The fourth issue of Alternating Current Press’ annual literary publication contains 48 works of poetry, photographs, fiction, essays, articles, and nonfiction by 33 authors about various historical topics. Within these pages, you will find contemporary outlooks on history right alongside little-known historical works that feel as fresh and as vibrant (and as scary) as if they were written today. Here, the old meets the new, and you’ll discover fascinating history from a personal, accessible, non-scholarly literary approach. As we go through an age of accountability and social justice as a society, the writing we’re seeing becomes more aware, more prominent in its voicing of history’s ill treatment of certain subsets of people and ideas. We start right out with the gut punch of American slavery, hearing the voices of then and now, through Rev. Richard Allen, slavemasters, runaways, and Frederick Douglass, and leading up to Juneteenth, when enslaved workers in Texas finally learned that they’d already been free for two years. We’ll meet Civil War zombies and cattle-hunting soldiers, and we’ll go in search of the lost hoof of a famous fire horse. We’ll explore the missionary failures of David Livingstone and Eleazar Wheelock and travel the seafaring journeys and shipwrecks of robber Joaquín Murrieta, arctic explorers, British lightermen, and one unfortunate girl in a rum keg. Women like Conchita Cintrón will have their firsts (and be arrested, naturally), and we’ll unravel the dark mind of Virginia Woolf. We’ll learn about the Brothertown Indians, the ill beginnings of Dartmouth College, and the massacres and stereotypes that Native Americans endured in the mid-to-late 1800s. We’ll travel to England with Samson Occom, Dominic Fanning, Oliver Cromwell, nuclear bombs, and the erosion of the East Yorkshire coastline through the years. Art is explored through the eyes of Leda with her swan, Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series, the photography of the Great Depression, and Victorian photographs with dead people. Featured Writer Kindra McDonald will take us through the Dismal Swamp and into the suicidal minds of Robert Frost and Meriwether Lewis, then through a history of salt, foot binding, and lost languages. Featured Writer Benjamin Goluboff examines the work and art curation of John Quinn and Walker Evans, the former responsible for the 1913 Armory Show that was the first exhibit of modern art, and the latter a renowned photographer of life in the 1930s. Their work is showcased next to the winners and finalists for the 2018 Charter Oak Award for Best Historical.
Authors
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information. David Livingstone was a Scottish physician, Congregationalist, and pioneer Christian missionary with the London Missionary Society, an explorer in Africa, and one of the most popular British heroes of the late 19th-century Victorian era. He had a mythical status that operated on a number of interconnected levels: Protestant missionary martyr, working-class "rags-to-riches" inspirational story, scientific investigator and explorer, imperial reformer, anti-slavery crusader, and advocate of commercial and colonial expansion. His fame as an explorer and his obsession with learning the sources of the Nile River was founded on the belief that if he could solve that age-old mystery, his fame would give him the influence to end the East African Arab-Swahili slave trade. "The Nile sources," he told a friend, "are valuable only as a means of opening my mouth with power among men. It is this power which I hope to remedy an immense evil." His subsequent exploration of the central African watershed was the culmination of the classic period of European geographical discovery and colonial penetration of Africa. At the same time, his missionary travels, "disappearance", and eventual death in Africa—and subsequent glorification as a posthumous national hero in 1874—led to the founding of several major central African Christian missionary initiatives carried forward in the era of the European "Scramble for Africa". His meeting with Henry Morton Stanley on 10 November 1871 gave rise to the popular quotation "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"
Kindra McDonald is the author of the chapbooks Concealed Weapons, (2015) and Elements and Briars, (2016) and the full-length poetry collections, Fossils published by Finishing Line Press and In the Meat Years by Aldrich Press, both in 2019. She received her MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. She teaches poetry classes at The Muse Writers Center in Norfolk, VA and is an adjunct writing professor. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and for Bettering American Poetry. She lives in the city of mermaids with her husband and cats where she bakes, hikes, and changes hobbies monthly.
Lois Baer Barr is a professor of Spanish at Lake Forest College. Her critical study, Isaac Unbound: Patriarchal Traditions in the Latin American Jewish Novel, was published by Arizona State University Center for Latin American Studies in 1995. She was co-executive producer of a documentary about Jewish singer and folklorist Isa Kremer, Isa: The People's Diva, (2000) distributed by Facets Multimedia. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize for fiction and poetry. Her stories, essays, and poems appear in English and Spanish in literary reviews, web zines, anthologies, and on Pace buses in Chicago's North Shore as a winner of the 2014 Poetry that Moves Contest of Highland Park Poetry. She lives in Riverwoods, Illinois with her husband Lew and likes to write, bike, and paint, but not at the same time.
(Adeline) Virginia Woolf was an English novelist and essayist regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
Walker Evans (November 3, 1903 – April 10, 1975) was an American photographer best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans' work from the FSA period uses the large-format, 8x10-inch camera. He said that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that are "literate, authoritative, transcendent". Many of his works are in the permanent collections of museums and have been the subject of retrospectives at such institutions as The Metropolitan Museum of Art or George Eastman House. In 2000, Evans was inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame
I'm a writer from North Carolina who writes primarily Southern contemporary and historical fiction. I earned my MFA in creative writing from Converse College in 2017, and I've taught composition and literature courses at East Carolina University for over twenty years. I'm a knitter and a lifelong geek. Those two things often overlap. I wear red lipstick with Star Wars t-shirts. I'm a nerd. I'm a Woman of a Certain Age. I'm an adult who hasn't grown up. When I'm not writing, I enjoy reading, knitting, and spoiling my pets.
