George and Ann RichardsCivil War Era Center

This workshop featured Kirsten Lee’s dissertation chapter “Archival Values: Feminist Recovery and the Specter of Blackness in Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton.” This chapter considers African and Mexican American women’s relation to landholding and gold in the early postbellum period, specifically in writings of Harper and de Burton recovered in the late twentieth century. Kirsten’s entire dissertation, Scenes of Speculation: Abolition and the Movement Literatures of Black North America, 1784-1886, examines how American westward (and failed southward) expansion secured settler citizenship through speculation and other forms converting land theft into capitalist value.