"The definitive, dramatic biography of the most important African-American of the nineteenth century: Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who became the greatest orator of his day and one of the leading abolitionists and writers of the era. As a young man Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) escaped from slavery in Baltimore, Maryland. He was fortunate to have been taught to read by his slave owner mistress, and he would go on to become one of the major...

No historical event has left as deep an imprint on America's collective memory as the Civil War. In the war's aftermath, Americans had to embrace and cast off a traumatic past. David Blight explores the perilous path of remembering and forgetting, and reveals its tragic costs to race relations and America's national reunion. In 1865, confronted with a ravaged landscape and a torn America, the North and South began a slow and painful process of reconciliation....

"This collection of essays by scholar-activist W.E.B. Du Bois is a masterpiece in the African American canon. Du Bois, arguably the most influential African American leader of the early twentieth century, offers insightful commentary on black history, racism, and the struggles of black Americans following emancipation. In his groundbreaking work, the author presciently writes that 'the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,'...

This volume is a memoir written by famous American orator and ex-slave, Frederick Douglass (1818-1895). This work is 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 describes the events of Douglass' life 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,...

"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. As a special feature the volume also presents Douglas's only foray into fiction, the 1853 novella "The Heroic Slave," about Madison Washington, leader of the real-life insurrection...