Various Newes

Starting with the next issue of SEAN Stephen Carl Arch (Michigan State U. arch@pilot.msu.edu) will contribute a column (ideally twice a year) devoted to a review of current critical writings treating the period between 1776 and 1830. Items included in this new column by the author of Authorizing the Past: The Rhetoric of History in Seventeenth-Century New England (1994) may now and then overlap with listings in "The Ink-Glass," but such occasional double- exposure should ultimately prove desirable to authors and SEAN readers alike.

The inaugural entry of "The Muse's Mercury" appears in this issue of SEAN. The nuanced title is appropriated from an early 18th-century London publication by John Oldmixon, one of Cotton Mather's adversaries. This title barely displaced the alternative "Curious Questions Propos'd by the Ingenious," drawn from John Dunton's The Athenian Mercury. The goal of this new column is to print very brief items by SEA members who would appreciate hearing what others might have to say in response to a particular question, or uncertainty, or puzzlement concerning some feature of an early American work or (more suitably) some passage in such a work. Brief responses, if any, and newqueries should be posted as e-mail (scheick@mail.utexas.edu), not as attachment files, for publication in later editions of this forum. Reader participation will determine the future of the forum, which need not conform to the inaugural entry. Conversation, rather than debate, is the model-a forum such as David S. Shields's representation of the role of belles lettres in "encouraging the pleasures, furthering play, and promoting the free conversation that bound persons in community" in 18th-century British-America.

The U. S. Post Office will honor John and William Bartram with the issue of a postage stamp. It features Franklinia alatamaha, commonly known as the Franklin tree, which is thought to have been propagated from seed collected by the Bartrams in 1765 from a single grove in Georgia. Undertaking a census of Franklinia, Historic Bartram's Garden in Philadelphia (www.libertynet.org/~bartram) requests word from anyone who knows the location of any of these relatives of the camellia.