Beginning in 1867 with the invention of the miniature (or “hobby”) press, young people in the United States began to publish their own amateur newspapers. Within the pages of those publications, adolescents included news articles, editorials, short stories, serialized fiction, poetry, and jokes. The collective result of their literary efforts was referred to as Amateurdom, or “the ’Dom” for short. Included in this teaching supplement are several representative short stories and editorials published by adolescents during the 1870s and 1880s. After reading the primary source material, students might be prompted to address some the questions for discussion included below.

A newly discovered Spanish description of Kongo increases our knowledge of the country, joining Filippo Pigafetta’s famous account to expand our knowledge of Kongo in this early period. This research shows that the MS was written in 1587 or 1588 and was written by Carmelite Diego de la Encarnación. It adds details on the history of the country, daily life culture, and links to other Carmelite works, including an unpublished chapter of an account by Diego de Santissimo Santo and shows the author could have written a longer but well-known account in the Vatican Library. It includes extensive quotations from the new text.

This short piece describes an experimental course at Florida State University in which undergraduates digitize issues of a turn-of-the-century Egyptian newspaper. Beginning students of Middle East studies can benefit from exposure to raw primary sources. Learning to read and process this newspaper using digital methods such as character recognition and text encoding, they generate a repository of text that can be of value to scholars in the field. Training students to do this work certainly offers them valuable, transferable technical skills. The combination of technical and conceptual work in a collaborative, laboratory setting is not easily accomplished, however. From an area studies perspective, it can be challenging to train students to discern what material is of significance, and how they might proceed to analyze it. Nevertheless, a great deal of knowledge in our field is produced incrementally, provisionally, and collectively. We can use institutional moves to re-imagine teaching to involve even inexpert students in this process of knowledge production.

This article recommends a virtually unknown manuscript on the early Portuguese presence in India to wider scholarly attention. Dubbed here the Wye manuscript, this text purports to be an English translation of a sixteenth-century Malayalam history that was produced at the court of the ruler of Calicut. The South Indian kingdom of Calicut was central to Portugal’s project of monopolizing the region’s all-important pepper trade; the Wye manuscript therefore holds the promise of adding an Indian perspective to a history that has been written largely on the basis of European sources. This article examines the external and internal evidence for the author’s claim of having translated the text from an original palm-leaf manuscript held by members of Calicut’s royal family. An analysis of its content shows significant overlap with an Arabic history of the sixteenth century; a comparison of their similarities and differences suggests a number of insights into the processes of composition and revision of both the Malayalam and Arabic texts. Last, and most important, the Wye manuscript is transcribed in full in the hope of stimulating further discussion and study.