81

Firing the Canon: Te Historical Search for

Literary Journalisms Missing Links
Nancy L. Roberts
University at Albany, SUNY, U.S.A.
Keynote address, International Association for Literary Journalism Stud-
ies, Toronto, Canada, May 2012
THE CASE FOR STUDYING MATERIAL CULTURE
W
hat could an ancient timber, a shard of china, gravestones, musical
instruments, cuts of meat, furniture, and even refuse dumps possibly
have to tell us about unearthing overlooked mines of literary journalism in
the United States? Much more than one at frst might think. To begin with,
in these artifacts of early American life, these small things forgotten, as the
anthropologist and historical archaeologist James Deetz has told us in his fas-
cinating book by the same name, lie clues to the culture of both colonial New
Englands English settlers and the black African Americans who lived among
them.
1
Tese common, everyday artifacts unearthed at Plymouth, Massachu-
setts and elsewhere in America give eloquent voice to people who did not
have the economic and educational wherewithal to leave behind elite records
in the way of great music, visual art, and writing. Instead, they produced
common material objectscultural remains, as Deetz calls themthat are of
incalculable value when decoded by historical archaeologists.
2
Tese materi-
als, when complemented by available data from probate, property, and tax
records; land deeds, court records, birth and death records; church records,
diaries, and other documents, reveal how these colonial Americans lived daily
life, including their ideas about design and space and even, we would have to
say, their world view.
Literary Journalism Studies
Vol. 4, No. 2, Fall 2012
82 Literary Journalism Studies
One of Deetzs most compelling fndings deals with the archaeological
and architectural remains of Parting Ways, a humble, late eighteenth-century
settlement near Plymouth established by a freed slave who had fought in the
Revolution, Cato Howe. Parting Ways material culture (i.e., post molds and
ceramics from the Turner-Burr house) reveals a strikingly West African un-
derstanding of space and design, in marked contrast to that of the neighbor-
ing white settlements. Te archaeology of such African American settlements
has illuminated our picture of black history in ways that written records alone
cannot. Deetz concludes: Te archaeology tells us that in spite of their lowly
station in life, [these African American settlers with West African roots] were
the bearers of a lifestyle, distinctively their own, neither recognized nor un-
derstood by their chroniclers.
3

Similarly, the work of folklorist Henry Glassie and others have fgured
importantly in the establishment of a rich tradition of scholarship on mate-
rial culture that reveals certain heretofore hidden and signifcant aspects of
American cultural history.
4
THE LINK TO LITERARY JOURNALISM STUDIES
M
any instructive parallels can be drawn to literary journalism studies,
if we will just ponder several leading questions. First, we need to be
mindful of the elite sources of literary journalism that have already attract-
ed full-bore scholarly analysis: books printed by recognized publishers and
magazines and newspapers such as Te New Yorker, Texas Monthly, and Te
New York Times. Yes, weve discovered and will continue to fnd major writ-
ers of literary journalism published in these pages, but we shouldnt overlook
other, less elite sourceswhere we may fnd not the usual suspects (Truman
Capote, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, et al.) but others with original visions of
literary journalism and the requisite abilities to realize them. Who knows how
our historical understanding of literary journalism might evolve, when we
uncover such voices and study them?
So, the leading question is this: for literary journalism, whats the equiva-
lent of material folk culture? Here I mean equivalent in the sense of being
an overlooked, commonplace source thats considered functional or utili-
tarian, rather than an intentional work of art (such as elite art, music, and
writing). Some of these comparatively functional potential sources of liter-
ary journalism are: household magazines and newspapers; letters, memoirs,
and diaries; epistolary journalism; religious tracts; travel writing; and social
movement, muckraking, and African American periodicals. Ill discuss each
of these in turn.
MISSING LINKS 83
UNCOVERING THE WORK OF WOMEN LITERARY JOURNALISTS: MAGAZINES
N
ote that a number of these potential sources will lead us to discover
the work of women writers. Do women write literary journalism? Its
not surprising that this question is still asked, considering that Tom Wolfe
included only two women (Joan Didion and Barbara Goldsmith) in his book
Te New Journalism. Tis classic 1973 work helped to defne the genre of
literary journalism as a mainly male province, as Jan Whitt points out.
5
So the
question of whether women write literary journalism is still posed, and the
answer may depend on where were looking. One neglected source is an entire
realm of publications scholars have basically bypassed: womens magazines,
as Amy Mattson Lauters has argued so convincingly in her book, Te Redis-
covered Writings of Rose Wilder Lane: Literary Journalist.
6
Here she presents
Lane (18861968) as a literary journalist, noting that Lanes literary journal-
ism has been largely overlooked because she wrote it for womens magazines
that have historically been devalued as media forms (including Womans Day,
Good Housekeeping, and Ladies Home Journal) as well as Cosmopolitan, Sunset,
Te San Francisco Bulletin, and the Pittsburgh Courier, an African American
newspaper.
And recent research reveals that still other womens magazines, more spe-
cialized because they deal wholly with farm life, are also repositories of liter-
ary journalism by women that deserves more than a cursory reading. Lauters
demonstrates this in her book-length study of such magazines as Te Farmers
Wife, Farm Wife News, and Country Woman.
7

Not to be forgotten are the literary ladies, as Sherilyn Cox Bennion
calls the women literary magazine editors of the nineteenth-century Ameri-
can West. Teir eforts at periodicals such as the Golden Era (1852), Te
Overland Monthly, and Te Californian, nurtured not just poetry and fc-
tion, but literary nonfction narrative that is well worth further exploration.
8
WOMENS LETTERS, DIARIES, AND JOURNALS; EPISTOLARY JOURNALISM
W
omen published very little in the frst half of the eighteenth cen-
tury, according to Elaine Showalter, a literary historian. Tey were
certainly writingletters, diaries, journals, and religious tracts, but these
were mainly private communications. Owing to societal norms and preju-
dice, publication paths were less open to them. When they did publish, it
was much more likely to be in newspapers rather than books.
9
And often, this
content took the form of letters, such as the many that the brilliant Marga-
ret Fuller (18101850) contributed to Horace Greeleys New York Tribune.
Greeley hired Fuller in 1844 and sent her to Europe in the summer of 1846 as
probably the frst woman foreign correspondent; between then and January
84 Literary Journalism Studies
1850 she wrote 37 dispatches for the New York Tribune from Great Britain,
France, and Italy.
10
Probably her very best were the war correspondence dis-
patches she sent to the Tribune after the 1849 Italian Revolution.
11
Fullers
writing as editor of Te Dial, the Transcendentalists infuential journal, is
also fertile literary journalism ground.
Katrina J. Quinn has recently brought to our attention the genre of
epistolary journalism, a largely unstudied form of literary journalistic narra-
tive, in nineteenth-century American newspapers.
12
While not all epistolary
journalism is necessarily literary journalism, she cautions, certainly some let-
ters written by journalists and published in the newspaper qualify as literary
journalismamong them, travel letters written to illuminate a specifc desti-
nation, not unlike the thick description prescribed by Cliford Geertz more
than a century later.
13

D
o unpublished letters qualify as literary journalism? Certainly let-
ters have yielded untold volumes of literary work, and many of these
works could be considered to be a form of journalism. Indeed, letters were
the frst journalistic forms in Europe. And they continued to be a means to
communicate news until being displaced to a considerable degree, in our age,
by email. For example, for a very long time, letters were the only sources of
news between those living on the eastern side of the Blue Ridge Mountains
and those living on the western side, as Hazel Dicken-Garcia writes in her
book To Western Woods. Here is an excerpt from one such letter, written in
1792 by Mary Howard in Kentucky to John Breckinridge in Virginia before
he moved his family to Kentucky: It gives me most sincere pleasure every
time I visit Cousin Betsy to see your Noble seat which is vastly preferable to
any I ever saw on James river. I ride to an eminence on which I expect youll
build. I there alight and has [sic] many a pleasing interview with you and my
dear Polly[:] Indeed, I cannot leave the solitary spot without shedding a tear
and wishing it real.
14
Similar claims about the important role of letters as a
form of journalistic communication could be made about other regions of
the United States.
Other examples are the letters Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) wrote
about her nursing experiences during the Civil War, frst published in Te
Boston Commonwealth (starting in May 1863). Trough the voice of her
comic character, Tribulation Periwinkle, Alcott details the challenges of car-
ing for wounded soldiers, the reality of which contrasts starkly with popular,
heroic images of the war.
15
For instance, she writes: One funereal lady came
to try her powers as a nurse; but, a brief conversation eliciting the facts that
she fainted at the sight of blood, was afraid to watch alone, couldnt possibly
take care of delirious persons, was nervous about infections, and unable to
MISSING LINKS 85
bear much fatigue, she was mildly dismissed. I hope she found her sphere,
but fancy a comfortable bandbox on a high shelf would best meet the re-
quirements of her case.
16
Nurse Periwinkle (Alcott) attends many deaths,
but none is more memorable than that of John, a beloved young soldier dy-
ing far from home and mother. I sat down by him, writes Alcott, wiped
the drops from his forehead, stirred the air about him with a slow wave of a
fan, and waited to help him die. He stood in sore need of helpand I could
do so little; for, as the doctor had foretold, the strong body rebelled against
death, and fought every inch of the way, forcing him to draw each breath with
a spasm, and clench his hands with an imploring look, as if he asked, How
long must I endure this, and be still!
17
W
omens letters present a particularly rich lode of material with literary
journalism potential. While historically, both men and women wrote
letters, epistolary journalism was a more common (and often the sole literary)
outlet for women. Many anthologies of letters have been recently published
and of course the possibilities for original, archival research are practically
limitless.
18
Increasingly, historical institutions are digitizing their collections
of letters to make them available online. For instance, the University of Min-
nesotas Immigration History Research Center has digitized letters that were
written between 1850 and 1970 both by immigrants and to immigrants in
languages other than English. See http://ihrc.umn.edu/research/dil/index.
html.
Others require online subscription, such as Manuscript Womens Letters
and Diaries from the American Antiquarian Society, which spans the years
1750 to 1950 and includes one hundred thousand pages of the personal
writings of women of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.
Some are famous, such as Annie Sullivan (describing how she taught Helen
Keller) and Ellen Tucker Emerson (Ralph Waldo Emersons daughter), writ-
ing about Concord, Massachusetts life during the Civil War, while many
more of the letter writers are obscure. See http://alexanderstreet.com/prod-
ucts/manuscript-womens-letters-and-diaries-american-antiquarian-society.
What potential cache of literary journalism lies in letter writing is sug-
gested by an excerpt that Quinn quotes from a letter by Samuel Bowles, the
editor of the Springfeld (Massachusetts) Republican (one of thirty-two that
he published in his paper during a cross-country trip in 1865). Bowles wrote
about crossing over the great Continental Divide: It was no more than a
thank-ye-marm in a New Englands winter sleigh ride, yet it separates the
various and vast waters of a Continent, and marks the fountains of the two
great oceans of the globe. But it was difcult to be long enthusiastic over this
infnitesimal point of mud; the night was very cold, and I was sore in unpo-
86 Literary Journalism Studies
etical parts from unaccustomed saddles, and I got down from all my high
horses, and into my corner of the stage, at the next station.
19

Another intriguing example is the correspondence of Mercy Otis War-
ren (17281814), a dramatist who wrote in 1779 to her best friend Abigail
Adams about the new American nation: America is a theatre just erected
the drama is here but begun, but while the actors of the old world have run
through every species of pride, luxury, venality, and vicetheir characters
will become less interesting and the western wilds which for ages have been
little known, may exhibit those striking traits of wisdom and grandeur, and
magnifcence, which the Divine oeconomist [sic] may have reserved to crown
the closing scene.
20
Tis sort of communication, in which women exchanged
ideas about American political life, is actually quite common during the eigh-
teenth century. Showalter tells us that women copied their letters and read
them aloud to their friends; epistolary writing was no small endeavor, but a
serious pursuit even when it was only shared among friends.
21
J
ust as letters can be a province of literary journalism narrative, so too can
be autobiographical writing such as memoir and diaries. In early America,
Indian captivity narratives such as Mary Rowlandsons 1682 book about her
abduction, A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary
Rowlandson, were immensely popular. Rowlandsons book, which shows a
specifcity of detail and observation that we would readily describe today as
journalistic, along with a literary sensibility and style, quickly became a
bestseller both here and abroad. It transcends the historical and cultural cir-
cumstances that produced it and by combining stark details, honesty, and
exquisite style, brings the experience of war and sufering to a personal and
accessible level.
22
Or consider Mary Boykin Chestnut (18231886), whose diary brought
to life the Civil War in a decidedly literary way.
23
Many literary women like
her kept diaries in the nineteenth century, even as they were writing literary
works for publication. And many women who wrote nothing else produced
diaries. Lillian Schlissels Womens Diaries of the Westward Journey is a classic
source, gathering diaries of women who were among the quarter of a mil-
lion Americans who crossed the continental United States between 1840 and
1870. Here is an excerpt from the diary of Catherine Haun: Tis was the
land of the bufalo. One day a herd came in our direction like a great black
cloud, a threatening moving mountain, advancing towards us very swiftly
and with wild snorts, noses almost to the ground, and tails fying in midair.
they seemed to be innumerable and made a deafening terrible noise.
24

Tantalizing research prospects lie in the increasing number of online
archives. For instance, the Harvard University Open Collections Program:
MISSING LINKS 87
Women Working, 18001930, features digitized diaries, memoirs, autobiog-
raphies, and journals. Tese contain stories and recollections of women as-
tronomers and doctors, preachers and missionaries, reformers and sufragists,
school girls and school teachers, a philanthropist and a country woman,
and, in the publications trade, several authors, an editor, and a book agent.
See: http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/ww/vcsearch.php?cat=diaries.
RELIGIOUS TRACTS AND PERIODICALS
I
n the early nineteenth century, religious tracts abounded. David Nord has
ably demonstrated that it was not the penny press publishers of the 1830s
but the earlier evangelical Christian publicists of the American Bible Society
and the American Tract Society who created the frst actual mass media.
25
To
my knowledge, no one has ever investigated what literary journalism might
lurk in these millions of pages (many of which were written by women)or
in the innumerable religious newspapers that blanketed the United States
throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, such as the Meth-
odist Christian Advocate and the American Messenger,
26
as well as the Christian
Advocate (a weekly paper published in New York by the Methodist Episcopal
Church, starting in 1826) and the Christian Recorder (published by the Afri-
can Methodist Episcopal Church, since 1852).
Why are these potentially rich sources for literary journalism overlooked?
Te answer may lie in the longstanding blind eye that many journalists
and by extension, historians of journalismcast toward religious institutions
in general. Too often, scholarship about religion is mistakenly equated with
proselytizing. Yet religion is a longstanding, central force with considerable
impact on society and has surely inspired works of literary journalism.
SOCIAL MOVEMENT PERIODICALS
S
ocial movement periodicals present yet another exciting prospect for liter-
ary journalism sleuthing. Te old truism that journalism thrives in times
of crisis also applies to literary journalism. In their anthology of Tirties
American women writers, Charlotte Nekola, and Paula Rabinowitz identify
a number of women who wrote reportage, theory, and analysis on behalf of
the Depression eras eforts to remake society, among them: Josephine Herbst,
Agnes Smedley, Anna Louise Strong, Ella Winter, Tillie Olsen, Meridel Le-
Sueur, and Mary Heaton Vorse, and Dorothy Day.
27

My own work on U.S. peace advocacy periodicals uncovered a trove
of women writers, heretofore largely unrecognized, who wrote passionately
and sometimes in a decidedly literary way about their ideas to achieve world
peace. One of them is Dorothy Day, whose writing in the Catholic Worker
newspaper from 1933 to 1980 I have discussed as an example of literary jour-
88 Literary Journalism Studies
nalism.
28
Tese women published their writing in scores of periodicals such as
the American Advocate of Peace, Four Lights, Friends Journal, the Circular and
Oneida Circular, New Harmony Gazette, Pax Christi USA, Peace and Freedom,
Shaker Manifesto, and Te Voice of Peace. Tey also wrote many books and
mainstream magazine and newspaper articles.
Sometimes, sifting through archival collections is the only way to recover
such lost history. At the Swarthmore College Peace Collection, I found re-
cords about a number of women who wrote extensively about peace issues
including several books each as well as extensive magazine and newspaper
articlesyet these women were nowhere to be found in any of the standard
biographical dictionaries, either in their time or ours.
29

H
istorically, other social movement periodicals such as the abolitionist
press have attracted gifted women writers such as Lydia Maria Child
(18021880). Tis multifaceted novelist, journalist, editor, and scholar wrote
forty-seven books and tracts including four novels and three collections of
short stories. She also wrote innumerable letters and substantial additional
fction and journalism, and the bibliography of her works is still growing
as more works, some anonymous, are discovered, according to her biogra-
pher Carolyn L. Karcher.
30
Child founded and edited Te Juvenile Miscel-
lany (18261834), a popular childrens magazine and also the National Anti-
Slavery Standard (18411843), the American Anti-Slavery Societys weekly
New York newspaper. (Her book-length collections of her columns from the
Standard, published in 1843 and 1845, were very popular and ofer intrigu-
ing literary journalism prospects.
31
)
Another accomplished abolitionist journalist was Sara Jane Clarke Lip-
pincott (18231904), who wrote under the name of Grace Greenwood for
the antislavery newspaper, the National Era, and the Saturday Evening Post of
Philadelphia.
32
Her journalism merits a closer look.
One cant leave the realm of social movement publications without not-
ing the vigorous nineteenth-century womans rights press that includes the
Revolution of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the Lily of
Amelia Bloomer, Womans Journal (Lucy Stone) and the Una (Paulina Wright
Davis).
33
What literary journalism may lie in these pages?
TRAVEL WRITING
T
ravel writing and foreign correspondence are yet other genres to which
some nineteenth-century women contributed, yet they are not usually
on our literary journalism radar, at least not before the twentieth century.
While Mark Twains literary journalism travel writing is well known,
34
Francis
Preston Blairs wife, Eliza Violet Gist (17941877), may have been the very
MISSING LINKS 89
frst American woman travel writer for a newspaper (the Washington Globe).
According to her husbands biographer, she was truly a co-editor of the Wash-
ington Globe with Blair, and assumed responsibility for foreign news, human
interest news, and special features, which included short stories, poetry, book
reviews, letters from diplomats and foreign travelers, brief anecdotes, riddles,
and other similar items.
35
Her travel pieces may ofer literary journalism
discoveries.
Sara Jane Clarke Lippincott was also a European correspondent for both
the abolitionist National Era and the Saturday Evening Post (18521853), and
her accounts of foreign cultures may show a distinctive feminine perspective
36

that is worth examining in relation to its literary journalistic qualities (such as
trenchant observation and sensory scene-setting).
Katherine Bonner Sherwood (18491883) wrote for the Memphis Ava-
lanche using the pen name Sherwood Bonner in the 1870s. Her travel let-
ters satirized the Boston and Concord intelligentsia, including Louisa May
Alcott. She proved herself an astute observer of the American scene during
the post-bellum period of rapid cultural and social change and deserves fur-
ther study as a potential literary journalist.
Te most famous travel writer of this period, of course, was a man
Bayard Taylor (18251878)who also may qualify as a literary journalist by
virtue of his insightful, participant-observation accounts of far-fung cultures
as a correspondent for Horace Greeleys Tribune in the 1840s and 1850s.
37
MUCKRAKING PERIODICALS
A
s we move into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we en-
counter the Progressive Era muckrakers, those crusading journalists who
tried to expose wrongdoing from the marketing of quack patent medicines to
Standard Oils unethical monopolistic practices. Surely they should be read
again with an eye toward recognizing literary journalism. Te passion of writ-
ers such as Ray Stannard Baker, Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Stefens, and others, in
the pages of publications such as McClures Magazine, Munseys, Cosmopolitan,
and Te American Magazine, to investigate corruption in politics and society
deeply, led to writing that we may indeed wish to consider for addition to the
corpus of literary journalism.
38

Historically, scholars of journalism have viewed muckraking and inves-
tigative reporting as belonging to a tradition separate from that of literary
journalism, as James Aucoin has observed: Tey situate bare-knuckled jour-
nalistic exposure of corruption, injustice, and maltreatment within historical
models of progressive reform. Te literature of fact, then, remains a parallel,
alternative tradition grounded in journalism-as-story-telling. Muckraking
90 Literary Journalism Studies
and literary journalism are seen as separate, parallel responses to shortcom-
ings in the mainstream media.
39
Yet exciting new work by Cecilia Tichi ar-
gues convincingly that muckrakingboth the classic early twentieth-cen-
tury Progressive variety, and more contemporary work by writers such as Eric
Schlosser (Fast Food Nation: Te Dark Side of the All-American Meal, 2001;
Laurie Garrett (Betrayal of Trust: Te Collapse of Global Public Health, 2000,
and Te Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World out of Balance,
1994), and Joseph Hallinan (Going Up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation,
2001)can qualify as nonfction narrative art.
40
Both muckraking and in-
vestigative reportingand literary journalismshare an emphasis on satura-
tion or immersion reporting, verifable fact, and the use such familiar literary
devices as characterization, voice, and symbolic language.
AFRICAN AMERICAN NEWSPAPERS
F
inally, a signifcant genre of African American literary expression, the
newspaper, began before the Civil War as a vehicle for abolitionist opin-
ion. Freedoms Journal, begun in 1827 by Samuel Cornish and John B. Russ-
wurm, set a standard of hewing to African American racial pride while serving
news and information targeted to that community. It was followed by Freder-
ick Douglasss North Star, and by the end of the Civil War more than forty Af-
rican American papers had been founded.
41
Eventually, as African Americans
settled in cities, they published newspapers for their communities such as the
Chicago Defender, Detroit Tribune, the Pittsburgh Courier, and the Amsterdam
News (New York). In their entirety, the millions of pages published in African
American newspapers since the early nineteenth century beg to be scrutinized
for the gems of literary journalism hidden there.
CONCLUSION
T
his is but a survey of some of the literary journalism equivalents of mate-
rial folk culture, and what is said here of American culture might also be
said of others. Rather than intentional works of art, these equivalents may be
more functional and utilitarian in their purposebut some may still reach
that elusive pinnacle of literary journalism, even if seemingly by accident. Just
like historical archaeologists, our challenge is to unearth in these small things
forgottenthese less elite sources from household and farming womens
magazines, letters, and religious tracts to travel writing and social movement,
muckraking, and African American periodicalsthe treasure that lies there-
in. Our excavations could reveal the ammunition to explode our formulaic
approaches, resulting in a diferent history of literary journalism, one much
more nuanced than we know now.
MISSING LINKS 91
Nancy Roberts is a professor in the Communication Depart-
ment and directs the Journalism Program at the University
at Albany, SUNY. She has taught literary journalism cours-
es for thirty years, at Albany and earlier at the University of
Minnesota. Her books include Te Press and America: An
Interpretive History of the Mass Media (with M. and E.
Emery), Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, and As
Ever, Gene: Te Letters of Eugene ONeill to George Jean
Nathan (with A.W. Roberts). She is the book review editor of Literary Journal-
ism Studies.

NOTES
1. James Deetz, In Small Tings Forgotten: Te Archaeology of Early American
Life (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1977).
2. As Deetz puts it, Historical archaeology studies the cultural remains of
literate societies that were capable of recording their own history. He further
defned historical archaeology as the archaeology of the spread of European culture
throughout the world since the ffteenth century and its impact on indigenous
peoples [In Small Tings Forgotten, p. 5].
3. Deetz, 15354.
4. Henry Glassie, Pattern in the Material Folk Culture of the Eastern United
States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968) and Folk Housing in
Middle Virginia: A Structural Analysis of Historic Artifacts (Knoxville: University of
Tennessee Press, 1975); Dell Upton and John Michael Vlach, Common Places: Read-
ings in American Vernacular Architecture (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press,
1986); Tomas J. Schlereth, ed., Material Culture: A Research Guide (Lawrence,
Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 1985).
5. Tom Wolfe, Te New Journalism (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1973);
Jan Whitt, Settling the Borderland: Other Voices in Literary Journalism (Lanham,
Md.: University Press of America, 2008), 119.
6. Amy Mattson Lauters, Te Rediscovered Writings of Rose Wilder Lane: Literary
Journalist (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 2007).
7. Lauters, More Tan a Farmers Wife: Voices of American Farm Women,
19101960 (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 2009).
8. Sherilynn Bennion, Equal to the Occasion: Women Editors of the Nineteenth-
Century West (Reno and Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 1990), 11931.
9. Elaine Showalter, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne
92 Literary Journalism Studies
Bradstreet to Annie Proulx (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 15.
10. Giovanna DellOrto, Giving Meanings to the World: Te First U.S. Foreign
Correspondents, 18381859 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002), 105.
11. Margaret Fuller Ossoli, At Home and Abroad, ed. Arthur B. Fuller (New
York: Te Tribune Association, 1869), 420.
12. Exploring an Early Version of Literary Journalism: Nineteenth-century
Epistolary Journalism, vol. 3, no. 1 (Spring 2011), 3251.
13. Cliford Geertz, Tick Description: Toward an Interpretive Teory of Cul-
ture, in Te Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973,
330.
14. Hazel Dicken-Garcia, To Western Woods: Te Breckinridge Family Moves to
Kentucky in 1793 (Rutherford, Madison, Teaneck, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson Uni-
versity Press, 1991), 175 [22 July 1792].
15. Showalter, 139.
16. Louisa May Alcott, Hospital Sketches (Carlisle, MA: Applewood Books,
1991), 91 [originally published: Boston: James Redpath Publishers, 1863], http://
digital.library.upenn.edu/women/alcott/sketches/sketches.html#86.
17. Alcott, 56.
18.Lisa Grunwald and Stephen J. Adler, eds., Womens Letters: America from the
Revolutionary War to the Present (New York: Dial Press, 2005).
19. Quinn, 48, quoting Samuel Bowles, Across the Continent: A Summers Jour-
ney to the Rocky Mountains, the Mormons, and the Pacifc States, with Speaker Colfax
(Springfeld, Mass.: Bowles, 1865), 75.
20. Quoted in Showalter, 17 .
21. Showalter, 18.
22. Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola, Introduction to Womens Indian
Captivity Narratives (New York: Penguin, 1998), 5.
23. Mary Chestnuts Civil War, ed. C. Vann Woodward (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1981).
24. Schlissel, 176.
25. David Paul Nord, Te Evangelical Origins of Mass Media in America,
18151835, Journalism Monographs, No. 88 (1984) (Columbia, S.C.: Association
for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication).
26. David Paul Nord, Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of
Mass Media in America, 17901860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
27. Charlotte Nekola and Paula Rabinowitz, eds., Writing Red: An Anthology of
American Women Writers, 19301940 (New York: Feminist Press, 1987); Dee Gar-
rison, Mary Heaton Vorse: Te Life of an American Insurgent (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1989). Also see: Norman Sims, True Stories: A Century of Literary
Journalism (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 134; James Boylan,
Publicity for the Great Depression: Newspaper Default and Literary Reportage, in
Mass Media between the Wars: Perceptions of Cultural Tension, 19181941, ed. Cath-
erine L. Covert and John D. Stevens (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press,
1984); and William Dow, Narrating Class in American Fiction (New York: Palgrave
MISSING LINKS 93
Macmillan, 2009), on Meridel LeSueur ( 13362) and Agnes Smedley (17985).
28. Nancy L. Roberts, Dorothy Day (evaluative essay), in A Sourcebook
of American Literary Journalism: Representative Writers in an Emerging Genre, ed.
Tomas B. Connery (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1992), 17985.
29. For instance: Fannie Fern Phillips Andrews, Florence Brewer Boeckel,
Frances Alice Kellor, Dorothy Hewitt Hutchinson.
30. Karcher writes: New articles of hers keep turning up, not only in hitherto
unexamined journals but in those already searched by other scholars. Child also
published a large number of articles anonymously or pseudonymously, both in her
husbands newspaper, the Massachusetts Journal (ca. 1828 until 1832), and during
the Civil War, in mainstream political newspapers. Many of these articles remain to
be located. Carolyn L. Karcher, Te First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biog-
raphy of Lydia Maria Child (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994),
757.
31. Lydia Maria Child, Letters from New York [First Series]. (New York: C.S.
Francis/Boston: James Munroe, 1843; London, Bentley, 1843); Lydia Maria Child,
Letters from New York. Second Serie. (New York: C.S. Francis/Boston: J.H. Francis,
1845).
32. DellOrto, 10506.
33. Catherine C. Mitchell, Historiography on the Womans Rights Press, in
Outsiders in 19
th
-Century Press History: Multicultural Perspectives, ed. Frankie Hutton
and Barbara Straus Reid (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University
Popular Press, 1995), 15968.
34. Tomas B. Connery, Journalism and Realism: Rendering American Life
(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2011), 8899.
35. Elbert B. Smith, Francis Preston Blair (New York: Te Free Press, 1980), 50.
36. Shirley Foster, Across New Worlds: Nineteenth-Century Women Travellers and
their Writings (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), 24.
37. DellOrto, , 29; James L. Gray, Bayard Taylor, in Dictionary of Literary
Biography, vol. 189: American Travel Writers, 18501915 (Detroit: Gale Research,
1998), 32135.
38. John M. Harrison and Harry H. Stein, eds., Muckraking: Past, Present and
Future (University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1973).
39. James Aucoin, review of Exposes and Excess: Muckraking in America,
19002000 by Cecelia Tichi (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004),
published on Jhistory (October 2006); http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.
php?id=12412
40. Cecelia Tichi, Exposes and Excess; Muckraking in America, 1900/2000
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
41. Bernell Tripp, Origins of the Black Press: New York, 18271847 (Northport,
Ala.: Vision Press, 1992), 9; also see Patrick S. Washburn, Te African American
Newspaper: Voice of Freedom (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2006).
94 Literary Journalism Studies