An Independence-Minded Ally, Wistful Postbellum Memoirs, and a Forgotten Comic-Strip Savant: The Readex Report (November 2015)
In this issue: the heralded 19th-century return of an independence-minded ally; wresting insight from wistful Postbellum memoirs; and an entire genre fueled by a forgotten comic-strip savant.
Lafayette’s Return: An Early American Media Event
By Jonathan Wilfred Wilson, Adjunct Instructor, Department of History, University of Scranton
In summer 2015, a wooden frigate named the Hermione sailed from France to the United States. It was recreating one of the voyages that brought the Marquis de Lafayette to fight in the American War of Independence. The new Hermione was a painstaking replica of Lafayette’s ship, built with authentic eighteenth-century methods. Its voyage, however, became a modern multimedia spectacle—with international television coverage, a website, and a busy Twitter account. > Full Story
By David Anderson, Department of Political and Cultural Studies, Swansea University, Wales, United Kingdom
Late nineteenth and early twentieth-century plantation memoirs and reminiscences are an important, though often overlooked, genus of Lost Cause apologia. Printed by some of the nation’s leading publishing houses, these narrative sources tend to foreground a conspicuous nostalgia for the plantation-era South, adopting literary strategies that connect with discourses of paternalism and carefully fashioned vignettes on close affinities, real or imagined, between master and slave. > Full Story
By John Adcock, creator of Yesterday’s Papers
The Gumps, a comic strip drawn by Sidney Smith and “watched daily by millions,” is generally credited as being the first continuity strip in which the characters’ situations continued from day to day. There had been continuity in strips before The Gumps began in 1917, particularly in the work of Harry Hershfield (“Desperate Desmond”) and Charles W. Kahles (“Hairbreadth Harry”), but it was The Gumps’ influence that led to the avalanche of soap and adventure comic strips appearing in the 1930s and after. > Full Story
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