Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Civil War and Reconstruction

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper fought for abolition, women's suffrage, Black suffrage, civil rights, and temperance throughout the second half of the nineteenth-century, all while lecturing across the nation and writing powerful novels, poems, essays, and sketches. Still, though Harper was well-known during her lifetime, many twentieth-century critics dismissed or ignored her. Building from pioneering archival work, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Civil War and Reconstruction gives the fullest account available of how this major African American author-activist claimed the book's nation-shaking title moments as her own. The book focuses especially on Harper's vision of what Reconstruction could be-not only what needed to be built back after the Civil War but what needed to be wiped away and what needed to be created anew to enact "a more perfect union."