European Journal of American Culture - 'Dead Men Tell No Tales': outlaw John A. Murrell on the antebellum stage

Charles Burke

My article, "'Dead Men Tell No Tales': outlaw John A. Murrell on the antebellum stage" has been published in the European Journal of American Culture. For those who are interested, the Harvard Theatre Collection catalogue reference for the manuscript written by Nathaniel Harrington Bannister that inspired this article can be found here. This is the abstract:

Abstract

Outlaw John A. Murrell, credited with the planning of a failed slave uprising in Mississippi in 1835, was a significant figure in antebellum popular culture. Previously unrecognized, however, is his use as a character on the antebellum stage. Proof of his employment in this role can be found in the Harvard Theatre Collection, home to a hitherto unidentified manuscript copy of a melodrama entitled ‘Murrell, the Pirate – A Play in Three Acts’. In this article, its creator is identified as Nathaniel Harrington Bannister, a significant pre-war actor-playwright. An exploration of its performance history reveals its significance in a variety of ways. It highlights the degree to which John Murrell was an adaptable and ambiguous antebellum villain. It helps to illuminate the life and career of Bannister and his contribution to the American stage. It provides new insights into the life and career of Charles Burke, another significant actor-playwright of the antebellum years who developed an important connection to ‘Murrell, the Pirate’. And because of Burke's association with the play, it also becomes plausible to place it as an important step on the road in the development of Joseph Jefferson III's production of ‘Rip Van Winkle’, one of the most successful and influential nineteenth century American plays.

And the full article is available here. In the forthcoming months I intend to make all of my articles and chapters available in this way.

Amelia Green(e), widow of both John Augustus Stone and Nathaniel Harrington Bannister

Review: American Literary Scholarship

River of Dreams has been mentioned in Alan Gribben's essay on Mark Twain in the 2007 edition of American Literary Scholarship. Here's what he had to say about it:

Material Culture

My review essay, "Before the Deluge: Reading, Writing and Rebuilding New Orleans", has been published in the Fall 2009 edition of Material Culture: The Journal of the Pioneer American Society. You can take a look at the contents page here. And here's the abstract:

Before the Deluge: Reading, Writing and Rebuilding New Orleans — A special comparative review of several books focusing on the city of New Orleans

By Thomas Ruys Smith, School of American Studies, University of East Anglia, UK

This review essay examines four recent books concerned with the history of New Orleans. Though their approaches and focuses vary – from nineteenth century memoir to historical geography to tourism studies – all four volumes offer a variety of insights into the development of the city. In particular, they offer readings of the city’s evolution that help to interpret the devastations of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 and give a timely sense of perspective to the ongoing attempts to rebuild New Orleans.

Elmira 2009: The Sixth International Conference on the State of Mark Twain Studies

I've just got back from Elmira College, host of The Sixth International Conference on the State of Mark Twain Studies, where I delivered the paper: "The Mississippi Was A Virgin Field: Mark Twain and Postbellum River Writings, 1865-1875."

More publication news coming soon.

Coming Soon: Blacklegs, Card Sharps & Confidence Man

From Edward Eggleston's The End of the World

Coming soon from Louisiana State University Press, my edited collection: Blacklegs, Card Sharps and Confidence Men: Nineteenth Century Gambling Stories from the Mississippi River. Arriving Spring 2010. More details as they're available.

BAAS 2009: "The Mississippi was a virgin field"

From Edward King's Great South

At this year's British Association for American Studies conference (University of Nottingham, April 16-19) I gave the paper: '"The Mississippi was a virgin field": Mark Twain and Postbellum River Writings, 1865-1876.' The abstract is available here. It's part of my ongoing endeavour to think about Twain's relationship with the Mississippi contextually. I'll be developing these ideas later this year at the Sixth International Conference on the State of Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, August 6-8 2009. 

On the subject of BAAS, I'm also organising next year's conference at the University of East Anglia, April 8-11 2010. More information is available here.

Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing

My chapter on the Mississippi ("The Mississippi River as Site and Symbol") has been published in the Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2009), edited by Alfred Bendixen and Judith Hamera. There are links to Amazon in the sidebar.

Journal of American Studies

My review of Thomas Buchanan's excellent Black Life on the Mississippi (University of North Carolina Press, 2004) has been published in the Journal of American Studies, 42:2 (August 2008), 358. It's available online here, and as a PDF here. Alternatively, you can simply read it below:

In Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851) Harriet Beecher Stowe produced one of the defining antebellum descriptions of the Mississippi: “Those turbid waters, hurrying, foaming, tearing along … Would that they did not also bear along a more fearful freight, the tears of the oppressed, the sighs of the helpless.” In this essential social history of black life on the Mississippi, Thomas Buchanan proves that although oppressed, the slave and free black men and women who lived and worked on the river were far from helpless. Alongside the familiar story of bondage and liberation, Buchanan invites his readers to enter the hitherto hidden “Mississippi world that slaves, and their free black allies, created amid the attempts of masters to control their labor and family lives.” As well as fitting a particularly large piece into the puzzle of antebellum river life, Buchanan's treatment of these unexamined aspects of African American experience should significantly influence conceptions of slavery and free black life far more widely. This was a world, as Buchanan describes it, of “secrets and dreams”: concealed communication networks, acts of resistance and resilience, sporadic rascality, music, escape, struggle for postbellum legal rights, and, above all, grinding work.

Buchanan's research is impeccable. Before now, readily available material concerning black life on the Mississippi was negligible. He has made good use of antebellum travel narratives, and even better use of court records and slave testimonies – particularly that of steamboat waiter and escapee William Wells Brown, whose story is woven into each chapter. Perhaps surprising, alongside the miseries of slavery and the dangers of steamboat life, is the powerful appeal that the river held for many of its black workers – strikingly similar to that which Mark Twain described working on him and his childhood friends. As ex-slave John Parker remembered, the Mississippi attracted him “like a magnet”: “as soon as I was free to move in my own selected direction I made straight for the river.” Two reservations: Buchanan is too swift to dismiss Twain (yet makes no mention of Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) or the character of Roxana and her experiences as steamboat chambermaid). Similarly, he seems to ignore the fact that P. B. S. Pinchback, the first black governor in America's history, was also an apprentice and partner to that most famous riverboat gambler, George Devol. But this is unreservedly an important book – vital for students of the Mississippi and relevant far more widely.