Setting a Watchman on the Language of the Past

By Lucy Ferriss. I heard the news of Harper Lee’s new novel—or, to be precise, of the planned release of the companion novel to To Kill a Mockingbird that she penned many decades ago—while I was doing research at the Missouri Historical Library and Research Center. My own subject, still vaguely outlined, is the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904, now more than a century in the past. Lee’s subject, of course, was the Jim Crow racism that prevailed in the mid-20^th century American South. More...