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With funds from the Federal Theatre Project (FTP),  the New York–based Living Newspapers team created six productions in the late 1930s. Covering a variety of public issues that included affordable housing, the plight of Dust Bowl farmers, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and labor law, these productions would reach hundreds of thousands of spectators and inspire adaptations across the country. Staged News interprets the Living Newspaper’s process and repertoire amid journalists’ changing conceptions of their profession.

During the antebellum period, British publishers increasingly brought out authorized and pirated editions of American fiction, poetry, and autobiographies from writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Hannah Flagg Gould. Katie McGettigan shows how the transatlantic circulation of these works played a formative role in shaping American authors’ careers, establishing the cultural value of U.S. writing and inspiring debates about the future of authorship, international copyright, and print culture.