Periodical Poets

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. 

Periodical Poets is a digital humanities project containing over 500 poems printed in New York-based, nineteenth-century periodicals run by Black editors. In doing so, it 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.

"How to Use the Site" provides more context on the site's organization of information, and how to best navigate searching through Items. 

Items, collections, and exhibits on the site are still being edited and updated. Suggestions and feedback are welcomed and greatly appreciated.

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Periodical Poets is a project by Charline Jao with the support of the Cornell Summer Graduate Fellowship in Digital Humanities, sponsored by Cornell University Library & Society for the Humanities.