Katrin Horn – Archival Gossip

Posted on March 13, 2023 by Katrin Horn

ArchivalGossip goes Podcast!

Bit of news: I’ve recently been invited to join the always great LadyFiction-Podcast to talk with Dr. Stefanie Schäfer about (transatlantic) gossip in periodicals (e.g. the writing of Anne Hampton Brewster, from whose “American Artists in Rome” my opening quote is taken) – of course, Charlotte Cushman also made an appearance!

In this special Women’s History Month episode, Stefanie Schäfer discusses gossip with American Studies scholar Katrin Horn, head of the research project www.archivalgossip.com. Following the trajectories of American artists in Rome, and specifically the making of actress Charlotte Cushman’s celebrity persona, they read the functions of gossip in 19th-century US magazines between the intimate and the political, between escapism and nation building, and they also ponder the question of how gossip became gendered.
Session summary by Trans-Atlanticist

You can listen or download here!

Posted on September 6, 2022 by Katrin Horn

How rich was Charlotte Cushman?

Charlotte Cushman was one of the biggest stars of the Anglophone theater in the nineteenth century. We know this because of the sheer number of articles and biographical sketches available about Cushman. We know this because reviews of her performances do not tire of stressing how big a star she was.

“WINTER GARDEN—REAPPEARANCE OF MISS CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN”, *New York Times*, Oct 2, 1860 (Source)

We also know this, because evidently Cushman was well paid, very well paid in fact. So much so, that the size of her fortune regularly warranted its own mention in newspapers. (Which is not so say that Cushman’s private letters aren’t also full of discussions of money. In 1847, for example, she explains to her future agent that she intents to “gallop through the country as fast as I can & make as much money as I can.” Judging by the numbers listed below, she did just that.)

Here’s how (at least according to public sources), Cushman’s wealth has developed over time:

Posted on March 28, 2022March 28, 2022 by Katrin Horn

Highlights from the Collection, Part 1

Geraldine Jewsbury’s Passionate Rebuke of Charlotte Cushman

As the project is slowly drawing to a close (we’ll wrap up by September, *sad face*), we want to use some of our remaining time to highlight items in our collection that have stood out to us for various reasons – be that they were particularly challenging to read, fun to explore, romantic, sad, eye-opening …. . In a way, this will be a way for Selina and myself to reminisce about what we’ve done these past three years. Hopefully, for others it will be an additional tool to navigate the collection which has grown to almost 1000 items.

So, without further ado: my first highlight among our items is a letter written by Geraldine Jewsbury, presumably from 1846, addressed to Charlotte Cushman, in which she offers a stern rebuke of the actress:

I am not an angel but a deal more of a wild cat & I’ll scratch you if I can’t beat you
Geraldine Jewsbury to Charlotte Cushman, Charlotte Cushman Papers, Library of Congress, 3449–3450, here: 3449

Posted on December 20, 2021August 7, 2023 by Katrin Horn

Ladies’ Home Journal

One Issue, A Whole Lot of Gossip

Last week, I had the pleasure of giving a guest lecture as part of the University of Münster’s Lecture Series In the Mood for Affect. The title of my lecture was “Capitalizing on Intimacy: The Rise of Gossip in US American Periodicals” and in preparing for it I re-discovered one issue of Ladies’ Home Journal that is so wonderfully bananas when it comes to gossip that
a) I decided to dedicate an entire section of the lecture to this one magazine issue (the other two sections were focussed on the careers of Grace Greenwood and Anne Hampton Brewster and how they profitted off of their personal ties within the expatriate community in Italy, and on Town Topics‘ stylistic evocation of intimate familiarity among readers and between readers and “The Saunterer” respectively), and
b) I wanted to share it with you here, too:

Let’s start with a bit of context: Simultaneous with the rise in public gossip for which I argue, the nineteenth century also witnessed another crucial and related trend in publications, namely etiquette manuals. As John Kasson summarizes in Civility & Rudeness, the interest in manners is intricately connected to changes in the social make-up, most centrally, the national focus on social mobility: “Fundamental to the popularity of manuals of etiquette was the conviction that proper manners and social respectability could be purchased and learned” (Kasson 43). Hence, it is unsurprising that the same magazines which might write about public figures and thus profit from the interest in gossip reports about their activities, might nonetheless also feature advice columns that warn against gossip’s potentially disastrous social consequences. So, I know that from a financial and editorial point of view it makes a lot of sense for the two opposing takes on gossip (condemning it / selling it) to exist side by side. Nonethelles, I was still struck by how that plays out in the August-issue of Ladies’ Home Journal from 1889 (full text accessible via HathiTrust).

Posted on July 1, 2021July 1, 2021 by Katrin Horn

Methods and Manuscripts: On Pursuing American Studies in the Archive

GAAS 2021 paper on working with manuscripts (when that’s not what you’ve been trained to do)

With a slight delay, I’d like to add here the talk I gave recently at the 2021 Annual Conference of the German Association for American Studies as part of a panel on “Dispatches from the Method Wars: New Approaches to Cultural Agency and Participation in American Studies” (June 18, 2021). The CfP spurred some reflections on how my current research on gossip in the nineteenth century and my prior project on camp in contemporary culture have similar “issues,” when it comes to some of the methods or scholarly ideals of American Studies. More precisely: the paper was an opportunity for me to think through “being too close” and “too much participation.”

(I hope you’re not coming here looking for anwers, because I mostly had questions).

Posted on April 7, 2021April 7, 2021 by Katrin Horn

Transatlantic Women’s Letter Writing of the 19th and early 20th Century (#BAAS2021)

incl. my Paper on:
Business and Intimacy in the Correspondence of Charlotte Cushman and James T. & Annie Fields

Yesterday, I had the great pleasure to chair a panel together with the incomparable Dr. Laura Rattray at this year’s digital conference of the British Association for American Studies. And what can I say, I had an absolute blast!

Here’s a rundown of our panel on Transatlantic Women’s Letter Writing of the 19th and early 20th Century, and below that my paper in full.

Posted on February 22, 2021March 8, 2021 by Katrin Horn · 2 Comments

Cushmania: Reconstructing Queerness and Celebrity of a Nineteenth-Century Actress

Conference Paper for Digital Humanities and Gender History (Feb 5, 2021) organized by Prof. Dr. Mettele, Pia Marzell, and Martin Prell

[Katrin] Introduction: Who We Are and What We Are Doing

Thank you to the organizers for having us today and thank you to everyone for your interest in “Cushmania: Reconstructing Queerness and Celebrity of a Nineteenth-Century Actress.”

Almost exactly 162 years ago to this day, the US American public learned that Miss Hosmer and Miss Cushman lived happily together in Rome. Now you are forgiven if you don’t recognize either of these names. I guarantee you, however, had you lived back then, you would have known Charlotte Cushman. Cushman was one of the most famous, most talked about women of her time – which you probably can guess from this little snippet, the same way that you already get a hint of her queerness.

Today, we (Selina and me, who shoulder this project together) would like to present parts of our ongoing research project entitled “Economy and Epistemology of Gossip in Nineteenth-Century US-American Culture,” for which we have built the website archivalgossip.com – which includes, among others, the collection Cushmania. Cushmania is an online database documenting the public reception and private life writing of actress Charlotte Cushman (1816-1876) via material collated from various US-American libraries and archives.

Cushmania to us is several things:

Posted on November 6, 2020March 29, 2021 by Katrin Horn

But wait, there’s more! (Cushman-related material online)

Did you come here looking for something that you did not find? Are your research travels cancelled and you’re looking for other ways to stay busy? Or were you simply so intruiged by our Cushman-collection that you want to read even more about this fascinating actress? Either way: you’re in luck! Thanks to Cushman’s large social network, letters sent and received by her, and numerous other texts that mention her are widely available in other digital archives.

So, in the hope that it might proof useful to some fellow American studies folks, celebrity studies people, (gender) historians, and who else might profit from nineteenth-century primary material, here’s a collection of digital sources we have relied on repeatedly in our own research.
(Stay tuned for updates, and get in touch, if you have any questions!)

Posted on September 24, 2020February 22, 2021 by Katrin Horn

Archives of Queer Intimacy

(or: musings on past obsessions and a new publication)

In my attempts to make sense of my encounters with ‘the archive’, I’ve stumbled upon Maryanne Dever’s article “Garbo’s Foot, Or, Sex, Socks, and Letters” (2010), which not only namechecks about 50% of my interests in its title, but also – and more importantly – makes a wonderful case for archival absences (“nothing”) as evidence. The introductory paragraph reads as follows:

In November 2006 I found myself staring at item no. 80 from Box 23 of the Greta Garbo material held at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia […] this visit was the culmination of a six-year desire to see what ‘nothing’ looked like.
(Dever 2010 163)

“Nothing,” of course, being the relationship between Greta Garbo and Mercedes de Acosta – according to the Rosenbach Museum and other “stake holders” in Garbo’s posthumous fame, a wishful thinking, a figment of people’s imagination. Certainly not a defining part of the life and legacy of one of cinema’s most enigmatic stars.

If we count more metaphorical archives (of popular culture, of auto/biographies), then I’ve searched them for “something” – meaning, traces, evidence, inspiration, whatever you wanna call it – where “nothing” was supposed to be for a very long time. In my early twenties, I devoured biographies like Barry Paris’ Garbo and de Acosta’s infamous Here Lies the Heart. I might have watched more movies and series for subtext than for main text. Always sure, there was something. (I’m not claiming my interest in gossip is neutral.)

Castle, Terry (1993): *The Apparitional Lesbian. Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture.* New York: Columbia UP.

Posted on February 27, 2020February 22, 2021 by Katrin Horn · 1 Comment

Attic to Archive

On the Provenance of the Charlotte Cushman Papers at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Loose Letters from Charlotte Cushman Papers

Much of the material I read for our research project (letters, diary entries) is of a very private nature. This raises ethical concerns as well as methodological issues:

But what does it mean to begin to sift the available traces of someone’s life? Where do the boundaries lie between private lives and public scrutiny? […] How do we make sense of surviving traces of their private lives that have found their way into public archives? What protocols govern scholarly attention to these particular aspects of the archival record?
Dever, Maryanne, et al. “The Intimate Archive.” Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 38, no. 1, May 2010, pp. 94–137.

It also raises very practical questions – some of which struck me immediately upon sitting down in front of one bound book of Charlotte Cushman’s personal correspondence (decyphering the handwriting, storage of data), some of which took a while to dawn on me. Most importantly:

How did these letters get here???