Banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for his refusal to conform to Puritan religious and social standards, Roger Williams established a haven in Rhode Island for those persecuted in the name of the religious establishment. He conducted a lifelong debate over religious freedom with distinguished figures of the seventeenth century, including Puritan minister John Cotton, Massachusetts governor John Endicott, and the English Parliament.
James Calvin Davis gathers together important selections from Williams's public and private writings on religious liberty, illustrating how this...
Banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for his refusal to conform to Puritan religious and social standards, Roger Williams established a haven...
"I like a little rebellion now and then"--so wrote Thomas Jefferson to Abigail Adams, enlisting in a tradition that throughout American history has led writers to rage and reason, prophesy and provoke. This is the first anthology to collect and examine an American literature that holds the nation to its highest ideals, castigating it when it falls short and pointing the way to a better collective future. American Protest Literature presents sources from eleven protest movements--political, social, and cultural--from the Revolution to abolition to gay rights to antiwar protest. Each...
"I like a little rebellion now and then"--so wrote Thomas Jefferson to Abigail Adams, enlisting in a tradition that throughout American history has le...
Stephen Crane's weirdly impressionistic The Red Badge of Courage is one of the first non-romantic novels of the Civil War--and the first non-romantic account to gain wide popularity. Paul Sorrentino introduces Red Badge to a new generation of readers for a fuller appreciation of the novel and its effects. He has selected as his text the first edition, published by D. Appleton & Co. in 1895.
Stephen Crane's weirdly impressionistic The Red Badge of Courage is one of the first non-romantic novels of the Civil War--and the first non-ro...
Douglass's memoir, first published in 1845, is the moving narrative of twenty-one years of enslavement and escape to freedom. In a new introduction, distinguished scholar Robert Stepto argues why this account was so important to the abolitionist cause and how it continues to resonate with readers today.
Douglass's memoir, first published in 1845, is the moving narrative of twenty-one years of enslavement and escape to freedom. In a new introduction, d...
Much more than an historical examination of liability, criminal law, torts, bail, possession and ownership, and contracts, The Common Law articulates the ideas and judicial theory of one of the greatest justices of the Supreme Court. G. Edward White reminds us why the book remains essential reading not only for law students but also for anyone interested in American history. The text published is, with occasional corrections of typographical errors, identical with that found in the first and all subsequent printings by Little, Brown.
Much more than an historical examination of liability, criminal law, torts, bail, possession and ownership, and contracts, The Common Law artic...
Jim Crow is the figure that has long represented America's imperfect union. When the white actor Thomas D. Rice took to the stage in blackface as Jim Crow, during the 1830s, a ragged and charismatic trickster began channeling black folklore through American popular culture. This compact edition of the earliest Jim Crow plays and songs presents essential performances that assembled backtalk, banter, masquerade, and dance into the diagnostic American style. Quite contrary to Jim Crow's reputation--which is to say, the term's later meaning--these early acts undermine both racism and slavery....
Jim Crow is the figure that has long represented America's imperfect union. When the white actor Thomas D. Rice took to the stage in blackface as J...
This enlarged edition of the most significant and celebrated slave narrative completes the Jacobs family saga, surely one of the most memorable in all of American history. John S. Jacobs's short slave narrative, A True Tale of Slavery, published in London in 1861, adds a brother's perspective to Harriet A. Jacobs's autobiography. It is an exciting addition to this now classic work, as John Jacobs presents further historical information about family life so well described already by his sister. Once more, Jean Fagan Yellin, who discovered this long-lost document,...
This enlarged edition of the most significant and celebrated slave narrative completes the Jacobs family saga, surely one of the most memorable in all...
Following on the heels of The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables was intended to be a far sunnier book than its predecessor and one that would illustrate "the folly" of tumbling down on posterity "an avalanche of ill-gotten gold, or real estate." Many critics have faulted the novel for its explaining away of hereditary guilt or its contradictory denial of it. Denis Donoghue instructs the reader in a fresh appreciation of the novel.
The John Harvard Library edition reproduces the authoritative text of The House of the Seven Gables in the Centenary...
Following on the heels of The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables was intended to be a far sunnier book than its predecesso...
Hawthorne's greatest romance, The Scarlet Letter, is often simplistically seen as a timeless tale of desire, sin, and redemption. In his introduction, Michael J. Colacurcio argues that The Scarlet Letter is a serious historical novel. If Hawthorne's fiction rigorously and faithfully subjects Hester and Dimmesdale to the limits of seventeenth-century possibility, it nonetheless looks forward to the better, brighter world of Margaret Fuller and Fanny Fern, of Charles Fourier and John Humphrey Noyes.
The John Harvard Library edition reproduces the authoritative text of...
Hawthorne's greatest romance, The Scarlet Letter, is often simplistically seen as a timeless tale of desire, sin, and redemption. In his int...
Since 1959 The John Harvard Library has been instrumental in publishing essential American writings in authoritative editions.
Jacob Riis's pioneering work of photojournalism takes its title from Rabelais's Pantagruel: "One half of the world knoweth not how the other half liveth; considering that no one has yet written of that Country." An anatomy of New York City's slums in the 1880s, it vividly brought home to its first readers through the powerful combination of text and images the squalid living conditions of "the other half," who might well have inhabited another country. The...
Since 1959 The John Harvard Library has been instrumental in publishing essential American writings in authoritative editions.