American Antislavery Writings: Colonial Beginnings to Emancipation (LOA #233) (Library of America)

For the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, here’s a assortment of writings that charts our nation’s lengthy, heroic confrontation with its most toxic evil. It’s an inspiring ethical and political battle whose evolution parallels the story of America itself. To advance their trigger, the opponents of slavery employed each obtainable literary kind: fiction and poetry, essay and autobiography, sermons, pamphlets, speeches, hymns, performs, even kids’s literature. That is the primary anthology to take the complete measure of a physique of writing that spans almost two centuries and, exceptionally for its time, embraced writers black and white, female and male. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Phillis Wheatley, and Olaudah Equiano supply unique, even revolutionary, eighteenth century responses to slavery. With the nineteenth century, an already numerous motion turns into much more assorted: the impassioned rhetoric of Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison joins the fiction of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa Could Alcott, and William Wells Brown; memoirs of former slaves stand alongside protest poems by John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Lydia Sigourney; nameless editorials complement speeches by statesmen equivalent to Charles Sumner and Abraham Lincoln.

Options useful notes, a chronology of the antislavery motion, and a16-page shade insert of illustrations.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an impartial nonprofit cultural group based in 1979 to protect our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and maintaining completely in print, America’s greatest and most important writing. The Library of America collection contains greater than 300 volumes so far, authoritative editions that common 1,000 pages in size, function material covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that can final for hundreds of years.