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Unlocked Book of the Month: Blackbird

Each month we’re highlighting a book available through PSU Press Unlocked, an open access initiative featuring scholarly digital books and journals in the humanities and social sciences.

About our June pick:

From the beginning, the Beatles acknowledged in interviews their debt to Black music, apparent in their covers of and written original songs inspired by Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, the Shirelles, and other giants of R&B. Blackbird goes deeper, appreciating unacknowledged forerunners, as well as Black artists whose interpretations keep the Beatles in play. Drawing on interviews with Black musicians and using the song “Blackbird” as a touchstone, Katie Kapurch and Jon Marc Smith tell a new history. They present unheard stories and resituate old ones, offering the phrase “transatlantic flight” to characterize a back-and-forth dialogue shaped by Black musicians in the United States and elsewhere, including Liverpool. Kapurch and Smith find a lineage that reaches back to the very origins of American popular music, one that involves the original twentieth-century blackbird, Florence Mills, and the King of the Twelve String, Lead Belly. Continuing the circular flight path with Nina Simone, Billy Preston, Jimi Hendrix, Aretha Franklin, Sylvester, and others, the authors take readers into the twenty-first century, when Black artists like Bettye LaVette harness the Beatles for today. Detailed, thoughtful, and revelatory, Blackbird explores musical and storytelling legacies full of rich but contested symbolism. Appealing to those interested in developing a deep understanding of the evolution of popular music, this book promises that you’ll never hear “Blackbird”—and the Beatles—the same way again.

Read more and access the book here: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-09561-5.html

See the full list of Unlocked titles here: https://www.psupress.org/unlocked/unlocked_gallery.html

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Unlocked Book of the Month: African American Artists and the New Deal Art Programs

Each month we’re highlighting a book available through PSU Press Unlocked, an open access initiative featuring scholarly digital books and journals in the humanities and social sciences.

About our March pick:

This book examines the involvement of African American artists in the New Deal art programs of the 1930s. Emphasizing broader issues informed by the uniqueness of Black experience rather than individual artists’ works, Mary Ann Calo makes the case that the revolutionary vision of these federal art projects is best understood in the context of access to opportunity, mediated by the reality of racial segregation. Focusing primarily on the Federal Art Project (FAP) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), Calo documents African American artists’ participation in community art centers in Harlem, in St. Louis, and throughout the South. She examines the internal workings of the Harlem Artists’ Guild, the Guild’s activities during the 1930s, and its alliances with other groups, such as the Artists’ Union and the National Negro Congress. Calo also explores African American artists’ representation in the exhibitions sponsored by WPA administrators and the critical reception of their work. In doing so, she elucidates the evolving meanings of the terms race, culture, and community in the interwar era. The book concludes with an essay by Jacqueline Francis on Black artists in the early 1940s, after the end of the FAP program. Presenting essential new archival information and important insights into the experiences of Black New Deal artists, this study expands the factual record and positions the cumulative evidence within the landscape of critical race studies. It will be welcomed by art historians and American studies scholars specializing in early twentieth-century race relations.

Read more and access the book here: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-09493-9.html

See the full list of Unlocked titles here: https://www.psupress.org/unlocked/unlocked_gallery.html

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Unlocked Book of the Month: Struggle for the City

Each month we’re highlighting a book available through PSU Press Unlocked, an open access initiative featuring scholarly digital books and journals in the humanities and social sciences.

About our December pick:

The urban renewal policies stemming from the 1954 Housing Act and 1956 Highway Act destroyed the economic centers of many Black neighborhoods in the United States. Struggle for the City recovers the agency and solidarity of African American residents confronting this diagnosis of “blight” in northern cities in the 1950s and 1960s. Examining Black newspapers, archival documents from Black organizations, and oral histories of community advocates, Derek G. Handley shows how African American residents in three communities—the Hill district of Pittsburgh, the Bronzeville neighborhood of Milwaukee, and the Rondo district of St. Paul—enacted a new form of citizenship to fight for their neighborhoods. Dubbing this the “Black Rhetorical Citizenship,” a nod to the integral role of language and other symbolic means in the Black Freedom Movement, Handley situates citizenship as both a site of resistance and a mode of public engagement that cannot be divorced from race and the effects of racism. Through this framework, Struggle for the City demonstrates how local organizers, leaders, and residents used rhetorics of placemaking, community organizing, and critical memory to resist the bulldozing visions of urban renewal. By showing how African American residents built political community at the local level and by centering the residents in their own narratives of displacement, Handley recovers strategies of resistance that continue to influence the actions of the Black Freedom Movement, including Black Lives Matter.

Read more and access the book here: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-09775-6.html

See the full list of Unlocked titles here: https://www.psupress.org/unlocked/unlocked_gallery.html

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Unlocked Book of the Month: Consensus and Debate in Salazar's Portugal

Each month we’re highlighting a book available through PSU Press Unlocked, an open access initiative featuring scholarly digital books and journals in the humanities and social sciences.

About our September pick:

Ellen Sapega’s study documents artistic responses to images of the Portuguese nation promoted by Portugal’s Office of State Propaganda under António de Oliveira Salazar. Combining archival research with current theories informing the areas of memory studies, visual culture, women’s autobiography, and postcolonial studies, the author follows the trajectory of three well-known cultural figures working in Portugal and its colonies during the 1930s and 1940s. The book begins with an analysis of official Salazarist culture as manifested in two state-sponsored commemorative events: the 1938 contest to discover the “Most Portuguese Village in Portugal” and the 1940 Exposition of the Portuguese-Speaking World. While these events fulfilled their role as state propaganda, presenting a patriotic and unambiguous view of Portugal’s past and present, other cultural projects of the day pointed to contradictions inherent in the nation’s social fabric. In their responses to the challenging conditions faced by writers and artists during this period and the government’s relentless promotion of an increasingly conservative and traditionalist image of Portugal, José de Almada Negreiros, Irene Lisboa, and Baltasar Lopes subtly proposed revisions and alternatives to official views of Portuguese experience. These authors questioned and rewrote the metaphors of collective Portuguese and Lusophone identity employed by the ideologues of Salazar’s Estado Novo regime to ensure and administer the consent of the national populace. It is evident, today, that their efforts resulted in the creation of vital, enduring texts and cultural artifacts.

Read more and access the book here: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-03410-2.html

See the full list of Unlocked titles here: https://www.psupress.org/unlocked/unlocked_gallery.html

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Unlocked Book of the Month: Falckner's Curieuse Nachricht von Pensylvania

Each month we’re highlighting a book available through PSU Press Unlocked, an open access initiative featuring scholarly digital books and journals in the humanities and social sciences.

About our August pick:

Originally circulated in Germany, Daniel Falckner’s Curieuse Nachricht von Pensylvania was one in a wave of pamphlets about the American colonies disseminated in Europe during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It stood alongside influential works by Penn and Pastorius that were circulated among Pietists and other groups to raise awareness in Europe about the practical and spiritual climates in Pennsylvania. Falckner’s pamphlet, in particular, was used in a promotional manner and utilizes a question-and-answer format, addressing everything from how to plan for a voyage to America to common professions for Europeans in the New World, dealings with the native population, seasonal climate, and hundreds of other issues. This translation of Curieuse Nachricht, first published by the Pennsylvania German Society in 1905, includes introductory chapters and annotations by Julius Sachse. The English translation and original German text appear on facing pages, and annotations examine the differences between an original manuscript and the version widely distributed by the Frankfort Company, a group of Pennsylvania land investors, in 1702.

Read more and access the book here: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-05384-4.html

See the list of full Unlocked titles here: https://www.psupress.org/unlocked/unlocked_gallery.html

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Q&A with John Bidwell

The author of The Declaration in Script and Print discusses Independence Day, the Declaration of Independence as an iconic document, and more.

Why do we celebrate independence on July 4th even though Congress voted for independence on July 2nd?

The date we have chosen for Independence Day depends on a document. By all rights we should be celebrating the day when the United States became an independent nation—July 2, 1776—when the Continental Congress adopted Richard Henry Lee’s resolution “that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.” John Adams predicted that July 2nd would be the national anniversary, a day marked with parades, bonfires, bell ringing, gun salutes, and “illuminations” of houses with candles in the windows. Adams was wrong, however, because he did not foresee the emotional impact of the official announcement, a broadside printed two days later with the title In Congress, July 4, 1776. A Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress Assembled. The date in the title is one reason why July 4th prevailed over July 2nd. But above all Americans cherished the text, an eloquent expression of fundamental rights based on principles of liberty, justice, and equality. Historians have traced its origins, its changing reputation, and its influence at home and abroad. I too have noted how it has been variously interpreted, but mainly I wish to show how it has been visualized, how it appeared in engravings, lithographs, and letterpress broadsides during the nineteenth century. I identify about two hundred prints and broadsides in The Declaration in Script and Print, expensive engravings suitable for framing as well as cheap stereotype keepsakes aimed at the bottom of the market. Starting with an innovative advertising campaign in 1816, I describe the merchandising tactics of artists, printers, and publishers who played on a surge of patriotic sentiment to promote their wares. In the same spirit, Penn State University Press has selected July 4th to be the release date for my book.

What was it that made the manuscript Declaration more inspiring to Americans than the printed version issued on July 4th?

Some delegates were not able to vote for independence on July 4th. A week later they received the necessary authorization, which made it possible for everyone to sign a manuscript version of the Declaration, “fairly engrossed on parchment.” They signed it on August 2, 1776, and reaffirmed the unity of the United States by changing the title to: “In Congress, July 4, 1776. The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America.” The text is more or less the same as the broadside edition, but written out by hand it seems more tangible, personal, and distinctive. Beneath it are fifty-six autographs of Founding Fathers, each an act of patriotism representing courage, conviction, and a shared commitment to a righteous cause. Awestruck Americans could pick out the names of Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, and other heroes of the Revolution. While giving the first edition its due, they have looked at the August 2nd manuscript as a more meaningful and evocative expression of their history and ideals. Printmakers catered to public demand by publishing reproductions of the manuscript although often only the signatures were reproduced in facsimile. Some believed that the manuscript had been signed on July 4th, wishful thinking all the better to convey the drama of the moment.

How and when did the Declaration become an iconic document?

In 1816 the Philadelphia newspaper publisher John Binns issued subscription proposals for an engraving of the Declaration. He was the first to tell Americans about the iconic value of that document, for which he designed a pictorial scheme that would define a new genre of patriotic prints—the signatures in facsimile, the text adorned with portraits, allegorical vignettes, and a massive cordon of state seals. Other printmakers adapted his designs, some imitated them in pirated editions, and two opportunists reprinted the original edition on the occasion of the Centennial. While Binns’s print was in press, an itinerant writing master, Benjamin Owen Tyler, produced a calligraphic version with the signatures in facsimile but without illustrations. That too inspired a series of imitations and adaptations. Binns accused Tyler of plagiarizing his prospectus, and Tyler fought back by impugning his opponent’s patriotism in a newspaper war that publicized both of these trend-setting prints. More than seventy per cent of the Declaration prints and broadsides published during the nineteenth century were derived in whole or part, directly or indirectly, from these archetypal images.

Why would Americans prefer facsimiles of the Declaration to the original manuscript?

Perhaps it wasn’t so much a matter of preference as practicality. Americans have been able to view the original in Washington where it has been displayed at various times in the Patent Office, the State Department, the Library of Congress, and the National Archives. Huge crowds came to see it in Independence Hall during the Centennial. Many were disappointed to discover that it was in poor condition, the text illegible in places and the signatures almost entirely effaced. Printmakers helped to popularize the Declaration, but their invasive replicating techniques are partly to blame for ruining it. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams realized that the manuscript was in danger and commissioned a scrupulously accurate reproduction of the text and signatures, printed in a limited edition dated “July 4th. 1823.” Adams and his successors strictly controlled the distribution of the official facsimile until the end of the century. Meanwhile the condition of the manuscript went from bad to worse. In 1894 complaints about its continuing deterioration prompted government officials to take it down and lock it in a safe, where they kept it out of sight for thirty years. During that time the State Department facsimile was the only option for those who wanted to visualize the founding document. To this day we rely on it to show what the manuscript must have looked like when it was signed by the Founding Fathers: that is what we see in souvenirs, textbook illustrations, and the New York Times every year on July 4th, an iconic image of an essential text.

The Declaration in Script and Print: A Visual History of America’s Founding Document is now available from Penn State University Press. Learn more and order the book here: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-09730-5.html. Take 30% off with discount code NR24.

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Unlocked Book of the Month: Territories of History

Each month we’re highlighting a book available through PSU Press Unlocked, an open access initiative featuring scholarly digital books and journals in the humanities and social sciences.

About our July pick:

Sarah H. Beckjord’s Territories of History explores the vigorous but largely unacknowledged spirit of reflection, debate, and experimentation present in foundational Spanish American writing. In historical works by writers such as Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Bartolomé de Las Casas, and Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Beckjord argues, the authors were not only informed by the spirit of inquiry present in the humanist tradition but also drew heavily from their encounters with New World peoples. More specifically, their attempts to distinguish superstition and magic from science and religion in the New World significantly influenced the aforementioned chroniclers, who increasingly directed their insights away from the description of native peoples and toward a reflection on the nature of truth, rhetoric, and fiction in writing history. Due to a convergence of often contradictory information from a variety of sources—eyewitness accounts, historiography, imaginative literature, as well as broader philosophical and theological influences—categorizing historical texts from this period poses no easy task, but Beckjord sifts through the information in an effective, logical manner. At the heart of Beckjord’s study, though, is a fundamental philosophical problem: the slippery nature of truth—especially when dictated by stories. Territories of History engages both a body of emerging scholarship on early modern epistemology and empiricism and recent developments in narrative theory to illuminate the importance of these colonial authors’ critical insights. In highlighting the parallels between the sixteenth-century debates and poststructuralist approaches to the study of history, Beckjord uncovers an important legacy of the Hispanic intellectual tradition and updates the study of colonial historiography in view of recent discussions of narrative theory.

Read more and access the book here: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-03278-8.html

See the full list of Unlocked titles here: https://www.psupress.org/unlocked/unlocked_gallery.html

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A Black Philadelphia Reader: An exerpt

The common date given for the settlement of Philadelphia is 1682, when William Penn established a Quaker colony, providing it with a name that means “one who loves his brother.” Penn intended an idyllic “greene country towne,” one that was well ordered, with large open spaces within its twelve hundred acres. It “was the first major American town to be planned.” Penn envisioned his “towne” as a place of freedom, particularly in terms of religion. As with a certain amount of history, much of this is myth. The land, of course, had been settled by the Lenape Indians long before the Europeans arrived. Additionally, Penn’s “greene country towne” soon became a highly congested city, plagued by disease, crime, and fires. Its vaunted freedom was largely limited to White Protestants, and its “brotherly love” certainly did not extend to most immigrants, to non-Christians, or, in particular, to its Black residents.

Blacks have been at the center of Philadelphia’s history since before it was even known by that name. More than two thousand Blacks lived in the area once called New Sweden between 1638 and 1655. The fledgling colony encompassed parts of western Delaware and parts of Pennsylvania that now include Philadelphia. One of the most famous of these settlers was Antoni Swart (Black Anthony), a West Indian who arrived in the colony in 1639 aboard a Swedish vessel. Though initially enslaved, records indicate he eventually became free and was employed by Governor Johan Printz.

The history of Black Philadelphians has been one fraught with both great promise and shattered dreams from its beginnings until today. Philadelphia was, as historian Gary Nash observes, “created in an atmosphere of growing Negrophobia”; still, despite ongoing racial prejudice, “it continues to this day to be one of the vital urban locations of black Americans.” It is this paradoxical condition that is the most characteristic dynamic of the city’s relationship with its Black citizens. One facet of this relationship has been constant: whether African Americans have thrived here or suffered egregious oppression, they have never remained silent, never letting anyone else define their situation for them. They have always voiced their own opinions about their condition in their city through fiction, poetry, plays, essays, diaries, letters, or memoirs. The city has been blessed with a number of significant authors, ranging, among others, from Richard Allen to W. E. B. Du Bois to Jessie Fauset to Sonia Sanchez to John Edgar Wideman to Lorene Cary. In addition, there have been numerous lesser known but also forceful figures as well, including the enslaved people Alice and Cato, who were only known by those names. Whether they were native sons and daughters or spent significant time in the city or were there only long enough to experience the city in an impactful moment, Philadelphia has touched them all deeply. This anthology is a documentation of and a tribute to their collective voice. The focus here is not just on writers with a Philadelphia connection but on the authors’ views on the city itself. The hope is to provide a wide variety of Black perspectives on the city.

There is something special about what leading African American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois once labeled “the Philadelphia Negro.” One reason for this uniqueness is the city’s relationship to its Black inhabitants, in part caused by their intertwined, virtually symbiotic, history. No other major Northern city in the country has had such a long connection with African Americans, one forged in the seventeenth century, and Blacks have never stopped coming. They first settled largely in what are now called the Old City and Center City, where some Blacks still live. They have since scattered throughout the city, sometimes by choice but often by necessity and force, today mostly residing in Northern and Western Philadelphia. Migration patterns have changed over the years, as in other cities, but the Black population in the city has rarely declined and has often increased in number. Philadelphia was, as of 2020, the sixth-largest metropolis in the nation, and Blacks make up more than 40 percent of the population there, more than the percentage of any of the other top ten cities in the country.

Philadelphia has a vibrant and culturally rich history, offering enormous promise to its inhabitants since its beginnings. It was founded with the premise of religious freedom and steeped in the radical independence movement that created this country. The city was settled by Quakers, perhaps the religious group that, in popular opinion if not always in fact, has most vociferously been associated with opposition to slavery. The “peculiar institution” was, in fact, almost nonexistent there by the early years of the nineteenth century. Philadelphia was the center of the Underground Railroad, with such legendary conductors as William Still. As the closest major city situated above the Mason-Dixon line, symbolically separating the North from the South, many fugitives from enslavement passed through Philadelphia. Some moved on, but a large number stayed, as the city seemed like the promised land for many African Americans. This is the powerful narrative of the city’s history that still holds true for numerous people today when they think of Philadelphia.

There is also something unique about the Black experience in this city. Blacks have had a nominal freedom throughout most of their existence in Philadelphia, yet when we look under the surface, Philadelphia’s treatment of African Americans has hardly been benign. The city has held out promises, but unfortunately many of these promises were not kept. Philadelphia may be situated in the North, but as Sonia Sanchez so eloquently writes in her poem “elegy (For MOVE and Philadelphia),” in many ways “philadelphia / [is] a disguised southern city.” There were Quakers, many of whom were abolitionists and worked for the Underground Railroad, but there were many others of the faith who were slaveholders, including the colony’s founder, William Penn. And even if the city was replete with abolitionists, it did not ensure that they viewed African Americans as equals. Blacks were, in fact, disfranchised from the vote in 1838, never to regain it until the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870. Although the city was the center of the antislavery movement, not all of its White residents opposed slavery, and even if they did, the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850 hampered efforts to keep Blacks out of bondage. Before and after the Civil War, as demonstrated throughout this text, the city experienced a series of violent racial conflicts and has continue to practice an ugly pattern of segregation in housing, transportation, education, and employment, severely limiting the prospects of improvement for its Black citizens. There is a long history of racial injustice practiced by Philadelphia’s police as well as Black residents being ignored, at best, by the city government.

A Black Philadelphia Reader: African American Writings About the City of Brotherly Love is available for pre-order from Penn State University Press. Learn more and order the book here: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-09731-2.html. Take 30% off with discount code NR24.

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How Pennsylvania's Political System Dealt with the COVID Pandemic and the 2020 Presidential Election

Thomas J. Baldino and Paula A. Duda Holoviak, the authors of Pennsylvania Government and Politics, discuss the divided Pennsylvania government, counting votes, and more.

As we were completing our book, Pennsylvania’s and the nation’s political systems experienced two events that individually would have presented a significant challenge to their governments’ stability but occurring simultaneously shook the very foundations of both. We refer to the COVID pandemic and 2020 presidential election. It seemed only fitting that we ask what effects, if any, these events had on the Keystone State’s government.

Under normal conditions, Pennsylvania’s government has conducted presidential elections and responded to major health emergencies without incident. But the intense partisanship that divided the electorate and the two major parties influenced not just the 2020 presidential contest but the state’s management of COVID.

In February 2020, President Trump officially announced that the US was in the throes of a pandemic. Pennsylvania was one of only a few states with a divided government—that is, the governor was a Democrat while both chambers of the General Assembly were dominated by Republicans. Initially, steps taken by Governor Wolf to protect the public from COVID were met with little to no resistance from the legislature. But as months passed, the Assembly’s GOP leaders attempted to block new executive actions, overturn existing ones, and even amend the state’s constitution to strip the governor of powers to manage emergencies. They also went to state and federal courts to challenge his actions. Why? As we explain, hyperpartisanship had infected what should have been a straightforward, bipartisan administrative response.

Likewise, during and after Election Day, what should have been routine processes for counting votes, especially mail-in ballots, and certifying the results became a tortured experience for state and county election workers as both parties, but most often the Republicans, sought to reverse election administrators’ decisions in state and federal courts. We again asked why, and our answer again was extreme partisanship.

One of the book’s overarching themes is the importance of governmental institutions, the constitutionally created ones—the three branches of government—as well as the extraconstitutional ones—namely, political parties, news media, and interest groups, which provide the lubrication that helps the system function smoothly. What we found is that while the institutions survived, all suffered damage. What remains to be seen is whether the institutions can recover.

Pennsylvania Government and Politics: Understanding Public Policy in the Keystone State is now available from Penn State University Press. Save 30% with discount code NR24: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-09679-7.html.

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Unlocked Book of the Month: Pennsylvania Lion or Panther & Felis Catus in Pennsylvania?

Each month we’re highlighting a book available through PSU Press Unlocked, an open access initiative featuring scholarly digital books and journals in the humanities and social sciences.

About our June pick:

This Metalmark volume combines two of Henry W. Shoemaker’s pamphlets, both published by Shoemaker’s Times Tribune Co., which also published his newspaper, the Altoona Tribune. Pennsylvania Lion or Panther, published in 1914, provides a narrative look into the history and romance of Pennsylvania’s mountain lion. Hunting lore and legends mix with local and natural history and Shoemaker’s musings on the disappearance of this once prevalent animal. The pages are dedicated to J. T. Rothrock, whose description of the mountain lion’s haunting cry graces the pages of this text. The second pamphlet, Felis Catus in Pennsylvania?, gathers reports of the 1922 capture of a wildcat in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, which many speculated was a European wildcat.

Read more and access the book here: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-02267-3.html

See the full list of Unlocked titles here: https://www.psupress.org/unlocked/unlocked_gallery.html

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The Four Shakespeare Folios, 1623–2023: An excerpt

The word folio appears only once in Shakespeare’s plays. In the final lines of the first act of Love’s Labour’s Lost, a comedy, Don Adriano de Armado invokes the instruments of his literary art: “Devise wit, write pen, for I am for whole volumes in folio.” The reference is not a flattering one. Armado is a braggart, enamored of his own stilted way of speaking, and his oath to fill folios with the strained devising of his wit is not one we hope he keeps. The irony is that a play concerned with literary fame—that elusive object that can “make us heirs of all eternity,” according to the King (1.1.7)—puts folio, the word perhaps most closely tied to Shakespeare’s own literary legacy, in the mouth of one of Shakespeare’s most mercilessly rendered fools.

Strictly speaking, “folio” describes a bibliographic format, or shape of book: early printed books were made up of sheets of paper that, once printed, gathered, and folded, were stitched together in sequence and bound into volumes. A folio is simply a book made up of sheets of paper folded once, making two leaves and four pages, usually of a large size (see Claire M. L. Bourne’s chapter in this book, and especially fig. 2.1). But folio is more than a term of art. When Shakespeare’s acting company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, first performed Love’s Labour’s Lost in 1594, folio was already a word with considerable cultural freighting. And by the end of the seventeenth century, as Francis X. Connor has observed, folios could represent “completeness, cultural prominence, and . . . literary immortality”— a fitting target, in other words, for Shakespeare’s satire and an apt vessel for Armado’s literary pretensions (Connor 2014, 177). But for Shakespeare, the word has accrued other, more specific meanings. Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, more widely known as the First Folio, contains thirty-six of the thirty-eight plays attributed in whole or in part to Shakespeare—that is, those written either by himself or in collaboration with other playwrights. When it was issued from the London print shop of Isaac Jaggard in November, 1623, the Folio represented the first successful attempt to gather Shakespeare’s dramatic corpus in one volume. And despite the fact that it was published posthumously, without Shakespeare’s involvement, the First Folio has attained a kind of mythic status: if folios stand for completeness, cultural prominence, and literary immortality, the First Folio typifies the format. Standing first for completeness (its editors, the actors John Heminge and Henry Condell, claimed in their preface to have gathered the plays and printed them “absolute in their numbers, as [Shakespeare] conceived them”), it has since become perhaps the most culturally prominent book in the English-speaking world and now functions as a byword for Shakespeare’s literary immortality.

Why, then, does this book, a volume of admittedly slighter dimensions than most folios, consider all four Shakespeare Folios instead of the First alone? Call it an attempt at a corrective. There exists in Shakespeare studies—or at least has existed until recently—an enduring fixation on origins: the authorship and origin of individual plays (so-called attribution studies), the origins of Shakespeare’s plots (which Shakespeare often borrowed and only rarely invented), and the textual origins of Shakespeare in print. In this last category, the Folio has loomed

large: of the thirty-six plays it contains, eighteen were printed in no other edition. This means that without the Folio, these eighteen plays—including The Tempest, Julius Caesar, and Macbeth—would have been lost, and the Shakespeare canon would be reduced by half. Because of this, three subsequent Shakespeare folios—a Second, printed in 1632, a Third printed in 1663, and a Fourth printed in 1685—have, as Jeffrey Todd Knight recently put it, long inhabited “a critic’s no-man’s land” (2017, 4). The later folios were textually negligible, mere derivatives of the First. And worse than that, each subsequent Folio muddled the First with textual impurities consequent to their printers’ ignorance or carelessness. The later Folios thus carried, according to Fredson Bowers, bibliographer and Shakespeare scholar, no authority in the editing of Shakespeare’s plays (1951, 241). Stanley Wells’s An A–Z Guide to Shakespeare (Oxford 2013) follows suit and describes the later folios as “reprints [with] no independent authority” (Wells 2013). More recently scholars have troubled this account with new evidence, but the premise holds: the First Folio’s proximity to Shakespeare and to those who knew him lends it an authority that the later folios lack. Enshrining this notion, one exhibition held to mark the four-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death in 2016 described the First Folio as “the book that gave us Shakespeare” (“First Folio!”).

This idea has a long history. Samuel Johnson—the eighteenth-century lexicographer and famously voluble subject of James Boswell’s Life—suggested that “the first [Folio] is equivalent to all others, and the rest only deviate from it by the printer’s negligence. Whoever has any of the folios has all, excepting those diversities which mere reiteration of editions will produce” (quoted in Murphy 2021, 112). George Steevens, who edited Shakespeare’s plays with Johnson, was even more dismissive, likening the later folios to “mere waste paper” (quoted in Hooks 2016, 190). Implied by Johnson and Steeven’s language is the idea of sameness, even equivalence between the Folios, and a generally untroubled sequence that led from the First to the Fourth. The chapters in this book trouble this idea, finding alterations, both profound and subtle, made between and within each edition and argue instead for a composite view of the four Folios.

The Four Shakespeare Folios, 1623–2023: Copy, Print, Paper, Type is available for pre-order from Penn State University Press. Learn more and order the book here: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-09732-9.html. Take 30% off with discount code NR24.

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Where the Grass Still Sings: An excerpt

As a child, I thought of all living creatures as part of my extended family. Several years after my father left my mother, and a month after her artist’s residency in Colorado had come to an end, my mother took her two daughters—my little sister, Anna, six, and me, eleven—and her dog back to the Midwest, where she had lived when she was still married. Life in cooperative art centers had been rich in many ways but did not produce much money, so when some friends offered to let us live in a barn on one of their unused properties, she took it. At the time, I did not realize that we were living in poverty. Poverty was never something I really thought about as a child. Owing largely to my mother’s ingenuity, my life seemed rich in many nonmonetary ways. The reality I lived in was the only one I knew, and so it never struck me as unusual, and certainly not sad, though when I tell stories to my daughter now, she often uses those words. But my mother has a shining, relentlessly optimistic spirit, and to her, living in a barn seemed like a rare opportunity to experience something unique and adventurous—and its being free made it especially attractive. So we moved into the barn.

The barn nestled between two thickly wooded hills, divided at the base by a small creek that ran fast after big storms but was otherwise a trickle. Coyotes, raccoons, owls, rattlesnakes, deer, and even an occasional bobcat resided in those woods. The barn seemed like an anomaly, as it was not surrounded by flat farmland. Years prior, it had been useful to a neighboring farm, accessible through the narrow valley, but it had been long abandoned. My mother’s friends had bought it thinking that turning a barn into a living space would be a great architectural project, but they discovered they did not have the time or money to actually fix it up.

The design of the barn was traditional for the Midwest. The lower part of the barn, the basement, was made of stone and concrete, a space for cattle, sheep, or hogs, with large openings for air flow; the bulk of the barn, the upper level, was a huge open space once used for storing hay bales, with plywood floors, knottyplank uninsulated walls, and thirty-foot ceilings. We lived on that level. The one untraditional feature of the barn was the addition of some windows. On the side that faced the valley, three four-by-eight-foot holes had been cut into the side of the barn and plate glass had been installed. The opposite wall also had a couple of finished windows. But not all of the holes had been filled with glass. One particular hole, a four-by-four-foot square up close to the eaves, was open to the evening air. My mother erected a couple of dividers made out of two-by-fours and drywall to create two ceilingless bedrooms, but the living space was mostly open. A big table near one of the large windows became the hub, the spot where we gathered for art projects and meals. During the day, the tractor-sized sliding door was open. My mother hung up a hammock between two of the giant structural beams, which was a great place for reading. There was no running water, but we did have electricity available, and extension cords allowed us to have lights at night, a boom box for music, a small TV that got two local channels, and a tiny refrigerator on the first level, where the livestock had lived. My mother’s pottery wheel and the portapotty also resided on the ground floor. As kids, Anna and I settled into this new spot with ease. We had moved so often that there was little stress about sleeping in a new place or keeping clothes in boxes.

The one feature of the barn that my mother recognized as distinctly different from other places we had lived was the number of nonhuman creatures living with us. Because the barn had so many unclosable openings to the outside world, the communities of creatures living in the surrounding woods frequently came into the building. My mother did not even raise an eyebrow at the mice, but the raccoons coming in for an easy snack unnerved her a bit more. I never saw a snake in there, but I would bet they traversed the basement, as we often saw them outside. My sister and I spent as little time in the basement as possible because it did seem cold and damp and slightly creepy. But the bats and insects upstairs did not bother us much at all, in part because of my mother’s strategy of naming everything.

When my mother realized that there was no way to control the number of wasps and June bugs and bats with whom we cohabitated, she decided to prevent her children from fearing them by consciously embracing them as part of the family. I realize now that she must have been influenced by E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. I don’t remember her ever calling a spider anything other than “one of Charlotte’s cousins.” Winthrop the Wasp and his friends needed to be given space because of their sensitive temperaments, and we were directed not to swat at them but to move slowly, so as not to startle them; we were never stung. We understood that Junie the Junebug and her friends were not very graceful fliers, and if they ran into you, you shouldn’t freak out but just pluck them off your shirt and take them back outside. Filmore the rabbit and his babies would have been most welcome inside, but they never seemed to want to move in. And the bats—and there were a lot of them—were all related to Angel.

Every night at dusk, the bats would fly in through the highest opening in the barn that had no window. My mother, my sister, and I all had very long, curly hair, and although the likelihood of a bat getting stuck in our hair was probably quite low, my mother had us put on hats and tuck our hair up inside them. “Time to put on your hats, girls!” she would say cheerily each night as the tiny black bodies started flying erratically around us. They came in to eat the bugs whirring around our table lamps. I have no memory of being bothered by mosquitoes in there, most likely because Angel and her relatives feasted on them. The electric thrill of having them sweep past your head never ceased, though. Once in a while a very brave friend would stay overnight out there with us, and I remember us being side by side in my makeshift bed with the covers up to our necks waiting for the bats to swoop down near our heads, and when they did, we would squeal and bolt under the covers, giggling in a combination of terror and elation that most people only experience at haunted houses set up for Halloween. But we knew not to be truly scared, because it was just Angel and her relatives, after all.

My mother’s creature-naming strategy helped solidify my belief that all of the nonhumans around us have amazing, complicated lives worthy of respect and honor. The foundation of this idea started even earlier for me, when my parents were still together and we were living next to a prairie where I spent days with my dog, inventing stories about all of the insects and toads and birds that lived there. The fact that all of these beings did not share a language with me did not strike me as something indicative of their inferiority. If anything, I thought humans were the ones with limitations. To this day, it feels like a gift to be in the presence of wild things.

Where the Grass Still Sings: Stories of Insects and Interconnection is now available from Penn State University Press. Learn more and order the book here: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-09684-1.html. Save 30% with discount code NR24.

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Pennsylvania's Most Pressing Issues

Paula A. Duda Holoviak and Thomas J. Baldino, the authors of Pennsylvania Government and Politics, discuss population loss, the dependency ratio, and more.

Pennsylvania is a vibrant and diverse state with a mix of urban, suburban, and rural communities, with cosmopolitan urban centers in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh linked by lush farmlands and forests across the state. With its many institutions of higher education and its vast natural resources and outstanding outdoor recreation areas, Pennsylvania should be a booming population center in the Northeast. However, the major issues faced by the Commonwealth today and into the next decade revolve around population loss, especially in rural areas, oweing to the aging of the existing population and a brain drain of talent from the state. Looking at population projections from 2020 to 2050, the Center for Rural Pennsylvania projects an overall population increase of 1.6 percent, with growth located primarily in Southeastern Pennsylvania. Rural counties, on the other hand, are projected to continue to lose population. In addition, the existing rural counties will continue to age with those sixty-five and older far surpassing the number of residents under the age of twenty. The dependency ratio—the number of people not in the workforce compared to those in the workforce—continues to rise sharply. Most of this increase is due to the aging of the population.

Population loss and population aging contribute to the looming fiscal crisis for the Pennsylvania government. The structural deficit refers to the inability of Pennsylvania to raise sufficient revenues, through tax dollars or program fees, to meet the basic needs of its residents, including education and healthcare. Fewer people working results in fewer tax dollars. An aging population produces increased demands for public services, including long-term care, in-home care, healthcare, and transportation. A declining rural population also affects the viability of rural school districts and the makeup of the rural workforce. The Center for Rural Pennsylvania points to a graying of the rural workforce. The vast majority of rural counties exceed the state average for number of workers above the age of sixty-five. Contributing to the aging workforce is the persistent brain drain, which occurs when highly educated young residents leave the state shortly after completing their education. The brain drain rate for Pennsylvania has been around 20 percent for the past forty years. The bottom line is we are losing young residents and aging rapidly.

What are the solutions to these problems? Some ideas include marketing rural areas to newcomers with an emphasis on quality of life, pouring development dollars into Pennsylvania industries, and increasing efforts to bring university research to the marketplace. Other tactics include instating college promise programs to assist low income and minority students in attaining a college degree and increasing funding for vocational education, community colleges, and apprenticeships. All these ideas are meant to make Pennsylvania more attractive to current and potential residents and businesses. What about raising taxes? Pennsylvania does not tax pension income, making it a retirement haven. Could a controversial tax on higher income retirees present a solution to the structural deficit? Regardless, scholars and policymakers will continue to grapple with these issues for the foreseeable future.

Pennsylvania Government and Politics: Understanding Public Policy in the Keystone State is now available from Penn State University Press. Save 30% with discount code NR24: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-09679-7.html.

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Unlocked Book of the Month: Letters of General John Forbes

Each month we’re highlighting a book available through PSU Press Unlocked, an open access initiative featuring scholarly digital books and journals in the humanities and social sciences.

About our May pick:

This volume is made up of the letters of British general John Forbes, who led the campaign against Fort Duquesne, a pivotal episode in the French and Indian War. Primarily from the year 1758, the letters, to William Pitt, Governor Denny of Pennsylvania, General Sharpe of Maryland, and others, offer readers a firsthand glimpse of the campaign, from the preparation through the expedition to Fort Duquesne and the eventual British capture of the fort, where Pittsburgh now stands. The correspondence is accompanied by various related letters between other key players in the expedition.

Read more and access the book here: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/0-271-02755-X.html

See the full list of Unlocked titles here: https://www.psupress.org/unlocked/unlocked_gallery.html

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Q&A with Loretta Victoria Ramirez

The author of The Wound and the Stitch: A Genealogy of of the Female Body from Medieval Iberia to SoCal Chicanx Art discusses rhetorics of woundedness, using historical rhetorical genealogies as acts of decolonization, and more.

Could you define rhetorics of woundedness?

Rhetorics of woundedness renders reality through the perspective of one whose woundedness has been undetected, disregarded, misdiagnosed, or superficially bandaged. This rhetoric exposes autobiography in its most vulnerable states to confront audiences, discomforting them out of passivity and into accountability. Displays of woundedness transform audiences into witnesses. Encounters with wounds additionally prompt audience action—to tend to the wound or deliberately let the injury fester. Rhetorics of woundedness is advocacy rhetoric, recruiting supporters while demarcating oppositional forces. While examining wounds is essential, the rhetoric avoids fetishizing wounded states, focusing instead on precariously stitched states and signifying delicate ephemeral healing amidst still-active assaults. Woundedness remains visible as an insistent marker that the public sphere is held accountable for examining historical conditions wherein violence against bodies is continuous and systematized. This violence may be physical, symbolic, linguistic, or academic, and is overwhelmingly related through female testimony. Indeed, rhetorics of woundedness has been historically associated with women.

How can the Latinx population benefit from learning about rhetorics of woundedness?

Latina artists, writers, and theorists have contributed enormously to shaping rhetorics of woundedness. In visual rhetorics, an illustrious contributor is Frida Kahlo, who emphasizes an unmaking of body to envision new states of being. In textual rhetorics, we see foundational works by Chicana writers such as Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, Ana Castillo, Emma Pérez, and Alicia Gaspar de Alba, who mobilize theories of the flesh wherein rhetors’ lived experiences generate knowledge of women’s embodied realities to petition for reform and justice. Latinx populations benefit from learning about the rhetorics of woundedness since the rhetoric is entrenched in Latinx cultural rhetorics and recognizes women’s contributions to a distinct line of cultural rhetorics with deep historical roots. Thinking of these roots, I am reminded of my students’ quick recognition of cultural rhetorical strategies when we discuss articulations of woundedness. I teach in an ethnic studies department, and many of my students are first-generation Latinas. Within this demographic, students often express emotions of fragmented identities as they daily navigate multiple social and cultural settings but do not sense their belonging in any of those spaces. Many of my students have learned that voicing the hurt of unbelonging activates a rhetorical belonging within a cultural genealogy that exposes wounds to challenge biases. Realization of rhetorical belonging is profound. Indeed, the cover of The Wound and the Stitch features a self-portrait by my former student, Ana Berrelleza, who has situated herself within rhetorics of woundedness and discovered not only a sense of belonging but also personal empowerment.

How can historical rhetorical genealogies serve as acts of decolonization?

I map rhetorics of woundedness as a continuity of historical rhetorics of the body, rooted in two prominent rhetorical inheritances: late-medieval female Iberian Franciscan devotional rhetorics and Mesoamerican concepts of securing stability, or nepantla, during turmoil. Yet ruptures in these rhetorical lineages manifest notably in late twentieth-century rhetorics that recentralize woundedness to express not devotional sacrifice but disproportionate losses wherein Chicanas are systematically targeted to surrender self, body, and opportunity. Many of these losses are rooted in colonial histories that still impact living conditions. Rhetorics of woundedness positions colonial wounds to serve concurrently as accusations of assault and testaments of survival. As I trace the female rhetorical genealogy of the rhetoric, I am most invested in ways Chicana adaptations disrupt normative rhetorical patterns to guide modern Chicanx rhetorics. This is the chief purpose of The Wound and the Stitch—to illustrate contemporary inheritors of rhetorics of woundedness as stepping outside European narrative frameworks to repurpose historical rhetorics for more immediate agendas focused on self-empowerment.

The Wound and the Stitch: A Genealogy of of the Female Body from Medieval Iberia to SoCal Chicanx Art by Loretta Victoria Ramirez is available for pre-order from Penn State University Press. Pre-order your copy here, and save 30% when you use discount code NR24 at checkout: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-09727-5.html

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Letters from Eisenbrauns: Q&A w/ María Almansa-Villatoro and Silvia Štubňová Nigrelli

María Almansa-Villatoro and Silvia Štubňová Nigrelli, editors of Ancient Egyptian and Afroasiatic: Rethinking the Origins, joined Eisenbrauns for a Q&A about their current research and how they hope it will shape future research.

Can you tell us about your current research, and how you became interested in the topic?

Almansa-Villatoro: I am mostly working on understanding how ancient Egyptians used language in specific social contexts, and how their choices to say things in certain ways, or omit information inform us about the way hierarchy, power, and ethics functioned. I study how Egyptians used politeness in personal letters, and what themes the king wants to emphasize in his royal discourse. What drew me to this topic is my conviction that we can learn so much about a specific culture by studying their use of language. As a scholar who has worked and lived in different countries, I am aware that when learning a new language, it is not enough to memorize rules and vocabulary, but one needs to know how to use indirectness, humor, or ambiguity in certain ways to convey specific things. And the way this is done is very variable across different cultures, but by looking at what is acceptable or unacceptable in certain contexts we can learn a lot about the underlying social and cultural values. I found for example that in Old Kingdom Egypt (c. 2600–2200 BCE) overt authoritarianism and coercion (even by the king) is frowned upon, and it is often camouflaged by indirect requests or euphemisms for acts of command. This teaches us that we can’t always take ancient texts literally and need to sometimes be able to read between the lines, but perhaps more importantly, that Egyptians considered impositions ethically reproachable. Nigrelli: My research aims to elucidate the complexities of the ancient Egyptian grammatical system and to better understand the world and lived experiences of ancient Egyptians through linguistic and philological analyses of written sources. Most recently I have been working on refining our understanding of some medical terms associated with visual impairment. I became interested in the ancient Egyptian language already in high school, when I came across a crash course of hieroglyphs in a popular history magazine and knew immediately that that was something I had to study. I love reading the original texts as they open up the door to the world of the ancient Egyptians and show us that, in many respects, they were people like us. The medical aspect of my research comes from my husband, who is an eye doctor, so we tend to talk a lot about eye diseases and treatments, both modern and ancient.

How do you anticipate your research will help inspire other research in your discipline?

Almansa-Villatoro: I have striven to raise awareness among my colleagues about the potential of applying the latest research methods in pragmatics and linguistics to the study of ancient sources, particularly (im-)politeness research and discourse analysis. These frameworks can bring us closer to the meaning of texts in their original ancient contexts, disentangled from what we, as modern scholars, think that the function of these documents should be. The use of interdisciplinary approaches not only shed new light on ancient data, but also enable a more nuanced understanding of the communicative or practical function of texts that we have imprecisely labelled as “propagandistic”, “religious”, or “literary.” Nigrelli: I am hoping to show that our traditionally accepted translations of some words/phrases can be interpreted in a different way, leading to a new look at how the Egyptians perceived their world, and that we should devote more time to studying ancient Egyptian semantics and linguistics. It seems to me that nowadays the language plays a rather minor role in Egyptological curricula and research, which is unfortunate, because its knowledge is crucial for our understanding and interpretation of ancient Egyptian written materials and the world of ancient Egypt in general.

What are the advantages of examining ancient Egyptian in its African context?

Almansa-Villatoro: The complicated history of ancient Egyptian has been traditionally dominated by a semito-centric approach which Egyptologists are now generally rejecting. The relationships within the Afroasiatic family are still not well understood, and scholars (including the contributors of our volume) do not even agree on what languages to include in the phylum. Ancient Egyptian in particular has the added difficulty of being attested for several millennia without a close relative. The other Afroasiatic languages that co-existed with Egyptian for much of its history were Semitic (e.g. Akkadian), and this contemporaneousness may have resulted in a bigger number of perceived similarities. In contrast, other African languages do not appear in the written record until much later, when Egyptian had gone through millennia of development. However, it is undeniable that most of the Afroasiatic languages are nowadays located in Africa, and Egyptian probably interacted with them for many centuries before the earliest texts. This is why we wanted to invite the contributors of our volume to rethink the origins of Afroasiatic and try and reconstruct the history of ancient Egyptian through its similarities to other languages in the phylum from the point of view of phonology, lexicon, and syntax. The surprise was that, depending on what aspect of the language one chooses to focus on, the resulting trees and genetic links are completely different. Hopefully these results will pave the way for future research on ancient Egyptian and Afroasiatic. Nigrelli: Looking at the ancient Egyptian language within its Afroasiatic context is important for our understanding and classification of the languages in this family and it should also help us with studying the interrelations among the early cultures, i.e., the speakers of the Afroasiatic languages. Trying to figure out the proto-language of each member of this language family should be the first step in reconstructing Proto-Afroasiatic. However, since ancient Egyptian constitutes a single branch in the Afroasiatic language family, we can’t compare it to other languages when trying to reconstruct Pre-Egyptian. We can work on its internal reconstruction to some extent, but that’s very difficult. That’s also why we organized this workshop – to explore, despite all these drawbacks, whether there is any methodological framework that could be employed to determine a more precise relationship among the Afroasiatic languages.

Ancient Egyptian and Afroasiatic: Rethinking the Origins is now available from Eisenbrauns. Learn more and order the book here: https://www.eisenbrauns.org/books/titles/978-1-64602-212-0.html. Save 30% w/ discount code NR24.

Eisenbrauns, an imprint of Penn State University Press, publishes books in in Ancient Near East studies, biblical studies, biblical archaeology, Assyriology, linguistics, and related fields. Find more information and Eisenbrauns books here: https://www.eisenbrauns.org/.

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Unlocked Book of the Month: Transcending Textuality

Each month we’re highlighting a book available through PSU Press Unlocked, an open access initiative featuring scholarly digital books and journals in the humanities and social sciences.

About our April pick:

In Transcending Textuality, Ariadna García-Bryce provides a fresh look at post-Trent political culture and Francisco de Quevedo’s place within it by examining his works in relation to two potentially rival means of transmitting authority: spectacle and print. Quevedo’s highly theatrical conceptions of power are identified with court ceremony, devotional ritual, monarchical and spiritual imagery, and religious and classical oratory. At the same time, his investment in physical and emotional display is shown to be fraught with concern about the decline of body-centered modes of propagating authority in the increasingly impersonalized world of print. Transcending Textuality shows that Quevedo’s poetics are, in great measure, defined by the attempt to retain in writing the qualities of live physical display.

Read more and access the book here: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-03775-2.html

See the full list of Unlocked titles here: https://www.psupress.org/unlocked/unlocked_gallery.html