American History

  • Roger Williams and His World

    Roger Williams and His World

    Roger Williams, a 17th-century English immigrant to New England, was famously banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635 for his “new and dangerous opinions”…

  • Frederick Douglass: Selected Writings and Speeches

    Frederick 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…

  • Letters from an American Farmer: Selections

    Letters 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.…

  • Moby-Dick; or, the Whale: Selections

    Moby-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…

  • Slaves in Algiers; or, A Struggle for Freedom

    Slaves 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…

  • Only by Experience: An Anthology of Slave Narratives

    Only by Experience: An Anthology of Slave Narratives

    Only by Experience: An Anthology of Slave Narratives collects, in whole or in part, sixteen of the most significant and influential slave narratives in English.…

  • A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison

    A 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…

  • Ranching and the American West: A History in Documents

    Ranching 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…

  • Spanish American Independence Movements: A History in Documents

    Spanish 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…

  • United States Immigration, 1800-1965: A History in Documents

    United States Immigration, 1800-1965: A History in Documents

    The debate over immigration has been a hallmark of the American nation since its earliest days, and it persists in generating a complex spectrum of…

  • Hetch Hetchy: A History in Documents

    Hetch 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…

  • Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave

    Narrative 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…

  • Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

    Selected 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)…

  • The Stamp Act of 1765: A History in Documents

    The 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…

  • Civil Disobedience

    Civil 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…

  • A Plea for Emigration; or Notes of Canada West

    A 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…

  • Herland and Related Writings

    Herland 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…

  • The Age of Reason

    The 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.…

  • Rights of Man

    Rights 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…

  • Uncle Tom's Cabin

    Uncle 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…

  • Ramona

    Ramona

    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…

  • Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo and Laura

    Secret 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…

  • The Autobiography of Ashley Bowen (1728-1813)

    The 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…

  • Common Sense

    Common 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…