Broadsides of “Vile and Clamorous Reports”
Purchase a series of eight broadsides printed by letterpress that display poems related to A/An for $75.
Bundle together the broadsides series and a copy of A/An for $100 (a $110 value).
Titled “Vile and Clamorous Reports,” the broadsides use found language and juxtaposition to expose the horror of the knotted relationship between the violence of the Salem Witch Trials and settler colonial violence.
The black text is composed of citations from “‘Vile and Clamorous Reports’ from New England: The Specter of Indigenous Conspiracy in Early Plymouth” (2019), a scholarly article by Andrew Ferris published in the journal Early American Literature, vol. 54, no. 2 (U North Carolina P). Ferris’ article outlines the role of paranoia and conspiracy thinking in colonists’ attitudes towards Indigenous peoples.
The red text contains every sentence which appears in the Salem Witch Trials court records that includes the words “the black man” (how the colonists described the devil) and “Indian.” For 17th-century English colonizers, Black was an umbrella category that included Indigenous people.
“Vile and Clamorous Reports” is a series consisting of eight polymer-plate broadsides printed in red and black ink on Boxcar Flurry Cotton, a thick stock with a soft and satin feel, on a Golding Pearl 14 platen press by Mitchel Ahern (mitchelka.org), Director of Operations at the Museum of Printing (Haverhill, MA).
