UNI professor adds to public history of North American Review with Harvard fellowship

A University of Northern Iowa English professor is using funds and resources provided by the Harvard University Houghton Library Dearborn Fellowship to reveal a fuller historical picture of the North American Review and the attitudes its editors held toward slavery and abolition ahead of the Civil War.

Jeremy Schraffenberger, a 2023-2024 visiting fellow, will spend a total of four weeks at the Houghton Library and receive a $4,500 stipend for his project, a UNI news release stated, titled “Slavery, Abolition, and Colonization in the Antebellum North American Review.”

“The ultimate goal of this project is not only to articulate a clear picture of the shifting public attitudes toward slavery as represented in the antebellum pages of the NAR, but also to discover how these ideas may be reflected in the private, internal documents during the editorial and publishing processes of the magazine, including artifacts referring to subscriptions, printing, and distribution,” Schraffenberger said in the release.

The North American Review, founded in 1815 in Boston, is the oldest literary magazine in the country. Contributors to the magazine have included Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Margaret Atwood, Kurt Vonnegut and more. UNI purchased the publication in 1968 from Cornell College and issues of the magazine are still printed today. Schraffenberger is a co-editor of the North American Review.

As only men connected with Harvard were allowed to edit the publication at the time, the release stated the Houghton Library holds materials from editors that are crucial to Schraffenberger’s research and inaccessible through other means. These include correspondence, manuscripts, notes and more.

Schraffenberger said in the release that current readers and writers of the publication will be able to access his work beyond any academic publication that comes of it.

“The invaluable resources of the Houghton Library will allow us to contribute to the ongoing historical project of the North American Review as we confront the past in order to move more restoratively into the future,” Schraffenberger said in the release.