Essential reading for students of African-American history includes autobiographies of former slaves Washington and Douglass, plus Du Bois' landmark essays, which counsel an aggressive approach to civil rights.
No people are more talked about and no people seem more imperfectly understood. Those who see us every day seem not to know us."—Frederick Douglass on African Americans "There is no negro problem. The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough, to live up to their own constitution."—on civil rights "Woman should have justice as well as praise, and if she is to dispense with either, she can better afford to part with the latter than the former."—on women "The thing worse than rebellion is the thing that causes rebellion."—on rebellion "A man is never lost while he still earnestly thinks himself worth saving; and as with a man, so with a nation."—on perseverance "I am ever pleased to see a man rise from among the people. Every such man is prophetic of the good time coming."—on Lincoln Frederick Douglass, a runaway Maryland slave, was witness to and participant in some of the most important events in the history of the American Republic between the years of 1818 and 1895. Beginning his long public career in 1841 as an agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Douglass subsequently edited four newspapers and championed many reform movements. An advocate of morality, economic accumulation, self-help, and equality, Douglass supported racial pride, constant agitation against racial discrimination, vocational education for blacks, and nonviolent passive resistance. He was the only man who played a prominent role at the 1848 meeting in Seneca Falls that formally launched the women's rights movement. He was a temperance advocate and opposed capital punishment, lynching, debt peonage, and the convict lease system. A staunch defender of the Liberty and Republican parties, Douglass held several political appointments, frequently corresponded with leading politicians, and advised Presidents Lincoln, Grant, Hayes, Garfield, and Harrison. He met with John Brown before his abortive raid on Harpers Ferry, helped to recruit African American troops during the Civil War, attended most national black conventions held between 1840 and 1895, and served as U.S. ambassador to Haiti. Frederick Douglass has left one of the most extensive bodies of significant and quotable public statements of any figure in American history. In the Words of Frederick Douglass is a rich trove of quotations from Douglass. The editors have compiled nearly seven hundred quotations by Douglass that demonstrate the breadth and strength of his intellect as well as the eloquence with which he expressed his political and ethical principles.
Introduction by Kwame Anthony Appiah Commentary by Jean Fagan Yellin and Margaret Fuller This Modern Library edition combines two of the most important African American slave narratives—crucial works that each illuminate and inform the other. Frederick Douglass’s Narrative, first published in 1845, is an enlightening and incendiary text. Born into slavery, Douglass became the preeminent spokesman for his people during his life; his narrative is an unparalleled account of the dehumanizing effects of slavery and Douglass’s own triumph over it. Like Douglass, Harriet Jacobs was born into slavery, and in 1861 she published Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, now recognized as the most comprehensive antebellum slave narrative written by a woman. Jacobs’s account broke the silence on the exploitation of African American female slaves, and it remains essential reading. Includes a Modern Library Reading Group Guide
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 urgently as ever. Edited by renowned scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Pulitzer Prize–nominated historian John Stauffer, The Portable Frederick Douglass includes the full range of Douglass’s works: the complete Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, as well as extracts from My Bondage and My Freedom and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass; The Heroic Slave, one of the first works of African American fiction; the brilliant speeches that launched his political career and that constitute the greatest oratory of the Civil War era; and his journalism, which ranges from cultural and political critique (including his early support for women’s equality) to law, history, philosophy, literature, art, and international affairs, including a never-before-published essay on Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture. The Portable Frederick Douglass is the latest addition in a series of African American classics curated by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. First published in 2008, the series reflects a selection of great works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by African and African American authors introduced and annotated by leading scholars and acclaimed writers in new or updated editions for Penguin Classics. In his series essay, “What Is an African American Classic?” Gates provides a broader view of the canon of classics of African American literature available from Penguin Classics and beyond. Gates writes, “These texts reveal the human universal through the African American particular: all true art, all classics do this; this is what ‘art’ is, a revelation of that which makes each of us sublimely human, rendered in the minute details of the actions and thoughts and feelings of a compelling character embedded in a time and place.” For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
DISCOVER ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT ACCOUNTS OF SLAVERY IN NINETEENTH CENTURY AMERICA One of history’s greatest crimes, the American slave trade led to the suffering of untold numbers of men and women. But how can we better understand the lives and experiences of those who endured it? Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is a harrowing first hand look at the brutal indignities of slavery in the nineteenth century, and the society that allowed it to happen. To better understand our shared present, we need to fully grapple with our difficult past. Douglass’ Narrative is a key piece of that puzzle. An insightful introduction by Debra Newman Ham, a former Black history archivist for the Library of Congress, analyzes the text and looks at the key events in Douglass’ life.
The journalism and personal writings of the great American abolitionist and reformer Frederick Douglass Launching the fourth series of The Frederick Douglass Papers, designed to introduce readers to the broadest range of Frederick Douglass's writing, this volume contains sixty-seven pieces by Douglass, including articles written for North American Review and the New York Independent, as well as unpublished poems, book transcriptions, and travel diaries. Spanning from the 1840s to the 1890s, the documents reproduced in this volume demonstrate how Douglass's writing evolved over the five decades of his public life. Where his writing for publication was concerned mostly with antislavery advocacy, his unpublished works give readers a glimpse into his religious and personal reflections. The writings are organized chronologically and accompanied by annotations offering biographical information as well as explanations of events mentioned and literary or historical allusions.
The selected correspondence of the great American abolitionist and reformer dating from the immediate post-Civil War years This third volume of Frederick Douglass's Correspondence Series exhibits Douglass at the peak of his political influence. It chronicles his struggle to persuade the nation to fulfill its promises to the former slaves and all African Americans in the tempestuous years of Reconstruction. Douglass's career changed dramatically with the end of the Civil War and the long-sought after emancipation of American slaves; the subsequent transformation in his public activities is reflected in his surviving correspondence. In these letters, from 1866 to 1880, Douglass continued to correspond with leading names in antislavery and other reform movements on both sides of the Atlantic, and political figures began to make up an even larger share of his correspondents. The Douglass Papers staff located 817 letters for this time period and selected 242, or just under 30 percent, of them for publication. The remaining 575 letters are summarized in the volume's calendar.
A second volume of the collected correspondence of the great African-American reformer and abolitionist features correspondence written during the Civil War years The second collection of meticulously edited correspondence with abolitionist, author, statesman, and former slave Frederick Douglass covers the years leading up to the Civil War through the close of the conflict, offering readers an illuminating portrait of an extraordinary American and the turbulent times in which he lived. An important contribution to historical scholarship, the documents offer fascinating insights into the abolitionist movement during wartime and the author's relationship to Abraham Lincoln and other prominent figures of the era.
Today Frederick Douglass is best known for his autobiographies; but while he was alive he was known as a fiery orator who was always in demand. Collected here are ten of Frederick Douglass' addresses. And while it is impossible to hear Frederick Douglass speak today, these addresses still manage to instill a sense of just how powerful and intelligent Douglass was. Included here are: The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro, What the Black Man Wants, Appeal to Congress for Impartial Suffrage, The Color Line, The Future of the Colored Race, A Plea for Free Speech, The Church and Prejudice, Fighting Rebels with Only One Hand, The Negro Exodus from the Gulf States, and The Unconstitutionality of Slavery.
Author, abolitionist, political speaker, and philosopher,Frederick Douglass was a pivotal figure in the decades ofstruggle leading up to the Civil War and the EmancipationProclamation. This inexpensive compilation of his speeches— including “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” (1852)and “Self-Made Men” (1859) — adds vital detail to the portraitof this great historical figure.Dover Original
A collection of twenty of Frederick Douglass’s most important orations This volume brings together twenty of Frederick Douglass’s most historically significant speeches on a range of issues, including slavery, abolitionism, civil rights, sectionalism, temperance, women’s rights, economic development, and immigration. Douglass’s oratory is accompanied by speeches that he considered influential, his thoughts on giving public lectures and the skills necessary to succeed in that endeavor, commentary by his contemporaries on his performances, and modern-day assessments of Douglass’s effectiveness as a public speaker and advocate.
I have neither been miserable because of the ill-feeling of those about me, nor indifferent to popular approval, and I think, upon the whole, I have passed a tolerably cheerful and even joyful life. I have never felt myself isolated since I entered the field to plead the cause of the slave, and demand equal rights for all. In every town and city where it has been my lot to speak, there have been raised up for me friends of both colors to cheer and strengthen me in my work. I have always felt, too, that I had on my side all the invisible forces of the moral government of the universe. -from Chapter 17: "Incidents and Events" American icon FREDERICK DOUGLASS (1818-1895)-editor, orator, author, statesman, and reformer-told his life story three times. First, in 1845's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, he felt it necessary to explain how a man born in chains could rise to national prominence and respect. In 1855, with My Bondage and My Freedom, he expanded upon his story with a more in-depth and even more thoughtful exploration of his life as a slave and his journey to escape it. (Both astonishing-and essential-books are also available from Cosimo.) His third autobiography, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass-first published in 1881 and presented here in the thoroughly revised 1892 edition-is his most reflective, offering the perspective of a man at the end of long life well lived. Douglass retells the story of his childhood and escape from slavery, offering details that he could not previously reveal, with friends, family, and other innocents still in the thrall of slavemasters. Now, though, with the Civil War and Emancipation well behind the nation, Douglass can also offer more provocative analyses of his own battle for personal freedom and his fight for the very soul of the nation. This classic of African-American literature and of 19th-century American history is a must-read for anyone wishing to consider himself well-read.
The impassioned abolitionist and eloquent orator provides graphic descriptions of his childhood and horrifying experiences as a slave as well as a harrowing record of his dramatic escape to the North and eventual freedom.
Frederick Douglass was born enslaved in February 1818, but from this most humble of beginnings, he rose to become a world-famous orator, newspaper editor, and champion of the rights of women and African Americans. He not only survived slavery to live in freedom but also became an outspoken critic of the institution and an active participant in the U.S. political system. Douglass advised presidents of the United States and formally represented his country in the diplomatic corps. He was the most prominent African American activist of the nineteenth century, and he left a treasure trove of documentary evidence detailing his life in slavery and achievements in freedom. This volume gathers and interprets valuable selections from a variety of Douglass’s writings, including speeches, editorials, correspondence, and autobiographies.
Life and Times was first published in 1881, revised and expanded in 1892. Although Douglass wrote two other autobiographies, Narrative (1845) and My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), he clearly deemed this comprehensive treatment of his life his most important autobiography. This edition reintroduces readers to a long-neglected essential of African-American literature. Life and Times revisits the events of his earlier autobiographies, demonstrating their connection to later events in his life: his political abolitionism, his connection to John Brown, the Civil War, his relationship with Abraham Lincoln, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow Era, and the Gilded Age.
Overview Here in one omnibus edition are all three of Frederick Douglass' landmark autobiographies. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is one of the most influential autobiographies ever written. This classic did as much as or more than any other book to motivate the abolitionist to continue to fight for freedom in American. Frederick Douglass was born a slave, he escaped a brutal system and through sheer force of will educated himself and became an abolitionist, editor, orator, author, statesman, and reformer. This is one of the most unlikely and powerful success stories ever written. In Frederick Douglass' autobiography My Bondage and My Freedom we can see the power of literacy and belief. Douglass transforms himself from slave to an abolitionist, journalist, orator, and one of the most powerful voices to emerge from the American civil rights movement with little more than force of will. His breadth of his accomplishments gave hope to generations of people who came after him in their fight for civil rights.
The illustrated version of America's most famous autobiography. Famous orator and former slave Frederick Douglass wrote the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, an 1845 memoir and treatise on the abolition of slavery. In describing the facts of his life in clear and concise prose, he fueled the abolitionist movement of the early nineteenth century in the United States. In this seminal work, Douglass details the cruelty of slave holders, how slaves were supposed to behave in the presence of their masters, the fear that kept many slaves where they were, and the punishments received by any slave who dared to tell the truth about their treatment. He learned to read and write while still a slave but also suffered at the hands of whites. He was starved, worked the fields until he collapsed, was beaten for collapsing, was jailed for two years after planning an escape attempt, and nearly lost his left eye in an attack while he was an apprentice in a shipyard. Douglass succeeded in escaping to the North and finding his own freedom but kept many details of his journey a secret to protect those who helped him and, hopefully, allow others to escape. Augmented by large sidebars written by soldiers, statesmen, and abolitionists from the antebellum period, as well as pieces by well-known historians and prominent African-Americans, and some new pieces by current historians and writers, this richly illustrated edition of this classic American autobiography sheds new light on Douglass's famous text for a new generation of readers.
The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass was Douglass' third autobiography. In it he was able to go into greater detail about his life as a slave and his escape from slavery, as he and his family were no longer in any danger from the reception of his work. It is also the only of Douglass' autobiographies to discuss his life during and after the Civil War, including his encounters with American Presidents such as Lincoln, Grant, and Garfield.
Library of America presents the biggest, most comprehensive trade edition of Frederick Douglass's writings ever published Edited by Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer David W. Blight, this Library of America edition is the largest single-volume selection of Frederick Douglass’s writings ever published, presenting the full texts of thirty-four speeches and sixty-seven pieces of journalism. (A companion Library of America volume, Frederick Douglass: Autobiographies, gathers his three memoirs.) With startling immediacy, these writings chart the evolution of Douglass’s thinking about slavery and the U.S. Constitution; his eventual break with William Lloyd Garrison and many other abolitionists on the crucial issue of disunion; the course of his complicated relationship with Abraham Lincoln; and his deep engagement with the cause of women’s suffrage. Here are such powerful works as “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” Douglass’s incandescent jeremiad skewering the hypocrisy of the slaveholding republic; “The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered,” a full-throated refutation of nineteenthcentury racial pseudoscience; “Is it Right and Wise to Kill a Kidnapper?,” an urgent call for forceful opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act; “How to End the War,” in which Douglass advocates, just days after the fall of Fort Sumter, for the raising of Black troops and the military destruction of slavery; “There Was a Right Side in the Late War,” Douglass’s no-holds-barred attack on the “Lost Cause” mythology of the Confederacy; and “Lessons of the Hour,” an impassioned denunciation of lynching and disenfranchisement in the emerging Jim Crow South. As a special feature the volume also presents Douglass’s only foray into fiction, the 1853 novella “The Heroic Slave,” about Madison Washington, leader of the real-life insurrection on board the domestic slave-trading ship Creole in 1841 that resulted in the liberation of more than a hundred enslaved people. Editorial features include detailed notes identifying Douglass’s many scriptural and cultural references, a newly revised chronology of his life and career, and an index.
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 culture into which Frederick Douglass was born. It brought him to the forefront of the antislavery movement and drew thousands, black and white, to the cause. Written in part as a response to skeptics who refused to believe that so articulate an orator could ever have been a slave, the Narrative reveals the eloquence and fierce intelligence that made Douglass a brilliantly effective spokesman for abolition and equal rights, as he shapes an inspiring vision of self-realization in the face of unimaginable odds.
In addition to a thoughtful selection of the essays, speeches, and autobiographical writings of Frederick Douglass, this anthology provides an illuminating Introduction; a timeline of Douglass' life; footnotes that introduce individuals, quotations, and events; and a selected bibliography.
This volume of The Frederick Douglass Papers represents the first of a four-volume series of the selected correspondence of the great American abolitionist and reformer. Douglass’s correspondence was richly varied, from relatively obscure slaveholders and fugitive slaves to poets and politicians, including Horace Greeley, William H. Seward, Susan B. Anthony, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The letters acquaint us with Douglass’s many roles—politician, abolitionist, diplomat, runaway slave, women’s rights advocate, and family man—and include many previously unpublished letters between Douglass and members of his family. Douglass stood at the epicenter of the political, social, intellectual, and cultural issues of antebellum America. This collection of Douglass’s early correspondence illuminates not only his growth as an activist and writer, but the larger world of the times and the abolition movement as well.
This ebook collection has been designed and formatted to the highest digital standards and adjusted for readability on all devices. "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass" is s generally held to be the most famous of a number of narratives written by former slaves during the same period. In factual detail, the text recount Douglass's life as a slave and his ambition to become a free man and is considered to be one of the most influential pieces of literature to fuel the abolitionist movement of the early 19th century in the United States. My Bondage and My Freedom is the second of three autobiographies written by Douglass, and is mainly an expansion of his first (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass), discussing in greater detail his transition from bondage to liberty. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass is Frederick Douglass' third autobiography in which he gave more details about his life as a slave and his escape from slavery in this volume than he could in his two previous autobiographies. Frederick Douglass (1818 –1895) was an African-American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York, gaining note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writings.
Enriched Classics offer readers accessible editions of great works of literature enhanced by helpful notes and commentary. Each book includes educational tools alongside the text, enabling students and readers alike to gain a deeper and more developed understanding of the writer and their work. Frederick Douglass’s powerful autobiographical account of life in bondage, his triumphant escape to freedom, and his analysis of slavery as a condition. Enriched Classics enhance your engagement by introducing and explaining the historical and cultural significance of the work, the author’s personal history, and what impact this book had on subsequent scholarship. Each book includes discussion questions that help clarify and reinforce major themes and reading recommendations for further research. Read with confidence.
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