance praise for Must Read: Rediscovering American Bestsellers

Some advance praise for Must Read: Rediscovering American Bestsellers (coming soon) from Paul Gutjahr, editor, amongst many other things, of this fantastic anthology of popular nineteenth century literature. He writes:

"Although the past two decades have seen a sizeable increase in scholarly interest in bestsellers in the American context, there remains a great deal of unexplored territory when it comes to such literature. Must Read goes a long way in addressing this deficiency by examining a tremendous range of such literature with great critical care, insight, and theoretical sophistication. Must Read is a must read for anyone interested in American bestsellers."

Review: Journal of Early American History

Southern Queen: New Orleans in the Nineteenth Century has been reviewed in the Journal of Early American History. David Anderson (Swansea University) writes:

Thomas Ruys Smith’s new book on the social and cultural milieu of nineteenth century New Orleans [...] [is] a richly documented and vivid history that invokes the individuality, the otherness, of a city that is at once familiar and strangely foreign, beguiling yet daunting, for both tourists and residents alike. 

[...]

Using an eclectic blend of contemporary travel accounts and letters [...] Smith evokes an intriguing portrait of a vivacious, cosmopolitan nineteenth century American city, a city unlike any other.

[...]

Southern Queen is an engaging, lively and accessible narrative [...] In engaging with the costs of memory Smith’s New Orleans is embroiled in a conversation with the past, with the dead who reside in its memory, and with those mythical figures, places and spaces, that continue to have such resonance in the national and international consciousness.

You can read other reviews of Southern Queen here.

BAAS 2012: Missing Ralph Keeler

(Ralph Keeler, via)

Later today I'm going to be speaking at this year's British Association for American Studies Conference, hosted by the University of Manchester. My paper's entitled: "Missing Ralph Keeler: Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and the life and death of a Literary Vagabond." It's a starting point for a longer article I plan to write over the coming months. And if you want to know a little more about the enigmatic figure of Keeler, you can take a look at my new blog, American Scrapbook.

Guest Lecture: Queen's University Belfast

On Wednesday March 14th I'm going to be travelling to Queen's University Belfast to give a paper as part of their American History Colloquium. I'll be talking about outlaw Joseph Thompson Hare, pictured above. The full title is: "'We raked the wilderness': The Dying Confession of Joseph Hare and the Image of the Highwayman in the Antebellum South". It starts at 4pm, and, I believe, is in Peter Froggatt Centre (PFC) 2/018.

This paper comes out of work I was doing last summer, so it'll be nice to finally give it a public airing. And should you wish to make the acquaintance of Hare and his misadventures, there's a version of his story contained here, in P. R. Hamblin's 1836 collection United States Criminal History; Being a True Account of the Most Horrid Murders, Piracies, High-Way Robbers, &c. (Fayetteville, Mason & De Puy). Enjoy. You'll be hearing more about him in due course.

Coming Soon: Must Read: Rediscovering American Bestsellers

It's been a while in the planning, but I'm very pleased to say that Must Read: Rediscovering American Bestsellers from Charlotte Temple to The Da Vinci Code, co-edited with my colleague Professor Sarah Churchwell, will be published later this year by Continuum. Above, a sneak peak of the cover. Below, a little bit about the collection.

Studies in American Culture: “Bring Our Country Back”: Country Music, Conservatives, and the Counter-Culture in 1968.

My article, '“Bring Our Country Back”: Country Music, Conservatives, and the Counter-Culture in 1968', has been published in Studies in American Culture (34.1, October 2011).

"All distinction of colour was lost"

(via NYPL)

Today marks the 200th anniversary of the second and final fight between English boxing champion Tom Cribb and American ex-slave Tom Molineaux. Taken together, both fights make up one of the most significant Transatlantic moments in early nineteenth century culture, encapsulating so many of the animating tensions of the age. As Kasia Boddy put it, the encounters between Cribb and Molineaux were amongst "the most mythologized events of the Regency."

Review: Times Higher Education

Southern Queen: New Orleans in the Nineteenth Century has been reviewed in Times Higher Education by Professor Helen Taylor (Exeter). She describes the book as an "important new study", and writes:

"Although New Orleans' early colonial and more recent years are well documented, Ruys Smith's book is one of only a handful of 19th-century chronicles. It covers the key events and phenomena that gave the city such resonance in the global imagination [...] When so much hagiographic and melodramatic cultural production ("literary treacle", in the geographer Peirce F. Lewis' words) has been poured over New Orleans, Ruys Smith deserves credit for this clear-sighted and judicious survey of its most complex and fascinating century."

You can read the full review here.

History Today: The Big Uneasy

History Today, August 2011

My article on New Orleans and its historic relationship with disasters of one kind and another is up now on the History Today website, and out in print next week. It was a pleasure to write, and they've done a lovely job with the illustrations. I think it pinpoints a lot of things in miniature that I touch on in depth in Southern Queen. So enjoy! Below, further information about some of the figures that I mention, and links to some of the sources that I used.

Out Now: Southern Queen: New Orleans in the Nineteenth Century

Southern Queen: New Orleans in the Nineteenth Century, is out today, published by Continuum.

BBC History Magazine: New Orleans in 1858

My travel guide to New Orleans in 1858 is out today in this month's BBC History Magazine (June 2011). This was a fun piece to write, not least because it threw up some interesting research questions. Much of the material I had to hand because of Southern Queen, but it also caused me to have to think about some peculiar specifics.