Project MUSE®: Early American Literature - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/49
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Early American Literature.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 35, no. 3 (2000) through current issueLatest Articles: Early American LiteratureTWOProject MUSE®Early American Literature1534-147X0012-8163Latest articles in Early American Literature. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Editors' Note
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982831
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For the past two years, we have been greatly anticipating this issue of Early American Literature, as it is the first special issue published under our coeditorship, and we are eager to share it with you. Led by guest editors Jay David Miller and Kaitlin Tonti, this special issue is titled "New Directions in Quaker Literary History," and it moves us beyond discussions of early Quakers as supporting actors who play a secondary role to Puritans in the cultural formations of early America. Issue 61.1 asks us to consider Quakers as central and foundational to the ways we understand the period. What is more, this issue demands that we engage with Quaker cultural histories on their own terms and consider the quite
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/49/image/coversmallEditors' Note2026-02-18text/htmlen-USEditors' Note2026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®83702026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18Special Issue Introduction: New Directions in Quaker Literary History
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982832
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The first Quakers believed, following the apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 3:6, that they were a people "not of the letter, but of the spirit" (King James Version).1 Given their emphasis on divinely inspired preaching, it can be tempting to think of Quakerism as a primarily oral culture. Nonetheless, letters poured from the early Friends, as they wrote scores of manuscripts and printed a high number of publications during the late 1640s through the early 1650s, taking shape during the crucible of the English Interregnum and its less restrictive printing environment. Quaker literature, like the Quaker movement itself, was radical, as demonstrated in its theological treatises on Christ's immanence within the believer
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/49/image/coversmallSpecial Issue Introduction: New Directions in Quaker Literary History2026-02-18text/htmlen-USSpecial Issue Introduction: New Directions in Quaker Literary History2026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®724042026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18Invention: Compulsory Memorialization ★1776/2026★
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982833
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I have childhood memories of celebrations in Utah that marked the nineteenth-century Mormon pioneers entering what they would call the Salt Lake Valley—known in the region as Pioneer Day and celebrated each July 24—that were much larger than the paltry parades for the Fourth of July. I remember pushing handcarts through parking lots dressed in settler drag during those hot, dry events. Pioneer Day was more popular than the celebrations that centered on the Fourth. In my memories, which position an initial cultural prioritization of 1847 over 1776, I imaginatively recall a slow and steady emergence of the Fourth of July taking pride of place. Newer events like Provo's Stadium of Fire—a massive fireworks display
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/49/image/coversmallInvention: Compulsory Memorialization ★1776/2026★2026-02-18text/htmlen-USInvention: Compulsory Memorialization ★1776/2026★2026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®471542026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18Crafting Captivity: Quaker Identity, Editorial Practice, and the Transatlantic History of God's Protecting Providence
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982834
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Jonathan Dickinson's God's Protecting Providence, first published in 1699 under the auspices of the Society of Friends, recounts the harrowing journey of more than two dozen European and African castaways who, after shipwrecking along the southeastern coast of Florida in 1696, spent nearly three months among the Ais Native peoples and their affiliates before being escorted by a Spanish reconnaissance party to St. Augustine.1 Traversing hundreds of miles through unfamiliar territory, the castaways encountered multiple Indigenous communities, navigated linguistic and cultural barriers, and relied on both their Quaker faith and the mercy of Native leaders to survive. Encouraged by Friends in Philadelphia, Dickinson
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/49/image/coversmallCrafting Captivity: Quaker Identity, Editorial Practice, and the Transatlantic History of God's Protecting Providence2026-02-18text/htmlen-USCrafting Captivity: Quaker Identity, Editorial Practice, and the Transatlantic History of God's Protecting Providence2026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®1534482026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18Being Numerous: A Reconsideration of Benjamin Lay's All Slave-Keepers
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982835
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In September 1738, the disowned Quaker Benjamin Lay interrupted the annual meeting of Philadelphia-area Friends in Burlington, New Jersey. He concealed a bladder filled with blood-colored pokeberry juice and, "in the presence of the whole congregation, thrust a sword … into the bladder, exclaiming at the same time, 'Thus shall God shed the blood of those persons who enslave their fellow creatures'" (Rush 297). Since the appearance of this description in the first biography of Lay, composed by physician and reformer Benjamin Rush more than half a century after the event, the "bladder of blood" story has been retold in nearly every subsequent account of Lay's life and writing. This anecdote is typically followed by
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/49/image/coversmallBeing Numerous: A Reconsideration of Benjamin Lay's All Slave-Keepers2026-02-18text/htmlen-USBeing Numerous: A Reconsideration of Benjamin Lay's All Slave-Keepers2026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®966812026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18Learning to Read like an Abolitionist: Benjamin Lundy and the Early Antislavery Print Sphere
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982836
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In 1864, Horace Greeley wrote of the late Quaker abolitionist and Baltimore editor Benjamin Lundy, "Slight in frame and below the common height, unassuming in manner and gentle in spirit, he gave to the cause of Emancipation neither wealth, nor eloquence, nor lofty abilities, for he had them not; but his courage, perseverance, and devotion are unsurpassed; and these combined to render him a formidable, though disregarded if not despised, antagonist to our national crime" (31). I begin this essay by drawing attention to Lundy's physical appearance because embodiment was central to Lundy's antislavery activism—he expanded his print network in the 1820s by traveling widely and pushing his newspapers into the hands of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/49/image/coversmallLearning to Read like an Abolitionist: Benjamin Lundy and the Early Antislavery Print Sphere2026-02-18text/htmlen-USLearning to Read like an Abolitionist: Benjamin Lundy and the Early Antislavery Print Sphere2026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®941842026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18A Volume of a "Different Hue": Transatlantic Print and the Making of the Aurora Borealis, a Quaker Literary Annual
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982837
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On January 20, 1834, a notice in the Washington-based National Intelligencer announced that a number of new works were available from P. Thompson's bookstore.Just received, the Friends' Annual, or Aurora Borealis, for 1834, edited by members of the Society of Friends, illustrated with plates. Price $2.Also on hand, a few copies of The Keepsake, Picturesque Annual, Book of Beauty, &c, &c. at reduced prices.Had prospective buyers made their way to that establishment they would have encountered a newly published Quaker literary annual bearing many of the hallmarks of a highly marketable genre.2 Its name deliberately invoked its origins in the North of England; one of its editors, George Atley Brumell, described the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/49/image/coversmallA Volume of a "Different Hue": Transatlantic Print and the Making of the Aurora Borealis, a Quaker Literary Annual2026-02-18text/htmlen-USA Volume of a "Different Hue": Transatlantic Print and the Making of the Aurora Borealis, a Quaker Literary Annual2026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®1165032026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18Conversation: An Ecosystem View of 1776 ★1776/2026★
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982838
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Should 1776 be a touchstone year in the narratives that environmental historians and literary critics tell? Taking into account the 250-year anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, seven scholars of early American literature and the environment met on Zoom to consider the ways that the political and social consequences of the American Revolution intersect with the ecological transformation of North America. As readers will see from the ensuing transcription of that conversation (which has been edited for length and clarity), there is much to be said about the varied and evolving awarenesses that people in late eighteenth-century North America had of their environments. We touched on the different
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/49/image/coversmallConversation: An Ecosystem View of 1776 ★1776/2026★2026-02-18text/htmlen-USConversation: An Ecosystem View of 1776 ★1776/2026★2026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®670162026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18The Politics of Early American Black Subjectivity and Resistance: Philosophizing the Political Theories of John Marrant, David Walker, and Maria Stewart
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982839
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Africans and African Americans deployed various political theories to animate their subjectivity and resist anti-Black hegemony during the United States' long nineteenth century. These are the ideas and theses that resonate in Sherrow O. Pinder's David Walker: The Politics of Racial Egalitarianism (Black Lives), Alphonso Saville IV's The Gospel of John Marrant: Conjuring Christianity in the Black Atlantic, and Kristin Waters's Maria W. Stewart and the Roots of Black Political Thought. By largely employing a storytelling approach within a chronological structure, the texts invite scholars to reconsider how they define Black agency, interrogate the archival methods used to document Black interventions, and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/49/image/coversmallThe Politics of Early American Black Subjectivity and Resistance: Philosophizing the Political Theories of John Marrant, David Walker, and Maria Stewart2026-02-18text/htmlen-USThe Politics of Early American Black Subjectivity and Resistance: Philosophizing the Political Theories of John Marrant, David Walker, and Maria Stewart2026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®200652026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18Mutiny on the Black Prince: Slavery, Piracy, and the Limits of Liberty in the Revolutionary Atlantic World by James H. Sweet (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982840
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James Sweet's Mutiny on the Black Prince: Slavery, Piracy, and the Limits of Liberty in the Revolutionary Atlantic World solves a 350-year-old mystery of what took place aboard the eighteenth-century enslaving vessel Black Prince, which included a mutiny, the murder of the vessel's company, and yet another uprising against the newly elected crew of the renamed pirate ship, Liberty, before the remaining crew scattered to various cities in Africa, Europe, Latin America, the United States, and the Caribbean. Until now, no one has endeavored to reconstruct the events that transpired aboard the ship transporting enslaved people that departed Bristol on December 10, 1768, and whose remains were found abandoned on the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/49/image/coversmallMutiny on the Black Prince: Slavery, Piracy, and the Limits of Liberty in the Revolutionary Atlantic World by James H. Sweet (review)2026-02-18text/htmlen-USMutiny on the Black Prince: Slavery, Piracy, and the Limits of Liberty in the Revolutionary Atlantic World by James H. Sweet (review)2026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®147012026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18Freeman's Challenge: The Murder That Shook America's Original Prison for Profit by Robin Bernstein (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982841
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The birth of the prison was coincident with the death of slavery in the northern states during the early nineteenth century. New York, which was home to the largest enslaved population north of Maryland, passed gradual abolition legislation in 1799. The legislation declared children born to enslaved women after July 4 of that year to be legally free, yet it required them to work for their mothers' enslavers until they reached their midtwenties. As a result, slavery in New York took decades to fully dismantle and extinguish. In the meantime, the state's free Black population grew steadily, stirring deep-seated fears among white supremacists that Black freedom would bring on a tidal wave of poverty, beggary, and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/49/image/coversmallFreeman's Challenge: The Murder That Shook America's Original Prison for Profit by Robin Bernstein (review)2026-02-18text/htmlen-USFreeman's Challenge: The Murder That Shook America's Original Prison for Profit by Robin Bernstein (review)2026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®121392026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18Prisoners of Congress: Philadelphia's Quakers in Exile, 1777–1778 by Norman E. Donoghue II (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982842
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The story that Norman Donoghue sets out in Prisoners of Congress is well-known to Quaker historians and historians of Revolutionary Pennsylvania, but largely unknown to the general public. In August 1777, twenty members of the Philadelphia Society of Friends, or "Quakers," many of them community leaders, were seized by the state's new Revolutionary government and sent under guard to Winchester, Virginia, two hundred miles away, where they were held under house arrest, without trial, for over seven months. During this period, fifty-year-old Thomas Gilpin and sixty-seven-year-old John Hunt would die of illness. Despite repeated demands both before and during their incarceration, the exiles were never given an
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/49/image/coversmallPrisoners of Congress: Philadelphia's Quakers in Exile, 1777–1778 by Norman E. Donoghue II (review)2026-02-18text/htmlen-USPrisoners of Congress: Philadelphia's Quakers in Exile, 1777–1778 by Norman E. Donoghue II (review)2026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®149452026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18Unmoored: The Search for Sincerity in Colonial America by Ana Schwartz (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982843
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Ana Schwartz asserts in the opening sentence of Unmoored: The Search for Sincerity in Colonial America that "sincerity is the protagonist of this book" (1). The term itself, as Schwartz defines it, is richly complicated, not "the truth itself" but instead "the glue that binds individuals to the truth" (3). Schwartz's book traces the "figurative ascent" of sincerity, and "how sincerity has come to be seen as the special purview of words," emphasizing in the process sincerity's "near invisibility" and its role in modern colonialism (4).In exploring the implications of sincerity as an ideal, Schwartz links this term to the identity of New England settlers as early moderns who were experiencing "a congealment of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/49/image/coversmallUnmoored: The Search for Sincerity in Colonial America by Ana Schwartz (review)2026-02-18text/htmlen-USUnmoored: The Search for Sincerity in Colonial America by Ana Schwartz (review)2026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®148312026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18Writing Early America: From Empire to Revolution by Trevor Burnard (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982844
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Trevor Burnard was a prolific and respected historian of early America, the Caribbean, and slavery in the Atlantic world. Writing Early America was one of his final publications, what he called a "field report," a contribution to the long-standing practice of regularly reckoning with the scholarly landscape. Among Burnard's arguments in this final work is that the development of a polite, maybe even antiseptic, style of academic debate in more recent early American scholarship is a marked change from previous practice. If it is a source of frustration to scholars that the general public might think the past should be a settled matter, it is equally odd, Burnard contends, for historians to stop arguing publicly and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/49/image/coversmallWriting Early America: From Empire to Revolution by Trevor Burnard (review)2026-02-18text/htmlen-USWriting Early America: From Empire to Revolution by Trevor Burnard (review)2026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®142672026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18Hidden Literacies ed. by Christopher Hager and Hilary E. Wyss (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982845
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Hidden Literacies is an open-access digital anthology hosted by Trinity College (Connecticut). It contains high-resolution images of texts—broadly conceived—that reveal the practice of reading and writing by marginalized Americans from the early eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. The texts vary greatly and include, for example, the narrative of John Maroney after his incarceration in a New York prison (1821–31), the account book of a formerly enslaved man in colonial Rhode Island, a handwritten children's magazine from New Hampshire, and images of a Kickapoo prayer stick, among others. The central theme for the collection is literacy and the varied ways in which it has been historically acquired and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/49/image/coversmallHidden Literacies ed. by Christopher Hager and Hilary E. Wyss (review)2026-02-18text/htmlen-USHidden Literacies ed. by Christopher Hager and Hilary E. Wyss (review)2026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®78252026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18Sedgwick Stories: The Shorter Works of Catharine Maria Sedgwick (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982846
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Established in 2012, the online resource Sedgwick Stories: The Shorter Works of Catharine Maria Sedgwick "aims to be a comprehensive, searchable digital collection of the stories, tales, and sketches written by Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789–1867) between 1822 and 1864." The archive is a broad, publicly accessible collection of Sedgwick's tales and sketches; that is to say, Sedgwick's shorter works. Currently administered by the project director, Deborah Gussman (Stockton University), and consulting editor, Lucinda Damon-Bach (Salem State University), along with undergraduate and graduate students working on transcriptions and annotations, this site is a work in progress: As of the writing of this review, the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/49/image/coversmallSedgwick Stories: The Shorter Works of Catharine Maria Sedgwick (review)2026-02-18text/htmlen-USSedgwick Stories: The Shorter Works of Catharine Maria Sedgwick (review)2026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®108152026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18Voices of the Enslaved: A Digital Humanities Approach to Encountering the Archive by Sophie White (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982847
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Voices of the Enslaved: A Digital Humanities Approach to Encountering the Archive, an online resource created by historian Sophie White and supported by the Omohundro Institute since 2024, contextualizes and documents four court cases that were tried in New Orleans between 1743 and 1765. In each case, White foregrounds the narrative of one enslaved individual of African descent, interrogated as defendant or witness: Jannot (1743), Marguerite (1764), Jeanot (1764), and Babette (1765). The selected litigants are diverse in both gender and age: The four deponents were between eleven and sixty-five years old when their interrogations took place. The resource accompanies White's acclaimed monograph Voices of the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/49/image/coversmallVoices of the Enslaved: A Digital Humanities Approach to Encountering the Archive by Sophie White (review)2026-02-18text/htmlen-USVoices of the Enslaved: A Digital Humanities Approach to Encountering the Archive by Sophie White (review)2026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®103542026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18Only by Experience: An Anthology of Slave Narratives ed. by Derrick R. Spires (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982848
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Only by Experience: An Anthology of Slave Narratives, a volume in the Broadview Anthology of American Literature series, offers a new look at well-known and more obscure narratives of enslavement. This inclusive collection challenges commonly accepted theories of the slave narrative genre. By composing the collection of orally related narratives, self-written texts, and those with more ambiguous authorship, editor Derrick R. Spires suggests the act of "writing the self into being," asserted by scholars a generation ago, is no longer the standard by which to measure the significance of a slave narrative. Instead, the human experience of enslavement and the quest for freedom that these narratives portray are
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/49/image/coversmallOnly by Experience: An Anthology of Slave Narratives ed. by Derrick R. Spires (review)2026-02-18text/htmlen-USOnly by Experience: An Anthology of Slave Narratives ed. by Derrick R. Spires (review)2026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®82512026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18Disability History Museum (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982849
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Founded in 2000 by researcher and documentary producer Laurie Block, the Disability History Museum (DHM) houses digital copies of over 2,500 texts and images, nearly all of which originated in the United States between 1800 and 2000. The site was originally created as a companion to Block's National Public Radio series, Beyond Affliction: The Disability History Project. Assembling materials from nearly seventy archives, including research universities, state historical societies, individual institutions, and private research libraries like the American Antiquarian Society, the DHM offers an accessible platform to explore cultural and social histories of disability in America.While the DHM's holdings are not
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/49/image/coversmallDisability History Museum (review)2026-02-18text/htmlen-USDisability History Museum (review)2026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®81232026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18Bacon's Rebellion, 1676–1677: Race, Class, and Frontier Conflict in Colonial Virginia by Verdis Lavar Robinson and Paul Otto (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982850
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Bacon's Rebellion, 1676–1677, in the "Reacting to the Past" series, is a historical role-playing game. In conventional accounts of Bacon's Rebellion, a crucial event in early American history, Virginia plantation owner Nathaniel Bacon and his supporters revolted against the colonial governor Sir William Berkeley. The Rebellion is believed to have accelerated the shift of Virginia society from one that was not dominated by slavery to a "slave society." Bacon's Rebellion, 1676–1677 places students in the roles of historical actors of the period.This book comprises five chapters. The first two help students get at the political, economic, and social contexts of Virginia in the 1670s. Chapter 3 introduces game rules.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/49/image/coversmallBacon's Rebellion, 1676–1677: Race, Class, and Frontier Conflict in Colonial Virginia by Verdis Lavar Robinson and Paul Otto (review)2026-02-18text/htmlen-USBacon's Rebellion, 1676–1677: Race, Class, and Frontier Conflict in Colonial Virginia by Verdis Lavar Robinson and Paul Otto (review)2026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®78392026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18Monima, or The Beggar Girl ed. by Richard S. Pressman (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982851
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Monima, or The Beggar Girl, first published in 1802, is a lesser-known early American novel that depicts the hardships of the urban immigrant underclass through the experiences of Monima Fontanbleu, a beautiful sixteen-year-old French émigré. Monima and her elderly father immigrated to America only to find themselves in dire poverty in Philadelphia. Because her father cannot speak English and is losing his eyesight, Monima must eke out a living for them both through small sewing and needlework jobs and occasional begging. Of course, these are not the only tribulations the beautiful and virtuous heroine must face; she becomes a target for female jealousy, seduction and rape attempts, imprisonments, and revenge
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/49/image/coversmallMonima, or The Beggar Girl ed. by Richard S. Pressman (review)2026-02-18text/htmlen-USMonima, or The Beggar Girl ed. by Richard S. Pressman (review)2026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®83972026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982852
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In a society already inundated with perpetual reminders of our nation's painful racial past, can any archive centering antislavery texts be a truly novel and engaging resource for students and educators? This is the question that, perhaps initially, comes to mind upon browsing Cornell University Library's digitized Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection. With the genesis of the collection dating back to the 1860s, this rare archive of manuscripts, pamphlets, letters, newspapers, maps, and more offers a wide-ranging assemblage of antislavery and Civil War documents that would be a valuable teaching resource on the American abolitionist movement. The collection was founded by Cornell's first president, Andrew Dickson
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/49/image/coversmallSamuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection (review)2026-02-18text/htmlen-USSamuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection (review)2026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®76222026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18Bark! Indigenous Cultural Expressions (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982853
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In their introduction to Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers (U of Washington P, 2019), Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton elaborate a chain of comparisons among different kinds of vessels:
The basket. The body. The canoe. The page. Each of these vessels has a form, a shape to which its purpose is intimately related. Each carries, each holds, and each transports. However, none of these vessels can be defined solely by their contents; neither can their purpose be understood as strictly utilitarian. Rather, the craft involved in creating such a vessel—the care and knowledge it takes to create the structure and shape necessary to convey—is inseparable from the contents that the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/49/image/coversmallBark! Indigenous Cultural Expressions (review)2026-02-18text/htmlen-USBark! Indigenous Cultural Expressions (review)2026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®127272026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18Making of America (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982854
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Making of America (MOA) at the University of Michigan is a digital collection of American publications from 1850 to 1877, currently hosting around ten thousand books and over thirty thousand journal articles. MOA focuses on US social history during this time to help users understand shifts in ideas and philosophies.The University of Michigan and Cornell University launched MOA together in 1995 with an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant. The initial digitized materials came from the archives and libraries of Michigan and Cornell, and other universities or institutions have contributed materials in the years since. After the Mellon Foundation's contribution, smaller funders and donors have supported the integration of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/49/image/coversmallMaking of America (review)2026-02-18text/htmlen-USMaking of America (review)2026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®73482026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18Sixty-Fifth Annual Convention (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982855
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The Sixty-Fifth Annual Convention of the Midwest Modern Language Association (MMLA), titled "Health in/of the Humanities," took place in Chicago in November 2024 one week after the 2024 US presidential election. The MMLA conference rooms were filled with a mix of sobering realism and hopeful optimism as participants sought ways to tackle the challenges facing the humanities both in the United States and globally. The program, which did not include panels specifically dedicated to early American literature, featured a great variety of discussions on nineteenth-century authors alongside twentieth-century and contemporary works. Nonetheless, the interdisciplinary, plurilingual, and multimedia nature of the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/49/image/coversmallSixty-Fifth Annual Convention (review)2026-02-18text/htmlen-USSixty-Fifth Annual Convention (review)2026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®148512026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18American Literature Association Conference (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982856
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On May 21, 2025, members of the American Literature Association returned to Boston for the association's thirty-sixth annual conference. The Westin Copley Place, the ALA's biannual gathering place in Boston's Back Bay, is ideally situated to afford the scholar of early American literature ample access to sites of historical and literary interest. The hotel is within walking distance of the Boston Public Garden, and Boston Commons and the Old North Church are each just a few stops away on the T system. For the flaneur inclined to wander between panels, the Copley Square area offers many opportunities to shop, eat, and explore. A rare May nor'easter brought heavy downpours and temperatures in the 40s, dampening some
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/49/image/coversmallAmerican Literature Association Conference (review)2026-02-18text/htmlen-USAmerican Literature Association Conference (review)2026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®159182026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18Notes on Contributors
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982857
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sharada balachandran orihuela is an associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her first book, Fugitives, Smugglers, and Thieves: Piracy and Personhood in Hemispheric American Literature (U of North Carolina P, 2018), examines depictions of illegal trade and makes them prominent in the analysis of American literature and in the construction of minoritarian racial, national, and gendered identities in the United States. She is currently at work on her next book-length monograph, which will examine narconarratives, and the international discourse on terrorism and drug prohibition in contemporary literature of the Americas. Her articles, essays, and reviews
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/49/image/coversmallNotes on Contributors2026-02-18text/htmlen-USNotes on Contributors2026-02-182026TWOProject MUSE®208582026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-18