Cornell University: “Website Sheds Light on 19th Century Black Literary Culture”

From Cornell Chronicle:

A digital humanities project cataloging the work of 19th century poets has unearthed a trove of work that sheds light on life, history and issues of the time, including the campaign to end slavery.

Doctoral student Charline Jao was inspired to create Periodical Poets after taking a class by Derrick Spires, associate professor of Literatures in English in the College of Arts and Sciences, which introduced her to many publications from this period.

“Some of the poems in these periodicals are hard to find in other places or haven’t been anthologized, but I think they’re worthy of preservation and presentation,” Jao said. “They are fascinating historically, they memorialize the times when they were written, but they’re also poems about people and their social lives. And a lot of them are just wonderful artistically.”

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“Periodical Poets might be the first project (to my knowledge) that gives us a fine-grained look at poetry (both original and reprinted) published in Freedom’s Journal, Rights of All and other New York papers,” Spires said. “The project demonstrates the range of reading interests that Black newspapers cultivated, from poems ‘written for’ the newspapers to poems reprinted from other sources.

The site includes 700 poems Jao discovered and transcribed from periodicals managed by Black editors in New York City. The site is searchable by publication, title, description, author and other parameters. The website also includes collections of poems focused on themes — from deaths and elegies to hymns and songs to British poets and women poets. Another section showcases a large collection of online and textual resources.

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