Bøger i The John Harvard Library serien

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.

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.

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.

This novel was intended to be far sunnier than The Scarlet Letter and to illustrate "the folly" of tumbling down on posterity "an avalanche of ill-gotten gold, or real estate." Critics have faulted the book for explaining away hereditary guilt or for a contradictory denial of it, but Denis Donoghue offers fresh appreciation of the novel.

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.

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.