Interview with Kelly Wisecup on “Accounting for Mary Fowler Occom”
An account of household purchases may seem trivial or banal, but in the case of the Indigenous woman Mary Fowler Occom--whose history lies in the shadow of her better-known husband, the Mohegan preach...
1 Nov 202213min
Interview with Ellen Cushman on “Letters and Characters”
The Cherokee syllabary, created by Sequoyah in the early nineteenth century, is among the most remarkable inventions in the modern history of literacy. Ellen Cushman shows us what it made possible for...
1 Nov 202213min
Interview with Jodi Schorb on “Writing the Prison”
The supposedly modern reformers who conceived New York state's Auburn Penitentiary forbade writing by inmates. But as the formerly incarcerated writer John Maroney made clear in his autobiography, the...
1 Nov 202212min
Interview with Philip Round on “Outlandish Characters”
The early 19th-century Kickapoo leader Kenekuk contrived a unique, non-alphabetic representation of a religious vision and inscribed it on ten-inch wooden boards. The "prayer stick" proliferated and ...
1 Nov 202221min
Interview with Tara Bynum on “Cesar Lyndon Was Here”
An enslaved man in eighteenth-century Rhode Island kept an account book in fine handwriting. But how much can a simple inventory of goods, in pounds and pence, really tell us? As Tara Bynum reveals, i...
1 Nov 202219min
Interview with Margaret Noodin on “Birch-Bark Publications of Simon Pokagan”
On this episode, Margaret Noodin interprets stories by Simon Pokagon, a nineteenth-century author and member of the Pokogon band of the Potawatomi tribe. Rather than reading the texts for story or nar...
1 Nov 202216min
