Footnote #3: A Literary Journal of History

The third issue of Alternating Current’s annual literary publication contains 45 works of poetry, photographs, fiction, essays, articles, and nonfiction by 24 authors about various historical topics. Within these pages, you will find contemporary outlooks on history right alongside little-known public domain 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, non-scholarly literary approach. This issue may be Footnote’s most disturbing, intimate, and deeply personal yet, bringing forward challenging ethical questions and moral dilemmas of our past, and imbuing them with modern sensitivities. In this issue, you’ll meet Lord Byron, Ota Benga, Mary Shelley, John Clare, Fanny and Joshua Chamberlain, and an aviator who couldn’t match wits with the Wright Brothers. You’ll go hunting on an 1800s kangaroo safari, graverobbing with Resurrection Men, and exploring the history of the theater and Tennessee Williams through the eyes of 9/11 New York. You’ll hop from ghost towns to Fort Clatsop to Paxton, Illinois, to a gentrifying England to mourn the downfall of old abbeys and long-urbanized California byways. You’ll learn of the horrors of human zoos, slavery, gynecological experiments on enslaved women, McCarthyism, and Jewish persecution, from the Rhineland Massacres of the Middle Ages, to Budapest in World War II. And we’ll add on to history’s endless list of women who never got their due, from female artists such as Kay Sage, Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven, and Leonora Carrington, to the nurses of the World War I Red Cross. The first Featured Writer, Toby Buckley, takes us from mythical mummies to Victorian ladies to the Radium Girls, with a dash of Louisa Ulrika’s cabinet conspiracies. The second Featured Writer, Joyce Schmid, travels from Gloucester Beach to Stanford University to the mining excavations of an Athenian agora well that turned up the remains of 450 dead babies—before making a quick stop with Fyodor Dostoevsky in front of the firing squad. Their work is showcased next to the winners and finalists for the 2017 Charter Oak Award for Best Historical. Trigger warnings: Slavery, gynecological experimentation, Jewish persecution, graphic hunting, human zoos. Find out more at http://tinyurl.com/footnotejournal3.