* Selected as One of the Best Books of the 21st Century by The New York Times * Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History *“Extraordinary…a great American biography” (The New Yorker) of the most important African American of the 19th 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)...

The newly discovered slave narratives of John Washington and Wallace Turnage—and their harrowing and empowering journey to emancipation.Slave narratives, among the most powerful records of our past, are extremely rare, with only fifty-five surviving post-Civil War. This book is a major new addition to this imperative part of American history—the firsthand accounts of two slaves, John Washington and Wallace Turnage, who through a combination of int...

New research on the long, shared struggle for freedom by people of African descent in the Detroit River borderland from a uniquely bi-national perspective.As the major gateway into British North America for travelers on the Underground Railroad, the U.S./Canadian border along the Detroit River was a boundary that determined whether thousands of enslaved people of African descent could reach a place of freedom and opportunity. In A Fluid Frontier: Slavery, Resis...

"A fascinating collection of essays" by eminent historians exploring how we teach, remember, and confront the history and legacy of American slavery ( Booklist Online).In recent years, the culture wars have called into question the way America's history of slavery is depicted in books, films, television programs, historical sites, and museums. In the first attempt to examine the historiography of slavery, this unique collection of essays looks at recent co...

An Enlightenment-era collection of essays, speeches, poems and dialogues that educated schoolboys and inspired Frederick Douglass & Ralph Waldo Emerson.First published in 1797, The Columbian Orator helped shape the American mind for the next half century, going through some twenty-three editions and totaling 200,000 copies in sales. The book was read by virtually every American schoolboy in the first half of the 19th century. As a slave youth, Frederick Dou...

Winner of the Bancroft PrizeWinner of the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln PrizeWinner of the Merle Curti awardWinner of the Frederick Douglass PrizeNo 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 ...

The pathbreaking autobiography of America’s most influential abolitionist and former slave, now with an introduction from Pulitzer Prize–winning Douglass biographer David W. BlightFrederick Douglass was born into slavery in 1818 on a farm on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. He lived in bondage for two decades, experiencing nearly every brutal treatment, physical and psychological, that a young slave could face—but he also learned to read, a key that would unlock his freed...

Born into slavery in 1818, Frederick Douglass escaped to freedom and became a passionate advocate for abolition and social change and the foremost spokesperson for the nation’s enslaved African American population in the years preceding the Civil War. My Bondage and My Freedom is Douglass’s masterful recounting of his remarkable life and a fiery condemnation of a political and social system that would reduce people to property and keep an entire race in chains.This classic...

The earliest known prison memoir by an African American writer—recently discovered and authenticated by a team of Yale scholars—sheds light on the longstanding connection between race and incarceration in America.“[A] harrowing [portrait] of life behind bars . . . part confession, part jeremiad, part lamentation, part picaresque novel (reminiscent, at times, of Dickens and Defoe).”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York TimesNAMED ...

This collection of eleven original essays interrogates the concept of freedom and recenters our understanding of the process of emancipation. Who defined freedom, and what did freedom mean to nineteenth-century African Americans, both during and after slavery? Did freedom just mean the absence of constraint and a widening of personal choice, or did it extend to the ballot box, to education, to equality of opportunity? In examining such questions, rather than defining every aspect of postem...

Library of America presents the biggest, most comprehensive trade edition of Frederick Douglass's writings ever publishedEdited 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...

*“The ghosts of the Civil War never leave us, as David Blight knows perhaps better than anyone, and in this superb book he masterfully unites two distant but inextricably bound events.”*―Ken BurnsStanding on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, a century after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, Martin Luther King, Jr., declared, “One hundred years later, the Negro still is not free.” He delivered this speech just three years after the V...