Books in the The John Harvard Library series

Dark, weird, psychologically complex, Hawthorne's short fiction continues to fascinate readers. Brenda Wineapple has made a generous selection of Hawthorne's stories, including some of his best-known tales as well as other, less-often anthologized gems.

No book more vividly explains the horror of American slavery and the emotional impetus behind the antislavery movement than Douglass's Narrative. In his Introduction, Robert B. Stepto reexamines the extraordinary life and achievement of a man who escaped slavery to become a leading abolitionist and one of America's most important writers.

These eight reports by white settlers held captive by Indians have gripped the imaginations of American writers through our history. The book presents the best of the New England narratives, delineating the social and ideological struggle between captors and settlers, and constituting a dramatic rendition of a spiritual struggle for redemption.

George Perkins Marsh's Man and Nature was the first book to attack the American myth of the superabundance and the inexhaustibility of the earth. It was, as Lewis Mumford said, "the fountainhead of the conservation movement," and few books since have had such an influence on the way men view and use land.

The effect of this "single, immortal, and dubious anecdote," and others like it, has made this book one of the most influential in the history of American folklore. The first republication of the book since 1927, it is unique in its detailed commentary on Weems and other biographers of Washington.

The Key of Liberty offers, better than any book yet published, a grassroots view of the rise of democratic opposition in the new nation. It sheds considerable light on the popular culture-literary, religious, and profane-of the epoch.

For 350 years Governor John Winthrop's journal has been recognized as the central source for the history of Massachusetts in the 1630s and 1640s. This full-scale, unabridged edition uses the manuscript volumes of the first and third notebooks, and James Savage's transcription of the middle notebook (accidentally destroyed in 1825).

Though the discussion of sectional and racial problems is an important element in the book, A Fool's Errand has merit as a dramatic narrative-with its love affair, and its moments of pathos, suffering, and tragedy. This combination of tract and melodrama made it a bestseller in its day.

The John Harvard Library presents the first American edition of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, one of the first non-romantic novels of the Civil War-and the first 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.

Davis gathers together important selections from Williams's public and private writings on religious liberty, illustrating how this renegade Puritan radically reinterpreted Christian moral theology and the events of his day in a powerful argument for freedom of conscience and the separation of church and state.

The nineteenth century was the heyday of furious contention between American political parties, and Joel Silbey has recaptured the drama and substance of those battles in a representative sampling of party pamphlets. The pamphlets demonstrate how, for this fifty-year period, political parties were surrogates for American demands and values.

The 19th century was the heyday of furious contention between American political parties, and Silbey has recaptured the drama and substance of those battles in a sampling of party pamphlets. The nature of political controversy, as well as the substance of politics, is embedded in these party documents which both united and divided Americans.

Published in London just as the idea of an "American" was becoming a reality, Letters introduced Europeans to America's landscape, customs, and then-new people. Moore's reader's edition situates these twelve letters, which shift from hope to disillusion, in the context of thirteen other essays representative of Crevecoeur's writings in English.

The Marble Faun mingles fable with fact in a mysterious tale of American artists liberated from New England mores in Rome. Hawthorne's novel is ultimately less about freedom than its costs. The John Harvard Library edition reproduces the authoritative text of The Marble Faun in The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

This landmark anthology collects speeches, letters, newspapers, journals, poems, and songs to demonstrate that John Brown's actions at Harpers Ferry altered the course of history. Without Brown, the Civil War probably would have been delayed by four years and emancipation movements in Brazil, Cuba, even Russia might have been disrupted.

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.

"Common Sense".

Unlike Whitman, Dickinson, or Wordsworth, Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (1821-1873) never wanted to start a revolution in poetry. This edition of Tuckerman's poetry includes several important poems omitted in "The Complete Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman".

Anne Bradstreet was one of our earliest feminists and the first true poet in the American colonies. This collection of her extant poetry and prose includes an introduction that sketches the poet's life.

Draws upon the author's experiences at Brook Farm, the short-lived utopian community where Hawthorne spent much of 1841.

A work of photojournalism that deals with the New York City's slums in the 1880s. It includes the images of the squalid living conditions of 'the other half', who might well have inhabited another country.

Jim Crow has long represented America's imperfect union. This edition of the earliest Jim Crow plays and songs presents essential performances assembling backtalk, banter, masquerade, and dance into the diagnostic American style. They celebrate blackness in a Republic that failed to unite until Americans agreed to disagree over Jim Crow's meaning.

Hawthorne's greatest romance is often simplistically seen as a timeless tale of desire, sin, and redemption. In his Introduction, Michael J. Colacurcio argues that it is also a serious historical novel. This edition reproduces the authoritative text of The Scarlet Letter in the Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Published serially in New York papers between October 1787 and August 1788, the 85 Federalist Papers written by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay under the pseudonym "Publius" advocated ratification of the proposed U.S. Constitution. The John Harvard Library text reproduces that of the first book edition (1788), modernizing spelling and capitalization.

The most controversial antislavery novel written in antebellum America, and a best-seller of the 19th century, this novel is credited with intensifying sectional conflict leading to the Civil War. In his introduction, Bromwich places the book in its Victorian contexts and reminds us why it is an enduring work of literary and moral imagination.

This Faustian tale of the spiritual disintegration of a young minister, written in the 1890s, deals subtly and powerfully with the impact of science on innocence and the collective despair that marked the transition into the modern age.

American Protest Literature presents sources from eleven protest movements-political, social, and cultural-from the Revolution to abolition to gay rights to antiwar protest. In this impressive work, Zoe Trodd provides an enlightening and inspiring survey of this most American form of literature.