By Taylor Jasmine | On January 19, 2025 | Updated May 11, 2025 | Comments (0)
Frances Watkins Harper (1825 – 1911), also known as Frances E.W. Harper or Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, was a 19th century American poet, novelist, social reformer, lecturer, suffragist, and abolitionist.
Presented here is the full text of Poems by Frances E.W. Harper, published in 1896. (Philadelphia: George S. Ferguson Co.) She wrote prolifically from the time she published her first collection of poetry in 1845, at the age of twenty.
A freeborn African American from Baltimore, Maryland, she dedicated her life to social causes, including abolition, women’s suffrage, and the quest for equality. Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On December 19, 2024 | Comments (0)
The Lifted Veil by George Eliot is a novella by the esteemed British author best known for weighty books like Middlemarch. She interrupted her work on The Mill on the Floss to work on it. Following is the full text.
The Lifted Veil first appeared in Blackwood Magazine in 1859, the same year that her highly regarded novel Adam Bede was published. It wasn’t published in book format until 1878 as part of a single volume with Silas Marner and Brother Jacob. The Lifted Veil wasn’t published as a stand-alone volume until 1924, more than forty years after the author’s death.
Latimer, the book’s unreliable narrator, is a sensitive intellectual who believes that he can see into the future and read the thoughts of others. These clairvoyant powers, in his mind, are a curse. Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On December 12, 2024 | Updated May 9, 2025 | Comments (0)
Georgia Douglas Johnson (1880 – 1966) was a respected poet and playwright associated with the Harlem Renaissance movement. Following is the full text of her first published collection, The Heart of a Woman and Other Poems (1918).
The Heart of a Woman was followed by Bronze (1922) and An Autumn Love Cycle (1928). Many years later she came out with Share My World (1962). With four published collections, it’s quite likely that Georgia was the most widely published of the female poets of her era.
Georgia’s poems were published in numerous periodicals and anthologies, particularly in the 1920s. In her poetry, Georgia addressed issues of race as well as universal themes of love, motherhood, and being a woman in a male-dominated world. Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On December 7, 2024 | Updated December 8, 2024 | Comments (0)
“How it Feels to Be Colored Me” is an essay by Zora Neale Hurston originally published in the 1928 edition of The World Tomorrow. She explores her unique experience with race in her customary wry, forthright manner.
Zora makes clear that she speaks only for herself, as the tone of this essay doesn’t necessarily reflect the more proudly propagandist Black writing that characterized the 1920s New Negro movement (also known as the Harlem Renaissance.
Yet she clearly critiques the rampant segregation and bias that were woven into the fabric of American life, North and South. Following is the full text of “How it Feels to Be Colored Me,” now in the public domain. The only alteration to the text has been to break up long paragraphs, for easier readability on devices. Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On November 14, 2024 | Updated December 24, 2024 | Comments (0)
Emma Goldman (1869 – 1940) was a noted political activist and promoter of the anarchist philosophy. She was best known for her role in the development of its theories in the early twentieth century.
As such, “Anarchism: What it Really Stands For” is a 1911 essay that crystalizes her views. Anarchism, in brief, argues against all forms of authority the abolishment of institutions of government, advocating for replacing them with stateless societies.
Goldman’s views seem particularly resonant — and relevant — in this age of government overreach into privacy and personal freedom. Read More→
Categories: 
Comments: