THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA
The Library of America, a nonprofit publisher and educational outreach entity, was founded in 1979 with grants from the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Although its mission was a well-grounded and no-nonsense business approach to publishing, it essentially was fulfilling a long-held dream by the great critic Edmund Wilson and others. The United States of America, they felt, ought to have a publications series of high standards and high quality of production for its national literature, and it ought to reflect the diversity and traditions of all of its writing.
The first books appeared in 1982, when I first began selling new books in an independent book store here in Carlisle. (The founding of Whistlestop Bookshop was three years away.) I still have my copies of Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman. I won’t tell you how many of the 300+ to date I have acquired, but I am happy to say I never regretted one. The books are remarkably beautiful and efficient and scholarly and finely-made. They are sometimes the only respectable edition available (beware of photo-offset print-on-demand editions!). The accompanying chronologies and notes and textual discussions of every volume are a joy and an education. I cannot praise them too highly.
This listing is what I carry in the store. If you would like other volumes, send me an e-mail or call the store. Enjoy browsing, buying, and owning landmark definitive editions of great writers or great American subjects.
The listings are alphabetical by author except for new or recent anthologies at the top. Older anthologies are at the bottom of the page.
All James Baldwin titles and Ursula K. Le Guin titles are on the respective pages of the authors.
Reconstruction: Voices from America's First Great Struggle for Racial Equality
Reconstruction: Voices from America's First Great Struggle for Racial Equality
The defeat of the Confederacy and the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 brought about the final destruction of slavery in the United States. Americans were confronted for the first time with the possibility of creating a republic dedicated to the principle of racial equality. What followed over the next twelve years was one of the most complex, inspiring, and ultimately tragic eras in American history. Reconstruction: Voices from America’s First Great Struggle for Racial Equality brings this tumultuous and fateful period to dramatic and violent life through the vivid testimony of more than sixty participants and observers. Here is a vitally important book for anyone interested in this crucial period and its inescapable relevance for today.
Historian Brooks D. Simpson presents more than 120 speeches, letters, newspaper and magazine articles, reports, and testimonies by famous figures—Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Andrew Johnson, Thaddeus Stevens, Ulysses S. Grant, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Mark Twain, Albion Tourgée—as well as dozens of lesser-known men and women, black and white, northern and southern. Through their words, readers experience the fierce contest between President Andrew Johnson and the Republican Congress that led to the nation’s first presidential impeachment; the adoption of the revolutionary Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments; the growth of black political power in the South; and the murderous violence of the Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist groups that, combined with northern weariness, indifference, and hostility, eventually resulted in the restoration of white supremacy in the former Confederate states. Testimony by Cynthia Townsend, Maria Carter, and Margaret Ann Caldwell records the relentless cruelty of white mobs and assassins, while speeches by Joseph H. Rainey, Robert Brown Elliott, and Richard Harvey Cain demonstrate the eloquence, passion, and courage with which the first African American congressmen addressed the nation in the cause of racial justice.
Reconstructionincludes a chronology of events, brief biographies of the writers and helpful historical notes, full-color endpaper illustrations, and an index.
Brooks D. Simpson, editor, is ASU Foundation Professor of History at Arizona State University and the author of Let Us Have Peace: Ulysses S. Grant and the Politics of War and Reconstruction, 1861–1868, The Reconstruction Presidents, and Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph over Adversity, 1822–1865. He is a co-editor of The Civil War: Told by Those Who Lived It, a unique firsthand narrative published in four volumes by the Library of America.
This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.