Tuskegee’s Silent Histories: The Jennie C. Lee Papers and the Visual Archive Christa Holm Vogelius Jennie Cheatham Lee, the second choir director at the Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama, served at the historically black college during a crucial moment in its history. During her tenure from 1903 to 1928, the institute transitioned away from the leadership of Booker T. Washington, who was its first teacher and president from 1881 until his death in 1915. Like Lee’s alma mater, Fisk University, Tuskegee trained teachers who would serve southern rural schools and also helped shape musical traditions in the early part of the twentieth century. It was under Lee’s leadership that the Tuskegee Institute Singers rose to national recognition and brought widespread attention to the school, leading the way for the group’s consideration as “one of the finest college choirs in the country” under William Levi Dawson, its director from 1931 to 1956 (Pool 90). But in spite of Lee’s centrality to the school’s musical mission, not much is known about her life and work (Brooks 320–27). Lee’s personal archive in the A. S. Williams III Americana Collection at the University of Alabama offers a chance to remedy this lack but also suggests some of the challenges that gender and media pose to the reconstruction of history. The Lee papers are largely photographic, made up primarily of the disassembled pages of scrapbooks Lee kept during her years at Tuskegee. The album’s candid images and ephemera capture the day-to-day lives of primarily female Tuskegee students, teachers, and administrators—including trips to the beach, hat-making classes, and group photos of the choir and singers—and are supplemented only by a small number of textual documents, most of them printed programs rather than personal manuscripts. Lee’s own writing is sparse. In this sense, the archive, gendered female and encoded visually, offers a clear counter-balance [End Page 48] to the official Tuskegee documents, which were written disproportionately by male administrators and teachers. It is, as Ellen Gruber Garvey writes of the American scrapbook, “a window into the lives and thoughts of people who did not respond to the world with their own writing,” but it also offers perspectives into alternative institutional and literary histories (4). These images argue powerfully that there is more to institutions like Tuskegee than their printed tracts, treatises, and mission statements. At the same time, however, they pose problems precisely because they relate to other images rather than to writing and thereby refuse to serve as mere support for textual evidence. The perspective this visual collection provides is that of an aspirational Tuskegee, a Tuskegee where the arts were not primarily utilitarian and where educational successes could not be measured only in the professional employability of its students. But in the power struggle between image and text, these scrapbook pages have any number of points against them: they are fragmented and disassembled rather than whole and conclusive; they are kept by a female teacher rather than a male administrator; and they are archival and largely cloistered rather than printed and widely disseminated. Yet my argument here is that writing a full history of institutions such as Tuskegee—and the literary histories they enable us to trace—requires us to give space to precisely these types of archives. Shawn Michelle Smith argues that “visual culture not only reflects but also shapes the racialized formation of American identities. Archives of photographs with distinct visual genealogies function as sites through which narratives of national belonging and exclusion are created” (5). What, then, are the “visual genealogies” of the Lee archive? And what “narratives of national belonging” does this collection participate in? With a visual language that draws from the aspirational trappings of middle-class portraiture, Lee’s images present a stark contrast to the social documentary angle more typically visible in other textual and visual representations of early African American schools. verbal and visual histories of the tuskegee institute Although no detailed history of Tuskegee’s choir program or its faculty exists for the period prior to William Dawson’s tenure, it is clear that music played a significant role at...

Lydia Maria Child's Abolition Democracy, and Ours Robert Fanuzzi The proposition that Lydia Maria Child's lifelong literary and political antislavery advocacy belongs to us and to the social justice aspirations we nourish for twenty-first-century academic literary scholarship is both a self-serving claim of literary conservatorship and a potentially disruptive change in the way we use periodization. Child's rediscovery in the 1990s, I submit, maximized a potential within women's studies literary recoveries by making it impossible to screen the nineteenth century's racial and anti-racist history from the practices and instruments of our own knowledge production. Since, or because of, Child's recovery, the American nineteenth century has changed for us, so that it is no longer a mummified object but an unfinished past that continues to unfold amid our contemporary injustices and demands the full measure of our scholarship, teaching, and institutional citizenship.1 What has brought us to this juncture, in which the proper consideration of Lydia Maria Child's aspirations for her antislavery literature includes our profession's aspirations for social justice? Carolyn Karcher's 1994 recovery of Child helped to create a temporal feedback loop in which we are able to recognize the occasion and setting for nineteenth-century literary scholarship in the riots, the criminal court injustices, the student movements, and the racial violence of today. In the preface to The First Woman in the Republic, Karcher situates her scholarship in the present, referring to the fluorescence of women's studies and antislavery literary scholarship that finally brought Child within the nineteenth-century Americanist orbit. More striking, however, is Karcher's use of another temporal point of departure for her recovery of Child: the devastating intellectual, political, and economic consequences of the reversal of Reconstruction in the late 1870s, which left both Child's reputation and the abolition movement for dead. Karcher uses the remainder of her preface to reconstruct a biographical and literary timeline up to Child's death in 1880, but in many ways the critical starting point is 1876 and the long shadow it has cast over both US history and historiography. As a result, Karcher's reflections on Child's thwarted antislavery advocacy are not limited to a single year but to the synchronicity or sum total of all those times that repeat and compound the [End Page 25] effect of Reconstruction's repeal. Ultimately, she attributes her interest in Child to this titanic repudiation of the nineteenth century's social justice milestone: "Child attracted me because she boldly tackled problems of racial, sexual, and economic justice that our society has yet to resolve" (xii). If Child's unique ability to channel the antislavery politics of the nineteenth century to the twenty-first rests with our failure to resolve them, then let us examine and intertwine two critical timelines of Karcher's literary recovery: the confluence of antislavery literary scholarship and women's studies in the 1990s and the black radical thinking that has germinated from historiographical reflections on the end of Reconstruction. The former is manifest in our critical impulse to bring to fruition a literary career whose arc Child firmly connected to the political fortunes of abolition. She saw their end even in 1841, when she was gathering abolitionist poems and literature for the gift book to be called The Liberty Bell; to Ellis Gray Loring she wrote: "What shall I do? The temptation is to quit reforms, but that is of the devil; for there is clearly more work for me to do in that field" (Child to Loring 44). The second temporality is evident in Child's fatalistic conviction that precisely because her antislavery arguments could never be won, she would be repurposing and reliving her literary accomplishments until the day she died. Nearly three decades after she published An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans, she replied to an anti-abolitionist correspondent addressed as Mrs. Mason by marshaling nearly the same evidence and using the same style with a litigator's glee, as if she were discovering the raison d'être for her first major work all over again (Child to Mason). An Appeal existed...

Seriality and Susanna Rowson's Sincerity Karen A. Weyler What makes a work teachable? How do we prepare students to read early American authors and genres when virtually everything we will teach in such a course will be unfamiliar to them? Sheridan Blau, in The Literature Workshop, argues that one of the secrets to engaging teaching is providing enough context so that students can comprehend a work, without offering so much that we substitute lecture for student engagement and discovery. He uses the example of Randall Jarrell's "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner." With direct knowledge of World War II receding into the distant past, this splendid poem hovers on the edge of legibility for many students; absent knowledge that men operating machine guns were confined to the claustrophobic spaces of a ball turret for the duration of an airplane flight, students produce wildly creative but ultimately frustrating misinterpretations of "wet fur" and "black flak" (qtd. in Blau 191).1 With this question of context in mind, how can we prepare students to read early serial fiction? And perhaps even more to the point, why would we want to teach serial fiction, when there are perfectly good reprint editions of early American novels that provide, in a single volume, the kind of textual infrastructure to which our students are accustomed: a unified, coherent text; footnotes; chronologies; author biographies; critical responses; and the like. In reading serial fiction, we give up these conveniences and create conditions that encourage students to teach themselves and to apply knowledge they have acquired in other contexts. Susanna Rowson's 1803–4 novel Sincerity dramatically and memorably animates the persistent inequalities faced by women and poor people in Anglo-American culture and the physical, social, and mental costs of living up to unattainable early-nineteenth-century feminine ideals. Moreover, teaching Sincerity as a text-in-parts encourages students to engage in metacognitive thinking about their reading experiences: it encourages them to think beyond the plot and reflect on reading as a process. Our class discussions thus oscillated between two central issues: interpreting how parts of Sincerity were embedded within multiple contexts, and interpreting how temporalities of reading shape interpretation. In this essay I will first explore why the novel-as-material-book has held a privileged status in American literary studies and what we might gain by moving beyond that model; then I will discuss how [End Page 162] teaching Sincerity with an emphasis on seriality facilitated student engagement in primary research and encouraged them to bring their own experiences as consumers of serial works to bear upon an early American literary text. privileging the book Scholars of British literature have historically been more attentive than scholars of American literature to the serial publication of long fiction, particularly with respect to Charles Dickens's work in magazines and standalone serials and to the triple-decker novels that were so popular among private subscription-based circulating libraries. By contrast, the serial novel receiving the greatest attention in nineteenth-century US literature is Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, even though that text is more likely to be discussed as a unified novel than as a serial. Fiction in serial format formed an essential component of post-Revolutionary magazine culture. As Jared Gardner has pointed out, the two most prolific novelists of the early republic, Susanna Rowson and Charles Brockden Brown, ended their careers writing not standalone novels but periodical pieces, as did Isaiah Thomas and Judith Sargent Murray (140–41). The largely anonymous, more responsive, and more democratic form of the magazine clearly appealed to writers as well as readers. Why, then, has early US serial fiction—specifically early-nineteenth-century magazine fiction—received markedly less attention than its British counterparts? This critical lacuna has been created partly by technological factors and by the reciprocal relationship between teaching and literary scholarship in the field of American literature. For most of the twentieth century, early American sentimental fiction—and it is fair to assert that while sentimentality is not the only mode in early American fiction, it predominates—was dismissed as sub-literary. The rise of feminist criticism, reader-response criticism, New Historicism, and...

Theorizing Democratic Feelings, Disagreement, and the Temporal Child in Catharine Maria Sedgwick's The Linwoods Marissa Carrere Written in the wake of the Nullification Crisis over tariffs on manufactured goods in which South Carolina threatened to leave the Union, Catharine Maria Sedgwick's 1835 novel The Linwoods stages the anxieties that condense around the desire to believe that democracy follows timeless certainties and the knowledge that its process necessarily entails negotiating contingent and ephemeral opinions. The Linwoods suggests that such irresolvable tension is vital to democratic thought, and Sedgwick uses the figure of the child to represent that tension. Because of nineteenth-century constructions of children as both malleable and transcendent, the figure of the child permits Sedgwick to dramatize the conflict between the self-evident truth and radical revisability of the Constitution and the patriotic feelings of American citizens. As the novel investigates the nature of both national and political commitments, Sedgwick uses the figural child to assert normative claims in response to her particular politico-historical moment while troubling the theoretical integrity of those claims. In limning Sedgwick's move toward the theoretical realm, my project aims to expand our understanding of how the child operates in the political literary imagination and to recognize Sedgwick's contributions to the archives of democracy. Contextualizing these aims demands that we read nineteenth-century American women's writing through the lens of political theory. Without question, the feminist recovery of nineteenth-century female-authored fiction introduced women writers to the political clime and canon; indeed, the inclusion of women involved disrupting the fantasy of an apolitical or ahistorical [End Page 33] aesthetic canon and recognizing literary texts as politically, socially, and historically contingent. However, literary historians have not fully examined how these texts theorize democratic governance and participation. While we read women's texts for their political valences and explicit political critiques and as political acts themselves, we might also ask how these texts variously theorize democracy not only in the ideological terms of gendered relationships to the political center but also at the level of philosophical principle. Admittedly, in seeking the conceptual nature of political critique I may be trying to tease a distinction that will ever elude us: What is the difference between reading a literary text for its political engagements and as a mode of political theory? How do we discern which aspects of a literary text count as articulations of political critique? Even without resolving these questions, we can acknowledge the need to rethink and revise the disproportionately (white-and) male-authored literary archive of democracy.1 This essay begins to offer a response by reading through the historical in order to reach the conceptual in Sedgwick's writing. the nullification crisis and the temporal child In the opening chapter of The Linwoods, a group of boys on a playground confound their adult audience with the un-childlikeness of their politically charged play. Mr. Linwood turns to his son and asks: "Herbert, can you tell me what these boys are about? They seem rather to be at work than play" (17). Herbert replies that the boys are "throwing up a redoubt to protect [their] fort" and to "keep off the British" (17–18), and Mr. Linwood is appalled by "the seeds of rebellion springing up in their young hot bloods": A loud huzzaing was heard from the fort—"What does that mean?" asked Mr. Linwood. "The whigs are hanging a tory, sir." "The little rebel rascals!—Herbert!—you throwing up your hat and huzzaing too!" (18) With this scene, Sedgwick establishes the intergenerational conflict between loyalist Mr. Linwood and his revolutionary children that the novel will work to resolve. Critical readings of The Linwoods generally characterize this conflict as a domestic political allegory responding to the nationalist concerns of its contemporary moment, in particular the passing of the Revolutionary generation and the threat of disunion raised by the Nullification Crisis of 1832–33.2 By casting these concerns about the current generation's national identity into the moment of its discordant origins, Sedgwick imagines the possibility of a reconciled and [End Page 34] healthy national future through proper models of republican virtue. In keeping with other domestic...

Fostering the Future:Lydia Maria Child's Environmental Engagements in The Juvenile Miscellany and Beyond Karen L. Kilcup Natural history and Native Americans figure among early-nineteenth-century white Americans' most significant obsessions. Often conflating the second into the first—depicting Indigenous peoples as "natural" and aligned with nonhuman animals—they authored histories, poems, novels, and tracts for both adults and children.1 Editing and writing for The Juvenile Miscellany—as well as contributing children's books and essays outside that venue—Lydia Maria Child spoke beyond her contemporaries' norms, reinventing imperialist natural history discourses, captivity narratives, and histories of America's settlement. Child educated young people and their mothers about early relations between settlers and Native Americans and problematized conventional notions of "civilized" and "savage," as she invested Indigenous peoples with personhood and told harsh truths that would propel Americans toward a more just future. In doing so, she promulgated several ideas that, more than 150 years later, would be included among the concepts that define environmental justice. These principles include "mutual respect and justice for all peoples"; "the education of present and future generations" on social and environmental issues; resistance to the exploitation of lands, peoples, and cultures; fair public policy; and recognition of the "special legal and natural relationship of Native Peoples to the U.S. government through treaties, agreements, compacts, and covenants affirming sovereignty and self-determination" ("Principles"). Child's work thus comprehends the interconnections among racial justice, environmental access and agency, cultural and political sovereignty, and human rights that drive contemporary social justice activists.2 Child tests her innovative ideas in nascent form in her early story "Adventure in the Woods," in which she promotes mutual respect and education. The story depicts how immigrant children Rachel and Benjamin, lost in the forest near their Boston home, encounter an Indian woman to whom Rachel and their mother have earlier provided food. Terrified because adults have told them many "frightful stories" concerning their Indigenous neighbors' "wickedness [End Page 13] and cruelty," the children fear her (7). But Child rejects the standard captivity narrative plot: her Native woman, whom the author suggests is maternal (and hence civilized), returns them to their worried family and visits them annually thereafter. Although Child invokes the Noble Savage, she nevertheless rejects fabricated stories that stress Indians' violence, educating future Americans—protagonists and readers—that they need to build a respectful interethnic community. She develops more complex views about land appropriation and Native sovereignty three years later in The First Settlers of New-England: or, Conquest of the Pequods, Narragansets and Pokanokets. As Related by a Mother to Her Children (1829). Like "Adventure in the Woods," this book foregrounds a mother figure to help child readers reimagine troubling histories and explore just citizenship. First Settlers constructs a pedagogical dialogue between "Mother" and two daughters that revises normative histories of settlement and Indian wars, inverting the categories "civilized" and "savage." Child ventriloquizes her sentiments through the children's observations. Daughter Caroline, for example, asserts, "I think, mother, it is somewhat extraordinary, that the colonists should complain with so much bitterness of the Pequods [sic] having punished with severity those who stole their corn, and burnt their hay or grass, and shot their game; after they themselves had so inhumanly destroyed the dwellings, killed the people, and refused to comply with the request of the Pequods to lay aside arms, and hear what their chief had to propose" (40–41). Depicting the resource wars waged against America's Indigenous peoples, Child underscores important environmental justice principles that include resisting exploitation of Indigenous peoples, honoring their treaties, and affirming their sovereignty. Child also published essays in the Miscellany that emphasized environmental justice. In May 1829 she issued one of a series of dialogues between the pseudonymous Aunt M. and her nephews. "American History" begins by praising Roger Williams and continues by relating the New England colonies' troubled histories, focusing finally on Connecticut. Although Aunt M. excuses the Pequods "for being savages," she contends that "it is much more difficult to excuse the cruelty of the English settlers, who had been educated in principles of Christian humanity" (202). The settlers attack the helpless Pequods, setting fire to...

Accessing Early Black Print Eric Gardner My contribution to the 2014 mla roundtable from which this forum grew centered on the word “access,” treating it capaciously and moving from questions of digitization and the preparation of editions to broad questions of praxis. In this Legacy forum I reiterate some of my arguments, update others, and emphasize how those arguments apply especially to Black women’s histories, texts, and places in print culture studies. Now as then, much that I have to say expresses worry and sometimes anger, but, as I did at the roundtable, I want to open with a moment of joy. Drafting the original piece, I snuck time to read the Legacy tributes to Frances Smith Foster and was especially enriched by Elizabeth Engelhardt’s “Cultivate Your Look of Astonished Disdain: Seven Mentoring Lessons from Frances Smith Foster.” “Lesson #3” is “The stakes are too high for us to be bored or boring.” “At the end of … [Foster’s] classes,” Engel-hardt writes, “the lesson was becoming clear. This stuff matters too much to waste time. And we have to do it together” (233–34). This moment remains my primer on access—a broad and expansive “we,” a real sense of duty, and a recognition that with access comes immense responsibility. Digitization has, of course, changed not only the approaches and some of the focal texts of African American literary study but also the very concept of “access.” The North American Slave Narratives project (nasn) on the Documenting the American South website (one of William L. Andrews’s greatest gifts to the field) remains a beacon. It is free, usable with even a slow Internet connection, carefully planned and executed, and rich in rare resources. It makes selective images available and provides some limited apparatus. Further, what might simply seem a massive collection is actually a powerful argument for the diversity of the genre.1 But “digital” does not mean accessible, and far too few of our resources are available even through venues like the nasn project. Try, for example, to find a single early issue of the Christian Recorder online without a subscription to Accessible Archives. If you are at a Research I institution, visit the database page of a regional comprehensive university or a small liberal arts college and imagine doing your work—our work—with the resources many academics actually have. Better yet, visit a handful of public libraries in diverse neighborhoods [End Page 25] and see how many make available the Black Abolitionist Papers, the Black Biographical Dictionaries project, or the Chadwyck-Healey African American poetry collection, to say nothing of the newer historical Black newspaper projects from vendors like ProQuest and ebsco. I submit that if we rediscover wonderful texts and only twenty or even two thousand individuals can access them, we have failed—especially if those twenty or two thousand are only at locations that still have significant library budgets. These issues are particularly important to African American women’s literature. Even as we are beginning to understand that Black and/or abolitionist periodicals often provided the best and sometimes only venues for early Black writers, we have barely begun to confront the fact that such venues were all the more important for Black women, who were generally denied print participation even more than Black men were. Even the small number of Black women able to create and/or find opportunities for book publication often relied heavily on periodicals. Consider, for example, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s single novel originally published between boards and her three novels serialized in the African Methodist Episcopal Church newspaper. Or think of exciting rediscovered writers like Lizzie Hart and Edmonia Goodelle Highgate, who seem to have published only in periodicals. While select projects have allowed scholars to begin to consider such writers, their work will never be widely accessible until we honestly explore alternative recovery and distribution methods and learn the lessons that the nasn project has been teaching for years. Similarly, almost all of the ongoing “big data” projects tied to nineteenth-century American literature will continue to ignore or dismiss Black voices (especially Black women’s voices) until their data sets have wider and...

Misinformation and Fluidity in Print Culture; or, Searching for Sojourner Truth and Others John Ernest Let me note at the outset that I am limiting my comments to nineteenth-century print culture, although this forum extends beyond the period I usually study. One of the questions we entertained for this exchange was, “How might a renewed attention to the lived experiences of individuals enrich a focus on printed materials?” When I reviewed the questions to write these remarks, I realized that I really don’t care whether my focus on printed materials is enriched in any way. It seems plenty rich as it is. What matters more to me is what happens when you turn this question around and ask, “How might renewed attention to the whole of print materials, and not just the relative handful of texts generally studied, enrich our understanding of the lived experiences of individual African Americans?” The answer, of course, is that we need to get into the complexities of print culture if we are ever to make any real progress in recovering African American history and doing justice to the lived experiences of individual African Americans in the nineteenth century. Of course, our studies will take us into a great deal of misinformation, which is why we need to attend to a broad range of printed materials. Sojourner Truth remains, ironically, a great example of the importance of print culture study, in part because she reminds us of the dangers of relying on a small sampling of texts in our search for the eloquence or the pure discursive power of the past. It is difficult, after all, to imagine an understanding of African American literary history that does not include Sojourner Truth—usually by way of a speech or two, sometimes by way of the Narrative—but Truth herself never wrote a word. One can note, of course, that the Narrative was written and edited by those close to her, which is largely how we have approached Truth, at least when we have dealt with mediating circumstances at all. More often, trusting the narrative, we have simply praised Truth for asking famously “Ar’n’t I a Woman?” and for asking Frederick Douglass, “Frederick, is God dead?” But a broader study of print culture reveals that Truth probably did not ask that particular feminist question, at least not in the speech for which she is famous for asking it. And as for her challenging question to Douglass, one source places that confrontation in 1847, another in 1850, another in 1852, another in 1859, and another in [End Page 22] 1863, and the locations for the confrontation range widely—from an antislavery meeting in Salem, Ohio, to the sidewalk in front of the White House just after Douglass met with President Lincoln. Do such complications matter? I think so. Both the feminist and the religious significance of Truth’s life and thought are more complicated but ultimately more powerful when we directly confront the challenge of recovering her presence from the past, for we are then forced to reflect on ourselves as we reflect on her—which is, by my account, a lesson Truth tried to teach throughout her career. As Truth’s example suggests, even for those who claim to approach individual African American lives with care, it is apparently tough to get things right. Negotiating the labyrinths of print culture, in fact, is very much what a great deal of African American print culture is about. This was quite clear in the 1827 editorial that defined the mission of the first African American newspaper, Freedom’s Journal. “We wish to plead our own cause,” the editorial announced, for too long have others spoken for us. Too long has the public been deceived by misrepresentations, in things which concern us dearly, though in the estimation of some mere trifles; for though there are many in society who exercise towards us benevolent feelings; still (with sorrow we confess it) there are others who make it their business to enlarge upon the least trifle, which tends to the discredit of any person of color; and pronounce anathemas and denounce our whole body for the misconduct of...