Frances E.W. Harper's Civil War and Reconstruction: A Biographical and Literary Study of a 19th-Century African American Writer, Orator, and Activist

FAIN: FEL-267597-20

Eric Scott Gardner
Saginaw Valley State University (University Center, MI 48710-0001)

Research and writing of a book on Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911), African American author, orator, abolitionist, suffragist, and civil rights leader.

With the support of an NEH Fellowship, I will complete the first book-length study of the Civil War and Reconstruction-era work of African American writer, speaker, and activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911). Harper’s career—especially the critical period between 1861 and 1877—remains surprisingly understudied, even though her efforts shaped African American literature, abolitionism, suffrage and civil rights struggles, the temperance movement, the Black press, and American lyceum culture. Beyond either traditional biography or collection of close readings, my book will explore how Harper claimed these nation-shaking moments as her own, both creating and critiquing public assessments of the war and its aftermath. It will argue that she forged a deeply intersectional praxis of public life that engaged the communities around her and that modeled the citizenship she demanded for herself and for other African Americans.