January 7, 2026: 2026 Anniversaries: Published in 1876

[The start of a new year means my annual series on historic anniversaries. Leading up to a weekend post on some of what I’m planning for my Spring semester sabbatical!]

For their 150^th anniversary, five distinct but interconnected literary works published during the Centennial year.

1)      Sidney Lanier’s “Centennial Cantata”: As I briefly highlighted in that hyperlinked post, Lanier was a Confederate veteran as well as a poet, and the invitation to write the opening poem for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia was thus a striking and telling one. But unlike the second text I’ll highlight, Lanier’s poem took a decidedly unifying tone, from its hope that all Americans would “Toil, and forgive, and kiss o’er, and replight” to its final image of the opening ceremony’s “music…waving the world’s best lover’s welcome to the world.”

2)      James D. Lynch’s “Robert E. Lee, or Heroes of the South”: I included Lynch’s poetry in that weeklong blog series on Confederate memory because his works took and reflect a very different tone from Lanier’s Cantata. Before turning to poetry the Confederate veteran Lynch was a neo-Confederate lawyer in Reconstruction Mississippi, and his first published poem “Robert E. Lee” extended that work in particularly subtle and insidious ways, portraying the Confederate general as an epic hero whom all Americans should admire and celebrate.

3)      Herman Melville’s Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land: Melville was no Confederate, as his excellent book of Civil War poetry Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) makes very clear. And his complex and multilayered epic poem Clarel is mostly not about the U.S. at all, focusing on his titular character’s literal and spiritual journey through the Middle East and his own faith. But the poem’s fourth and final part, “Bethlehem,” does feature as an important supporting character Ungar, a mixed-race (white and Native American) Confederate veteran exploring his own past and faith on the pilgrimage. Clarel is fascinated by Ungar, a small but significant reminder of the appeal of such perspectives in 1876 America.

4)      Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer: Twain’s first solo novel (he had co-written The Gilded Age with Charles Dudley Warner) is set in the antebellum South, but unlike its sequel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) isn’t particularly interested in historical or cultural questions of region and race. But as those two hyperlinks to my Dad’s Mark Twain in His Times website indicate, I’m filially obligated to include Twain’s 1876 publication in this list. And in truth, no American author who dominate the rest of the 19^th century (and in many ways our collective conversations about American literature ever since) like Sam Clemens did.

5)      Sarah Piatt’s That New World: If I was filially obligated to include Twain’s novel, I’m personally obligated to feature a collection from my favorite American poet. That New World doesn’t feature any of my favorite individual Piatt poems, but in every poem it illustrates her unique, dense, and compelling dialogic style, and how she uses it to capture so many layers to parenting and family, marriage and relationships, identity, and more. And while her titular poem doesn’t specifically refer to America, I can’t help but imagine that for a Centennial-year publication Piatt was considering her still young nation as part of her contexts at least.

Next historic anniversary tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?