Open Rivers: Knowing the Mississippi

It was great to be asked to contribute something to Open Rivers, a fantastic new interdisciplinary journal "that recognizes rivers in general, and the Mississippi River in particular, as space for timely and critical conversations about the intersections between biophysical systems and human systems." Along with a number of other people to have written about the river, I was asked to respond to two questions: "How did you come to know the Mississippi River?  What does it mean, to you, to know the Mississippi River?" You can find my answer here, and below:

Mark Twain Journal

Solomon Eytinge, illustration for John Hay's "Jim Bludso" (1871)

I've got an article coming out in the next issue of the Mark Twain Journal (Fall 2015): “‘The Mississippi was a virgin field’: Reconstructing the River Before Mark Twain, 1865-1875.” This one was a long time coming! As you can see here, I've been working on this since at least 2009. Gosh, I think it might be even longer. Anyway, I'm delighted that it's coming out in the Mark Twain Journal, and I'm equally delighted with how many illustrations they've allowed me to include. It should look pretty lovely, at least. This is my attempt to build a picture of the cultural life of the Mississippi in the decade before Mark Twain properly claimed the river as a subject. It's still amazing to me how rich this subject is - I look at steamboat races, bridge building, art, literature, travel writing, and plenty of other things too. More information here on the journal's website. I'll update this post when it's available online. Enjoy.

UPDATE: for those who have access, it's now available here.

Complete University Guide: American Studies

A quick one: I was asked to put together the American Studies subject guide for the Complete University Guide - and it's now available here.

Southern Quarterly: Roustabouts, Steamboats, and the Old Way to Dixie: The Mississippi River and the Southern Imaginary in the Early Twentieth Century

I was thrilled to be invited to contribute something to the latest edition of the The Southern Quarterly, a special issue on the Mississippi that also features river luminaries like Christopher Morris, Michael Allen and Barbara Eckstein. All told, it's a brilliant slab of river writing that does a lot to cement the development of a field of study around the Mississippi - something that's been bubbling for the last few years. My article's titled "Roustabouts, Steamboats, and the Old Way to Dixie: The Mississippi River and the Southern Imaginary in the Early Twentieth Century." I take a look at a neglected body of river writings that blossomed between the publication of Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), his last major statement on the river, and Edna Ferber's Show Boat (1926), which redefined the river for decades to come. I focus on late-career works by Southern writers like George Washington Cable, Ruth McEnery Stuart and Mary Noailles Murfree, explore a variety of travel accounts, and end up in Tin Pan Alley. For those who have access, you can browse the entire issue here through Project Muse. Alternatively, I've uploaded my article here - enjoy.

Television: Myth Hunters / Anglia News

Long time, no update - so a quick couple of posts about things that I've been doing over the last year (gosh). First, television news. I'm featured in Episode 3, Season 3 of Myth Hunters - "The Lost Ship of the Mojave Desert" - mainly talking about the California Gold Rush. This was a fun gig. Here am I am, holding forth:

For the moment, the American version is available on YouTube, so grab it while you can, below. Otherwise, it'll undoubtedly pop up again on a history channel of some variety:


And then, at the end of last year, it was a pleasure to talk about highwaymen for Anglia News (the local news channel for Norwich and parts east) to commemorate the long-awaited opening of a road, the A11 (told you it was local news). Here I am, bloviating again, this time chez UEA:

More updates soon.

BrANCA Reading Group: The Leavenworth Case

I'm thrilled to be co-organising the next BrANCA (British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists) Reading Group in November. I'm even more thrilled about our choice of text: we'll be discussing Anna Katherine Green's pioneering detective novel The Leavenworth Case (1878), one of the bestselling books of the late nineteenth century. I'll put up a post on American Scrapbook about both the book and Green sometime soon. In the meantime, get your copy from Project Gutenberg here, or there's a Penguin Classics edition available if you prefer. Happy reading. And you can find out about what we got up to at the last Reading Group in Manchester here.

UPDATE: Full details about the event are now available on the BrANCA website.

In other news, as of today I'm the Head of the Department of American Studies at the University of East Anglia.

Must Read: Reviews

Must Read: Rediscovering American Bestsellers from Charlotte Temple to The Da Vinci Code has been receiving some gratifying reviews recently.

British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists - Inaugural Symposium

Tomorrow I'm heading out to the inaugural symposium of the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists - BrANCA for short - at the University of Sussex. I think that the creation of this organisation has been one of the more exciting academic developments of the past year or so, so I was even more thrilled to be asked to chair one of the panels. The full programme's available here. Looking forward to it!

The Readex Report: “A Family Newspaper”: Pearl Rivers and the Rebirth of the New Orleans Daily Picayune

My article on Pearl Rivers - poet, journalist, first female editor of an American daily newspaper - and her relationship with the New Orleans Times-Picayune has just been published in the Readex Report. The whole thing's available here. Make the acquaintance not just of Pearl Rivers herself, but a whole crew of pioneering newspaper women including Dorothy Dix and Catherine Cole. And don't forget The Weather Frog...

Public Lecture: Norfolk to New Orleans: Riding, Reading and Writing the Mississippi River, Norwich Forum, June 4th

Harriet Martineau, Jonathan Raban

This June, I'm delighted to be taking part in the UEA Showcase Week taking place at the Norwich Forum as part of the University's 50th anniversary celebrations. More details are available here, and the full schedule of talks (featuring some very hot tickets) is here. At 3pm on June 4th I'm going to be talking about Harriet Martineau and Jonathan Raban - two writers with Norfolk roots who travelled along the Mississippi River at rather different moments in its history. Readers with keen memories may remember that I've written about these two before - Martineau here (and in River of Dreams), and Raban here, if anyone wants to bone up in advance. The full blurb of the talk is below. Hope to see you there.

Heir Hunters

Last year I did some filming for an episode of BBC1's Heir Hunters that finally aired today. I was brought in to tell the story of the unhappy marriage between Nellie Grant, daughter of President Ulysses, and her British husband, Algernon Sartoris. Researching their union was a lot of fun, since it mainly involved digging into nineteenth century celebrity gossip. For a little while at least, Nellie and Algie were quite the golden couple, celebrated in publications across the globe. Then, things rapidly soured...

For a little while you can see the episode here. And I also wrote a post for American Scrapbook that includes a lot of the lovely detail that I couldn't get into the programme (like the descriptions of Nellie by Henry James). That's available here, forever - enjoy.

Nellie Grant and Algernon Sartoris

"Finding Your Roots": In Conversation with Branford Marsalis at the US Embassy

Branford Marsalis, me

Last week I was lucky enough to be asked to take part in an event at the US Embassy organised by PBS America to promote their new documentary series Finding Your Roots. They screened an episode that featured the New Orleans family histories of jazz legends Branford Marsalis and Harry Connick Jr. - you can watch a preview, here. Branford Marsalis himself flew in for the event, above, and I was part of a Q&A session with him after the screening. I'd certainly recommend watching the episode (indeed, the series) if you get a chance - it touches on fascinating dimensions of New Orleans history throughout, replaying so many of the issues and moments raised in Southern Queen in a very intimate way.

Gods of the Mississippi

Great news for anyone with even a passing interest in the social and cultural history of the Mississippi River: Michael Pasquier's Gods of the Mississippi is just about to be released by Indiana University Press. I'm delighted to say that I have a chapter in the collection. It's an exploration of a number of antebellum American new religious movements (the Vermont Pilgrims, Mormons, Millerites), their relationship with the Mississippi, and the ways in which echoes of these groups lived on in the writings of early Midwestern realists like Mark Twain, William Dean Howells and Edward Eggleston who grew up around them. But beyond that, this looks to be a very compelling set of essays which should very fruitfully extend our understanding of the river's role in national life.

I'm doubly delighted to say that River of Dreams also gets a kind hat-tip in Michael Pasquier's introduction - alongside Thomas Buchanan's wonderful Black Life on the Mississippi (that I reviewed here). This is what he has to say:

Gods of the Mississippi is available from Amazon.com here, Amazon.co.uk here, and can be previewed on Google Books here.

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.