Back in August of 2019, Faustus and Jennifer Reid played at an event held at the historic Quarry Bank Mill Museum near Styal in Cheshire, and we took the opportunity to film the performances and to interview on film some of the people involved. The resultant mini-documentary is a very useful short introduction to the themes and texts associated with our project, based particularly on Faustus’s five-track CD, Cotton Lords, which was released earlier in 2019.

We were lucky to be able to call on some expert professionals to make the film, including director Rachel Jardine, cameraman Tom Slee, and editor Natasha Martin, all of whom have extensive experience  working with the BBC. The sound for the performance was mixed by Faustus’s engineer, Matt Williams, who also produced and engineered the Cotton Lords CD. Our thanks to go to all of these people for their contributions to this film, which we feel goes some way towards encapsulating many aspects of the research we have carried out over the last few years. Our thanks also go to the AHRC, whose funding made all of this possible. The funding period is over now, but we will be continuing to find poetry, and to add it to this site, with a further full launch of lots of new material scheduled for the end of April 2020. Included in this will be some fascinating American texts collected through the New York Public Library. Watch this space.