At ALA last week, I shared some “hidden treasures”–underutilized resources–at the SSAWW site, http://ssaww.org. Some people asked if I would share the slides from the presentation, so here they are:
Amlit resources in the news
Two new archival resources (links)
Via Twitter just now, two archival resources with great visual materials:
1. Turn of the Century Posters at the New York Public Library http://images.nypl.org/index.php?id=1543077&t=f
2. From the New York Public Library, an interactive map of New York over time
Previously Unknown Source of The Scarlet Letter Discovered
Via Rob Velella on Twitter, Professor Richard Kopley’s discovery of an unknown source for The Scarlet Letter:
DUBOIS, Pa. — An indispensable masterwork in American literature, “The Scarlet Letter,” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, has been a staple in literary studies and English courses for generations. Now, thanks to the work of Penn State DuBois Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus Richard Kopley, more is known about how this novel came to exist.
Kopley has edited and re-released “The Salem Belle: A Tale of 1692” (Penn State Press), a novel first published, anonymously, in 1842. The unidentified author was Ebenezer Wheelwright. Kopley considers the book as a major source for the 1850 novel “The Scarlet Letter.” However, Wheelwright’s book had fallen into obscurity and was nearly lost to history. Kopley’s research shows that Hawthorne drew inspiration for his classic from this previously little-known work. The new edition includes an introduction and notes by Kopley, which detail his research into the two novels and their connection.
[Read more at the link]
Jack London’s Photographs at the Huntington Library
Jay Williams, author of Author Under Sail: The Imagination of Jack London, 1893-1902, recently announced to the Jack London listserv that the Huntington Library is in the process of digitizing the contents of London’s photograph albums:
http://hdl.huntington.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/p16003coll7
Among the photographs available there are this one picturing the Bond brothers at their cabin with “Jack,” the dog that inspired the character of Buck in The Call of the Wild. 
Lily Bart’s New York in Films, 1896-1905
A few links that let you see the New York of Lily Bart in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, with a few additional links just because they’re interesting. I’ll keep adding to this post as I find more. Several of the individual films are available on DVD from such collections as Treasures from the American Film Archives.
- Visual Tour of New York 1896-1901, with added street sounds:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qr7kRYO29n4
The “Visual Tour” has an extended sequence of a man with a snow shovel, possibly looking for work in a way reminiscent of what Hurstwood saw in Dreiser’s Sister Carrie.
2. Oldest Footage of New York with maps of today:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQR-HKzESsM
3. This Was New York has Hester Street, Ellis Island, and other locations:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_A77jLNQ92I
4. via Irene Gammel @MLC_Research on Twitter: Audio recording of a dinner party in London, October 5, 1888, addressed to Thomas Edison:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebDdwcsrB4U&feature=youtu.be
Approaches to Teaching Jack London
It’s here! I received a hardcover and a paperback version of Approaches to Teaching the Works of Jack London yesterday. Nicely done, MLA, to give the volume’s contributors both a hardcover and a paperback edition.
I saw an earlier ad with a different cover (here). That one has the traditional dog sled associated so much with London’s Klondike adventures. I’m glad they chose this picture instead, for unless I’m mistaken, this is the picture of London dressed for going undercover in the slums of London for his book The People of the Abyss. It’s this other London–the rancher, journalist, socialist, etc.–that people need to know better.
The Amazon page didn’t have a table of contents, and I couldn’t find it on the MLA site, so here’s a picture of the ToC:
Project REVEAL: Scanned mages from American authors’ archives at the Harry Ransom Center
In Project REVEAL, The Harry Ransom Center has put scans from its collections of manuscripts, photographs, and printed texts of American authors online:
http://hrc.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/reveal#nav_top
The Writers of Project REVEAL
“No Irish need apply” a myth? No, it’s true.
Brooklyn Eagle, May 1, 1863. From Patrick Young’s blog post (link below).
At Easily Distracted, Timothy Burke reports the remarkable story of Rebecca Fried, a high school student at Sidwell Friends, who has disproved Professor Richard Jensen’s contention that “No Irish Need Apply” was a feverish figment of the Irish-American imagination:
Fried’s essay is a refutation of a 2002 article by the historian Richard Jensen that claimed that “No Irish Need Apply” signs were rare to nonexistent in 19th Century America, that Irish-American collective memory of such signs (and the employment discrimination they documented) was largely an invented tradition tied to more recent ideological and intersubjective needs, and that the Know-Nothings were not really nativists who advocated employment (and other) discrimination against Irish (or other) immigrants. existence of signs and ads saying “No Irish need apply,” taken as a given in many history classes, was challenged.
Fried published her findings in “No Irish Need Deny: Evidence for the Historicity
of NINA Restrictions in Advertisements and Signs”, Journal of Social History, 10:1093, 2015.
Patrick Young, who reproduces excerpts from Fried’s article and some of the many supporting ads, also includes some of the back-and-forth between Jensen and a respectful but unintimidated Fried:
Yes there were NINA newspaper ads—I was the one who found the first one—but I argued they were very rare. If a man read every job want-ad in his newspaper every week for 40 years, he would have a 50-50 chance of coming across one NINA ad in his lifetime. That’s what I called very rare—& the student called very common. Richard Jensen
. . .
I also have to respectfully disagree with your numerical calculation. I explain why at page 25 of the article, which is a brief response to your points. Briefly, if the man in your example read the Sun newspaper, he would have read at least 15 male-directed NINA ads in a single year, plus any female-directed ones, plus any from other sources. Thanks again for this. I respect you and your work.
Rebecca Fried
Burke has a nuanced post that discusses the implications for historians, but on an individual (and non-historian) level, I’ll be using this in English 372 this fall not only to illustrate the issue of anti-Irish prejudice, which we discuss in a broader context of racism and xenophobia, but also to highlight the importance of questioning theories and returning to the evidence even when, or especially when, an idea is taken as given.
Frank Norris Studies and the Dreiser Newsletter now available online
Some years back, for the Howells Society site and the Frank Norris page, I compiled a list of Frank Norris Studies even though it was unfortunately not available.
Now it is!
Here’s the link to the complete run of Frank Norris Studies:
http://franknorrissociety.org/frank-norris-studies-1986-2004/
And here’s the link to the Dreiser Newsletter.There’s also an index.
http://www.dreisersociety.org/the-dreiser-newsletter.html
I will be the Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser pages to reflect two good new resources,
New Frank Norris Society Site and American Literary Naturalism Newsletter Archive
Update 2/28/23: Site is no longer active.
The Frank Norris Society has a beautiful new site at http://franknorrissociety.org/, courtesy of Eric Carl Link, Steven Frye, and Hannah Huber. There you can find a membership form and also the back issues of The American Literary Naturalism Newsletter, which is indexed by the MLA.
Congratulations to the FNS for putting together this resource!
Donna M. Campbell 