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Using archival and genealogical sources, this study corrects the long-standing misattribution of the American novels Monima; or, The Beggar Girl (1802) and Margaretta; or, The Intricacies of the Heart (1807) to Martha Meredith Read. Their true author, Mary Endress Ralston (1772-1850), is introduced as a bilingual Pennsylvania German Lutheran literary pioneer.

Using archival and genealogical sources, this study corrects the long-standing misattribution of the American novels Monima; or, The Beggar Girl (1802) and Margaretta; or, The Intricacies of the Heart (1807) to Martha Meredith Read. Their true author, Mary Endress Ralston (1772–1850), is introduced as a bilingual Pennsylvania German Lutheran literary pioneer.

Sentiment and Celebrity tells the story of a man the New York Times once called “the most talked-about author in America.” A widely admired, if controversial, master of the sentimental appeal, poet and “magazinist” Nathaniel Parker Willis (1806-1867) was a pioneer in the modern business of celebrity. By charting the shape and thrust of the various controversies that surrounded Willis, this book shows how the cultural and commercial impulses that fostered the development of antebellum America’s love affair with fame and fashion drew power and sustenance from the concurrent allure of genteel cultivation and sentiment.

In November 1808 President Thomas Jefferson received an extraordinary letter. Signed “A Slave,” the twenty-four-page missive was half plea, half threat: an impassioned appeal for the president to act to end slavery backed by threats of dire consequences if he refused to budge. Along with a transcription of this important and long-overlooked antislavery text, the attendant commentary considers the matter of its provenance, sources, style, arguments, and reception by the president. Whoever A Slave was, his letter to Jefferson deserves to be read again.

This article challenges a reigning interpretation of the pivotal contested U. S. presidential election of 1800: the view that Aaron Burr did not try actively to wrest victory from his running-mate Thomas Jefferson. With variations, this case is advanced in Nancy Isenberg's Fallen Founder (2007), Edward J. Larson's A Magnificent Catastrophe (2007), Joanne B. Freeman's Affairs of Honor (2001), and most other modern accounts of this election. This article offers new evidence of behind-the-scenes scheming to sustain the case that Burr did indeed act to compass the presidency for himself. First and foremost is a newly-discovered incriminating letter from a political deputy detailing a plan to steal the election in the U. S. House of Representatives. Re-examination of the political and constitutional crisis surrounding the election also yields new information about how Alexander Hamilton sabotaged Burr's schemes; evidence to show why delays in communication probably lost the presidency for Burr; and insight into how Burr and his deputies conspired to cover up their machinations despite the best attempts of partisan antagonists to expose their treachery. In offering a revised interpretation of this consequential electoral crisis and its partisan dimensions, the article redirects our attention toward the importance of might be called the dark side of early republican politics, a shadowy and Machiavellian world where ambition, deal-making, deceit, and disinformation could—as they did on this occasion—lead the nation to the brink of civil conflict.

Beyond the issue of provenance, Baker opines that there is still much to be learned from the letter: about the religious, intellectual, social, and political contexts in which it operated; about how its arguments were constructed; about the hopes for change that triggered its composition; and, more speculatively, about its reception by the president. Whoever A Slave was, his letter to Thomas Jefferson deserves to be read again.

Using archival and genealogical sources, this study corrects the long-standing misattribution of the American novels Monima; or, The Beggar Girl (1802) and Margaretta; or, The Intricacies of the Heart (1807) to Martha Meredith Read. Their true author, Mary Endress Ralston (1772–1850), is introduced as a bilingual Pennsylvania German Lutheran literary pioneer.

Rampant drunkenness, a deserted chapel, schoolboy Voltaires greeting Rousseaus on the Green—this is how Lyman Beecher recalled his Yale days in his (1864). But evidence suggests that these colorful events may have been cribbed from an unsigned 1818 memoir of, oddly enough, Yale's President Timothy Dwight.

How did the stately, republican literary world of Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper give way to the sensationalist, personality-saturated mass market society of the late nineteenth century? In answering this question, Sentiment and Celebrity tells the story of a man the New York Times once called the most talked-about author in America. A widely admired, if controversial, master of the sentimental appeal, poet and magazinist Nathaniel Parker Willis (1806-1867) was a pioneer in the modern business of celebrity. In his heyday, he knew both popularity and success as few other American writers had. Willis, who became the gossip-dishing darling of the middle class and whose sister was the popular writer Fanny Fern (of Ruth Hall fame), was a shrewdly self-styled man of letters who attained international fame by publicizing the renowned figures of the day, including himself, and by playing to, or playing upon, the sentimental desires of his readers. By the 1840s, he could count himself among the nation's highest paid writers and most influential arbiters of fashion and feeling (especially with genteel women), though he could also describe himself, accurately enough, as one of the best abused literary men of his generation. With fame and self-promotion came unexpected, perhaps unforeseeable, burdens, and scandal followed eventually. By charting the various controversies that surrounded Willis, this book shows how the cultural and commercial impulses that fostered antebellum America's new love of fame and fashion drew sustenance from the concurrent allure of genteel cultivation and sentiment. Still, perennial tensions between desires for privacy and the invasive impulses of publicity, and between desires for sincerity and the appeal of social and commercial artifice, rendered this cultural conjunction highly unstable. Readers of Willis were both attracted to and disturbed by his written work and his very person; he introduced new possibilities for fashion, taste, and celebrity, and these new modes of thought and emotion were at once enchanting and unsettling. Because this cultural instability and the impulses that spawned it cut across a number of discourses, and because, in many ways, this double-edged quality remains central to our modern celebrity culture, Sentiment and Celebrity will appeal to students and scholars of several disciplines, among them literary studies, women's studies, sociocultural history, and communication studies. As Thomas N. Baker demonstrates in these fascinating pages, not only does Willis's story enrich our understanding of the early history of celebrity and the development of this country's literary marketplace in the years before the Civil War, it also shows how the cultural phenomena of sentiment and celebrity have gone hand in hand since their inception. Given the countless ways in which fame (literary or otherwise) continues to pervade (and pervert) the American Dream, Baker's book is a life and times study that speaks directly to our own lives.