American History
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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”…
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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…
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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.…
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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…
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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…
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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.…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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)…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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.…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…