Blackleg

Coming Soon: Must Read: Rediscovering American Bestsellers

2012-01-17T15:36:00.000Z

It's been a while in the planning, but I'm very pleased to say that Must Read: Rediscovering American Bestsellers from Charlotte Temple to The Da Vinci Code, co-edited with my colleague Professor Sarah Churchwell, will be published later this year by Continuum. Above, a sneak peak of the cover. Below, a little bit about the collection.

What is it about certain books that makes them massive bestsellers? Why do some of these books remain popular for centuries, and others fade gently into obscurity? And why is it that when scholars do turn their attention to bestsellers, they seem only to be interested in the same handful of blockbusters, when so many books that were once immensely popular remain under-examined?

Addressing those and other equally pressing questions about popular literature, Must Read: Rediscovering American Bestsellers is the first scholarly collection to offer both a survey of the evolution of American bestsellers across the centuries, and critical readings of some of the key texts that have shaped the American imagination since the nation’s founding.

Beginning with a consideration of the difficulty in identifying and measuring the “bestseller” as a category, this collection moves across American history by using the bestseller as a guide to the vast terrain of a nation’s popular culture. Focusing on a mix of enduring and forgotten bestsellers, the essays in this collection consider 18th and 19th century works, like Charlotte Temple, Ben-Hur or Ten Nights in a Bar-Room, that were once considered epochal but are now virtually ignored; 20th century favorites such as The Sheik and Peyton Place; and 21st century blockbusters including the novels of Nicholas Sparks, The Kite Runner, and The Da Vinci Code.

Whilst each bestseller has its own story to tell, readers will find surprising points of connection and continuity: identity politics; religion; sentimentality; violence; erotics; nation-building; cosmopolitanism; consumer capitalism; landscapes; dreams and fantasies; nightmares and prohibitions, all feature recurrently. In short, these texts and their audiences contain multitudes, and scholars and general readers alike will find that editors Sarah Churchwell and Thomas Ruys Smith have brought together a compelling collection of essays that provide fascinating perspectives on a wide variety of “must reads.”

And you can already pre-order Must Read from Amazon. More information about release dates etc. as they become available.

Studies in American Culture: “Bring Our Country Back”: Country Music, Conservatives, and the Counter-Culture in 1968.

2011-11-06T21:36:00.001Z

My article, '“Bring Our Country Back”: Country Music, Conservatives, and the Counter-Culture in 1968', has been published in Studies in American Culture (34.1, October 2011).
Here are the first few sentences:

By any reckoning, 1968 was an extraordinary year in the life of country music. Embroiled in the bitterness of the presidential election, appropriated by the radical young, feted with unprecedented crossover success on the popular charts, country music was omnipresent in a year of significant national turmoil. The ramifications of each of these different strands have profound implications for the development of country music, its place in American life, and, indeed, for American culture more generally [...] This article attempts to reconstruct the ways in which country music served as a vital—though ambiguous and contradictory—part of the national conversation in the late 1960s. Acting as a battleground between competing political voices, country music also provided a surprising space of rapprochement, creating curious bedfellows in a way unlike any other element of popular culture at this time.

In part, the article examines the use that George Wallace made of country music during his presidential campaign in 1968. As chance would have it, reading Rick Bragg's All Over but the Shoutin' (1997) the other day, I came across his description of the music at a Wallace rally. It bears quoting in full, and serves as a perfect introduction both to the kind of things at stake in this article, and the tangled world of country music in 1968:

Everybody seems to be here, everybody white. The city auditorium is packed with sweating, jostling bodies, and two little blond-haired boys try hard not to get stepped on as their momma, holding tight to their hands, steers them through the cheering crowd. A band is playing "Dixie" as the people clap their hands in time, and someone is waving a Confederate battle flag back and forth, back and forth. There are pipe shop workers still in their soot-covered, dark-blue work clothes, and big-haired ladies who work behind the counters of the Calhoun County Courthouse, and old-sun-scorched men in Liberty overalls and brown fedoras who drove all the way from Rabbit Town and Talladega and Knighten's Crossroad, just to see the free show. Up on the big stage a beautiful woman in a lime green minidress, knee-high go-go boots and a Styrofoam boater hat with WALLACE on it prances out and starts to sing loud about the day "my momma socked it to the Harper Valley PTA," and though it did not register at the time, I am certain a few of the church ladies swallowed their snuff.

You can read the full article here. And if you're looking for something appropriate to listen to while you read, as Bragg's memories suggest there was no bigger country song in 1968 than Jeanne C. Riley's version of Tom T. Hall's "Harper Valley P.T.A":

"All distinction of colour was lost"

2011-09-28T17:02:00.000+01:00

(via NYPL)

Today marks the 200th anniversary of the second and final fight between English boxing champion Tom Cribb and American ex-slave Tom Molineaux. Taken together, both fights make up one of the most significant Transatlantic moments in early nineteenth century culture, encapsulating so many of the animating tensions of the age. As Kasia Boddy put it, the encounters between Cribb and Molineaux were amongst "the most mythologized events of the Regency."

Their first fight in December 1810 (narrated in Pierce Egan's classic Boxiana here) had been an epic affair, lasting 39 rounds. It had also been dogged with controversy. In the 19th round, the crowd of spectators had rushed into the ring, injuring Molineaux's hand, forever miring Cribb's victory in uncertainty. A rematch was inevitable. As Egan put it in Boxiana, "from the excellent specimen which Molineaux portrayed in his contest with the CHAMPION [...] the Moor was entitled to another trial." The fight was scheduled for September 28, 1811.

Coming so close to the War of 1812, at a time when Transatlantic relations were strained, the contests between Cribb and Molineaux were freighted with national - and racial - significance. In Egan's telling words:

In the final event, this second fight was hardly the equal of the first. Cribb beat Molineaux handily in eleven rounds. But the general fascination with the result was no less profound. Egan records that in London, "an immense crowd" assembled in Leicester Square, outside the house of Molineaux's trainer and mentor Bill Richmond - himself an ex-slave. Cribb "was cheered through all the towns he passed" on the way back to London. Such scenes exceeded "every thing in the annals of pugilism."

Molineaux's rise to fame from a plantation in Virginia had been truly remarkable. His fall was just as precipitous; he drank himself to death by 1815. But his fights with Tom Cribb ensured him a kind of immortality. The English crowd might not have been kind to Molineaux in 1810, but it was with no irony that Molineaux's name was included in a poetic tribute to British boxing and its patriotic significance. He was pictured as one of a number of famous boxers squaring off with Napoleon:

No less remarkable was the tribute to Molineaux that ran in Blackwood's Magazine in 1820. In their account of Cribb and Molineaux's exertions, the brutality of bare-knuckle fighting gave way to a rather extraordinary exhortation of equality:

And Blackwood's was equally happy to indulge in speculation about what might have been:

In America, however, it was a different story. Though "America's first great champion", Molineaux remained virtually unknown in the land of his birth. As Elliott Gorn describes, "Descriptions of his fights [...] appeared sporadically in the American press. But these second-hand accounts generated a feeble response in America [...] While tens of thousands of Englishmen could recite Molineaux's exploits relatively few Americans even knew his name." Molineaux deserved a better fate then; he deserves a better fate now.

Further reading: Anyone interested in knowing more about the Cribb-Molineaux fights and their rich Regency milieu could do much worse than starting with George MacDonald Fraser's historical novel Black Ajax (1999).

Review: Times Higher Education

2011-09-01T08:38:00.001+01:00

Southern Queen: New Orleans in the Nineteenth Century has been reviewed in Times Higher Education by Professor Helen Taylor (Exeter). She describes the book as an "important new study", and writes:

Although New Orleans' early colonial and more recent years are well documented, Ruys Smith's book is one of only a handful of 19th-century chronicles. It covers the key events and phenomena that gave the city such resonance in the global imagination [...] When so much hagiographic and melodramatic cultural production ("literary treacle", in the geographer Peirce F. Lewis' words) has been poured over New Orleans, Ruys Smith deserves credit for this clear-sighted and judicious survey of its most complex and fascinating century.

You can read the full review here.

History Today: The Big Uneasy

2011-07-20T12:33:00.003+01:00

History Today, August 2011

My article on New Orleans and its historic relationship with disasters of one kind and another is up now on the History Today website, and out in print next week. It was a pleasure to write, and they've done a lovely job with the illustrations. I think it pinpoints a lot of things in miniature that I touch on in depth in Southern Queen. So enjoy! Below, further information about some of the figures that I mention, and links to some of the sources that I used.

Theodore Clapp

1. Theodore Clapp. In many ways, this article, and much of the history of New Orleans, can be summed up in the quotation that appears near the beginning:

"The alternations of health and sickness, joy and sorrow, commercial prosperity and misfortune, sweep over the Crescent City with the suddenness and fury of those autumnal hurricanes which occasionally visit it."

They are the words of Rev. Theodore Clapp, who appears later in the article as an eyewitness to some of the city's worst experiences with Yellow Fever. Clapp was a true original, and one of the most distinctive figures of antebellum New Orleans. He arrived in the (predominately Catholic) city in the early 1820s and, after a number of doctrinal shifts, established what has been described as the first and only Unitarian church in the antebellum South. His comments are taken from his Autobiographical Sketches and Recollections During Thirty Five Years' Residence in New Orleans (1857), available here.

Abraham Oakey Hall

2. Yellow Fever. For anyone who's interested, the Report of the Sanitary Commission of New Orleans on the Epidemic Yellow Fever of 1853 that I quote from is available here. But much more entertaining are the descriptions of the city to be found in The Manhattaner in New Orleans (1851). The eponymous Manhattaner is responsible for the description of Yellow Fever that, perhaps a little flippantly, likens the effects of the disease to a champagne hangover. His other sketches of city life are equally enjoyable. Though published anonymously, the Manhattaner was actually Abraham Oakey Hall, who spent time in New Orleans as a legal apprentice. Rather remarkably, he later moved back to New York, became Mayor, and was embroiled in the Tweed Ring scandal. The more harrowing descriptions of Yellow Fever taken from Harper's New Monthly Magazine come from an article entitled “History and Incidents of the Plague in New Orleans,” available here.

George Washington Cable

3. War and Reconstruction. Though George Washington Cable is largely forgotten and unread today, in the late nineteenth century he was as famous as Mark Twain. His remarkable autobiographical description of life in New Orleans from the beginning of the war to its fall - "The crowds on the levee howled and screamed with rage" - was published in The Century magazine in 1885, as part of its "Battles and Leaders of the Civil War" series. It's available here. And in the same issue, you can read the other side of the story. Union Admiral David Dixon Porter narrates his experiences of the capture of New Orleans here. For an extended account of the massacre at the Mechanics' Institute - "The floor ... was covered with the blood, limbs, hair and brains of human beings" - see Emily Hazen Reed's Life of A. P. Dostie; or, The Conflict in New Orleans (1868).

Belle Hunt

4. Tourism. Belle Hunt's account of New Orleans, published in Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly in 1891, provides a great summary of the reasons why New Orleans became a tourist hub in the late 1890s. Made famous by the writings of George Washington Cable and, latterly, Grace King, the city seemed to offer a picturesque, romantic decrepitude that Gilded Age Americans (and, indeed, millions of tourists today) found particularly appealing. You can access a PDF of Hunt's piece here, and, for good measure, you can read her 1890 collection of Texas poetry - Lone-Star Lights - here. A good companion to Hunt's account of New Orleans is Julian Ralph's “New Orleans, Our Southern Capital,” published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1893.

Enjoy the article! And if you do, you'll probably enjoy the book that inspired it.

UPDATE: Full-text PDF available here.

Out Now: Southern Queen: New Orleans in the Nineteenth Century

2011-06-01T18:16:00.007+01:00

Southern Queen: New Orleans in the Nineteenth Century, is out today, published by Continuum.

At least, it's out in the UK. Its US release date is August 4th (though you can pre-order on Amazon.com). You can order it direct from the Continuum website, or from Amazon.co.uk. You can also preview Southern Queen on Google Books. If you do pick up a copy, let me know what you think either here or on Twitter. Here's what some kind folks have had to say about it so far:

Thomas C. Buchanan, author of Black Life on the Mississippi: Slaves, Free Blacks, and the Western Steamboat World:

"A major contribution to the history of the Queen City."

Anthony Stanonis, author of Creating the Big Easy: New Orleans and the Emergence of Modern Tourism, 1918-1945 (University of Georgia Press, 2006):

"A sweeping history of nineteenth century New Orleans, as provided now by Thomas Ruys Smith's Southern Queen, has been sorely lacking [...] Scholars and general readers will find Smith's book a valuable and highly accessible addition to studies of this alluring city. Those new to the city's past, moreover, would do well to take Smith as a guide."

J. Mark Souther, author of New Orleans on Parade: Tourism and the Transformation of the Crescent City (Louisiana State University Press, 2006):

"Richly appointed with voices of the city's denizens and of those who visited, Southern Queen reveals the myriad ways that the nineteenth century shaped the New Orleans we know today. In this highly readable book, Smith offers a welcome synthesis of the scholarship on this important epoch in the history of the Crescent City."

BBC History Magazine: New Orleans in 1858

2011-05-24T08:30:00.003+01:00

My travel guide to New Orleans in 1858 is out today in this month's BBC History Magazine (June 2011). This was a fun piece to write, not least because it threw up some interesting research questions. Much of the material I had to hand because of Southern Queen, but it also caused me to have to think about some peculiar specifics.

The issue of hotels, and the price of rooms, was a good case in point. Throughout the antebellum period, the St. Charles and St. Louis hotels were the most famous establishments in the city, renowned for their opulence. But both of them burnt down numerous times, so how to make sure they were standing in 1858? Thank goodness for John Kendall's classic History of New Orleans, published in 1922, which devotes a whole chapter to "Hotel Life in New Orleans." Also useful for contextual detail was Norman's New Orleans and Environs, a pioneering guide to the city published in 1845.

But what about room rates? This proved particularly tricky, until I came across this wonderful passage from intrepid traveler Frederika Bremer's account of her time in New Orleans in Homes of the New World (1853):

This was the Hotel St. Charles, and here we at first took up our quarters. But when I found that for a cold little room, with an immense bed, up three flights of stairs, with the privilege of the great saloon, where I would not go if I could help it, and the privilege of eating a variety of meals, which I could not eat without making myself ill, and at hours that did not suit me—when I found that for all this magnificence I must pay three dollars per day, without being able with it all to enjoy one pleasant hour, I became anxious to find another home.

I am now living in a private boarding-house, with a respectable widow. I have a large, handsome room, carpeted, and with a fire-place, and two large windows looking out into a market-place planted with young trees still green, and with a grass-plot in the centre. This is La Fayette Square. It is a beautiful and very quiet place. I esteem myself quite happy in my dwelling, for which I pay, together with my board, only ten dollars per week, which is low for New Orleans.

And finally, here's a selection of contemporary illustrations of New Orleans - sights that would have been seen by every visitor to the city in 1858:

Canal Street in 1857, from Ballou's Pictorial (August 1, 1857)

The intersection of Canal Street and Royal Street, November 18, 1860

The French Quarter, Harper's Weekly, March 30, 1861

The Levee, Harper's Weekly, March 30, 1861

UPDATE: Full-text now available here.

Apocalypse on the Mississippi!

2011-05-20T21:32:00.006+01:00

Having not long completed a book chapter on the significance of the Mississippi River for new religious movements in America in the years before the Civil War, I got a profound shock of recognition when I read this ABC report about Harold Camping’s predictions of the forthcoming apocalypse. One of the signs that the end is nigh?

The Mississippi River: Recent flooding has prompted some speculation that pervasive crop destruction is sure to follow, resulting in the widespread famine that's scheduled to help usher in the Apocalypse.

In their own way, these kind of pronouncements fit into a significant American tradition. There is a long history of prophesying Armageddon, particularly along or in relation to the Mississippi. Indeed, the current interest in the possibility of imminent rapture is as nothing compared to events in the nineteenth century, as the example of William Miller attests.

A belief that the end of the world was just around the corner was present to a lesser or greater degree in most of the new religious movements of the early nineteenth century. But the idea that the end of the world was on its way sooner rather than later was given a particular urgency by the work of William Miller. Though a Deist in his youth, Miller became a Baptist after the War of 1812. Then, through an intensive program of scriptural examination, he became convinced, in David Reynolds’ words, that “the Second Coming of Christ ... would occur sometime between March 1843 and April 1844.”[1] And as David L. Rowe points out, one of the major events that encouraged him in his work was “the dramatic New Madrid earthquakes that struck the Mississippi River Valley from 1808 to 1812” and “aroused popular apocalyptic fears.”[2]

Though Miller began to preach his message in 1831, it was not until the late 1830s that he gained a popular following. Judging the scale of his support is difficult, since Millerism was never a formal denomination, but Whitney Cross estimates that “well over fifty thousand people in the United States became convinced that time would run out in 1844, while a million or more of their fellows were skeptically expectant.”[3] Though Miller was never keen to set a precise date for the coming apocalypse, encouraged by his followers he finally settled on October 22nd 1844. Outlandish tales of Millerite preparations for the end circulated widely, swiftly followed by reports of their so-called “Great Disappointment.”

The impact of Miller’s prophecies, particularly along the Western rivers, can be seen in the effect that they had on a very significant group of Midwestern writers. In A Boy’s Town (1890), his memoir of his early years in Ohio, William Dean Howells remembered his childhood as a time when many believed that the “world was going to be burned up”: “the believers had their ascension robes ready, and some gave away their earthly goods so as not to be cumbered with anything in their heavenward flight.”[4] As Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson have described, Howells’ grandfather was at their vanguard: “Neighbors joked that whenever Joseph saw an ominous cloud in the sky, he donned his ascension robes in readiness for eternity.”[5] Even though his father assured him that this was a “crazy notion,” Howells still felt himself affected by “the tint of the prevailing gloom.”[6]

Pioneering local-colourist Edward Eggleston framed his entire 1872 novel The End of the World around the Millerite excitement of the 1840s as it played out along the Ohio River. In Eggleston’s view, “The people liked the prospect of the end of the world because it would be a spectacle, something to relieve the fearful monotony of their lives [...] Here was an excitement, something worth living for.”[7]

And in Hannibal, Mississippi, Mark Twain, nine years old in 1844, never forgot the way that a contingent of Millerites gathered on local landmark Lover’s Leap to wait for the millennium. References to Millerites can be found throughout his work, and they were still on his mind when he returned to Hannibal in 1902, for the last time. Twain climbed Holliday Hill with childhood friend John Briggs, gazed out across the river, and gestured towards Lover’s Leap: “There is where the Millerites put on their robes one night to go up to heaven,” Twain remembered. “None of them went that night, John, but no doubt many of them have gone since.”[8]

References
[1] David S. Reynolds, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 290.
[2] David L. Rowe, God’s Strange Work: William Miller and the End of the World (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2008), 77, 78.
[3] Whitney Cross, The Burned-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800-1850 (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 287.
[4] William Dean Howells, A Boy’s Town (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1890), 203.
[5] Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson, William Dean Howells: A Writer’s Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
[6] Howells, A Boy’s Town, 203.
[7] Edward Eggleston, The End of the World (New York: Orange Judd and Co., 1872), 59.
[8] Gary Scharnhorst, Mark Twain: The Complete Interviews (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006), 457.

Kindle Editions

2011-05-13T18:14:00.000+01:00

The release of Southern Queen might be just around the corner, but Kindle editions of my other two books have just been added on Amazon. Click on the covers above to buy or for a free preview. And stay tuned for more updates soon.

Review: Gateway: The Magazine of the Missouri History Museum

2011-03-24T23:04:00.000Z

River of Dreams was reviewed in issue 28 of Gateway, the magazine of the Missouri History Museum. David Lobbig writes:

"Thomas Ruys Smith vividly connects his readers to an important time in the explosive peopling of our nation [...] which taken together is like the relearning of a favourite story or song long forgotten [...] What we know in more modern terms as our "strong, brown god" has a rich, important history and myth hardly known. It is a river flowing with archetypes. Perhaps it is not possible for us to see the river with the same eyes as those who once strove against its strength and unpredictability to be sustained by its life. But those people saw their dreams reflected in the Mississippi, and this accounting gives a proper perspective so that readers today, sitting on its banks, may see themselves more clearly."

Review: Journal of Illinois History

2011-03-23T11:43:00.000Z

Blacklegs, Card Sharps and Confidence Men has been reviewed in the Journal of Illinois History. Greg Hall writes:

“To bring to life the cultural world of the Mississippi River Valley of the nineteenth century is no easy task […] Thomas Ruys Smith does this with a compilation of stories that focus on specific elements of that cultural world that in some ways are quite alien to our own. Yet the legacy of the period can still resonate within our historical memory […] Therefore it is a significant contribution to our understanding of American cultural history that Smith provides here, because before the cowboy and the gunslinger, there was the riverboat gambler.”

You can read the whole review here.

Guest Post: Mardi Gras in 1873

2011-03-08T18:22:00.002Z

Waiting for the parade in 1873 - Edward King's The Great South

To commemorate Mardi Gras 2011, I've contributed a guest post to Rob Vellela's American Literary Blog about the implications, literary and otherwise, of Mardi Gras in 1873. You can read it here.

Southern Queen: More Advance Praise

2011-02-19T10:23:00.000Z

I'm very pleased to say that Southern Queen has garnered some more advance praise, this time from Thomas C. Buchanan, author of the essential Black Life on the Mississippi: Slaves, Free Blacks, and the Western Steamboat World:

"Thomas Ruys Smith puts his readers in the minds of the many travellers who visited the city, allowing us to understand the creation of the myth of New Orleans as well as its physical reality. He deftly mixes engaging storytelling and thoughtful historical analysis on every page. The book is a major contribution to the history of the Queen City."

Southern Queen: More Advance Praise

2011-02-12T09:20:00.007Z

The City of New Orleans, Currier & Ives, 1885

Huge thanks to Anthony Stanonis, author of the wonderful Creating the Big Easy: New Orleans and the Emergence of Modern Tourism, 1918-1945, for the following commentary on Southern Queen: New Orleans in the Nineteenth Century:

It's easy to get lost in New Orleans. Even a native, such as myself, can become confused not only by the condition and direction of the streets but also by their names – names that recall the diverse cultures that have made the Southern Queen so unique among American cities. A walk or drive or streetcar ride quickly becomes a trek through history.
The city contorts with the bend of the Mississippi River. The result is that some streets run for a few short blocks, usually perpendicular to the river, while other avenues parallel the river's levee for miles. These roads reflect the economic importance of the river to New Orleans during the nineteenth century – the hundred years when the city emerged as one of the most populous and prosperous in the country. Those same roads show the effect of the swampland upon which the city rests. Nicknamed the "Wet Grave" during the antebellum period, New Orleans no longer endures regular epidemics of yellow fever, malaria, and other diseases. The antebellum years certainly brought riches to the Crescent City, but the costs were paid in lives – the city claimed the highest mortality rate in the United States before the Civil War. Although the swamps have long been drained and the mosquitoes now held at bay with pesticides, the damp, compacting soil still opens gapping potholes for many an automobile. New Orleanians have even come to adopt these craters as emblematic of a place that, in the twenty-first century, resists modernization.

Scholarship on New Orleans has long reflected those contorting and battered streets. Popular historians such as Lyle Saxon and Herbert Asbury in the early twentieth century to Phil Johnson and Buddy Stall in the late twentieth century wrote invaluable accounts yet lacked the rigor of the trained academic. That has changed in recent decades as professional historians and literary scholars have interrogated the city's rich culture and past. Such works, however, have often focused on select periods, such as Reconstruction, or persons, such as Marie Laveau.

A sweeping history of nineteenth century New Orleans, as provided now by Thomas Ruys Smith's Southern Queen, has been sorely lacking. Smith's work navigates the rise and decline of New Orleans as a major American port. In doing so, Smith shows himself to be a well-versed guide through the latest scholarship about the city. He skillfully blends the secondary literature with insights drawn from contemporary travel accounts, novels, and diaries. The result is a vivid description of life in the nineteenth century New Orleans – and, just as important, of its popular image as one of the most unique cities in the world.

Smith shows how the city negotiated conflicting ethnic and national identities as possession passed from Spain to France to the United States in the few years leading to the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Tensions remained well into the mid-nineteenth century. However, the successful defense of New Orleans against a major slave uprising in 1811 followed by the defeat of the British at nearby Chalmette in 1815 served to unite elites within the city. The emergence of cotton literally poured wealth onto the levees in the decades leading to the Civil War. Dreams of continued prosperity disappeared behind the smoke of combat. Emancipation stripped the slave markets and masters of their profitable trade in flesh. And the rise of the railroads diverted the flow of produce away from the docks. Through the 1870s, racial violence created political turmoil. Even hopes for a better day among freedmen dissipated as Jim Crow laws restored a racial caste system. The declining economic fortunes of New Orleans bred nostalgia for the antebellum days and, with the World's Cotton Exposition in 1884-5, tourism increasingly emerged as a lifeline for the city. Smith closely traces this tale of rise and decline – and his eye for telling quotations enlivens the story.

Smith is certainly correct in asserting that nineteenth century New Orleans continues to influence life in post-Katrina New Orleans, especially in shaping tourism and race relations. Southern Queen provides a thoughtful map through the historic landscape that shaped the Crescent City of today. Scholars and general readers will find Smith's book a valuable and highly accessible addition to studies of this alluring city. Those new to the city's past, moreover, would do well to take Smith as a guide; those grave-deep potholes are no fun.

Review: Year's Work in English

2011-02-11T10:14:00.001Z

River of Dreams got a nod in Year's Work in English Studies 89 (2010):

"In recent years, Twain's travel writing has received renewed attention in scholarship. Especially strong examples of this trend are Thomas Ruys Smith's River of Dreams: Imagining the Mississippi Before Mark Twain..."

Southern Queen: Advance Praise

2011-02-07T17:25:00.002Z

Above, the first draft of the jacket for my new book, Southern Queen: New Orleans in the Nineteenth Century (click for bigger). Below, some advance praise from J. Mark Souther, author of the excellent New Orleans on Parade: Tourism and the Transformation of the Crescent City (Louisiana State University Press, 2006):

"Richly appointed with voices of the city's denizens and of those who visited, Southern Queen reveals the myriad ways that the nineteenth century shaped the New Orleans we know today. In this highly readable book, Smith offers a welcome synthesis of the scholarship on this important epoch in the history of the Crescent City."

Southern Queen in the Continuum Catalogue

2011-01-29T13:31:00.003Z

Southern Queen: New Orleans in the Nineteenth Century is featured in a variety of Continuum catalogues this season (here), but this spread from the US Trade and Academic Highlights Catalogue (pdf here) is the most fulsome (click for bigger):

River of Dreams: 75 Great Literature Books Published by LSU Press

2011-01-12T10:25:00.001Z

As part of their 75th anniversary celebrations, Louisiana State University Press has put together a series of lists highlighting "75 great LSU Press titles in various subjects." I'm very proud to say that River of Dreams was selected as one of their 75 great literature books. You can browse the whole list here - and, as you can see, I'm in humblingly good company.

UPDATE: Since LSUP took the page down, I though I'd preserve the list for posterity, below. Needless to say, there's some good reading here!

Andrews, William L. - The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt (1980).
Beck, Charlotte H. - The Fugitive Legacy: A Critical History (2001).
Bennett, Barbara - Comic Visions, Female Voices: Contemporary Women Novelists and Southern Humor (1998).
Bolton, Linda - Facing the Other: Ethical Disruption and the American Mind (2004).
Bone, Martyn - The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction (2005).
Brinkmeyer, Robert H., Jr. - The Fourth Ghost: White Southern Writers and European Fascism, 1930-1950 (2009).
Brivic, Shelly - Tears of Rage: The Racial Interface of Modern American Fiction-Faulkner, Wright, Pynchon, Morrison (2008).
Brooks, Cleanth - William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (1989).
Brooks, Cleanth, John T. Purser, and Robert Penn Warren - An Approach to Literature (1937).
Chandler, Richard E. and Kessel Schwartz - A New History of Spanish Literature (1991).
Chopin, Kate - The Complete Works of Kate Chopin - Edited by Per Seyersted (1969).
Ciuba, Gary M. - Desire, Violence, and Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction: Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Walker Percy (2007).
Coleman, James W. - Faithful Vision: Treatments of the Sacred, Spiritual, and Supernatural in Twentieth-Century African American Fiction (2006).
Cologne-Brookes, Gavin - Dark Eyes on America: The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates (2005).
Costello, Brannon - Plantation Airs: Racial Paternalism and the Transformations of Class in Southern Fiction, 1945–1971(2007).
Cowan, Louise - The Fugitive Group: A Literary History (1959).
Crowder, Ashby Bland - Wakeful Anguish: A Literary Biography of William Humphrey (2004).
Crowther, Hal - Cathedrals of Kudzu: A Personal Landscape of the South (2000).
Cutrer, Thomas W. - Parnassus on the Mississippi: The Southern Review and the Baton Rouge Literary Community, 1935–1942(1984).
Davis, Mary Kemp - Nat Turner Before the Bar of Judgement: Fictional Treatments of the Southampton Slave Insurrection(1999).
Falkner, Murry C. - The Falkners of Mississippi: A Memoir (1967).
Gaudet, Marcia and Carl Wooton, eds. - Porch Talk with Ernest Gaines: Conversations on the Writer's Craft (1999).
Grammer, John M. - Pastoral and Politics in the Old South (1996).
Gray, Richard - Southern Aberrations: Writers of the American South and the Problems of Regionalism (2000).
Hagood, Taylor - Faulkner's Imperialism: Space, Place, and the Materiality of Myth (2008).
Hannon, Charles - Faulkner and the Discourses of Culture (2005).
Harris, Trudier - The Scary Mason-Dixon Line: African American Writers and the South (2009).
Hebert-Leiter, Maria - Becoming Cajun, Becoming American: The Acadian in American Literature from Longfellow to James Lee Burke (2009).
Higgins, Brian, and Hershel Parker - Reading Melville's Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (2007).
Hobson, Fred - Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to Explain (1983).
Holladay, Hilary - Wild Blessings: The Poetry of Lucille Clifton (2004)
Humphries, Jefferson - Metamorphoses of the Raven: Literary Overdeterminedness in France and the South Since Poe (1985).
Jackson, Blyden - The History of Afro-American Literature. Volume 1: The Long Beginning, 1746-1895 (1989).
Jones, Anne Goodwyn - Tomorrow is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859–1936 (1982).
Justus, James H. - The Achievement of Robert Penn Warren (1981).
Kennedy, J. Gerald - The Astonished Traveler: William Darby, Frontier Geographer and Man of Letters (1981).
Kronick, Joseph G. and Kathryne V. Lindberg - America's Modernisms: Revaluing the Canon, Essays in Honor of Joseph N. Riddel (1996).
Ladd, Barbara - Nationalism and the Color Line in George W. Cable, Mark Twain, and William Faulkner (1997).
Lamb, Robert Paul - Art Matters: Hemingway, Craft, and the Creation of the Modern Short Story (2010).
Lehan, Richard - Literary Modernism and Beyond: The Extended Vision and the Realms of the Text (2009).
Lowe, John, ed. - Louisiana Culture from the Colonial Era to Katrina (2008).
Marrs, Suzanne - One Writer's Imagination: The Fiction of Eudora Welty (2002).
Mather, Cotton - Selected Letters of Cotton Mather - Compiled by Kenneth Silverman. (1971).
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Monteiro, George E. - Stephen Crane's Blue Badge of Courage (2000).
O'Gorman, Farrell - Peculiar Crossroads: Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and Catholic Vision in Postwar Southern Fiction(2004).
Percy, William Alexander - Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter's Son (1974).
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Quinlan, Kieran - Strange Kin: Ireland and the American South (2005).
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Romine, Scott - The Real South: Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction (2008).
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Coming Soon: Southern Queen

2010-11-17T15:31:00.002Z

Above, a first glimpse of the cover of my new book, Southern Queen: New Orleans in the Nineteenth Century, to be published Summer 2011 by Continuum. Here's the blurb:

In the nineteenth century, there were few cities in the world more remarkable than New Orleans. Cosmopolitan, alluring, dangerous – a profound mélange of Old World sensibilities and New World possibilities – it was a place unlike anywhere else in America. Southern Queen: New Orleans in the Nineteenth Century examines the city’s rise and fall in this crucible period, charting its transformation from a small colonial backwater on the banks of the Mississippi, through the apex of its power and influence in the antebellum years, to the years of poverty and hardship that followed the Civil War. It is a story characterised by the city’s reputation for decadence, exoticism and illicit pleasures – the glittering carnival mask that the Big Easy still presents to the world. But it is also a story punctuated by a host of disasters that provide stark counterpoints to the glamour of Mardi Gras. Throughout the nineteenth century, the city that care was supposed to forget was visited by wars, epidemics, riots, and – from slavery to Reconstruction and beyond – continual and violent racial tension. Yet through it all, the Southern Queen developed a profound romantic appeal that proved irresistible to an astonishing cast of visitors - travelers, writers, artists and musicians of every kind. It was, in short, an extraordinary time in the history of an extraordinary place. This is the untold story of the life and times of nineteenth century New Orleans, and it is an account that illuminates our understanding not just of the past, but of the present and future of one of America’s most iconic places.

I'll update with a firm release date when it's available. In the meantime, more information is available on the Continuum website, and you can preorder from Amazon here (or here, if you're in the UK).

Review: Louisiana History

2010-08-11T09:29:00.000+01:00

River of Dreams: Imagining the Mississippi Before Mark Twain has been reviewed by Daniel Claro in Louisiana History (50:2, Spring 2009). He writes, "this book succeeds in depicting the wonderfully rich literary context that inspired and informed Twain's career."

For a sneak preview of what I'm currently working on, click here.

BBC Radio Scotland: The Book Café - Audio

2010-07-19T17:03:00.000+01:00

My conversation with BBC Radio Scotland's Book Café is now up on the iPlayer. Thanks to all involved. Alternatively, you can access the audio of my segment here.

BBC Radio Scotland: The Book Café

2010-07-16T15:49:00.000+01:00

This Monday (July 19th) I'll be appearing on BBC Radio Scotland's Book Café to talk about Mark Twain, his legacy, and the forthcoming publication of his autobiography. It starts at 1.15. You can listen live here, and I'll throw up an iPlayer link after the broadcast. More information available here:

And as the hundred year ban on publishing Mark Twain's memoirs ends, John Freeman, Editor of Granta Magazine, and Twain expert Dr. Tom Smith will be joining Clare to explain the ban and discuss the legacy of the writer hailed by William Faulkner as 'the father of American literature'.

Review: Journal of Southern History

2010-06-16T09:34:00.003+01:00

River of Dreams: Imagining the Mississippi Before Mark Twain has been reviewed by James E. Seelye in the Journal of Southern History (May 2010). He writes:

"River of Dreams: Imagining the Mississippi before Mark Twain by Thomas Ruys Smith is an engaging guide to changing conceptions of the Mississippi River during the antebellum period. Smith's accessible and well-written narrative catalogs the variety of views and commentary about the "American Nile" from a range of individuals, including writers, foreign visitors, and U.S. presidents. One of the work's biggest strengths is the wide spectrum of views that Smith examines [...] Smith uses an impressive array of primary sources by those with firsthand knowledge of or associations with the Mississippi River [...] Cultural historians will find the book to be a solid portrait of antebellum life along the Mississippi River; those interested in historical memory will find the study especially useful."

Review: Journal of the Early Republic

2010-06-10T08:27:00.000+01:00

River of Dreams: Imagining the Mississippi Before Mark Twain has been reviewed in the Journal of the Early Republic. Ann Ostendorf writes:

"Thomas Ruys Smith examines the meaning of the river in the antebellum American imagination. Using literary analysis, Smith unpacks the multitude of written and visual representations of the river as it flowed through American culture and consciousness [...] Smith shows how Twain's postbellum fascination with the literary Mississippi emerged out of decades of prior cultural appropriations [...] Smith's extensive uses of primary-source quotations are often delightfully expressive of contemporary worldviews [...] Ultimately, this work is a creative expression of the nineteenth-century American mind and culture through the ways people of that era viewed this iconic natural resource."

British Association for American Studies Conference, April 8-11 2010

2010-04-01T10:06:00.011+01:00

I'm organizing the international British Association for American Studies Conference 2010, running April 8-11 at the University of East Anglia in the UK. The final programme can be found here, and you can keep up to date with conference news on the School of American Studies blog, Containing Multitudes. Looking forward to meeting everyone!

Advance Praise for Blacklegs, Card Sharps and Confidence Men

2010-03-02T07:35:00.007Z

Advance praise for Blacklegs, Card Sharps and Confidence Men: Nineteenth-Century Mississippi River Gambling Stories, published May 2010 by Louisiana State University Press:

“Blacklegs, Card Sharps, and Confidence Men is the most significant collection of riverlore published in decades. Thomas Ruys Smith’s wide-ranging anthology includes selections from high and low culture, demonstrating the evolution of gambling from a widely feared part of the early river trade to a romanticized American cultural icon. This collection is essential to understanding the history of gambling in America and solidifies Smith’s reputation as the leading cultural historian of American river life.”

—Thomas C. Buchanan, author of Black Life on the Mississippi: Slaves, Free Blacks, and the Western Steamboat World

“The Mississippi riverboat gambler ranks alongside the mountain man, frontier scout, patriot militiaman, borderlands outlaw, and cowboy as an archetypal American folk hero. Yet the scholarly literature of the riverboat gambler is sparse compared to that of his folkloric colleagues. Thomas Ruys Smith helps to correct this slight in Blacklegs, Card Sharps, and Confidence Men. Smith has gathered together a splendid collection of both literary and historical writings (and combinations thereof) that tell the exciting story of this nineteenth-century icon. Scholars and laymen alike will enjoy sitting back and reading these engaging tales.”

—Michael Allen, author of Rodeo Cowboys In The North American Imagination

Available now from Amazon.

Review: Southern Literary Journal

2010-02-12T19:46:00.003Z

River of Dreams has been reviewed by Scott Romine in the Southern Literary Journal, as part of a longer essay, "The Nature of the South" (42:1, Fall 2009). He writes:

River of Dreams is a rich study, splendidly researched and elegantly written. Although its subtitle and blurb from Louis Budd position it relative to Mark Twain, the book’s true achievement lies in its nuanced account of the “countless [antebellum] stories . . . told in countless ways about the giant river that bisected America” (194). If, as Budd suggests, River of Dreams should be required reading for readers of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, it is equally valuable to students of antebellum culture [...] archivally and synthetically rich—indeed, it is quite dazzling.

You can read the full review here.

Blacklegs... in the LSU Press Spring 2010 Catalog

2010-01-18T12:55:00.003Z

Blacklegs, Card Sharps and Confidence Men (coming May 2010) in the Louisiana State University Press Catalog, Spring 2010 (available here). Click for a bigger version of the image.

Blacklegs, Card Sharps and Confidence Men: A First Glimpse

2009-12-09T12:18:00.003Z

Coming May 2010. In the meantime, here's the official site on the Louisiana State University Press website. And here are the product pages for Blacklegs... on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. More information as it emerges.

European Journal of American Culture - 'Dead Men Tell No Tales': Outlaw John A. Murrell on the Antebellum Stage

2009-11-06T08:33:00.011Z

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

2009-10-15T07:33:00.002+01:00

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

2009-09-23T17:10:00.004+01:00

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.

Update: full article now available here.

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

2009-08-13T15:11:00.009+01:00

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

2009-06-08T17:51:00.003+01:00

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"

2009-06-08T17:33:00.004+01:00

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

2009-02-05T10:53:00.004Z

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

2008-09-27T08:48:00.003+01:00

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

2008-08-03T19:30:00.011+01:00

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

2008-08-03T17:04:00.006+01:00

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

2008-07-14T21:58:00.006+01:00

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

2008-05-08T11:05:00.004+01:00

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

2008-04-27T08:47:00.004+01:00

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.

BAAS 2008

2008-03-26T18:01:00.001Z

At this year's British Association for American Studies Conference, held at Edinburgh University, I'll be speaking about: '"A Colossal White Elephant": New Orleans, the New South, and the Cotton Centennial Exposition, 1884-5.' It's a small part of my larger, ongoing research into New Orleans' social and cultural history.

Future Radio: New Orleans Jazz

2008-03-12T08:45:00.000Z

Following on from last August's appearance on Future Radio (96.9 FM), this Sunday (March 16th) I'll be appearing on Tony Cleary's show to talk about the beginnings of New Orleans jazz.

Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies

2008-03-04T13:01:00.004Z

River of Dreams has been reviewed by Luther Brown in Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies. He writes: "This is a valuable book and should be in the collections of anyone concerned with re-presenting place, early Americana, The River, and certainly Mark Twain."

Click for bigger images:

American Literature

2008-03-04T11:59:00.003Z

River of Dreams has received mention in American Literature:

Future Radio: New Orleans Jazz

2008-02-12T17:21:00.002Z

Following on from last August's appearance on Future Radio (96.9 FM), this Sunday (March 16th) I'll be appearing on Tony Cleary's show to talk about the beginnings of New Orleans jazz.

Conference: 1968, The Year of Living Dangerously

2007-09-14T07:09:00.000+01:00

This Sunday, I'll be presenting a paper at the American Studies Network conference at the University of East Anglia: ""Bring Our Country Back": Reaction, Revolution and Country Music, 1968." Above, the Byrds playing at the Grand Ole Opry in 1968.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

2007-09-02T10:10:00.000+01:00

My entry on Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is now up at the Literary Encyclopedia. An extract:

Mark Twain’s most famous novel, perhaps the most famous American novel ever published, begins with a series of warnings: “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot” (xxv). In all the long years since its publication in 1884, Twain’s disingenuous threat has availed little: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been dissected and discussed in extraordinary detail, and praised and blamed accordingly. Thus far at least, this disarmingly – or deceptively – simple tale of an outcast young boy attempting to help a runaway slave escape to freedom seems capable of bearing the weight of criticism heaped upon it. The book, its characters, and its themes and symbols retain a mythic (albeit controversial) place in the American canon – even in the American psyche.

Mississippi Quarterly

2007-09-01T11:14:00.000+01:00

My article on the John A. Murrell conspiracy and the Lynching of the Vicksburg gamblers on Independence Day, 1835, has now been officially published in the Mississippi Quarterly (59:1-2 (Winter-Spring 2006), 129-160).

UPDATE: Interestingly enough, this article is now available for download via Amazon.com.

Future Radio: The Roots of Jazz

2007-08-21T09:46:00.000+01:00

This Sunday (August 26, 1-2pm), I'll be appearing on Norwich's Future Radio (96.9 FM) talking to Tony Cleary about early black American music and the roots of jazz. If you can't receive Future Radio, you can listen live via the internet.

Booklist Review

2007-05-16T08:52:00.003+01:00

Writing in Booklist (May 1, 2007), the publication of the American Library Association, George Cohen described River of Dreams as "a lively and wide-ranging account of this majestic body of water."

River of Dreams - Update

2007-04-29T10:00:00.000+01:00

As the release date for River of Dreams approaches, a preview of the dust jacket (click a section for a larger image):

Plus, some advance praise for the book. The first comes from Louis J. Budd:

"River of Dreams pulled me along as irresistibly as the Mississippi itself, deep into the South's past. Mark Twain, I think, would have read it as closely as he read and enjoyed the actual river in his piloting days. Though this book deserves rapt (not raft) attention for its own insights and appreciativeness, explicators of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn should absorb it before traveling further with or into Huck, on the river or on shore."

The next, from John Seelye:

"I read Thomas Ruys Smith's book in one day's sitting (with a two hour break) a testimony to the author's graceful and lucid style, yet what he has given us is a detailed anatomy of writing inspired by North America's greatest river and the crowded scene of humanity in all its nefarious forms associated with the Mississippi during the first century of the republic. Smith's canvass starts with the post-Revolutionary period and ends with the years immediately following the Civil War. What emerges from his account is an iconography dominated by a heavy chiarasco, at the center of which is his lengthy account of gamblers, swindlers, and river pirates that gave such dark coloration to the river's chronicles: 'crooked letter, crooked letter' indeed.
"At the start, Jefferson associated the Mississippi with national unity, progress, and prosperity, but Britain's John Law had already given its name to a monstrous bubble of stock manipulation. It figured large in the obscure imperial schemes of General Wilkinson and Aaron Burr and later became associated with the horrific explosions of the steamboats that were Robert Fulton's gift to American progress. Travelers like Frances Trollope associated it with the intolerably boorish aspects of democracy, Harriet Stowe associated it with the horrors of slavery, and eastern hack writers created a mythical Davy Crockett whose crude energies seemed the river incarnate rising up as a buckskin-clad grotesque giving form to the perceived threat of Jacksonian democracy.
"Samuel L. Clemens, a.k.a. Mark Twain, whose boyhood experiences in Hannibal gave us Tom Sawyer and whose apprenticeship to southwestern humor gave us Huck Finn, receives his due but this books' chief value is as a mural approximating those three miles of canvas rolled out as panoramas before the wondering gaze of audiences who knew a lot more about the Mississippi River after the show was over. And so will you."

River of Dreams - Update

2006-12-08T10:24:00.000Z

Release date for River of Dreams: Imagining the Mississippi Before Mark Twain has been slated for June 2007. As you can see from the sidebar, it's already available for pre-order on Amazon.com - and numerous other reputable bookstores around the internet.

LSUP has also released its publication list for Spring 2007, which means that River of Dreams now has its own website here.

ISBN: 0-8071-3233-0 cloth
ISBN13: 978-0-8071-3233-3
272 pages, 26 Halftones, 1 Map, 6 x 9

River of Dreams - A First Glimpse

2006-10-01T08:53:00.000+01:00

A first glimpse of the cover of River of Dreams: Imagining the Mississippi Before Mark Twain (Louisiana State University Press, Spring 2007). This is a first draft and subject to change before publication, but it gives a hint of what's to come. The background is a detail from Herzog Friedrich Paul Wilhelm von Württemberg's lithograph, Die Balize an der Mündung des Missisippi (1828-1835).

And to go along with the cover, here's the promotional copy for the book, soon to appear in the LSU Press Spring 2007 catalogue:

River of Dreams: Imagining the Mississippi before Mark Twain
Thomas Ruys Smith

The Mississippi River’s cultural role in antebellum America

Even in the decades before Mark Twain enthralled the world with his evocative representations of the Mississippi, the river played an essential role in American culture and consciousness. Throughout the antebellum era, the Mississippi acted as a powerful symbol of America’s conception of itself - and the world’s conception of America. As Twain understood, “The Mississippi is well worth reading about.” Thomas Ruys Smith’s River of Dreams is an examination of the Mississippi’s role in the imagination of the times, and explores its cultural position in antebellum literature, art, thought, and national life.

Presidents, politicians, authors, poets, painters, and international celebrities of every variety experienced the Mississippi in its Golden Age. They left an extraordinary collection of representations of the river in their wake, images which developed as America itself changed. From Thomas Jefferson’s vision for the Mississippi to Andrew Jackson and the rowdy river culture of the early nineteenth century, Smith charts the Mississippi’s shifting importance in the making of the nation. In contrast, he examines the accounts of European travelers, including Frances Trollope, Charles Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackeray, whose notorious views of the river were heavily influenced by the world of the steamboat and plantation slavery.

As the antebellum period progresses, Smith discusses the importance of visual representations of the Mississippi, exploring the ways in which views of the river, particularly giant moving panoramas that toured the world, echoed notions of manifest destiny and the westward movement. He evokes the river in the late antebellum years as a place of crime and mystery, especially in popular writing, and most notably in Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man. An epilogue discusses the Mississippi during the Civil War, when possession of the river became vital, symbolically as well as militarily. The epilogue also provides an introduction to Mark Twain, a product of the antebellum river world who was to resurrect its imaginative potential for a post-war nation and produce an iconic Mississippi that still flows through a wide and fertile floodplain in American literature.

From empire building in the Louisiana Purchase to the trauma of the Civil War, the Mississippi’s dominant symbolic meanings tracked the essential forces operating within the nation. As Smith shows in this groundbreaking work, the story of the imagined Mississippi River is the story of antebellum America itself.

Thomas Ruys Smith is a lecturer in American literature and culture at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom.

Big Muddy 6.1

2006-09-14T15:45:00.000+01:00

My review of Jay Feldman's When The Mississippi Ran Backwards is about to appear in issue 6.1 of Big Muddy: A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley. It's a smart looking publication mostly devoted to new fiction and poetry.

Revue Française d'Études Américaines

2006-05-21T06:32:00.001+01:00

Margaret Hall, Frances Trollope, Harriet Martineau

My article, ''The river now began to bear on our imaginations': Margaret Hall, Frances Trollope, Harriet Martineau and the Problem of the Antebellum Mississippi', is available for sale and download here and here. The special issue of the Revue Française d'Études Américaines dedicated to the Mississippi is available from Amazon France.

Update: Full text PDF available for free here.

Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing

2006-04-03T08:22:00.000+01:00

'The Shanty-Boat' (from Willard Glazier's Down the Great River, 1887)

The Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing - featuring my chapter on the Mississippi: 'The Essence of America: The Mississippi River as Site and Symbol' - now has its own websites on the Cambridge University Press website:

Hardback; Paperback

More information as it emerges.

Next Year's Courses: The Civil War and The South

2006-03-19T18:33:00.000Z

Admiral Porter's Fleet Running the Rebel Blockade of the Mississippi at Vicksburg, April 16th 1863 (Currier & Ives)

Course outlines for two units that I will be convening at the University of East Anglia next year:

Nineteenth Century Representations of the Civil War:
The Civil War defined the American Nineteenth Century, and yet it has often been asserted that it was an 'unwritten war'. This unit will refute such claims, and examine the diverse ways that the conflict found expression throughout the nineteenth century, from Harriet Beecher's Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851-2) – in Lincoln's words, 'the book that started this great war' – to the publication of Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage in 1895. We will encounter a rich variety of representations – documentary photography, journalism, letters and diaries, memoirs, poetry, song, popular fiction, children's literature, short stories and novels – and consider throughout what the changing nature of the imagined Civil War has to tell us about America.

(Update: full course outline available here.)

Nineteenth Century Literature of the American South:
This unit will explore the transformation of Southern literature in the nineteenth century and, in so doing, will examine the changing nature of the South itself. In the first half of the course, we will witness the emergence of a distinct Southern literary identity in the years before the Civil War, and particularly consider the effect of slavery on the development of Southern letters. In the latter half, we will encounter, through Reconstruction and beyond, the effects of defeat, liberation and memory, and their concomitant, contradictory expression in the diverse literary modes of poetry, plantation fiction, local colour and realism.

(Update: full course outline available here.)

University of East Anglia

2006-03-10T20:28:00.000Z

From September I will be a Lecturer in American Studies (Literature and Culture) at the University of East Anglia. Contact details and links to my courses to follow. For now, more information about the School of American Studies is available here.

Update: My UEA profile is now available to view here.

New Statesman - 'Mardi Gras Among the Ruins'

2006-02-25T14:20:00.000Z

Invitation to the Mistick Krewe of Comus' Ball, 1925

My article on this year's Mardi Gras celebrations in New Orleans has been published in the New Statesman. Here's the first paragraph:

'Mardi Gras Among the Ruins'

'Not for the first time in its history, New Orleans is being held together by glitter and glue. Much of the city is still in ruins, and rebuilding plans are being vehemently debated, but Mardi Gras festivities are proceeding as normally as they can - normally, that is, for New Orleans...'

University College London

2006-01-06T14:47:00.000Z

This term I will be working as a Temporary Lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature University College London. Contact details available here.

I'll be teaching a range of courses including my own unit on New Orleans literature. New Orleans: Before the Deluge, will cover Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, John Kennedy Toole's Confederacy of Dunces, Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter, and James Lee Burke's Neon Rain.

Mississippi Quarterly - 'Independence Day, 1835'

2005-10-22T20:08:00.000+01:00

John Murrell stealing a slave

My article on the literary appearances of outlaw John Murrell and the Vicksburg gambler lynchings is soon to appear in Mississippi Quarterly. A preview of the first two paragraphs:

'Independence Day, 1835: The John A. Murrell Conspiracy and the Lynching of the Vicksburg Gamblers in Literature.'

'1835 has long been renowned as an extraordinary year for the Mississippi, not least because November witnessed the birth of one Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Events in the summer had already ensured that Independence Day, 1835 would enjoy a long afterlife in memory. Violence spread along the river. In Madison County, Mississippi, particularly the towns of Beattie’s Bluff and Livingston, paranoid terror gripped the population. It was widely believed that a criminal conspiracy masterminded by the (already incarcerated) John A. Murrell was about to result in a slave rebellion, timed to coincide with the upcoming national holiday. From the end of June to the middle of July, mob violence and vigilante justice held sway, resulting in ‘several dozen’ deaths and lynchings. Itinerant whites – primarily, steam doctors – were hanged alongside suspected slaves. As the Columbus (Miss.) Democratic Press described Murrell’s plot, ‘A more diabolical attempt – a deeper laid scheme of villainy, was never brought to light […] white men […] have, with a fiend like madness, instigated the ignorant and generally contented African, to rise.’

In Vicksburg, tensions between the town and its itinerant community of gamblers were about to ignite. It began with a brawl, at the Fourth of July celebration hosted by the Vicksburg militia between some of its members and a gambler (or a known associate of gamblers), Francis Cabler. After tarring and feathering Cabler, the militia resolved upon the formation of an Anti-Gambling Committee. Gamblers were given twenty-four hours to leave town. After the allotted period of time had passed, the militia and a civilian mob descended upon the ‘Kangaroos’, the infamous waterfront district that took its name from a famous gambling-house that had burned down the year before. Breaking up roulette wheels and faro tables as they went, the militia found a group of individuals ensconced in Alfred North’s coffee house. After an exchange of shots the militia stormed the building. One of its members, Dr Hugh Bodley, was shot dead. Five men – labelled as gamblers – were seized and promptly hanged. Other river towns followed suit, exiling, though not executing, their own gambling communities. The Louisville Advertiser announced that the ‘proceedings at Vicksburg have kindled a spirit throughout the lower country which is breaking forth at every point, and obliging the blackleg fraternity to make their escape with all haste...’

New Statesman - 'Gulf Coast Blues'

2005-10-17T07:26:00.000+01:00

A link to my article on the historic parallels for Hurricane Katrina in the New Statesman (12 September, 2005):

'Gulf Coast Blues'

'During the summer months, churches along America's Gulf Coast join together in a prayer that humbly acknowledges their precarious position in the world. It is "A Prayer for Hurricane Season": "We live in the shadow of a danger over which we have no control: the Gulf, like a provoked and angry giant, can awake from its seeming lethargy, overstep its conventional boundaries, invade our land and spread chaos." The destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina may be shocking in its magnitude, but for those who lived in its path, it should be no surprise. The Deep South has long been subject to disasters of biblical proportions. New Orleans alone can list flood, fire, plague and famine in its 300-year history. Parallels for modern horrors are all too easy to find, and natural catastrophes have proved essential for the political, social and cultural development of this unique region of the United States...'

Welcome to Blackleg - About the Author

2005-10-15T21:38:00.001+01:00

Canada Bill throwing monte

Blackleg is an occasional record of the publications and research activities of Dr Thomas Ruys Smith, Lecturer in American Literature and Culture at the University of East Anglia (Norwich, United Kingdom). Links to electronic versions of my writings, or to information about them, can be found in the sidebar.

A relatively up-to-date CV can be found here.

Please feel free to contact me about anything on this site or any aspect of my research . Just click on BLACKLEG.