Just a quick note to let folks know that the work continues. 

Please enjoy my latest piece, a contribution to the Oxford Research Encyclopedia on Literature that focuses on "Early African American Print Culture."

Working on: more on Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, a project on "Sanda" and Appointed, and lots of research on Black Reconstruction literature.

(Image: portrait of Phillis Wheatley, Engraved by Scipio Moorehead, Included as the Frontispiece of Her 1773 Poems on Various Subjects. Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-12533.)

Apologies for the BPU-Blog’s brief hiatus, but be assured that our work continues.  I’m still learning--and then learning more--about African American literature, African American history, and the ways these subjects interface with our current moment.
 
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper continues to be one of my best teachers:  the more deeply I research her work (especially in the Civil War and Reconstruction), the more I find it amazingly relevant to today’s world.
 
A case in point is her lecture “National Salvation,” which readers can find online in the latest issue of Common-place.  Only recently rediscovered, the lecture is simply spectacular: fiery, piercing, and wide ranging--and Harper fulfills her promise that “I am coming right home” and “am not going to bathe my lips in honey when I speak.”
 
Please read it, share it widely, and continue learning.

I’m happy to share some wonderful news:  Black Print Unbound has been named the winner of the Research Society for American Periodicals Book Prize.  The 2017 award recognizes the best scholarly book on American periodicals published in 2015 and 2016.
 
I was pleased to receive the award and to talk about the book at the 2017 American Literature Association Annual Conference.  Shown here are Mark Noonan, RSAP President, and James Berkey, RSAP Secretary, presenting the prize.

The prize committee said that Black Print Unbound offers “magisterial vision and imaginative force that will set new standards for periodical scholarship.” Click here for fuller coverage.  For more information on RSAP, see their website.

 I’ve been excited to see interest in Edmonia Goodelle Highgate increasing.

A striking intellect, exciting writer, long-time activist, and dedicated teacher, Highgate (1844-1870) certainly deserves more attention in our classrooms and our scholarship.  (For more on Highgate, see my Black Print Unbound, as well as an earlier blog entry, “Edmonia Highgate, the New Orleans Massacre, and Christian Recording.”)
 
As part of my on-going study of nineteenth-century African American engagement with print culture, I continue to look for traces of Highgate and her work, and I wanted to share a recently-recovered letter not listed in the extant scholarship. 

Published in the 3 April 1869 National Anti-Slavery Standard, it details Highgate’s later work in Mississippi.

Specifically, it offers a rich sense of the educational struggles and goals of many of the recently-freed people in and around Jackson, Mississippi.  It shares local and state news, including noting an assassination attempt on James Lynch (1839-1872), former Christian Recorder editor, editor of the Jackson Colored Citizen, and Mississippi politician and activist.  In all of this, the letter speaks powerfully to our current day, too.
 
It also gives us glimmers of the lives of figures like John Russell Parsons (a white soldier who enlisted soon after graduating from Yale, became a Reconstruction-era Mississippi State Representative from Hinds County, and was found drowned on 3 March 1869) and of Edmonia Highgate’s sister Caroline V. Highgate, listed as “Miss C. V. Highgate,” who would later marry white veteran and politician Albert T. Morgan and have, among other children, twentieth-century writer and peace activist Angela Morgan.
 
But the gem for me, amid Highgate’s engaging narrative, is the report of freed folks reading, memorizing, and reciting the works of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. 

Harper had already done several tours in the South, both lecturing and learning, and she was beginning to add to her rich antebellum literary production (in addition to the various editions of her Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects  and individual poems published in diverse periodicals, see the recently rediscovered Forest Leaves).  Her long blank verse poem Moses: A Story of the Nile  was garnering praise, and only two days after Highgate penned her letter, the Christian Recorder would publish the first chapter of Harper’s first serialized novel, Minnie’s Sacrifice, a narrative with powerful echoes in the stories Highgate hints at below.

Enjoy and keep learning!

 
 
From Mississippi.
The Work in Jackson.
 
                                                                                                           Jackson, Miss., March 18th.

To the Editor of the Standard:
 
            Interesting occurrences are transpiring here continually.  Perhaps we might afford pleasure to some should we essay to chronicle them.  Everything plainly indicates that “good is being made the final goal of ill.”

            The bell on the M. E. Church, which was formerly owned by a slaveholder to summon bondmen to their unrequited toil, now calls a large and cheerful assembly, not only to Sabbath School and other sanctuary services, but to the Benevolent and Literary Societies which convene every Saturday night.  The former has $110.25 in its treasury.  This amount is the combined contributions of most of the hard-working young male and female freed people in this city.  Rigid self-denial alone enables them to make these monthly donations, in order that they may care for the poor among them, and defray their burial expenses when they die.  In the literary society we noticed mere boys, who had found the opportunity of spending but a few hours daily from their honest vocations, acquitting themselves decorously as presiding officers, and in no instance violating parliamentary rule.  Several selections from Whittier and Frances E. W. Harper were rendered by these laundresses, cooks, porters, waiters, etc., with a pathos that told truly that the rhymed story was their own.  We were pleased to notice several soldiers giving respectful audience; also the teachers of these youths. Several appreciative grey-headed old aunties were in attendance whose faces expressed the fact that they never expected to see this day.

            Our schools contain about three hundred pupils.  A society of Orthodox Friends are well represented here by several teachers who teach graded departments in miserably insufficient shanties.  “The Gen. Grant” school, taught by Miss C. V. Highgate, is composed mostly of adults who aspire to become teachers.  Several promising young persons have been taken and assigned to large schools in the country.

            The West Jackson school has been well supplied with maps through the generosity of Northern friends.  Night schools are well attended by those who work all day.  Some of our pupils were attacked by a gang of rowdies last night who threatened them with rough handling if they “did not stop going to the d----d night school.”  A box from McGrawville, N. Y., has just reached us containing some very valuable clothing, also two of Dr. C. P. Grosvenor’s incomparable safety lamps.  This timely donation was most acceptable.

            The attempted assassination of Rev. Jas. Lynch, you will probably learn from another source.  One of Massachusetts’ brave sons, Major J. R. Parsons, met his death, it is currently believed, by “foul play”; he having been over prominent as an ardent supporter of the Radical party.

                                                                                                                                      E. G. Highgate
 





 
And if you're wondering about Cyrus Pitt Grosvenor's safety lamps, mentioned above, here's an illustration:

I was excited to hear a story on NPR that focused on “Information Wanted” ads; see http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/02/22/516651689/after-slavery-searching-for-loved-ones-in-wanted-ads
 
The story profiles an exciting new online project, “Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery,” which is available at http://informationwanted.org/
 
Wonderful to see, too, that this project includes deep collaboration with Mother Bethel AME Church in Philadelphia, whose heroic efforts to preserve African American history (including Jabez Pitt Campbell’s run of the Christian Recorder) have been simply amazing.
 
Ideally, I’d like to have seen the story mention Heather Andrea Williams’s beautiful book Help Me to Find My People, which, to my mind offers one of the richest discussion of the ads I’ve seen.  
 
Similarly, several of the exciting pieces of this project, ranging from seeing transcription as community action to rescuing pieces of Black print culture for active contemporary consideration, have been pioneered by the Colored Conventions Project at http://coloredconventions.org/  
 
These other resources are most definitely worth close consideration, too.
 
But it is a wonderful story and an amazing project.  Check it out!
 
I’ve blogged some about the ads--and specifically about experimenting with tracing the stories of some of the individuals who placed such ads. 

If you’d like to learn more, those blog posts are available at
http://www.blackprintculture.com/bpu-blog/information-wanted-black-print-black-families-american-stories
and
http://www.blackprintculture.com/bpu-blog/more-information-wanted-african-american-histories

My apologies for the long hiatus; I continue to learn and then learn more about African American literature, African American history, and the ways these subjects interface with our current moment.

I’ve been consistently excited to see the rich new work in our field—amazed by the books that can be read in dialogue with Black Print Unbound and joyous about how much more we can learn about early Black print culture.
 
In that spirit, I wanted to devote some blog space to sharing information on some of the incredible titles published in the last couple of years—as well as some of the wonderful work that’s soon to be published. 
 
So here, described in snippet form, are some books to be reading, celebrating, and building from.  Teach them, cite them, argue with them, and tell your libraries to buy them. 

 
 
The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation
Benjamin Fagan
University of Georgia Press, 2016
9780820349404
http://www.ugapress.org/index.php/books/black_newspaper_and_the_chosen_nation
An innovative study of the early Black press, focused on conceptions of Black “chosenness” vis-à-vis print culture and anchored in careful archival work, with close attention to Freedom’s Journal, the Colored American, Frederick Douglass’s North Star, the Provincial Freeman, and the Weekly Anglo-African.

Love, Liberation, and Escaping Slavery: 
William and Ellen Craft in Cultural Memory
Barbara McCaskill
University of Georgia Press, 2015
9780820338026
http://www.ugapress.org/index.php/books/love_liberation_escaping_slavery
Based on years of amazing archival research, the story behind one of the most amazing narratives of slavery and escape (the Crafts’ Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom) and the story, as well, of the Crafts’ lives before and after—narratives that tell us much about early Black print, Black mobility, and possibilities of citizenship.

The Strangers Book:  The Human of African American Literature
Lloyd Pratt
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015
9780812247688
http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15435.html
A striking and new approach to American literature focusing how early African American culture's conceptions and deployments of the figure of the stranger might reshape our senses of humans and humanism, featuring intriguing work on Frederick Douglass and on Les Cenelles by a scholar as careful in the archive as he is thoughtful about literary theory and practice.
 

Dividing Lines:  Class Anxiety and Postbellum Black Fiction
Andrea N. Williams
University of Michigan Press, 2013
9780472036745
https://www.press.umich.edu/4766752/dividing_lines
One of the best and most detailed studies on questions of class and African American literature—especially later nineteenth-century literature—with provocative readings of work by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Sutton Griggs, and Charles Chesnutt, among others.
 

Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century
Nazera Sadiq Wright
University of Illinois Press, 2016
9780252082047
http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/54fkh7kt9780252040573.html
An in-depth exploration of the ways in which the figure of the Black girl functioned in and shaped early African American literature, built on extensive archival work, with close consideration of texts ranging from Black periodicals to conduct books and writers ranging from Frances Harper to Gertrude Bustill Mossell.
 

A History of Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry
Jennifer Putzi and Alexandra Socarides, eds.
Cambridge University Press, 2016
9781107083981
http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/literature/american-literature/history-nineteenth-century-american-womens-poetry?format=HB&isbn=9781107083981
A rich resource on women’s poetry of the period writ broadly, including a number of essays that pay real and thoughtful attention to Black women’s literary work.  (Full disclosure: the chapter on “Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry of Slavery and Abolition” is mine—a piece I’m so excited to share.)
 
 



Good reading to all of you. More to come!

A pause from blogging to do an interview with the wonderful New Books Network, with special thanks to interviewer James West.  Take a listen at http://newbooksnetwork.com/eric-gardner-black-print-unbound-the-christian-recorder-african-american-literature-and-periodical-culture-oxford-up-2015/

As my last post suggested, considering how issues of the early AME Christian Recorder were numbered (and mis-numbered) only begins to highlight the difficulties of exploring what early Black periodicals we have and don’t have—and how early Black periodicals have and have not come to us.
 
Take the early Recorder as an example. 
 
First, some quick background.  All of the online issues of the early Recorder and all of the microfilm prints trace back to a single run of the paper: the collection put together by Bishop Jabez Pitt Campbell and now housed at Mother Bethel in Philadelphia.  If you carefully go through a source like WorldCat or even the Chronicling America project  and eliminate records that are for microfilm rolls or online versions—or that initially appear to be for paper items and are actually, because of cataloging errors, really for film or electronic resources—you’ll actually find that there are almost no listings for pre-1880 paper issues.  Contact the libraries that seem to have paper issues—as I did in writing Black Print Unbound—and you’ll grow even more sad and angry.
 
Before we begin to think through the issues surrounding having only a single run of a major early Black newspaper, a more basic question: just what do the Campbell run and derivatives contain and what is missing?
 
For the period covered by Black Print Unbound—post-1860 and pre-1869—at least thirteen issues of the Recorder were likely published but are not in the Campbell derivatives. 
 
These issues are, quite simply, missing:
 
12 January 1861  (Elisha Weaver’s first issue as editor)
6 June 1863
13 June 1863
20 June 1863
27 June 1863
4 July 1863
11 July 1863
19 November 1864
11 March 1865  (the issue that should contain Ch. 3 of Julia Collins's Curse of Caste)
13 May 1865   (the issue that should contain Ch. 12 of Curse of Caste)
1 December 1866
30 March 1867
 27 June 1868 
 
Because of my close, contextualized study of issue numbering, my guess is that the paper did not appear on 23 May, 30 May, 6 June, or 13 June 1868; that said, there is an outside possibility that there may have been issues—now missing—on (some of) these dates with erroneous and/or duplicated numbering. 
 
After Benjamin Tucker Tanner took over as editor in mid-1868, at least two more issue dates seem to have been skipped before the final issue of the year—26 December 1868.
 
But this is only the beginning of the story of what’s not present in the resources derived from the Campbell collection.  
 
Just a reminder: the Recorder was a single sheet, folded once, and printed on both sides to produce four pages.
 
More than three dozen issues are only presented partially in both film and online products; 35 of these seem to be true partials.  Most of the partials are missing a full half-sheet—that is, two full pages.  
 
A list of the partial issues:
 
1862
14 June 1862 (pages 1 and 2 missing)
26 July 1862 (pages 1 and 2 missing)
23 August 1862 (pages 1 and 2 missing)
13 December 1862 (pages 1 and 2 missing)
20 December 1862 (pages 1 and 2 missing)
 
1863
17 January 1863 (pages 1 and 2 missing)
7 February 1863 (pages 1 and 2 missing)
28 February 1863 (pages 1 and 2 missing)
26 September 1863 (pages 1 and 2 missing)
31 October 1863 (pages 1 and 2 missing)
28 November 1863 (only pages 1, 3, and 4 appear in the film and other derivatives)
5 December 1863 (pages 1 and 2 missing)
19 December 1863 (pages 1 and 2 missing)
 
1864
6 February 1864 (pages 1 and 2 missing)
5 March 1864 (pages 1 and 2 missing)
19 March 1864 (pages 1 and 2 missing)
23 April 1864 (pages 1 and 2 missing)
13 August 1864 (pages 1 and 2 missing)
22 October 1864 (pages 1 and 2 missing)
29 October 1864 (pages 1 and 2 missing)
5 November 1864 (pages 1 and 2 missing)
24 December 1864 (only pages 1, 3, and 4 appear in the film and other derivatives)
 
1865
21 January 1865 (pages 1 and 2 missing)
28 January 1865 (pages 3 and 4 missing)
11 February 1865 (pages 1 and 2 missing)
17 June 1865 (pages 1 and 2 missing; should contain Ch. 17 of Curse of Caste)
16 September 1865  (pages 1 and 2 missing; should contain Ch. 30 of Curse of Caste)
 
1866
13 January 1866 (pages 1 and 2 missing)
14 April 1866 (pages 1 and 2 missing; no images in online version at all)
11 August 1866 (pages 1 and 2 missing)
6 October 1866 (pages 1 and 2 missing)
 
1867
2 March 1867 (pages 1 and 2 missing)
13 April 1867 (pages 1 and 2 missing)
11 May 1867  (pages 1 and 2 missing; no images in online version at all)
 
1868
18 April 1868  (pages 1 and 2 missing; no images in online version at all)
1 August 1868  (pages 1 and 2 missing; no images in online version at all)
28 November 1868  (pages 1 and 2 missing; no images in online version at all)
 
 
Let’s do some quick math.  The 35 issues that are true partials equate to 70 pages of the Recorder that are missing.  Add that to the 13 fully missing issues (52 more pages), and we have 122 pages of the Recorder that scholars simply haven’t seen. 
 
And remember: these figures cover only the Recorder from the moments when Elisha Weaver jump-started the paper in 1861 to the end of 1868. 
 
(Consider, for a moment, the fact that we only have the issues that we have because of the powerful foresight on Jabez Pitt Campbell’s part and the care of Mother Bethel in holding the Bishop’s copies long after his death.  What amazing effort, what love!)
 
I’m not simply making an argument for folks to go to the actual paper and to value the actual paper—or to read through full issues rather than using “full text” searching. 
 
(I would, though, make both of those arguments, especially given the simple fact that “full text” rarely exists and when it does, is often marred by transcription errors.) 
 
I’m recognizing that we simply don’t have lots and lots of pages of a key early Black periodical.
 
While this recognition certainly isn’t new to hardcore students of African American print, I submit that literary historians—even those African Americanists who have long dealt with a fragmentary record—simply haven’t come up with adequate theory or practice for dealing with these kinds of absences and these kinds of efforts.  We haven’t even compiled the kinds of lists above for many periodicals.

Our talk about absences will have to go well beyond close reading—well beyond, say, figuring out how to talk about how to read a serialized novel without all of the chapters present (a tough enough task). 
 
For now, some brief thoughts.
 
We desperately need, in addition to full and accurate bibliographic and catalog records of Black periodicals, real and in-depth scholarly consideration of circulation, distribution, library acquisition practices, and collection development and weeding practices tied to African American print in diverse libraries and other settings.  We need to much more fully and richly support projects that help catalog and make available material at places like HBC’s and Black churches, and we need to think about ways of not blocking what we’ve found behind paywalls.  (If you’re interested in these questions, check out my essay “Accessing Early Black Print” and the broader forum it is a part of on “Where are the Women in Black Print Culture Studies?” in the current issue of Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers.)
 
Another problem?  I’ve found no catalog record or bibliographic note that covers the ground described above.  That means if you go to any number of sources—some of the lists on Chronicling America and in WorldCat but also in key bibliographies of Black newspapers—the listings for the film and online versions of the Recorder often look as if there are for complete runs.
 
I don’t want to go all Nicholson Baker (see Double Fold)—though he’s has good stuff to say—but I wonder whether, in the flurry of microfilming, folks who had paper copies read these erroneous records, assumed that the paper copies they held had already been filmed, and disposed of issues that we may now never see. . . . 
 
I have similar worries about the rush to uncritically praise digitization.  (The recent forum on “Digital Approaches to Periodicals,” especially Benjamin Fagan’s “Chronicling White America” in the Spring 2016 American Periodicals does a nice job of beginning to address some of these—and other—key questions about digital periodical projects.)
 
Of course, this means that we need to continue to look for missing paper issues.  Think of Noliwe Rooks’s work in preparation for her wonderful book Ladies’ Pages or, on a smaller scale, the recovery of a missing chapter of one of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s serialized novels, Sowing and Reaping.  But also remember Ellen Gruber Garvey’s landmark work on scrapbooks, and think about ways to find pieces of those missing issues.
 
In short, we need to do the work of finding every last bit we can.  But as we do this, we also need to talk much more actively about how to do our work communally and respectfully, with a much fuller sense of where we are and how we got here.



 
 
Press room of the Planet newspaper, Richmond, Virginia, c.1899. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <https://www.loc.gov/item/90706966/>.

I wanted to return to the BPU Blog to share some of the intriguing questions that have come out in the initial response to Black Print Unbound—especially those that make us think about the work we need to do and how we might do that work.
 
Both this entry and the next will focus on what may initially seem mundane questions—but are, nonetheless, massively important and provocative: how we might “count” and conceive of what we have left of the Recorder of the 1860s.
 
Folks have, for example, occasionally asked me why Black Print Unbound and much of my other works cite the Recorder and other Black newspapers by date in text rather, say, with full notes emphasizing volume/issue numbers or whole numbers.
 



My quick answer generally centers on my desire to make it easier for readers to find the issues I’m talking about, as most presentations--from microfilm that runs in chronological order to online resources organized around dates.  I’m also deeply interested in thinking about the texts I study in time.
 
But I want to highlight two other reasons that have broader methodological import.
 
First, none of the major documentation styles effectively envisions scholarship that relies on a large number of citations from newspapers.  As with the initial attempts to figure out how to cite online sources—something that hasn’t been fixed much—all of the major documentation formats, at best, require massive, cumbersome, and often repetitious listings.  (Consider, just for a moment, how even the American system of dates used in Black Print Unbound—named month and numeric day followed by a comma before the numeric year—requires a flurry of commas and semi-colons that make any list of issues hard to read.) 
 
As we’ve done in much literary criticism, we’ve built citation systems that privilege the bound book (something that carries only a year).  Folks who work with census records, land records, and a range of other archival sources can testify similarly.
 
Second, editing and printing can be messy business, and there were moments when it seems the Recorder editor or staff—and/or the external contracted printers—had too much on their minds to carefully track volume numbers, issue numbers, and/or whole numbers.  This means that there are sometimes errors in some or all of these numbers.  While dating is occasionally imperfect—and while it can sometimes suggest an immediacy of the moment that wasn’t always present, given lag time in the editorial or printing work on the one side of an issue and delays in mailing and receiving issues on the other—issues dates are usually simply more accurate.
 
The sometime-inaccuracy in terms of the Recorder’s numbering becomes a crucial concern if, for example, we use issue numbering alone to think about which issues are missing.  (My next entry will focus on questions surrounding missing and partial issues.)  Thus, what follows is a year-by-year thick description of the paper’s numbering between 1861 and 1868—one drawing on and slightly expanding note 14 in chapter 2 of Black Print Unbound (pages 264-265).
 
One last thought before that description, though: as I talk about in Black Print Unbound and elsewhere, these questions also highlight flaws in most catalog and bibliographic records of the Recorder.  Anecdotally, I can say that such flaws run throughout other treatments of Black periodicals—especially Black newspapers—of the nineteenth century.  This, it seems to me, reminds us again of the simple facts that we still have much work to do at the most basic levels if we are to have a full sense of early Black print culture.
 
So here’s how to “count” the early Recorder:
 
1861
Elisha Weaver opened 1861 with a “new series” and so dropped previous editor Jabez Pitt Campbell’s numbering and approach to labeling issues.  Taking the (now-missing) 12 January 1861 issue as volume 1, number 1, the rest of the 1861 issues are numbered correctly, ending with 1.51. 
 
1862
The 4 January 1862 issue is correctly numbered 2.1 and whole number 52.  Though some 1862 issues are extant in only partial form, all are accounted for in terms of numbering.  The 27 December 1862 issue represents the first catchable error in numbering during Weaver’s tenure. While correctly marked 2.52, its whole number was mistakenly given as 104.  (As the 13 December 1862 and 20 December 1862 issues are partials missing their first two pages, it is difficult to tell where this error began, though the 6 December 1862 issue’s whole number is correct.) 
 
1863
The 3 January 1863 issue is numbered 3.1 but, continuing the late-1862 error, has the incorrect whole number 105.  The 10 January 1863 is numbered 3.2 and the corrected whole number 105 (thus sharing this whole number with the 3 January issue).  Though there are June and July missing and partial issues, the 18 July 1863 is correctly numbered 3.29, whole number 132.  The final issue of 1863 (26 December) is correctly numbered 3.52, whole number 155. 
 
1864
The first issue of 1864 (2 January) is numbered 4.1, whole number 156.  The 9 April issue has an incorrect whole number—171, which should be 170—and this error persists in whole numbers for the rest of 1864.  The final issue of 1864 (31 December) is numbered 4.52 (correct), whole number 209 (which should be 208). 
 
1865
The initial issue of 1865 (7 January) corrects the whole number error and is numbered 5.1, whole number 209 (thus sharing this whole number with the 31 December 1864 issue). The 18 February 1865 issue, which should have been whole number 215, is mislabeled 216, and this error persists for the rest of 1865.   Of less import, the 18 March 1865 issue is erroneously marked 5.12; it was actually 5.11; the 1 April 1865 issue, which is marked 5.13, corrects this error by carrying the same number as the 25 March 1865 issue.
 
1866
Except for the last issue of January 1866, that month’s issues continue the error in whole numbering from 1865.  The 27 January 1866 issue’s whole number (264) corrects this error (and so shares the whole number with the 20 January 1866 issue).  The final 1866 issue (29 December) is correctly numbered 6.52, whole number 312.
 
1867
The first issue of 1867 (5 January) is correctly numbered 7.1, whole number 313, and the rest of this year’s numbering is correct. The last 1867 issue (28 December) was numbered 7.52, whole number 364.
 
1868
The first issue of 1868 (4 January) was correctly numbered 8.1, whole number 365.  No issues after 8 February 1868 (8.6, whole number 370) up to 28 March 1868 have been found, and the 4 April 1868 issue is available only in partial/damaged form.  The 11 April 1868 issue is numbered 8.9, whole number 372; this confusing numbering (it should be either 8.8, 372 or 8.9, 373) suggests that only one or perhaps two issues were published during the gap. 
 
Issues for 18 April, 25 April, and 2 May 1868 seem to have come out roughly on time, but the numbering of the 2 May 1868 issue (8.12, whole number 375, continuing the 11 April 1868 error in numbering) and of the 16 May 1868 issue (8.13, whole number 376)—as well as the lack of an extant issue between—suggest that no issue was published on 9 May 1868. 
 
The 20 June 1868 issue—the first extant issue from new editor Benjamin Tucker Tanner—is listed only as whole number 377, though Tanner’s later continuance of the numbering above would also mean it was 8.14.  
 
All of this strongly suggests that the paper did not appear at all on 23 May, 30 May, 6 June, or 13 June 1868.  After Tanner took over, at least two more issues seem to have been missed before the final issue of the year (26 December), which is numbered 8.39, whole number 402 (continuing the 11 April 1868 error). 
 

On a brief hiatus from blogging, as there's lots of teaching and writing going on. 

But here's a new piece--part of a wonderful roundtable--on the recent recovery of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Forest Leaves and what it might mean for folks involved in African Americanist literary history and beyond: "Leaves, Trees, and Forests: Frances Ellen Watkins's Forest Leaves and Recovery."

You'll find it in the current issue of the wonderful online journal Common-place.