The New Star Chamber and Other Essays

Annotated Editon

Edgar Lee Masters

“Masters was an idealistic Democratic Party activist and friend of presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan when this book was published in 1904. The annotations, new to this edition, identify people and terms important to understanding the essays.”—

Illinois Trails & Traces PORTRAITS AND STORIES ALONG THE STATE’S HISTORIC ROUTES

Text by Gary Marx and photographs by Daniel Overturf, with a foreword by Dick Durbin

Tracing the troubled roots of American capitalism and imperialism

Coedited by noted Masters scholar, Jason Stacy, and his class, “Editing History,” this annotated edition of Edgar Lee Masters’s The New Star Chamber and Other Essays reappears at a perilous time in US history, when large corporations and overseas conflicts once again threaten the integrity of American rights and liberties, and the United States still finds itself beholden to corporate power and the legacy of imperial hubris. In speaking to his times, Masters also speaks to ours.

These thirteen essays lay bare the political ideology that informed Spoon River Anthology. Masters argues that the dangerous imperialism championed by then-President Theodore Roosevelt was rooted in the Constitution itself. By debating the ethics of the Philippine-American War, criticizing Hamiltonian centralization of government, and extolling the virtues of Jeffersonian individualism, Masters elucidates the ways in which America had strayed from its constitutional morals and from democracy itself. The result is a compelling critique of corporate capitalism and burgeoning American imperialism, as well as an exemplary source for understanding its complicated author in the midst of his transformation from urban lawyer to poet of rural America.

Edgar Lee Masters (1868-1950), best known for Spoon River Anthology, was born in Garnett, Kansas and grew up in Petersburg and Lewistown, Illinois. After practicing law in Chicago for over three decades, he left to pursue writing full time, publishing a total of twelve plays, twenty-one books of poetry, six novels and six biographies.

Jason Stacy is the author of Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town

Assistant editors: Brandon Adams, Scott Both, Joseph Davis, Shawn Emily, Jessica Guldner, Amy Kapp, Joseph King, Andrew Niederhauser, Abbigayle Schaefer, Elizabeth Schroader, Andrew Shepherd, Nicholas Swain, and Lucas Turnbull.

In print again for the first time since 1904, this edition includes an introduction and historical annotations throughout. Edited and annotated by students at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, and designed and illustrated by students at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, this volume traces economic and political pathologies to the origins of the American republic. The New Star Chamber and Other Essays is as vital now as it was over 100 years ago.

“In a lyrical combination of archeological and historical research, personal stories, and startling photographs, Gary Marx and Daniel Overturf remind us that the territory of Illinois long predates the coming of white settlers. They reveal how today’s roads and railbeds were once buffalo traces and Native American trading routes, and tell a deep, layered, and uncommon history of the prairie state.”

Mary Wisniewski, author of Algren: A Life

Exploring Illinois history through the paths we travel

Illinois Trails & Traces partners the deft writing of Gary Marx with vivid photography by Daniel Overturf to illuminate ever evolving patterns of travel and settlement. Taking the reader on a journey down early buffalo traces and Native American trails, this book shows how these paths evolved into wagon roads and paved highways. Marx and Overturf explore historic routes ranging from Route 66 to the Underground Railroad, all the way back to postIce Age animal migration trails followed by Paleo-Indian people. The authors also examine how rivers, canals, and railroads spurred the rapid rise of Illinois as a modern state.

Marx and Overturf bring history into the present by including over forty photographic portraits and written profiles of individuals who live along these routes today. Many of the people you will meet on these pages work to preserve and honor the history of these passages. Others profiled here embody the spirit of the old roads and provide a vivid link between past and present. Through this journey, we discover that we’ve all been traveling the same road all along.

Paper: 978-0-8093-3848-1

E-book: 978-0-8093-3849-8 $29.95, 294 pages, 113 illus.

Learn more and order at www.siupress.com/trailsandtraces

Gary Marx is a journalist whose work has appeared in the Kansas City Star and numerous other publications. Daniel Overturf, an exhibiting photographer and professor emeritus of photography at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, has coauthored Artificial Lighting for Photography (2009) with Joy McKenzie. Together Marx and Overturf are the authors of A River Through Illinois (2007).

Paper: 978-0-8093-3918-1, $28.95

Hardcover: 978-0-8093-3919-8, $38.00

E-book: 978-0-8093-3920-4, $18.99 340 pages, 24 illus.