Hello and welcome to Nineteenth-Century Ohio Literature, a collection of readings prepared at the University of Akron in Akron, Ohio. Each installment includes both a nineteenth-century text and supporting materials such as an introduction and a bibliography. These supporting materials will help twenty-first-century readers to understand and better appreciate the nineteenth-century material presented.

These readings were selected mainly for their appeal to readers today. Most are from Ohio magazines and newspapers from a time when news reporting was often more creative and colorful than professional. This series is edited by Jon Miller. More information about Nineteenth-Century Ohio Literature can be found in the links on the sidebar.

In a famous introduction to one of his books, Nathaniel Hawthorne contrasted the pleasure of reading old books with the pleasure of reading old newspapers: "[None of the old books in the library], strange to say, retained any sap, except what had been written for the passing day and year, without the remotest pretension or idea of permanence. There were a few old newspapers . . . which re-produced, to my mental eye, the epochs when they had issued from the press, with a distinctness that was altogether unaccountable. It was as if I had found bits of magic looking-glass among the books, with the images of a vanished century in them." -- Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Old Manse" (1846)

ISSN 2577-1302

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Submissions from 2018

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The Purloined Letters: A Collection of Mail Robbery Reports from Ohio Papers, 1841-1850, Marc Cibella

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“When one shingle sends up smoke”: The Summit Beacon Advises Akron About the Epidemic Cholera, 1849, Elizabeth Hall

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Douglass’ Reply to A. C. C. Thompson’s ‘Letter from Frederick Douglass,’ as Reprinted in The Anti-Slavery Bugle: A Critical Edition of Both Letters, with a Summary of Maryland’s Fugitive Slave Laws, Kayla Hardy-Butler

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Colonel John Johnston's "Biography of Tecumtha" (1854), Caitlin Metheny

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“Jailed on the Charge of Sodomy”: A Same-Sex, Interracial Marriage in 1888, Adam Yeich

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Female Cyclists: Two Essays from the 1869 Hancock Jeffersonian, Paige Zenovic