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.

Press Cuttings

A series of press cuttings from my time in Kirkwood and Hannibal:

The Webster-Kirkwood Times:

Hannibal Magazine:

The Hannibal Courier-Post:

The Fence Painter:

The Mark Twain and the Mississippi River Symposium, L to R: Conor Henley, Lawrence Howe, Thomas Ruys Smith, Bruce Michelson, Tom Quirk:

And finally, my appearance on KHQA television (with a slightly peculiar transcription):

Flush Fred

I've just returned from a research trip to St. Louis, Hannibal, New Orleans and New York. I'll be posting some press clippings of the first part of the trip later. First, however, I'm posting some of the fruits of the New Orleans leg. As preparation for my forthcoming anthology of nineteenth century gambling stories from the Mississippi River (Louisiana State University Press), I travelled to Tulane University to take a look at one of the last remaining copies of Edward Willett's Flush Fred's Full Hand, published in 1884 by Beadle & Adams, New York. This classic story of heroic riverboat gambler Flush Fred wasn't in good shape, so it seemed like a good idea to preserve it digitally. Below, I've put together a flickr set of page photos, cover to cover.


Publication information, as well as details of Flush Fred's other appearances, can be found here.

Signing & Symposium

I'm travelling to the US this week, and whilst there I'll be appearing at two events. First, I'll be attending a book signing for River of Dreams: Imagining the Mississippi Before Mark Twain in St. Louis, co-sponsored by Main Street Books and the Kirkwood Public Library - Thursday 17th July, 7.30pm.

Then, on Sunday 19th July, I'll be giving the keynote address at a symposium on Mark Twain and the Mississippi River at the Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum in Hannibal, Missouri. More information is available below - click on the pictures for bigger images.

Conference: Understanding the South

I'll be giving a paper at the forthcoming Understanding the South, Understanding Modern America: The American South in Regional, National and Global Perspectives, hosted by the University of Manchester (May 22-24). You can read an abstract of my paper, "Bring Our Country Back: Country Music, The Southern Strategy and the 1968 Presidential Election", here.

Journal of Illinois History

River of Dreams has been reviewed in the Journal of Illinois History by James Hurt. Hurt says:

River of Dreams is an impressive achievement that will interest not only students of the American landscape (or riverscape) and the cultural uses to which it has been put but also "general readers" [...] the book as it stands is an intelligent, original, and imaginative contribution to American cultural studies.