IOPN is excited to announce the upcoming publication of Shining Stars: African American Women Authors of the Civil War Era by Lavonda Kay Broadnax, an independent researcher and retired Library of Congress librarian. Her project was inspired by her desire to create a handout for FREED: Female RE-Enactors of Distinction, an organization of women who seek to educate others on the accomplishments of women and African American soldiers in the Civil War. The handout grew from historic publications, electronic resources and handwritten catalog records. She eventually pursued means to make the handout readily accessible to a wider audience. The final project is a database that includes biographical entries, author images, full-text publications, historic newspaper articles and other texts focused on the lives and writings of Civil War-era African American women.
“The existence of an early African American print culture is not widely known. The goal of this project is to highlight the contributions of a specific subset of this print culture, African American women of the Civil War-era. This is accomplished by providing easy access to the full text of their works, the full text of historic newspaper articles and historic biographical essays, and images. These resources enhance our knowledge of these little-known authors, which increases our understanding of African American history and thus American history.”—Lavonda Broadnax, Project Author
This work is a digital humanities project that was developed as part of a collaboration with the History of Black Writing’s Black Book Interactive Project (BBIP) Digital Publishing Scholars Program, an NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant, and African American Studies Publishing Without Walls 2 (AFRO-PWW 2) at the University of Illinois, funded by the Mellon Foundation. AFRO-PWW 2 collaborates with Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Black Studies scholars at PWIs, and community-based memory institutions to produce open-source digital publications that document Black lives and experiences.
Shining Stars: African American Women Authors of the Civil War Era will be published by IOPN under the Publishing Without Walls imprint’s Black Studies series in Spring 2025.