Mark Alan Mattes is assistant professor of English at the University of Louisville. He is the editor of Handwriting in Early America: A Media History (UMass 2023), and he is currently working on a book about Indigenous and settler memory in the Ohio Valley. He recently won the NCSA’s 2024 BIPOC Scholars Prize for his article, “Trees and Texts: Indigenous Memory, Material Media, and the Logan Elm.”

If you could eat or drink anything from the nineteenth century, what would it be, and why?

What do you mean, could? In 2012, I was part of a little brewing club along with some graduate student buddies, “The Suds of Liberty,” and one of our members found an early 19C recipe from the Chemical Society of Philadelphia for “Pea Hull Beer.” According to the recipe, the key to extracting the sugars in order to make the wort was to boil the hulls until “insipid.” If I still had a bottle of the finished product, I would not drink it again. Instead, I would pour one out for my fellow Suds. The reason is probably obvious.

What is your favorite nineteenth-century material object that you own?

My favorite 19C object is a lovely gift from my colleague at the University of Louisville, Andrew Rabin: the “Fac-simile of the Original Draught by Jefferson of the Declaration of Independence” from the July 8, 1876, issue of Harper’s Weekly. The broadside was often reprinted as a kind of salvo in contests over the meaning of U.S. national founding. The inclusion of Jefferson’s “struck-out” anti-slavery draft language is compelling in its own right, especially in light of the troubling contradictions between his famous words and his deeds as a slaveowner. But the best parts of the object at hand are the reproduced signatures of pro-slavery delegates to the Second Continental Congress who are forced to posthumously underwrite anti-slavery sentiments. This was a particularly spicy design choice to make during the transition from the Reconstruction era to the Jim Crow era. I should also add that I am a gigantic nerd for remediations of handwriting and Andrew gets me.

If you could go on a weeklong road trip with anyone from the nineteenth century, who would it be? Where would you go? And what would you do along the way? 

I would tag along with Charles Dickens during his 1842 travels in North America. He’d be droll, and I would chuckle.