What do you think?
Rate this book
Footnote 3
The third issue of Alternating Current’s annual literary publication contains 45 works of poetry, photographs, fiction, essays, articles, and nonfiction by 24 authors about various historical topics. Within these pages, you will find contemporary outlooks on history right alongside little-known public domain works that feel as fresh and as vibrant (and as scary) as if they were written today. Here, the old meets the new, and you’ll discover fascinating history from a personal, non-scholarly literary approach.
This issue may be Footnote’s most disturbing, intimate, and deeply personal yet, bringing forward challenging ethical questions and moral dilemmas of our past, and imbuing them with modern sensitivities. In this issue, you’ll meet Lord Byron, Ota Benga, Mary Shelley, John Clare, Fanny and Joshua Chamberlain, and an aviator who couldn’t match wits with the Wright Brothers. You’ll go hunting on an 1800s kangaroo safari, graverobbing with Resurrection Men, and exploring the history of the theater and Tennessee Williams through the eyes of 9/11 New York. You’ll hop from ghost towns to Fort Clatsop to Paxton, Illinois, to a gentrifying England to mourn the downfall of old abbeys and long-urbanized California byways. You’ll learn of the horrors of human zoos, slavery, gynecological experiments on enslaved women, McCarthyism, and Jewish persecution, from the Rhineland Massacres of the Middle Ages, to Budapest in World War II. And we’ll add on to history’s endless list of women who never got their due, from female artists such as Kay Sage, Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven, and Leonora Carrington, to the nurses of the World War I Red Cross.
The first Featured Writer, Toby Buckley, takes us from mythical mummies to Victorian ladies to the Radium Girls, with a dash of Louisa Ulrika’s cabinet conspiracies. The second Featured Writer, Joyce Schmid, travels from Gloucester Beach to Stanford University to the mining excavations of an Athenian agora well that turned up the remains of 450 dead babies—before making a quick stop with Fyodor Dostoevsky in front of the firing squad. Their work is showcased next to the winners and finalists for the 2017 Charter Oak Award for Best Historical.
Trigger warnings: Slavery, menstruation and gynecological experimentation, Jewish persecution, graphic hunting, human zoos.
Find out more at tinyurl.com/footnotejournal3.
This issue may be Footnote’s most disturbing, intimate, and deeply personal yet, bringing forward challenging ethical questions and moral dilemmas of our past, and imbuing them with modern sensitivities. In this issue, you’ll meet Lord Byron, Ota Benga, Mary Shelley, John Clare, Fanny and Joshua Chamberlain, and an aviator who couldn’t match wits with the Wright Brothers. You’ll go hunting on an 1800s kangaroo safari, graverobbing with Resurrection Men, and exploring the history of the theater and Tennessee Williams through the eyes of 9/11 New York. You’ll hop from ghost towns to Fort Clatsop to Paxton, Illinois, to a gentrifying England to mourn the downfall of old abbeys and long-urbanized California byways. You’ll learn of the horrors of human zoos, slavery, gynecological experiments on enslaved women, McCarthyism, and Jewish persecution, from the Rhineland Massacres of the Middle Ages, to Budapest in World War II. And we’ll add on to history’s endless list of women who never got their due, from female artists such as Kay Sage, Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven, and Leonora Carrington, to the nurses of the World War I Red Cross.
The first Featured Writer, Toby Buckley, takes us from mythical mummies to Victorian ladies to the Radium Girls, with a dash of Louisa Ulrika’s cabinet conspiracies. The second Featured Writer, Joyce Schmid, travels from Gloucester Beach to Stanford University to the mining excavations of an Athenian agora well that turned up the remains of 450 dead babies—before making a quick stop with Fyodor Dostoevsky in front of the firing squad. Their work is showcased next to the winners and finalists for the 2017 Charter Oak Award for Best Historical.
Trigger warnings: Slavery, menstruation and gynecological experimentation, Jewish persecution, graphic hunting, human zoos.
Find out more at tinyurl.com/footnotejournal3.
140 pages, Paperback
First published March 3, 2020
About the author
Leah Angstman
18 books152 followersLeah Angstman is a researcher, transplanted Michigander living in Boulder, and executive editor of Alternating Current Press and The Coil magazine. She is the author of OUT FRONT THE FOLLOWING SEA (Regal House, 2022), SHOOT THE HORSES FIRST (Kernpunkt Press, 2023), and FALCON IN THE DIVE (Regal House, 2024), and her writing can be found in Publishers Weekly, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nashville Review, and elsewhere. You can find her at leahangstman.com and on social media as @leahangstman.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
February 29, 2020
The third volume of Footnote contains fascinating historical fiction, creative non-fiction, and poetry. Volume 3 is a sort of hybrid of tales plucked from the past and innovative work from modern authors. Highlights include Robert Louis Stevenson's The Body-Snatcher, the incredible poem Were You There? by Sue Blaustein, and Letters From a Lesser Aviator, Edward Helfers' clever missive fiction.
Historical lit is difficult to get right. Poorly used old-world dialogue or a biased revisionism can ruin otherwise earnest stories or poems, but the pieces within Footnote seem to handle each historical period, reflection, and even atrocity with a refreshing eloquence.
While the individual pieces are provocative, the way in which the collection as a whole is edited is a masterful example of how the way in which a journal is built can lend itself to the concepts contained within (cheers to Leah Angstman). Yes, history is brutality. History is bone and despair, hope and salvation. History is the ego and questionable motives of the people who inhabit it. But it is not each of these things individually at separate moments in time. History is all of these things, beautifully twisted together, weaving in and out of character and circumstance with harrowing nuance. Capturing this is the true brilliance of Footnote.
Historical lit is difficult to get right. Poorly used old-world dialogue or a biased revisionism can ruin otherwise earnest stories or poems, but the pieces within Footnote seem to handle each historical period, reflection, and even atrocity with a refreshing eloquence.
While the individual pieces are provocative, the way in which the collection as a whole is edited is a masterful example of how the way in which a journal is built can lend itself to the concepts contained within (cheers to Leah Angstman). Yes, history is brutality. History is bone and despair, hope and salvation. History is the ego and questionable motives of the people who inhabit it. But it is not each of these things individually at separate moments in time. History is all of these things, beautifully twisted together, weaving in and out of character and circumstance with harrowing nuance. Capturing this is the true brilliance of Footnote.
Displaying 1 of 1 review