C19: America in the 19th Century

C19: America in the 19th Century

The C19 Podcast is a production by scholars from across the world exploring the past, present, and future through an examination of the United States in the long nineteenth century. The official podcast of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists.

Episodes

S09 E03 | Chesser & Holly: A Collision of Love, Race, and Law in Nineteenth-Century Arkansas

September 22, 2025 • 37 mins
In 1888, James Chesser and Georgianna Holly married in the growing city of Fort Smith, Arkansas. A few months later during James's arrest, courts argued that Georgianna was legally a man. Legal and social structures at the time struggled for language to define this mixed-race couple in a time before rampant anti-sodomy and anti-miscegenation laws. In this episode, Rachel Trusty (Bucknell University) lays out what is known about th...
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S09 E02 | How Do We Teach Literature When Students Won’t Read What We Assign?

August 14, 2025 • 37 mins
This episode addresses the elephant slouching on its phone in the corner of many literature classrooms. Mary Isbell (University of New Haven) describes her search for a solution to the student reading crisis, incorporating conversations recorded as she was writing Searching for Wonder: Teaching Literature with Student-Selected Texts. These conversations reveal the many reasons faculty may be hesitant to set aside their carefully cu...
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S09 E01 | Just Add Nutmeg: YouTube, Nostalgia, and the Fantasy of Early America

July 21, 2025 • 59 mins
In this episode, Christopher Douglas (Jacksonville State University) leads Ashley Rattner (Jacksonville State University) through some of the most popular late 18th and early 19th-century content available on YouTube: period cooking recreation. If one were to search "18th century America" or "early America" on YouTube, the top results are short videos of people making food in recreation settings. This episode focuses specifically o...
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S08 E05 | Napoleon and the Caribbean

January 23, 2025 • 69 mins
In this episode, Marlene L. Daut (Yale University) and Grégory Pierrot (UConn-Stamford) revisit Ridley Scott's big-budget 2023 biopic, Napoleon, out of Apple Studios. The film’s writers promised to tell the story of France’s first emperor, Napoléon Bonaparte, in a novel way. Designed to focus on his relationship with his wife Joséphine de Beauharnais, the film instead harnessed much of its energy on rehearsing Bonaparte’s well-know...
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S08 E04 | California, a Slave State: Birth of a State

November 14, 2024 • 39 mins
In this episode, Jean Pfaelzer (Prof. Emerita, University of Delaware) describes the untold history of slavery, slave revolts, and resistance in California, based on her award-winning book California, A Slave State. Interviewed by Karen Clopton, JD, Chair of the San Francisco Human Rights Commission and Harvard University Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow, Pfaelzer looks West to upend the notion of slavery in the United States ...
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S08 E03 | Club Newspapers and Civic Collaboration at Chicago Settlement Houses

October 21, 2024 • 37 mins
In this episode, Fiona Maxwell (University of Chicago) highlights the presence and power of youth voices in the collaborative print culture of Progressive Era Club Newspapers. Through a close look at Northwestern University Settlement House, Fiona illustrates the varied, and often fun, ways in which children and youth from marginalized communities utilized the power of collective imagination to reimagine their public sphere. The ep...
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S08 E02 | The Time and Place of Performance

September 23, 2024 • 45 mins
“The Time and Place of Performance” looks at the vast circuits of nineteenth-century performance. Amy Huang (Bates College) and Kellen Hoxworth (University at Buffalo, SUNY) consider how nineteenth-century performances move backward and forward, citing past moments, and themselves undergoing processes of recycling and re-presentation to move into the future and challenge the framework of the nation-state. This conversation explores...
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S08 E01 | Undomesticated: Nonhuman Animals and Queer Resistance in Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

August 23, 2024 • 37 mins
Generally associated with postbellum regionalism, mutinous heroines feigning New England propriety, and consumable literature for the urban elites, recent re-readings of Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman’s fiction have uncovered its nuanced, surreptitious, and explosive quality. Much of this disquiet is concentrated in the bodies of barely domesticated animals. Contributors to this episode – Elena Furlanetto (host, University of Duisbur...
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S07 E05 | The G19 New Book Forum on The Matter of Black Living by Autumn Womack

June 12, 2024 • 46 mins
Since May 2021, G19: The Graduate Student Collective of C19 has produced and published The New Book Forum, an online interview series that facilitates conversations between graduate students and the author of a recent book in the field of 19th-century American literature. This episode is hosted by the forum’s founders, Rachael DeWitt (Columbia University), Max Chapnick (Northeastern University), and Allison (Ally) Fulton (Universit...
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S07E04 | Sagacious Canine Companions: Nineteenth-Century Newfies in Fact and Fiction

May 9, 2024 • 40 mins
In this episode, Kassie Jo Baron (University of Tennessee at Martin) and Karah M. Mitchell (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) investigate the popularity and representation of “sagacious” Newfoundland dogs in nineteenth-century American literature. The episode begins with an overview of animal studies as a theoretical framework for analyzing the relationship between animals, history, and literature. Keeping this framework...
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S07E03 | Reclaimed Melodies: Martin R. Delany, Joshua McCarter Simpson, and Stephen Foster

April 3, 2024 • 36 mins
In this episode, Paul Fess (LaGuardia Community College) explores the connections between Martin Delany and the songwriters Joshua McCarter Simpson and Stephen Foster. Embedded in the mix of Delany’s novel Blake; or, The Huts of America are several songs that invoke some of Foster’s most familiar melodies, such as those associated with the songs “Oh! Susanna” and “Uncle Ned.” Digging through the archive, scholars have discovered th...
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S07E02 | The End: Looking Forward to the Eighth Biennial C19 Conference

February 19, 2024 • 43 mins
In this episode, we look forward to the upcoming C19 Conference, to be held March 14-16 in Pasadena, California. Jessica Van Gilder (University of Kentucky) interviews Chair of the C19 Program Committee Lara Langer Cohen (Swarthmore College) and G19 leader and editor Courtney Murray (Pennsylvania State University) to discuss the theme and location of the conference and offer practical advice for first-time participants. Along the w...
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S07E01 | Studying Transness in the Nineteenth Century

January 16, 2024 • 39 mins
In this episode, Eagan Dean (Rutgers University, New Brunswick) makes the case that trans studies is an important new area for nineteenth century cultural history and that the stakes of this scholarship are higher than ever. Featuring author Peyton Thomas and scholars Rebekkah Mulholland (California State University, Sacramento) and Jen Manion (Amherst College), Eagan Dean gives an overview of current scholarship in the field and o...
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"Best of" the C19 Podcast | Tena, Too, Sings America

December 13, 2023 • 35 mins
How does an enslaved woman's song from 1830s in Georgia end up on a 1950s radio program in South Africa and in a modern singing class? This is the surprising story of an African-born woman named Tena, whose music has echoed for generations across continents, airwaves, and even college classrooms. Mary Caton Lingold (Virginia Commonwealth University) first encountered Tena’s song in a book of sheet music by Carl Sandburg but a serie...
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S06 E04 | PhDs Who Union

August 7, 2023 • 51 mins
Over the last few years, academia has seen a wave of labor action, especially by graduate workers. In this episode, Max Chapnick (Boston University) and Lawrence Lorraine Mullen (University at Buffalo), expand on their MLA 2023 panel on graduate worker labor organizing, exploring the relationship between labor unions, graduate student research, and pedagogy. Chapnick and Mullen start by revisiting brief audio clips from the MLA p...
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S06E03 | Truth Stranger than Fiction: The Life and Literature of Yda H. Addis

June 14, 2023 • 31 mins
In the last two decades of the 19th  century, newspaper readers across the U.S. were familiar with the work of California writer Yda H. Addis (c. 1857-1941). Her original, adapted, and translated short fiction appeared in newspapers from coast to coast, and her bilingual journalism appeared in U.S. and Mexican periodicals. But by 1900 her career was in tatters after a nasty divorce, a stint in jail, and an attempted murder charge. ...
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S06E02 | Did You Hear?: Eavesdropping on 19th Century Women

April 5, 2023 • 46 mins
In this episode, Susannah Sharpless (Cornell University) and Charline Jao (Cornell University) propose gossip as a scholarly approach and indulge their desire to talk about other people. Our hosts connect juicy tidbits from the lives of nineteenth-century women writers to questions about the role of biography, identification, and inference in scholarship more broadly. Jao explores the life of Rose Terry Cooke, whose short stories a...
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S06E01 | Doing Recovery in the 21st Century: A Journey Through the Archives and Beyond

March 2, 2023 • 70 mins
Certain texts and writers have been allotted attention and resources in the study of American literature, while others remain understudied and sometimes even unknown. The efforts of literary recovery seek to make available lesser-known texts by exploring the archives and doing different kinds of editorial work. How might such recovery efforts materialize in the form of book editions, anthologies, or digital archives? What kinds of ...
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“Best of” the C19 Podcast | "The N Word in the Classroom: Just Say No"

February 15, 2023 • 46 mins
The N-word is here to stay, and so are debates about it. However, scholars and teachers don’t need the word to disappear so much as they need to be more deliberate and intellectually rigorous in handling it. In this episode, Koritha Mitchell (Ohio State University) suggests that students and faculty members should not be subjected to hate speech in the classroom just because it appears in the texts we study. She shares her deep dis...
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“Best of” the C19 Podcast | Networked Connections: Exploring Emily Dickinson

February 1, 2023 • 36 mins
Every week, back in 2018, Ivy Schweitzer and her team of students at Dartmouth College selected several poems and letters written by Emily Dickinson in 1862, a year of creativity “at the White Heat.” They framed these poems with a summary of the news of the time, literary culture, biographical events in the Dickinson circle, a brief survey of more recent critical responses, and personal reflection. This episode explores that cumula...
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