PROJECT: Periodical Poets

Periodical Poets is a digital humanities project containing over 500 poems printed in New York-based, nineteenth-century periodicals run by Black editors. Created by Charline Jao with the support of the Cornell Summer Graduate Fellowship in Digital Humanities, the project is sponsored by Cornell University Library & Society for the Humanities. As explained in the project’s about page, “In the nineteenth century, New York City’s print culture was largely dominated by Printing House Square, a lower-Manhattan collective of media groups including The Sun, The Tribune, Scientific America, The World, The Day Book, and Hearth and Home. Only blocks away, Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm published the first Black-owned newspaper Freedom’s Journal and Thomas Hamilton edited the first  Black literary magazine The Anglo-African Magazine. Poetry – both original and reprinted – was a regular part of these periodicals.”

The project “reflects on literary trends, nineteenth-century reading practices, and the role of poetry in abolition and protest. Users will find familiar names such as Phillis Wheatley and Alexander Pope in these pages, (in addition to an extensive number of anonymous, original poetry) discussing topics such as abolition, temperance, nature, and religion.” In addition to the collection of 500 poems, there are six exhibits:

• British Poets
• Deaths and Elegies
• Hymns and Songs
• Maps
• Pen Names
• Women Poets

Source: Auto Draft