Project MUSE®: J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/596
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists.daily12026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (2013) through current issueLatest Articles: J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century AmericanistsTWOProject MUSE®J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists2166-74382166-742XLatest articles in J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. Feed provided by Project MUSE®“A Pleasant Gathering of Friends”: Celebrating Frances E. W. Harper at Last
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985032
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Readers of this special issue may notice that, across the entries, the word black is rendered inconsistently—by some authors treated as a proper noun (and thus capitalized) and by others treated as a common noun. This is not an accident. Aware that the question of whether to treat the word as proper or common is an open one and that most scholars have legitimate reasons for treating the word one way or another, we have elected to respect the decisions of each of our contributors, an editorial practice that is becoming increasingly more common among editors and publishers.How do you throw a birthday party for a woman like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper? Especially if the party is long overdue? Readers of J19 are
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/596/image/coversmall“A Pleasant Gathering of Friends”: Celebrating Frances E. W. Harper at Last2026-03-07text/htmlen-US“A Pleasant Gathering of Friends”: Celebrating Frances E. W. Harper at Last2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®299802026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07“If They Kill Me”: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Black Boatmen and the Legacy of Civil War Heroism
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985033
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In the years leading up to and during the Civil War, American poets championed the ship as a symbol of the nation. This metaphor is at least as old as the classical era, but for citizens of a country divided over slavery, the hope that a brave captain and loyal crew would help the union navigate turbulent political waters was especially powerful.1 “The ship has weather’d every rack,” Walt Whitman writes in “O Captain, My Captain,” a poem that epitomizes the ship’s function as an allegory for the nation-state.2 Other once-popular examples, like Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “The Voyage of the Good Ship Union” and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Building of the Ship,” celebrated the ship as a place of solidarity and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/596/image/coversmall“If They Kill Me”: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Black Boatmen and the Legacy of Civil War Heroism2026-03-07text/htmlen-US“If They Kill Me”: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Black Boatmen and the Legacy of Civil War Heroism2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®1091072026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07Black National Housekeeping: Domesticity as Public Health in the Post-Reconstruction Works of Frances E. W. Harper
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985034
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This is the era of golden opportunity for American womanhood. It is theirs to exert their influence against the lawlessness in the land which is not merely racial, but a symptom of disease in the body politic.Author and activist Frances E. W. Harper devoted the latter years of her career to both exposing and elevating the condition of black women in the United States throughout the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction eras, often drawing upon popular, mainstreams ideals of domesticity and republican motherhood to celebrate black women’s contributions and to share their plight. Domestic themes, imbued with racial politics and attuned to gender inequality, pervade the public speeches Harper delivered throughout the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/596/image/coversmallBlack National Housekeeping: Domesticity as Public Health in the Post-Reconstruction Works of Frances E. W. Harper2026-03-07text/htmlen-USBlack National Housekeeping: Domesticity as Public Health in the Post-Reconstruction Works of Frances E. W. Harper2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®1215382026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07To “Every Hater of American Despotism”: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Correspondence in the Nineteenth-Century Black Press
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985035
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On June 23, 1860, the Weekly Anglo-African newspaper published a letter by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper urging readers to donate money to the defense fund of a group called the “Philadelphia Rescuers”: six men imprisoned for aiding an enslaved man, Moses Horner, in his attempt to self-emancipate. Harper’s letter, called “An Appeal for the Philadelphia Rescuers,” argues, “It is not enough to express our sympathy by words; we should be ready to crystalize it into actions.”1 The letter successfully revived public interest in the fate of the hastily imprisoned Philadelphia Rescuers, inspiring subscribers to donate money to their defense fund, and shortly afterward, the Rescuers were released. Harper’s “Appeal” is
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/596/image/coversmallTo “Every Hater of American Despotism”: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Correspondence in the Nineteenth-Century Black Press2026-03-07text/htmlen-USTo “Every Hater of American Despotism”: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Correspondence in the Nineteenth-Century Black Press2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®708402026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07The Stateswoman-Poet
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985036
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Poets have read during the inauguration of only six US presidents, all Democrats; the first was Robert Frost at John F. Kennedy’s in 1961. It is an oddly compelling fact that three Black women poets have served in this capacity: Maya Angelou at Bill Clinton’s first, in 1993; Elizabeth Alexander at Barack Obama’s first, in 2009; and Amanda Gorman at Joe Biden’s in 2021. This statistical overrepresentation presents a picture puzzle of the cultural politics of US liberalism. The mind reels at the Democratic Party’s curatorial vision: why have their recent presidencies customarily begun with a Black woman as herald?Notice the descending ages of the poets across three decades: Angelou performed at sixty-four, Alexander
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/596/image/coversmallThe Stateswoman-Poet2026-03-07text/htmlen-USThe Stateswoman-Poet2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®667662026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07Frances E. W. Harper’s Radical Black Feminist Politics in The Underground Railroad
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985037
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If there is anything I can do for them in money or words, call upon me. This is a common cause; and if there is any burden to be borne in the Anti-Slavery cause—anything to be done to weaken our hateful chains or assert our manhood and womanhood, I have a right to do my share of the work.In this epigraph, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper asserts the two mechanisms by which she centered her activism throughout her decades-long fight for the abolition of slavery, women’s rights, and Black women’s organizing—money or words. Her money was earned from her literary contributions and work as an anti-slavery lecturer, and her words were manifested in her poetry, short stories, novels, lectures, and speeches. Harper was one of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/596/image/coversmallFrances E. W. Harper’s Radical Black Feminist Politics in The Underground Railroad2026-03-07text/htmlen-USFrances E. W. Harper’s Radical Black Feminist Politics in The Underground Railroad2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®925822026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07“A Delicious Sense of Joy and Love”: On Centering Black Women Readers and Black Domestic Idealism in Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985038
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After he had gone, Iola sat by the window, gazing at the splendid stars, her heart quietly throbbing with a delicious sense of joy and love.Being [Black] girls, it is inevitable that they should sympathize or desire to sympathize with the heroine of these novels, even to be like, dress like and act like those heroines so far as their circumstances will permit.The emotional pleasure and joy of late-nineteenth-century Black girl and women readers have rarely been considered by scholars of African American literature. Through a close textual analysis of Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892), I demonstrate the usefulness of centering the interiority of Black girls and women in my reading of the novel’s domestic
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/596/image/coversmall“A Delicious Sense of Joy and Love”: On Centering Black Women Readers and Black Domestic Idealism in Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy2026-03-07text/htmlen-US“A Delicious Sense of Joy and Love”: On Centering Black Women Readers and Black Domestic Idealism in Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®1033652026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07To Calmly Rest: Frances E. W. Harper’s Sensational Black Disability Poetics
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985039
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Frances E. W. Harper’s 1895 poem “The Sparrow’s Fall”1 meditates on God’s love for all beings: human, nonhuman, Black, and impaired. The religious poem describes a racialized sparrow, “Only a brown and weesome thing, / With drooping head and listless wing” (22, lines 9–10) who falls to the earth, seemingly powerless: “Too frail to soar—a feeble thing— / It fell to earth with fluttering wing” (21, lines 1–2). While nineteenth-century sentimental poetry often frames physical weakness as a metaphor for suffering to be overcome, Harper refuses to equate frailty with tragedy; instead, she presents this “brown” sparrow’s fall while refusing to exclude it from recognition. The poem ends with a rhetorical question:The
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/596/image/coversmallTo Calmly Rest: Frances E. W. Harper’s Sensational Black Disability Poetics2026-03-07text/htmlen-USTo Calmly Rest: Frances E. W. Harper’s Sensational Black Disability Poetics2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®949682026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07The Pleasures of Harper’s Peripheral Verse
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985040
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Nestled between “Sir, We Would See Jesus” and “Thank God for Little Children” in Harper’s 1871 Poems is the ballad “The Bride of Death.” It laments the fate of a young woman who dies shortly before her wedding. But unlike Harper’s many poems that present death as a gateway to heaven, “The Bride of Death” makes no reference to God or eternity. Instead, Harper personifies death as the bridegroom’s coercive, malevolent rival: “His wooing was like a stern command, / And cold was the pressure of his hand.”1 He takes the bride to his “dusty palace” and leaves her to sit in its “still hall” among the other dead. This antirealist narrative is punctuated with references to funeral customs and physical markers of death like
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/596/image/coversmallThe Pleasures of Harper’s Peripheral Verse2026-03-07text/htmlen-USThe Pleasures of Harper’s Peripheral Verse2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®340462026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07A Woman of Her Time . . . and Ours
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985041
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Decency is not an American inheritance; it requires deliberate effort. Unfortunately, too few have learned this lesson. Most operate as if decency were inevitable, as if it need not be cultivated on purpose. This delusion seems especially prevalent among people socialized as white who consider themselves to be “good” and “decent.” With so many assuming progress will simply materialize, our current historical moment is marked by as much hostility as the decades that kept Frances Ellen Watkins Harper in the struggle for justice through her fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties.When the Civil War began, Watkins Harper1 was in her forties and had long been a celebrated poet and abolitionist orator; her commentary
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/596/image/coversmallA Woman of Her Time . . . and Ours2026-03-07text/htmlen-USA Woman of Her Time . . . and Ours2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®200072026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07Author Bios
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985042
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Danielle Procope Bell is assistant professor of Africana studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is affiliate faculty with the English and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Departments. Procope Bell specializes in Black feminist thought ranging from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Her monograph, Distinctly Different: Autigendering as a Black Feminist Practice, considers the perennial interstitial space between critical autism studies and Black gender studies. It is under advance contract with the University of Illinois Press.Alexandra Burgess earned her PhD in English from the University of California, Davis. She is currently a full-time faculty member in the English Department at
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/596/image/coversmallAuthor Bios2026-03-07text/htmlen-USAuthor Bios2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®81922026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07