The Winnifred Eaton Archive. This archival website is a reconceptualization and drastic expansion of the Winnifred Eaton Digital Archive which I originally launched at the University of Virginia E-text Center in 2004. The project team is led by Mary Chapman at the University of British Columbia; I am serving on the project as Senior Consultant.
How the Other Half Laughs: The Comic Sensibility in American Culture, 1895-1920 (2020). MyMy most recent book, which has received several honorable mentions for the 2021 Charles Hatfield Prize from the Comic Studies Society and the 2021 Research Studies for American Periodicals Book Prize. Also available directly from the University of Mississippi Press and downloadable as ebook if you have an institutional subscription to Project Muse.
Freedom’s Witness: The Civil War Correspondence of Henry McNeal Turner (2013). I found Turner’s newspaper columns in the African American newspaper The Christian Recorder, detailing the leadup to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, the decision to deploy black troops in the Civil War, and Turner’s experiences as one of the first black chaplains in the Union Army. Serving the 1st U.S. Colored Troops, Turner witnessed several major battles, including the Siege of Petersburg (VA) and the Battle of Fort Fisher. He also served, after the war, in the Freedmen’s Colony at Roanoke, VA. Turner wrote passionately about both the present plight and potentially bright future of African Americans during this tumultuous time. Read more at the Facebook page I have created for the book, or purchase at WVU Press or Amazon.com (Click to Look Inside is available).
Zora Neale Hurston: Collected Plays, co-edited with Charlie Mitchell (2008). Charlie and I found some of these plays at the Library of Congress digital archive, but located others by digging through play anthologies, periodicals, and various archival collections. The book includes links to sound files at the Library of Congress with the songs sung in the plays. Loyola produced four of the short plays in 2007–they were surprisingly (to me, I guess because I knew how rough the actual scripts were!) powerful in performance. Definitely worth reading if you are a Hurston fan. You can see a preview of the book– and purchase it, of course– at Amazon.com.
Think. Do. 