Expanding our understanding of what it meant to be a nineteenth-century author, Amanda Adams takes up the concept of performative, embodied authorship in relationship to the transatlantic lecture tour. Adams argues that these tours were a central aspect of nineteenth-century authorship, at a time when authors were becoming celebrities and celebrities were international. Spanning the years from 1834 to 1904, Adams’s book examines the British lecture tours of American authors such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Mark Twain, and the American lecture tours of British writers that include Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, and Matthew Arnold. Adams concludes her study with a discussion of Henry James, whose American lecture tour took place after a decades-long absence. In highlighting the wide range of authors who participated in this phenomenon, Adams makes a case for the lecture tour as a microcosm for nineteenth-century authorship in all its contradictions and complexity.

The Three Continents One History project was launched on 25th March 2007 at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. The day marked our commemoration of the millions that were killed and enslaved. It is fitting that it began the start of our journey to uncover the role that Birmingham played in this. The project will inform all sections of society about one of the bleakest chapters in the history of humankind. It will explore the Caribbean experience of slavery as well as analyze the socio-economic links and legacies of the transatlantic era. Project from New Style Radio and the Frantz Fanon Research Unit - Using primary and secondary research, workshops, presentations and debates and a documentary series on New Style Radio 98.7fm.