1. Invite students to compare and contrast the “Memoir of Zulma Marache” and District Attorney James R. Whiting’s closing arguments in the People v. Costello, alias Maxwell, et al. in terms of the “parts” of literature: character, plot; conflict; figurative language, etc. What differences emerge in terms of narrative arc, theme, character, tone, and other elements of literature?

2. Introduce students to Voyant, a digital close-reading platform that looks for word patterns and frequency. What words and themes stand out in the “Memoir”? How about in Whiting’s closing arguments in the People v. Costello?  What do the differences and similarities Voyant reveals suggest about the audience and purpose for each text?

3. Ask students to consider the “Memoir” or Whiting’s closing arguments in terms of literary modes such as the gothic or sentimental. What tropes, ideals, and themes emerge when read through those lenses? What questions emerge for them as a result of this exercise? 

The “Memoir” lends itself to several approaches in the early American survey course and other classes that focus on literature before the Civil War.

1. Nineteenth-century literary culture was rife with literary reviews and critical commentary as responded to America’s flourishing literary culture.  Ask students to imagine that they are Zulma Marache and she is writing a review of one of the works found in nineteenth-century literature anthologies. 

Based on what they know of Marache’s history and the style and themes of the “Memoir,” what would she agree with, criticize, or appreciate about the text to which she is responding?

(Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance,  Margaret Fuller’s  “The Great Lawsuit” or Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl offer intriguing options, although there are many more!)

2. Zulma Marache and Harriet Jacobs, author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, were contemporaries. Marache’s engagement and seduction occurred in 1842, the same year Jacobs escaped slavery and made her way to New York City. Although there are clear differences in their stories and lived experiences, there are also similarities that are worth exploring. Some possibilities: 

Amp It Up: Advanced undergraduate and graduate students can enhance their arguments with further research and sources such as Jean Fagan Yellin’s Harriet Jacobs: A Life, digitized sources available at Harriet Jacobs: Selected Writings and Correspondence, Beyond Seduction and Abortion: The Life and “Memoir”of Zulma Marache, and the sources included in this project’s Bibliography.

2. The rhetoric of seduction provided a powerful framework for mitigating the implications of women’s sexual and reproductive autonomy in the antebellum era. This rhetoric drew on the conventions of late eighteenth-century American seduction novels such as Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple, Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette, and the lesser-known, anonymously-written “Amelia; or, the Faithless Briton.” Ask students to compare and contrast one of those novels with District Attorney James R. Whiting’s closing arguments in The People vs. Costello. How does Whiting draw on or engage their characters, plots, metaphors, and tone?

Alternately, have students to compare and contrast the “Memoir” itself to one of the seduction novels named above. How does the “Memoir” draw on, resist, or complement the chosen novel’s message, or Whiting’s interpretation of Zulma Marache and her experience?

It is easy to overlook the importance of paratext, the seemingly “small” things in a text such as advertisements, illustrations, book reviews, and other items that sometimes seem irrelevant.  However, these elements are vital to readers’ engagement with publications and shape how they understand the news. This assignment asks students to step into the past as they read the New York Herald’s reporting on the first two days of the trial proceedings for the People v. Costello.

1. Assign students a chronological sequence of newspapers to study, such as the first two days of the New York Herald’s coverage on March 21, 1844and March 22, 1844. Have them focus on these questions:

Amp It Up:  If your class has explored concepts such as paratextuality and seriality, ask students to reflect on their experiences drawing on those terms.

Good general sources to engage in such an activity include Joshua Ratner’s “Paratexts” (Early American Studies, vol. 16, no. 4, Fall 2018, pp. 733-740); James Mussel’s “The Matter with Media,” and/or Gérard Genette’s introduction to Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation to frame and support their response. Graham Thompson’s “The Seriality Dividend in American Magazines” (American Periodicals, vol. 21, no. 1, 2018, pp. 1-20), selections from Frank Kelleter’s edited collection, Media of Serial Narrative (Ohio State UP, 2017).

One of Beyond Seduction and Abortion’s aims is to invite broader exploration of the lives and stories of female physicians’ clients. Some of these women include: 

Invite students to engage in primary source research by using resources such as the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America and the New York Public Library Digital Collections (for example, its city directories) to investigate the backgrounds and experiences of one of the figures above. They could:

Although the New York Herald offered the most extensive coverage of Zulma Marache’s story and her testimony in March 1844, other newspapers covered it as well. These include newspapers that one can access through the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America and digital sources available behind paywalls or through library databases, such as Newspapers.com or American Periodical Series.

The prompts below invite students to consider how questions of access, bias, etc. inform the creation and shaping of knowledge.

1. Ask students to compare the New York Herald’s and New-York Daily Tribune’s “City Intelligence” columns following Marache’s December 1, 1843 report of her abortion to the police, or other coverage her story as it appeared in the press in March 1844. Then, ask them to think about the following:

Finally, ask students to reflect on this exercise. What are some take-aways for them as students and citizens?

Amp It Up: Assign groups of students to different New York City newspapers, reading the  March 21, 1844 and subsequent issues. Have them pay special attention to the paper’s coverage of Marache’s story, the trial, and other seduction and abortion cases (note: there may not be any!) Then, ask them to do some secondary research on their assigned paper’s history, politics, editors, etc. (Frank Luther Mott’s American Journalism: A History of Newspapers is a good starting place. Ask them to report their findings to the class, and to consider what the differences between the papers and their perspectives suggest about the news, information, and knowledge.

The digitization of primary sources has made historical materials more convenient for researchers to access, as have the abilities to search for information by date or key word. However, the ease of access comes with some invisible costs.

The exercises below explore some of benefits and drawbacks of research in the digital age. They assume that students have prior experience with some of the primary texts pertaining to Zulma Marache and that they have only read the texts out of context, rather than in the full newspaper itself.

1.  Have students search for Zulma Marache, Napoleon Loreaux, Catharine Guetal, Dr. Abeille or other figures mentioned in the “Memoir” using a database such as Chronicling America or Newspapers.com.

Direct them to explore different ways of searching for the person’s name. For example, they can use quotation marks around names, specify dates, publication names, etc. Ask them to expand to another database, if possible. Do they get the same hits and stories?
Have them reflect, orally or in a brief paper, on their experiences. What have they learned, or are they wondering about, as researchers and as digital citizens?

Amp It Up: Assign Ryan C. Cordell’s “Why You (a Humanist) Should Care About Optical Character Recognition.” Have students apply his arguments as they reflect on the discoveries they made in the above activity.