In Volume II: Foundations in Democracy, you’ll find early accounts of Native American life in the journals of artist George Catlin; colonial narratives from St. John de Crevecouer (Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth Century America); the captivity narratives of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs (Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl), and Sojourner Truth; the autobiographies, memoirs, and notes of Ulysses S. Grant, Thomas Jefferson, William Tecumseh Sherman, Abraham Lincoln, and Benjamin Franklin; the essays and poetry of Emerson; The Federalist Papers by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, considered by Thomas Jefferson to be the best commentary on the principle of government ever written; the transcendentalist writings of Henry David Thoreau (including "Civil Disobedience," perhaps the most famous essay in American literature); and much more.
From the Age of Reason through Romanticism, Transcendentalism, the Civil War, the western movement of the 1800s, to the dawn of the 20th century, the canvas of American history bursts forth with the ingenuity, exuberance, and democratic spirit that is the foundation of the nation.
Included are 43 titles:
The Letters of John and Abigail Adams by John and Abigail Adams
The Portable John Adams by John Adams
North American Indians by George Catlin
The Loss of the Ship Essex, Sunk by a Whale by Owen Chase
Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America by J. Hector St. John De Crevecoeur
Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana
Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
Chronicle of the Narvaez Expedition by Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca
American Notes for General Circulation by Charles Dickens
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave by Frederick Douglass
My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass
Nature and Selected Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings by Olaudah Equiano
The Autobiography and Other Writings by Benjamin Franklin
Personal Memoirs by Ulysses S. Grant
The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay
Army Life in a Black Regiment by Thomas Wentworth Higginson
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs
Pragmatism and Other Writings by William James
The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James
Notes on the State of Virginia by Thomas Jefferson
Behind the Scenes by Elizabeth Keckley
The Journals of Lewis and Clark by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
Rights of Man by Thomas Paine
Common Sense by Thomas Paine
The Thomas Paine Reader by Thomas Paine
The Oregon Trail by Francis Parkman
The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons by John Wesley Powell
The Private Journal of William Reynolds by William Reynolds
Memoirs by William Tecumseh Sherman
A Texas Cowboy by Charles A. Siringo
The Falcon by John Tanner
A Year in Thoreau's Journal by Henry David Thoreau
Walden and Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers by Henry David Thoreau
Domestic Manners of the Americans by Fanny Trollope
Narrative of Sojourner Truth by Sojourner Truth
Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington
Against Slavery: An Abolitionist Reader
Colonial American Travel Narratives
Early American Writing
Women's Indian Captivity Narratives
Women's Early American Historical Narratives
