This article explores The Crisis magazine as a framework for students to gain a better understanding of the historical and cultural contexts of the works produced during the Harlem Renaissance. Ortega’s essay details the benefits of archival research for undergraduate students and specific ways in which to use The Crisis as a teaching tool in an interdisciplinary curriculum. Finally, her essay examines the ways in which The Crisis helps facilitate an understanding of canon formation during the Harlem Renaissance.

This article focuses on the uses of the Early English Books Online (EEBO) database as a case study for how to introduce undergraduates to archival research. I provide four cases in which working with the digital archive has allowed my students to attend to variations in typography, spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and overall design in early modern printed texts. Working with the EEBO database challenges students to reconsider how a printed text represents a series of editorial choices; it encourages them to make persuasive claims about the differences in the appearance of an early modern lyric or dramatic text when it is situated in different contexts; it enhances the students’ ability to work independently and derive pleasure from the serendipity of the archive; and perhaps most important, it can actually help students develop a clearer and more effective practice of close reading in the twenty-first century.

This review essay places Local Histories in the context of recent books and studies examining the wide variety of composition and rhetoric courses and pedagogical practices that existed in nineteenth-century America. The book has two general foci as represented in its split title: Local Histories, or microhistories of institutions, curricula, and figures; and Reading the Archives of Composition, an extended look at several hitherto unexamined archival sources and their associated projects. The editors identify three central purposes for their book: to challenge the “Harvard narrative,” which, they claim, places the origin of “composition” at Harvard and other elite Eastern colleges; to offer several alternative “microhistories” from various institutional sites, and to document, interpret, and interrogate specific archival holdings and the nature of archival work in composition. While the reviewers find the challenges to “the Harvard model” as history and historiography overstated, overall, they find the collection important for its studies of diverse sites and its attention to less visible figures: teachers who acted as early innovators, and students whose written compositions, informal diaries and letters offer new lenses for making history. The authors of various chapters who unveil their documentary and archival work in process, disclosing both finds and gaps and offering their developing understandings of the archive as construct, perform a valuable service to future scholars of composition studies.

This article proposes a strategy for teaching students about periodization, canonicity, and recovery work. It assigns Mary Darby Robinson's reading list as course material in women's literature as well as in Romantic-period classes and other kinds of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century interdisciplinary courses.