Friday, April 12, 2019

Coming soon! Deep Water: The Mississippi River in the Age of Mark Twain


Coming late 2019: Deep Water: The Mississippi River in the Age of Mark Twain! More updates soon

Update: looks like it's already available for preorder!

Amazon UK

Amazon US

Current release date is December 17th 2019.


Friday, January 11, 2019

The Forum: Mark Twain


Back in July I was delighted to be part of an episode of The Forum on BBC World Service dedicated to Mark Twain. You can listen to it here

Friday, April 27, 2018

Now in paperback: Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music: American Changed Through Music


Complete with a spiffy new cover, Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music: America Changed Through Music is soon to be released in paperback! June 12th, apparently.

Available from Amazon UK here, Amazon US here.

Wednesday, February 07, 2018

Center for Mark Twain Studies: Quarry Farm Fellowship


With enormous thanks to the Center for Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, I'm thrilled to be one of the Quarry Farm Fellows this year. This means that for two weeks in the summer of 2018, along with my family, I'm going to be living and working at Quarry Farm, Mark Twain's summer retreat and the place where he wrote many of his most important books (Adventures of Huckleberry Finn chief among them). While there, I'll be spending my time on my next book, provisionally entitled: Deep Water: The Mississippi River in the Age of Mark Twain. Here's my blurb for the Quarry Farm website:


 A full list of the 2018 Fellows is available here - a tremendous list of projects!

Tuesday, March 14, 2017

Readex Report: Ralph Keeler


In my continuing effort to keep the memory of Ralph Keeler alive, I've just published a short account of his career and disappearance in the Readex Report (Vol 12, Issue 1): "The Lost Prince of American Bohemians: The Strange Life and Mysterious Death of Ralph Keeler, Literary Vagabond." You can check it out here.

Tuesday, January 17, 2017

America Changed Through Music - More Advance Praise

I'm thrilled to say that our collection Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music: America Changed Through Music has garnered some more praise - this time from Rob Young, author, amongst many other things, of the magnificent Electric Eden. Here's what he had to say:
The Anthology of American Folk Music is a talismanic casket of musical treasures, containing the key to decoding the tangled patterns of Harry Smith’s interests in multiple art forms. This valuable essay collection offers invigorating and learned perspectives on the Anthology and its connections with folklore, magic, and hidden histories of America. It’s a celebration of Smith’s maverick verve and shamanic energy, reinstating him as a wonder-working polymath whose occult activities rippled out widely into 20th century culture.
- Rob Young, author of Electric Eden and Editor-at-Large of The Wire magazine

Wednesday, December 14, 2016

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


I'm delighted to say that tomorrow is the release date for Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music: America Changed Through Music (Routledge) - a collection of essays about this landmark collection of music that I've been working on with my colleague Ross Hair for a good little while. It started life as a conference in 2012 marking the 60th anniversary of the Anthology - much more information about that here.

For those who don't know, the Anthology of American Folk Music was a pioneering collection of songs released by Folkways records in 1952. It contained eighty-four commercial recordings of American vernacular and folk music originally issued between 1927 and 1932, and featured an eclectic and idiosyncratic mixture of blues and hillbilly songs, ballads old and new, dance music, gospel, and numerous other performances less easy to classify. Harry Smith, the curator of this collection, was himself an extraordinary polymath - a collector, musicologist, painter, film-maker, and much more - who overlaid his musical selections with mystical symbolism and esoteric knowledge. Taken together, the collection has been delighting and perplexing its listeners ever since.  

Despite its high-profile fans and endless influence, this is the first book devoted to the Anthology. We are thrilled that so many wonderful people agreed to contribute to the collection. Alongside scholarly discussions of the collection's methods, meanings and music, we also have essays by contemporary musicians Nathan Salsburg and Sharron Kraus, and an afterword by Rani Singh, Director of the Harry Smith Archives and one-time assistant to Smith himself. 

We've already garnered some nice praise, too:
The Anthology of American Folk Music is an extraordinary cultural entity, one that has assumed mythical status. And Ross Hair and Thomas Ruys Smith’s fascinating collection manages to preserve our wonder at the music and at the eccentricity of its curator, while bringing new insights and fresh arguments to its history. Just as the Anthology is full of strange delights, so too is this book.
- Professor John Street, author of Music and Politics.
You can find the book on the Routledge site here.

It's available on amazon UK here, and amazon US here. The kindle edition is affordable! It should be out in paperback soon. Enjoy!

Saturday, October 29, 2016

Missing Ralph Keeler: Comparative American Studies


Many moons ago I came across a couple of oblique references to Ralph Keeler while researching travel accounts of the Mississippi River in the wake of the Civil War. He quickly proved to be too intriguing to ignore. After a paper at BAAS 2012 and a lot of digging around, I managed to piece together an account of his career and, in particular, his very significant literary friendships with writers like Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Thomas Bailey Aldrich that has a lot to tell us about the literary world in the decade after the war. "Missing Ralph Keeler: Bohemians, Brahmins and Literary Friendships in the Gilded Age" has just been published in Comparative American Studies, 14:2 (2016), 1-23. It's available here, for those with access. And for a limited time, even those without a subscription should be able to read it here. I hope this lays his ghost to rest!

The Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South


A belated announcement that my chapter on highwayman Joseph Thompson Hare (remember him?) has been published in Fred Hobson and Barbara Ladd's Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South. It's a wonderful volume and a thrill to be in such good company. More information available here.

Wednesday, September 30, 2015

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:


Sunday, September 13, 2015

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.

Tuesday, September 08, 2015

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.

Friday, July 31, 2015

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.

Thursday, July 30, 2015

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.

Friday, August 01, 2014

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.

Thursday, October 31, 2013

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!

Monday, September 23, 2013

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...

Thursday, May 09, 2013

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.

Wednesday, March 06, 2013

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