The reputations of Hartford, Connecticut, residents Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mark Twain overshadow the city's antebellum authors. NeMLA 2016 seems ideally situated for a session to raise the academic appreciation and profile of earlier writers who contributed to Hartford's historical literary legacy, which includes Lydia Sigourney, Ann Plato, abolitionist ministers like Lyman Beecher and Amos G. Beman, and Hartford-born pamphlet writer Maria Stewart. Hartford was also a publishing center with a young Samuel G. Goodrich and later, Lewis Skinner, who printed Rev. James C. Pennington's book about African and African American history; lexicographer-journalist Noah Webster was of West Hartford, and The Charter Oak, was Hartford's anti-slavery newspaper. Paper proposals on any one or a combination of these identified persons or topics are welcome.