Amber Kirwan is a PhD student in English at the University of Cambridge and the British Library. Her current research is on African American periodicals of the mid-20th century such as the Chicago Defender, Negro Digest and Negro Story among others. She is funded by the AHRC CDP programme.  

Where other listings in a library catalogue might tell us an author name, an explanatory title or even genre, this is not the case for periodicals. Studying magazines and newspapers, research often begins with a list of dates. These dates contain a lot of practical details about periodicals: when they are published, publication order, publication period etc. Yet for all this information, they tell me very little about the periodicals and what I will find inside. In a periodical listing all I have to guide me are dates, flat and lifeless, with no meaning outside of their relation to each other. 

Screenshot of the British Library Catalogue showing the results for the search term 'Chicago Defender'.

In this sense, to read periodicals is to jump in, no context. No context despite, of course, knowing the extremely specific historical context of an abstract date. It is a peculiar feeling - knowing exactly when in history you are, but with no sense of what this means.

This feeling of jumping into an unknown has become very familiar to me as of late; starting my PhD has been full of new things. In January 2024 I began a doctorate with the British Library on ‘Short Fiction in Mid-20th Century African American Periodicals’. As a CDP AHRC student, I designed my project around a pre-established research topic (for more information on CDPs, see the end of the blog; they are a great way to do doctoral study).¹ This meant that I was new both to African American Studies and to periodicals. My previous research interests had been in mid-century Caribbean literature, specifically poetry, so even seeing myself as an Americanist was startlingly new. Much like studying periodicals, I had that peculiar feeling of knowing exactly where I was, with very little sense of what this meant.

Screenshot of the British Library Catalogue record for the Chicago Defender [City Edition] 1945-1966; shelfmark MFM.MA.496.

And so, I jumped: first into the Black Chicago Renaissance, the successor to the Harlem Renaissance during the mid-century in (you guessed it) Chicago; and then into modernist little magazines - magazines which are so named not for their size (although they were also physically small) but for their circulations. I began looking at Negro Digest, the Chicago Defender, Crisis, Negro Story, and then continued to the Harlem Quarterly and Negro Quarterly, and the newspapers Pittsburgh Courier and the Baltimore Afro-American.²  I did this the only way I could - plucking a random date from a long list and starting to read. 

Screenshot of the British Library Catalogue record for the Harlem Quarterly; shelfmark Mic.F.396.

Slowly I am constructing the contexts of these magazines around me. Now I recognise the names which reoccur in the periodicals. I know not just the canonical Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, but Ricardo Weeks, a poet, and Myrtle Sengstacke, associate editor of Negro Story. The most recent name that I recognized was one John Henrik Clarke, editor of the Harlem Quarterly. He was familiar because he was the same John Henrik Clarke that my grandfather had been sending me YouTube videos about for weeks. It is these points where you bump into yourself that research feels like it starts to take on meaning. 

Microfiche reader depicting the cover of Harlem Quarterly Vol.1 No.2.; shelfmark Mic.F.396.

I’m going to be writing regular posts here over the course of my PhD, sharing my research, the nuggets of interest I bump into in the British Library and the other serendipitous moments of understanding that bump into me over the course of my doctorate. I will also share the process of the project as well as the trials and errors of research as I jump into this other New Thing: a PhD. Studying periodicals will always begin with an opaque catalogue entry, with a long list of issues, with the limited historical contexts of publication dates. Over the next four years, as I read and I research at the British Library, some of those dates and their corresponding periodicals will come alive. I hope to share some of them here with you.  

Notes

1. CDP stands for Collaborative Doctoral Project. AHRC CDP PhD projects are collaborative PhDs between a cultural institution (such as the British Library) and an academic institution (such as the University of Cambridge). They are fully funded by the AHRC, the Arts and Humanities Research Council. For more information and a list of currently available AHRC CDP PhDs please go to https://www.ahrc-cdp.org/

2. Below is a list of mentioned periodicals with their catalogue numbers.  Please note that not all are currently accessible from the Library collection due to the cyber-attack; items with an asterisk are available to view in the Library collection at the date of publication:

• Negro Digest [6075.155000]
• Chicago Defender [MFM.MA496]
• Crisis [3487.382000] This is also publicly available on Google Books
• Negro Story [Mic.F.409] ***
• Harlem Quarterly [Mic.F.396] ***
• Negro Quarterly [Mic.F.388] ***
• Pittsburgh Courier [part of the ProQuest Historical Black Newspapers Collection; currently unavailable due to the cyber-attack]
• Baltimore Afro-American [part of the ProQuest Historical Black Newspapers Collection; currently unavailable due the cyber-attack]

 

 

Monique Hayes is a historical fiction author, poet, and screenwriter from Maryland. She was a 2023 Eccles Institute Visiting Fellow at the British Library.

As an author who often utilizes young adult protagonists, I have to think about what passions and promises propel my characters to act. Will they ultimately get what they want? My novel-in-progress Sally Forth focuses on two enslaved brothers with disparate dreams and journeys, who go boldly into the Revolutionary War when they’re promised freedom for their service. While younger brother Brook’s path as a Continental Army soldier comes with difficult challenges, his older brother Albie, a Black Loyalist, goes down a rockier road full of weak promises, debilitating hardships, and dehumanizing moments. It becomes increasingly hard for Albie to get what he wants and deserves.

My Eccles Institute Visiting Fellowship gave me access to rich resources so I could flesh out Albie’s journey, from his first time holding a uniform emblazoned with “Liberty to Slaves” in Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment to his days of crippling doubt in Nova Scotia and then his struggle to survive in Sierra Leone.

My primary goal during my Visiting Fellowship was to unearth as much information as I could about the Black Loyalist settlement of Birchtown and the Freetown colony in Sierra Leone. Unlike his brother who craves education, Albie’s passion is land ownership. He’s denied this as a slave in Chester County, Pennsylvania, and brightens at the promise of getting his own land in Birchtown after he emigrates to Nova Scotia. My eyes were truly opened by the British Library’s holdings. There were enlightening eyewitness accounts and secondary sources detailing how much the 1,521 free Blacks of Birchtown were disenchanted by the poor soil, the delays in receiving their land allotments, the lack of food and housing supplies, and the prejudice that forced them to take low-paying labour jobs.

The most stunning account came from a white landowner’s grandfather: “They just dug a hole in the ground and put a little packed roof over it…There was a small trapdoor in one side of the roof and the negroes entered the house by dropping right down through. And that was the black man’s home - a hole in the ground with a roof over the hole.”¹ Others erected crude huts, but the Black settlers often received lumber and tools after their white counterparts. It became much easier for me to compose scenes focused on Albie dealing with these injustices and waiting years for his longed-for land.

Inefficient surveyors and harsh winter conditions frustrated the Black Birchtown settlers as well. Some surveys for Black settlers were halted when new white Loyalists arrived looking for land. Other land allotments guaranteed to the Black Loyalists were taken away and used for other purposes.

I particularly gravitated to a passage about Black Loyalist Caesar Perth who went to his 34-acre lot for the first time, only to find “a rocky outcropping that was not suitable for crops.”² This was what Perth and 183 men received after several years of patience. I was heartbroken and inspired to craft a scene between Albie and Perth, arriving to see the “rewards” for their service, another crushing blow years after the loss at Yorktown.

After this devastating realization, Albie accepts the offer Thomas Peters gave to nearly 1,200 Black Nova Scotians to emigrate to Sierra Leone in 1792. According to naturalist Henry Smeathman, the land in Sierra Leone was a “suitable location”: “An opportunity so advantageous may perhaps never be offered to them again; for they and their posterity may enjoy perfect freedom.”³

Image 1: A drawing of Freetown in 1798, by William Augustus Bowles, a visiting Creek Indian leader. Frontispiece for Dr. Thomas Winterbottom’s An Account of the Native Africans of Sierra Leone (1803). Shelfmark L.69/5614.

However, that freedom was not at all perfect. Studying Mary Louise Clifford’s From Slavery to Freetown allowed me to truly see the major distrust between abolitionist John Clarkson and Peters, the negative influence the Sierra Leone Company had over the budding colony, and the emasculation of Peters over time.

Still, I was very moved when reading about the emigrants’ experiences, including the eldest emigrant that made the journey funded by the Sierra Leone Company. The one-hundred- and four-year-old woman, possibly the mother of famous preacher Cato Perkins, was determined to go so “that she may lay her bones in her native country.”⁴ Albie is just as eager to connect with his African past and start a family in the newly formed Freetown.

Image 2: Margaret Whitman Blair, “Liberty or Death: The Surprising Story of Runaway Slaves Who Sided with the British During the American Revolution” (2010). Shelfmark Y.K. 2010.b.6889.

What most surprised and inspired me was Thomas Peters’ downfall during the early days of Freetown. I was well aware that Sierra Leone’s intense rainy season and various illnesses plagued the settlers, but Peters’ life was more complex than I thought. Former Black pioneer Peters went from the settlers’ preferred leader to an outcast among his peers due to the machinations of Clarkson and other officials.

Orphan Albie views Peters as a father figure. He admires Peters, who protested when authorities delayed land distribution and failed to let the colonists govern themselves. Peters’ sudden death after being accused of theft is an event neither the settlers nor Albie are prepared for, and it’s a haunting historical example of what a life of dashed dreams can do.

I’m incredibly grateful for the Eccles Institute Visiting Fellowship which fulfilled one of my dreams to study these materials in-depth so I could give Albie a more historically accurate and meaningful journey. As he pursues his passions, Albie’s heart and spirit are tested on and beyond American shores, and I hope his story finds its way into the hearts of many readers.

References

1. "Birchtown: The History and the Material Culture of an Expatriate African-American Community", by Laird Navin and Stephen Davis. Chapter 4 of Moving On: Black Loyalists in the Afro-Atlantic World, ed. by John Pulis (London: Garland, 2013), p. 72. Shelfmark Y.C. 2003. a. 12259.

2.  Mary Louise Clifford. From Slavery to Freetown (London: MacFarland, 1999) p. 60. Shelfmark Y.C. 1999. b. 6067

3.  Henry Smeathman, Plan of a settlement to be made near Sierra Leone, on the Grain Coast of Africa (London: 1786). Shelfmark B.496.(1).

4.  “The Black Loyalists in Sierra Leone” by Wallace Brown. Chapter 6 of Moving On: Black Loyalists in the Afro-Atlantic World, ed. by John Pullis (London: Garland,1999), p. 109. Y.C. 2003. a. 12259.

These Student Notes accompany the 2024 edition of ‘US Politics Today’, an exciting learning programme that takes place each November for students of A-level Politics.  

Former Members of the US House of Representatives – one Democrat, one Republican – share reflections from their direct experience at the heart of Washington D.C., and discuss the latest trends and events with leading academics. These conferences and events offer students the chance to hear some of the critical questions and issues in US politics come alive and leap out of the textbook, and support classroom work on key topics in A-level US Politics courses, including sessions on The Presidency, Congress, the Supreme Court, and Elections and Democracy. 

This year, former Members of Congress Cheri Bustos (D-IL, 2013-2023) and Bob Dold (R-IL, 2011-2013; 2015-2017) shared their experiences and insights of lawmaking and representing two very different congressional districts in Illinois – together with their interpretations of the Republicans’ triumph in the general election.  

Professor Andrew Moran, Rep. Bob Dold and Rep. Cheri Bustos at the British Library, 22 November 2024.

If you would like access to catch-up recordings of the conference which took place at the British Library on Friday 22 November 2024, including academic presentations and Q&As with the Former Members of Congress, please email [email protected]. Please also get in touch if you would like to register your interest in bringing a class to the live events in London in 2025. 

Student Notes 

Professor Philip Davies: The Party Political Balance in Washington

Professor Josephine Harmon: Congress

Professor Andrew Moran: The Presidency

Dr Emma Long: The Supreme Court

Other Links and Resources 

Cheri Bustos recalls the events of 6 January 2021: https://www.politico.com/news/2022/01/03/january-6-capitol-riot-house-democrats-525975 

CNN’s updated data on the general election: 

https://edition.cnn.com/election/2024/results/president?election-data-id=2024-PG&election-painting-mode=projection-with-lead&filter-key-races=false&filter-flipped=false&filter-remaining=false 

Congress to Campus is organized by the Eccles Institute for the Americas and Oceania, in collaboration with the USAFMC and with the support of the US Embassy, London.