Spring and Summer 2024
The Spring/Summer issue for 2024 features articles on the winner of the 2024-25 Oakes Smith Society Research Fellowship, Descriptions of papers delivered at ALA (Chicago) May 24, and several updates on material research on Oakes Smith’s life and career.
Our Winter issue announces the availability of Elizabeth Oakes Smith: Selected Writings, along with its full table of contents. Other stories include a report of two Society officers dining at Clink (a terrific italian resaurant) in Boston, built out of the Suffolk County jail where Oakes Smith’s son was incarcerated for some months in 1861. I happens one of the officers is Appleton’s great-great grand-daughter. Also covered are Jon White’s Lincoln award and an article he wrote about Oakes Smith and Horace Greeley for the Lincoln Forum Bulletin.
Our Spring/Summer 2022 issue reports on new links between Oakes Smith and writers of her generation and the next, notably Elizabeth C. Wright, whose Lichen Tufts was published in 1860. CFPs, our budget, and a new partnership with Friends of Lakeview Cemetery are also detailed.
Our Winter 2022 issue brings news of the radio exploration of the site of Oakes Smith’s home on Long Island, seeking its exact location and evidence of its relation to the tavern where George Washington stopped on his tour of Long Island in 1790. We also advertise the appearance of Elizabeth Oakes Smith: Selected Writings, Volume I, and our CFPs for the ALA conference in the spring of 2023. (Click on our “addendum” for corrections and additions to the Winter 2022 issue!)
In our issue for fall 2021, we announce the first recipient of our $1500 travel fellowship, the forthcoming publication of three volumes of Selected Works by EOS (Mercer Press) edited by Timothy Scherman, important new critical work on EOS by Elissa Zellinger, and her inclusion in the electronic supplement (better than nothing!) of Broadview’s new anthology of American Literature.
In our spring issue, we announce our panel line-up for the American Literature Association, and an important discovery made by a student in Tim Scherman’s Spring 2021 seminar on Oakes Smith—the fact that “The Two Wives,” previously listed on the website as a short story, was actually a full serialized novel, appearing in every issue of The Herald of Health for 1870. In other news, Poe scholar Sandra Tomc has recently written on the ways EOS and other women writers help us, even today, revise the gendered context in which we see Poe’s work.
In our winter ‘20 issue, we announce publication of Oakes Smith’s entry in Gale’s NCLC volume with a summary of its critical contents. There’s also a CFP for Oakes Smith panel at the COVID-delayed American Literature Association conference in Boston (July 7-11, 2021). The Society also announces its grant program for Oakes Smith scholarship in the Portland area.
In our Fall 2019 issue, we announce the formal incoporation of the Elizabeth Oakes Smith Society as a 501c(3) and its mutiple advantages for scholars and contributors to Oakes Smith’s legacy. New publications include Oakes Smith’s inclusion in a forthcoming volume of Gale/Cengage’s Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, and a film now in production documenting Oakes Smith’s climb of Mt. Katahdin in 1849.
Our latest issue features new critical writing from Elissa Zollinger and Adam Tuchinsky, as well as brief summaries of recent unpublished novels found in Rare Books and Manuscripts at the Small Collection at the University of Virginia, plus the announcement of a forthcoming biography of Oakes Smith's son, Appleton Oaksmith, by Jon White.
In this issue, we record Oakes Smith's appearance at two separate panels at ALA (San Francisco), along with the work of several graduate students generating excellent research on Oakes Smith's work at Northeastern Illinois University. One of the papers at the EOS Society's organized panel, "New Scenes in the Re-emergence of Elizabeth Oakes Smith," was delivered by one of these students, detailing her discovery of what is probably Oakes Smith's earliest piece of short fiction, "The Black Fortune-Teller" (1831).
In this issue, we announce Caroline Woidat's new edition of The Western Captive, papers on Oakes Smith at SSAWW, a new image of Oakes Smith discovered by independent scholar Loren Christie, and the discovery of a practically unknown (unpublished) novel by Oakes Smith mistitled in the library catalog at UVa as "The Queen of Trumps."