Research & Innovation

ohnson's vast influence on twentieth-century American music, combined with his mysterious death at the age of twenty-seven, has allowed speculation and myths to obscure the facts of his life. The most famous of these legends depicts a young Johnson meeting the Devil at a dusty Mississippi crossroads at midnight and selling his soul in exchange for prodigious guitar skills.

While the purview of digital forensics was once specialized to fields of law enforcement, computer security, and national defense, the increasing ubiquity of computers and electronic devices means that digital forensics is now used in a wide variety of cases and circumstances. Most records today are born digital, and libraries and other collecting institutions increasingly receive computer storage media as part of their acquisition of "papers" from writers, scholars, scientists, musicians, and public figures. This poses new challenges to librarians, archivists, and curators—challenges related to accessing and preserving legacy formats, recovering data, ensuring authenticity, and maintaining trust. The methods and tools developed by forensics experts represent a novel approach to these demands. For example, the same forensics software that indexes a criminal suspect's hard drive allows the archivist to prepare a comprehensive manifest of the electronic files a donor has turned over for accession.

This report introduces the field of digital forensics in the cultural heritage sector and explores some points of convergence between the interests of those charged with collecting and maintaining born-digital cultural heritage materials and those charged with collecting and maintaining legal evidence.

lthough Conrad did not visit the country until a year before his death, his fiction served as both foil and mirror to America's conception of itself and its place in the world. Peter Mallios reveals the historical and political factors that made Conrad's work valuable to a range of prominent figures―including Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Richard Wright, Woodrow Wilson, and Theodore and Edith Roosevelt―and explores regional differences in Conrad's reception.

It explores material that has been largely left out of the antislavery story: the cases brought by abolitionists to free slaves who had traveled with their masters into free territory. Wong's essay reconstructs the records of these cases from popular literature, newsprint, and legal pamphlets to explore what recent literary and historical scholarship has largely overlooked. Harriet and John S. Jacobs, Maria Weston Chapman, Sojourner Truth, and Ellis Gray Loring appear alongside a number of largely unknown slave attendants in an essay that explores the complex ways legal discourses circulating in newsprint constituted the agency and subjectivity of slaves who petitioned Northern courts for freedom (in counterdistinction from the criminal will of the fugitive).

Atlantic scholarship – most notably Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic – has looked to the chronotope of the seafaring ship in its efforts to chart the cosmopolitan contours of the nineteenth century. For Gilroy, the ship gives figurative expression to a cultural and political remapping of modern racial formations that transcends the “boundaries and integrity of modern nation states” (4). Ships call to mind both the Middle Passage and the mercantile routes that joined the Americas with Europe, Africa, and the plantation zones of the Caribbean. For Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, black maritime circulation thus constituted one aspect of the “many-headed hydra” that unsettled the political sovereignty of European nation-states in the Atlantic world (31).

Each year, the National Humanities Center welcomes up to forty scholars from across the humanities and all over the world.

During their time in residence, Fellows are given the freedom to work on their projects while benefiting from the exceptional services of the Center.

(2010): 1247-1248.

Secret Histories claims that the history of the nation is hidden -- in plain sight -- within the pages of twentieth-century American literature. David Wyatt argues that the nation's fiction and nonfiction expose a "secret history" that cuts beneath the "straight histories" of our official accounts. And it does so by revealing personal stories of love, work, family, war, and interracial romance as they were lived out across the decades of the twentieth century.

Wyatt reads authors both familiar and neglected, examining "double consciousness" in the post--Civil War era through works by Charles W. Chesnutt, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington. He reveals aspects of the Depression in the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Anzia Yezierska, and John Steinbeck. Period by period, Wyatt's nuanced readings recover the felt sense of life as it was lived, opening surprising dimensions of the critical issues of a given time. The rise of the women's movement, for example, is revivified in new appraisals of works by Eudora Welty, Ann Petry, and Mary McCarthy.

Running through the examination of individual works and times is Wyatt's argument about reading itself. Reading is not a passive activity but an empathetic act of cocreation, what Faulkner calls "overpassing to love." Empathetic reading recognizes and relives the emotional, cultural, and political dimensions of an individual and collective past. And discovering a usable American past, as Wyatt shows, enables us to confront the urgencies of our present moment.

Exemplaria 22.2 (2010): 99-118.

The suicides cause Wyatt to move to small-town Middle Economy to live with his uncle, aunt, and ravishing cousin Tilda.