Editor's Notes

In the last issue I remarked about the rich archive of German-language early American writings. A reader e-mailed me asking whether similar riches existed from Nouvelle France that have been unexamined, "particularly from the 18th-century." After referring her to Gordon Sayre's recent EAL article on the treatment of the Natchez Massacre in French letters, I began pondering the problem. What works would I most like to see articles about that have never received mention in EAL or AL? Two came immediately to mind: LE SAGE (Alain-René); Les Aventures de Monsieur Robert Chevalier, dit de Beauchêne, capitaine de flibustiers dans la Nouvelle-France. Paris, 1731. This is a tale of a French corsair raised by the Iroquois who winds up in various anti-English adventures in the Great Lakes and Caribbean. In the fourth section there is an alternative history meditation on the Iroquois discovery of Europe. Of poems, perhaps the works of Louisianan Julien Poydras deserve attention, particularly his panegyric to Governor Galvez, "La Prise du morne du Bâton Rouge Monseigneur de Galvez," a text of which appears on the world-wide web at http://www.centenary.edu/french/poydras.htm. The early nineteenth century produced one fascinating play about eighteenth-century native affairs: La Fete du Petit-Ble, ou L'Heroism de Poucha-houmma, by Paul Louis Le Blanc de Villeneufve, performed in New Orleans in 1809 and printed in 1814. The French department of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette has specialized French Louisiana literature and culture studies, but these works deserve notice by the entire community of scholars.

I was given the opportunity to test the Digital Early American Imprints: Evans (1639–1800) in October and November of 2004. I found it a useful, sometimes exhilarating experience to perform word and phrase searches through the entire corpus of pre-1800 publications. While the rough type in certain of the cheap imprints caused false hits with some frequency, the Optical Character Recognition performed admirably, particularly when one worked with phrases rather than single words. While the application's use for literary inquiry is apparent to all, I wished to determine its uses for other sorts of investigation. There has been uncertainty among southern food historians about how rice bread, the staple bread of the Low country in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was prepared. The earliest instructions date from the second quarter of the nineteenth century, well after its general introduction into the diet. So I entered "rice bread" into the three Archive of Americana databases (Evans, Early American Imprints: Shaw-Shoemaker [1800–1819], and Early Newspapers—the latter two only partially complete at this juncture), and there, amid a welter of cargo manifests, instructions about rationing sailors, and advertisements, were three recipes and one detailed instruction with commentary on its preparation in an 1803 encyclopedia printed in Philadelphia. Eureka! Mystery solved. My one trepidation about the Evans is that it makes research in print sources so convenient that for reasons of ease, scholars may be tempted to neglect one of the hard-earned lessons of the 1980s—that much of the literary exchange of colonial America occurred in manuscript.