Anne Hampton Brewster’s Letters from Rome 

Dr. Etta M. Madden, Missouri State University 

Madden will transcribe and contextualize selections from the more than 600 “letters” Philadelphian Anne Hampton Brewster (1819-1892) wrote from Rome as a newspaper correspondent engaged with Italian politics and urban development during the Unification era and US Reconstruction. Published primarily on the first or second page of the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin and the Boston Daily Advertiser, between 1869 and 1883, Brewster’s letters illuminate the ways in which many American women engaged with global political culture. The project zooms in on Brewster, bringing to life the ways in which she understood the publishing world as one in which she helped to create the news by contributing to the “feed” crossing the Atlantic and by engaging the culture in which she lived as an expatriate. In addition to writing contextualizing documents and creating a searchable bibliography of the texts, Madden and Whitaker will train graduate students (with the aid of the Hub) in using Markdown to transcribe and tag Brewster’s letters.

ArchivalGossip. A Scholarly Take on Nineteenth-Century Tattle Tales

Dr. Katrin Horn, University of Bayreuth (Germany), with Selina Foltinek, University of Bayreuth

ArchivalGossip is the digital outlet of Horn’s ongoing American Studies research project “Economy and Epistemology of Gossip in Nineteenth-Century US American Culture” (2019-2022). With an emphasis on realist fiction, life writing, and magazines, the project seeks to answer of what and how gossip knows and what this knowledge is worth. To this end, the site analyzes women’s uses of gossip at the time between the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 and the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, with a focus on the decades between 1860 and 1900 as a time when “the woman question” was particularly pertinent in American culture. The site consists of the project’s blog, a sources page, annotations, and a digital database of selected objects of study collected from various archives (such as Library of Congress, New York Public Library, and Pennsylvania Historical Society). The database, still in its early stages, collects letters, diaries, articles, cartoons, photographs and paintings, auto/biographies, and information on people and events. With the Recovery Hub, Horn and Foltinek will develop a project charter and the data visualization and metadata aspects of the site, creating new exhibits, a timeline, and mapping functionality. The Hub will provide additional training in Omeka and visualization tools, such as Palladio.

Mary Johnston’s The Wanderers

Dr. Jane Atteridge Rose, University of South Florida

This project offers a reprint of Mary Johnston’s The Wanderers (1917) as well as a selection of short texts by Johnston, including her Atlantic Monthly essay “The Woman’s War.” Johnston was one of America’s best-known writers during the first three decades of the twentieth century, but her renown faded, and her socially engaged texts have been lost to most modern readers. Her works reflect advanced feminist thinking and a deep knowledge of history, philosophy, and religion, as well as “newer” disciplines of sociology, anthropology, psychology, and economics. With the help of the Recovery Hub, Rose will create a static, sustainable site, with Johnston’s texts encoded using TEI Simple. Rose’s site will offer contextual notes regarding Johnston’s writing during the Progressive Era, including her attitudes toward woman’s suffrage, collective ownership of property, and the freeing of religion from dogma.