First published in 1869, Lorna Doone is the story of John Ridd, a farmer who finds love amid the religious and social turmoil of seventeenth-century England. He is just a boy when his father is slain by the Doones, a lawless clan inhabiting wild Exmoor on the border of Somerset and Devon. Seized by curiosity and a sense of adventure, he makes his way to the valley of the Doones, where he is discovered by the beautiful Lorna. In time their childish fantasies blossom into mature lov...

A stirring account of wartime experiences from the leader of the first regiment of emancipated slavesThomas Wentworth Higginson, a Unitarian minister, was a fervent member of new England's abolitionist movement, an active participant in the Underground Railroad, and part of a group that supplied material aid to John Brown before his ill-fated raid on Harpers Ferry. When the Civil War broke out, Higginson was commissioned as a colonel of the black troops training in...

While much has been written about the impact of Darwin’s theories on U.S. culture, and countless scholarly collections have been devoted to the science of evolution, few have addressed the specific details of Darwin’s theories as a cultural force affecting U.S. writers. America’s Darwin fills this gap and features a range of critical approaches that examine U.S. textual responses to Darwin’s works.The scholars in this collection represent a range of disciplines—literature,...

First published in 1903, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois' "The Souls of Black Folk" is a seminal work in African American literature and an American classic.In this work Du Bois proposes that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line." His concepts of life behind the veil of race and the resulting "double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others," have become touchstones for thinking about race in America. In...

According to Wikipedia: "John McElroy (1846–1929) was an American printer, soldier, journalist and author, most known for writing the novel The Red Acorn and the four-volume Andersonville: A Story of Rebel Military Prisons, based upon his lengthy confinement in the Confederate Andersonville prison camp during the American Civil War... In January 1864, he was among dozens of men captured in a skirmish near Jonesville, Virginia, by Confederate cavalrymen under William E. Jones. McElroy sent ...

In Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860), William Craft recounts the circumstances under which he and his wife escaped from slavery. His account also relates incidents that portray the evils of slavery, including its negative effects on slaveholders, white children sold into slavery, and other slaves.

This essential one-volume collection brings together some of the most influential and significant works by African-American writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Included herein are such classics as Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845) and excerpts from W.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Harriet A. Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself

Account of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, first published in 1865. According to Wikipedia: "George Alfred Townsend (January 30, 1841 – April 15, 1914), was a noted war correspondent during the American Civil War, and a later novelist. Townsend wrote under the pen name "Gath", which was derived by adding an "H" to his initials, and inspired by the biblical passage II Samuel 1:20, "Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askalon"... He is considered to have been the youn...

This compelling historical fiction of the Civil War and Lincoln’s assassination is an “exploration by a brilliant and thoughtful writer of the labyrinthine ways of good and evil”(Los Angeles Times)"The Judges of the Secret Court isn’t just a novel about John Wilkes Booth; it is a vision of what life and the world do to us."—Michael Dirda, The Washington PostDavid Stacton’s The Judges of The Secret Court i...

A moving cultural biography of abolitionist martyr John Brown, by one of the most important African-American intellectuals of the twentieth century.In the history of slavery and its legacy, John Brown looms large as a hero whose deeds partly precipitated the Civil War. As Frederick Douglass wrote: "When John Brown stretched forth his arm ... the clash of arms was at hand." DuBois's biography brings Brown stirringly to life and is a neglected classic.