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Eric Gardner

@profgardner.bsky.social

Proud geek, dad, and husband. Teacher and literary historian with emphasis on Black print culture--esp. C19 and African American women writers. Opinions my own.

99 Posts329 Follower296 Folgt
Eric Gardner@profgardner.bsky.social · last yr.

Proofs are proofed. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Civil War and Reconstruction is on track for 1 Oct release from Oxford UP. The book wouldn’t exist w/o support from the NEH & so many librarians & scholars committed to the fact that Black history is American history. We still have so much to learn.

Excerpts from proofs of the title page of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Civil War and Reconstruction by Eric Gardner and of the Contents page. The latter lists: Acknowledgments, page ix; Chapter 1, Strangers and Neighbors: Recovering Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Life and Work, page 1; Chapter 2, Origin Stories, page 29; Chapter 3, Reconstructing an Abolitionist Voice, page 66; Chapter 4, “Go on”: Harper’s Challenges to Reconstruction, page 94; Chapter 5, “Lay the whole foundation anew”: Harper in the Thick of Reconstruction, page 134; Chapter 6, The Fifteenth Amendment and Epic Struggles, page 176; Chapter 7, Endings and Not, page 221; Notes, page 263; Works Cited, page 295; Index, page 305.
Eric Gardner@profgardner.bsky.social · last yr.

“[I]t may have been the fourth of July; it does not matter.... The next day my child … said: ‘I know why we can’t ride in the cars; because we are colored!’ … yet … trodden under foot as our people are, I would not change souls with the richest and proudest stockholder….”--Frances E. W. Harper 1867

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s “National Salvation”: A Rediscovered Lecture on Reconstruction - Commonplace

What makes Harper’s January 31 [1867] lecture rare is that we have its full text. The Philadelphia Evening Telegraph printed a transcription of “National Salvation” the day after Harper spoke.

commonplace.online

Zinn Education Project@zinnedproject.bsky.social · last yr.

Help us reach 10K followers on Bluesky. We provide free people's history lessons, Teach the Black Freedom Struggle classes, Teaching for Black Lives study groups, book giveaways, this day in people's history posts, & we organize to defend the right to teach truthfully. www.zinnedproject.org

Zinn Education Project: Teaching People's History

The Zinn Education Project promotes and supports the teaching of people’s history in middle and high school classrooms across the country. Based on the lens of history highlighted in Howard Zinn’s bes...

zinnedproject.org

Eric Gardner@profgardner.bsky.social · last yr.

The daily barrage of evil made me hold back on a cover reveal, but maybe this is the day. Out later in 2025, this book, like 7000+ books & so many other rich projects, would not exist without the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities. These stories must be told & we must save the NEH.

The cover of Eric Gardner’s Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Civil War and Reconstruction. On a blue background, the largest portion of the cover reproduces a C19 engraving of African American author-activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper found in William Still’s 1872 The Underground Rail Road. The portrait shows her head and upper body. She is wearing traveling clothes, and she is in three-quarters profile, facing to the left. Her hair is pulled back in her signature chignon, and she looks ahead with wisdom and determination. The engraving lines can be seen throughout the portrait, especially on her skin and her dress. A mostly-opaque yellow rectangle rests perhaps two-thirds of the way down the cover below Harper’s chin and neck. Here, inside a thin brown border, the words “Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s” are offered in brown all caps, followed by the words “Civil War and Reconstruction” in smaller white all caps, followed by a partial centered line, followed by the author’s name in smaller brown all caps.
Eric Gardner@profgardner.bsky.social · last yr.

Pols & pundits, please quit saying things are "distractions." It is both dismissive & wrong. DEIJ, colleges & universities, museums & libraries, PBS & NPR, the NEH & the NEA make lives better & simply make some lives possible. If you call them “distractions,” you’ve already capitulated.