Looking Backward: 2000 – 1887
Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888) is one of the most influential utopian novels in English. The narrative follows Julian West, who goes to sleep in Boston in 1887 and wakes in the...
View ArticleCommon Sense
When Common Sense was published in January 1776, it sold, by some estimates, a stunning 150,000 copies in the colonies. What exactly made this pamphlet so appealing? This is a question not only about...
View ArticleThe Autobiography of Ashley Bowen (1728-1813)
The first American sailor known to write his own autobiography, Ashley Bowen remains a valuable storyteller who can speak to today’s readers about the maritime world in the age of sail. Ashley Bowen...
View ArticleSecret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo and Laura
Based on Leonora Sansay’s eyewitness accounts of the final days of French rule in Saint Domingue (Haiti), Secret History is a vivid account of race warfare and domestic violence. Sansay’s writing...
View ArticleRamona
Ramona has often been compared to Uncle Tom’s Cabin for its influence on American social policy, and this is the only edition available that presents this important novel in its full historical...
View ArticleUncle Tom’s Cabin
With its gripping plot and pungent dialogue, Uncle Tom’s Cabin offers readers today a passionate portrait of a nation on the verge of disunion and a surprisingly subtle examination of the relationship...
View ArticleRights of Man
Advocating equality, meritocracy, and social responsibility in plain language, Thomas Paine galvanized tens of thousands of readers and changed the framework of political discourse with this text. He...
View ArticleThe Age of Reason
The Age of Reason is one of the most influential defences of Deism (the idea that God can be known without organized religion) ever written. This edition presents Part 1, Paine’s controversial...
View ArticleHerland and Related Writings
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s provocative utopian novel Herland, first published in 1915, tells its story through the observations of three male explorers who discover a land inhabited solely by women;...
View ArticleA Plea for Emigration; or Notes of Canada West
Mary Ann Shadd’s pamphlet A Plea for Emigration; or Notes of Canada West is, as the title promises, a settler guide designed to inform prospective immigrants of conditions in their proposed new home....
View ArticleCivil Disobedience
In 1848, Henry David Thoreau twice delivered lectures in Concord, Massachusetts, on “the relationship of the individual to the state.” The essay now known as Civil Disobedience is a significant and...
View ArticleThe Stamp Act of 1765: A History in Documents
When Parliament sought to raise funds through the passing of the Stamp Act in 1765, they did not anticipate the protests and staunch opposition to the new law that would ensue in the colonies. Though...
View ArticleSelected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Essayist, lecturer, poet, and America’s first “public intellectual,” Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) is the central figure in nineteenth-century American letters and the leader (albeit reluctantly) of...
View ArticleNarrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
Published in the bicentenary year of Frederick Douglass’s birth and in a Black Lives Matter era, this edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass presents new research into his life as an...
View ArticleHetch Hetchy: A History in Documents
In 1913, President Woodrow Wilson signed legislation approving the construction of the O’Shaughnessy Dam to inundate the Hetch Hetchy Valley inside Yosemite National Park. This decision concluded a...
View ArticleUnited States Immigration, 1800-1965: A History in Documents
Recent debates over immigration have given rise to a complex spectrum of opinions, attitudes, and emotions. In fact, these debates have been a hallmark of the American nation since its earliest days....
View ArticleSpanish American Independence Movements: A History in Documents
The independence movements of Spanish America in the early nineteenth century constitute one of the main junctures in Latin American history. Not only did they put an end to Spanish colonialism in...
View ArticleRanching and the American West: A History in Documents
The transformation of the American West is one of the key topics in the study of both US history and global environmental history. The role of ranching in the West is also central to the growing field...
View ArticleA Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison
A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison offers a remarkable perspective on eighteenth-century America. A white settler by birth, Mary Jemison was taken captive as a child in 1758 and adopted by...
View ArticleSlaves in Algiers; or, A Struggle for Freedom
As Americans began defining who was to be counted a citizen in their newly-established republic, Susanna Rowson’s comic opera Slaves in Algiers (1794) makes an earnest case that women be accorded the...
View ArticleOnly By Experience: An Anthology of Slave Narratives
The historical and literary importance that slave narratives—the autobiographical accounts written by formerly enslaved people in the United States and throughout the Atlantic world in the eighteenth...
View ArticleMoby-Dick; or, the Whale: Selections
When Melville completed Moby-Dick, he wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne that “I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as a lamb.” While it took the world some time to appreciate the magnitude of...
View ArticleLetters from an American Farmer: Selections
Letters from an American Farmer is increasingly recognized as one of the foundational texts in the study both of American literature and of American history. This compact edition combines a selection...
View ArticleFrederick Douglass: Selected Writings and Speeches
Universally recognized today as one of the most important and influential Americans of the nineteenth century, Frederick Douglass rose to prominence in the national abolitionist movement before and...
View Article
