This site presents a ground-up, dynamic, open-access anthology of American literature before 1900, developed by faculty and students in the English department at Stony Brook University. At present, it comprises most of the primary source texts for three Spring 2018 courses:

• English 217 – “American Literature I” (Andrew Newman)
• English 301 – “American Tales” (Newman)
• English 350 – “The Dark Romantics: Poe, Hawthorne and Melville” (Susan Scheckel)

It also hosts a repository of early African-American literature and demo syllabus for a special topics course in American literature 1776-1865:

• English 316 – “Special Topics” (Scott Zukowski) [under construction]
• Repository of Early African-American Literature (Scott Zukowski) [under construction]

This semester, students in these courses will be annotating these texts using hypothes.is, an open-source online annotation software. Initially, the annotations will only be visible within “groups” of faculty and student editors, but eventually many will be promoted to a “public” layer. To see the public annotations, join hypothes.is.

Humanities Commoners: If you’re interested in joining the site to share, add, and annotate texts, please contact me.