Booknotes: The Reconstruction Diary of Frances Anne Rollin

New Arrival:

• The Reconstruction Diary of Frances Anne Rollin: A Critical Edition edited by Jennifer Putzi (UNC Press, 2025).

UNCP has been going pretty hard on the Reconstruction and CW-adjacent stuff in recent catalogs, so it's no surprise that there is some direct overlap among them. That is certainly the case here, with both main subject and her husband also prominently featured in another F/W title, January's Requiem for Reconstruction.

From the description: "In 1867, Frances Anne Rollin, a Black writer and teacher from South Carolina, traveled to Boston to seek a publisher for her biography of famed Black abolitionist, writer, and Civil War veteran Martin R. Delany—the first full-length biography written by an African American. Beginning in January 1868, Rollin kept a diary while in Boston documenting her progression on Delany’s biography, negotiations with publishers, visits from friends, attendance at lectures and readings, and her marriage to William J. Whipper, a Black politician and jurist."

More from the description: Rollin’s diary has the distinction of being "one of the earliest known diaries by a Southern Black woman." Editor Jennifer Putzi's critical edition, The Reconstruction Diary of Frances Anne Rollin, "offers the first complete transcription and annotation of Rollin’s diary, along with a robust introduction providing important biographical, historical, cultural, and literary contexts for readers."

Saying the introduction is robust is a bit of an understatement as it runs 132 pages! In addition to the extensive footnotes attached to the diary, there is a hefty appendix section (much of it dealing with material related to Rollin's Life and Public Services of Martin R. Delany, which was published in 1868). The diary itself "provides one of the fullest pictures of an African American woman as an author, activist, and well-connected and politically involved individual during the Reconstruction era(.)"