John L Stauffer

The Portable Frederick Douglass (Penguin Classics)

A new collection of the seminal writings and speeches of a legendary writer, orator, and civil rights leader This compact volume offers a full course on the remarkable, diverse career of Frederick Douglass, letting us hear once more a necessary historical figure whose guiding voice is needed now as...

The Tribunal: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid (The John Harvard Library)

When John Brown led twenty-one men in an attack on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry on October 16, 1859, he envisioned a biblical uprising of millions of armed bondsmen, thus ridding the nation of the scourge of slavery. The insurrection did not happen, and Brown and the other surviving raiders ...

The State of Jones: The Small Southern County that Seceded from the Confederacy

In 1863, after surviving the devastating Battle of Corinth, Newton Knight, a poor farmer from Mississippi, deserted the Confederate Army and began a guerrilla battle against the Confederacy. A pro-Union sympathizer in the deep South who refused to fight a rich man’s war for slavery and cotton, for t...

The Abolitionist Imagination (The Alexis de Tocqueville Lectures on American Politics)

The abolitionists of the mid-nineteenth century have long been painted in extremes--vilified as reckless zealots who provoked the catastrophic bloodletting of the Civil War, or praised as daring and courageous reformers who hastened the end of slavery. But Andrew Delbanco sees abolitionists in a dif...

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave: (Library of America Paperback Classic)

One of the greatest works of American autobiography, in a definitive Library of America text: Published seven years after his escape from slavery, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) is a powerful account of the cruelty and oppression of the Maryland plantation cult...

American Protest Literature (The John Harvard Library)

“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 ...

The Battle Hymn of the Republic: A Biography of the Song That Marches On

It was sung at Ronald Reagan's funeral, and adopted with new lyrics by labor radicals. John Updike quoted it in the title of one of his novels, and George W. Bush had it performed at the memorial service in the National Cathedral for victims of September 11, 2001. Perhaps no other song has held such...

The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race

At a time when slavery was spreading and the country was steeped in racism, two white men and two black men overcame social barriers and mistrust to form a unique alliance that sought nothing less than the end of all evil. Drawing on the largest extant bi-racial correspondence in the Civil War era, ...

The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race

The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race

American Protest Literature

Quality Assurance of Food