In the first half of the nineteenth century technological advances made paper easy to manufacture and cheap enough to throw away, leading to a deluge of ephemera.

The American abolition movement was one of the most notable contributors to the early global volume of ephemera. [POSTAL CAMPAIGN.] The sheer volume of transient print materials deployed on behalf of the anti-slavery movement created an enormous body of text at first intended to be temporary, but retrospectively thought to be worthy of preservation.

Currently we can access these ephemera retyped into print anthologies, or buried in digital archives, but we miss their materiality.

No one talks about the poems.

Read within a transient material context, Harper’s poems also call attention to the physical spaces in which they are first seen – and then ask for more. 26 They ask to be encountered – to be experienced through and beyond even the sentimental feeling they are commonly said to evoke. 27 Like all ephemera, they convey time as space: the location where a poem is seen, touched, and remembered. 28 As a result, the space where they are encountered should capture their existence as fluid and ephemeral material objects – bound to an interactive material and visual spatio- temporality that is understood to disappear. It should be a medium in the most expansive sense of the term, the “means by which something is communicated or expressed” and a “substance in which an organism lives or is cultured” (Oxford English Dictionary).

Over time this significant body of ephemera has been transcribed and resituated in larger and more permanent collections in attempts to preserve its contents. Starting in the nineteenth century, poems, speeches, and essays first printed in pamphlets or newspapers were often meticulously re-set into special collections and anthologies.

In 1839, Angelina Grimké Weld and her fellow abolitionists (husband) Theodore Weld, and (sister) Sarah Grimké published American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. The book was a compilation of dozens of first-hand accounts of slavery, many of them taken “from the advertisements, which [slave owners] have published in their own newspapers” (62). The idea seemed to be that abolitionists would overwhelm readers with the volume of texts recounting the horrors of slavery, and encountering a sizeable collection of so many different accounts would convince a complacent public to change their minds and take action.

Autographs for Freedom, written in 1853, was a similarly significant volume “fully committed to the antislavery cause” (Kinnamon 461). The curators of the collection, abolitionist editor Julia Griffiths and other members of the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, hoped that the book would “sweep away from this otherwise happy land, the great sin of SLAVERY” (emphasis original, Griffiths v). The book contained abolitionist-written stories, letters, and poems, many also published elsewhere. Autographs placed texts by black and white abolitionists in conversation with each other and used them to engage an uninformed public within a trusted and more permanent location.

Publishing an eclectic collection of work like Autographs was an attempt to mobilize many different and previously ephemeral voices for the abolitionist cause, within the (literally) weightier context of a traditional volume.

A notable early example of the movement’s innovative use of ephemera began in 1835, when the American Anti-Slavery Society started what is commonly considered the first-ever direct mail campaign. Abolitionists in the north located thousands of individual addresses within slaveholding states, to which they mailed thousands of anti-slavery pamphlets and other ephemera. Though the short-lived “postal campaign” was able to disseminate abolitionist writing far and wide, overall it actually radicalized the pro-slavery movement, which staged dramatic anti-slavery literature burnings.

These texts were meant to be temporary, but now we see them resituated in anthologies. How does this change our reading?

(Give example from “slave auction”)