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Title details for Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass - Available

Frederick Douglass

Speeches & Writings

by Frederick Douglass
David W. Blight
ebook
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Library of America presents the biggest, most comprehensive trade edition of Frederick Douglass's writings ever published
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. (A companion Library of America volume, Frederick Douglass: Autobiographies, gathers his three memoirs.) With startling immediacy, these writings chart the evolution of Douglass’s thinking about slavery and the U.S. Constitution; his eventual break with William Lloyd Garrison and many other abolitionists on the crucial issue of disunion; the course of his complicated relationship with Abraham Lincoln; and his deep engagement with the cause of women’s suffrage.
 
Here are such powerful works as “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” Douglass’s incandescent jeremiad skewering the hypocrisy of the slaveholding republic; “The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered,” a full-throated refutation of nineteenthcentury racial pseudoscience; “Is it Right and Wise to Kill a Kidnapper?,” an urgent call for forceful opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act; “How to End the War,” in which Douglass advocates, just days after the fall of Fort Sumter, for the raising of Black troops and the military destruction of slavery; “There Was a Right Side in the Late War,” Douglass’s no-holds-barred  attack on the “Lost Cause” mythology of the Confederacy; and “Lessons of the Hour,” an impassioned denunciation of lynching and disenfranchisement in the emerging Jim Crow South.
 
As a special feature the volume also presents Douglass’s only foray into fiction, the 1853 novella “The Heroic Slave,” about Madison Washington, leader of the real-life insurrection on board the domestic slave-trading ship Creole in 1841 that resulted in the liberation of more than a hundred enslaved people. Editorial features include detailed notes identifying Douglass’s many scriptural and cultural references, a newly revised chronology of his life and career, and an index.
 
 

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    September 27, 2022

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9781598537239

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9781598537239
      • File size: 1256 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from August 27, 2018
      Yale historian Blight’s study of runaway slave-turned-abolitionist Frederick Douglass—a “radical patriot” and “prophet of freedom,” a “great voice of America’s terrible transformation from slavery to freedom”—benefits not only from Blight’s decadeslong immersion in the history of American slavery and abolitionism, but also from his access to privately owned sources unavailable to previous scholars. To Blight, Douglass’s character and ideology were rife with paradox, and in this huge and meticulously detailed study he unpacks apparent contradictions: Douglass’s unexpected happiness as an urban slave in Baltimore; his devotion to his wife, Anna, and their children, whom he rarely saw due to his constant travels as an abolitionist orator; his love for the promise he saw in America and hatred of how slavery had degraded it; his repeated revisions of his autobiographical writings as he reinterpreted his experiences; his second marriage to a white woman, an act both socially transgressive and opposed by his children. The Douglass who emerges from this massive work is not always heroic, or even likable, but Blight illuminates his personal struggles and achievements to emphasize what an extraordinary person he was. Though one might wonder, given Douglass’s extensive writings and the numerous works of scholarship discussing him, about the need for yet another biography, it turns out that there was much more to be learned about him.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      January 2, 1995
      Extracts from writings and speeches by the 19th-century abolitionist are paired with Alcorn's dramatic linocuts. (Jan.) Melba Patillo Beals, who as a teenager in 1957 became a key player in a critical civil rights struggle, has abridged for young readers her affecting adult title Warriors Don't Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock's Central High School (Pocket/Archway, paper $3.99, ages 11-up ISBN 0-671-89900-7). The original edition was reviewed in Nonfiction Forecasts, March 28, 1994. (Feb.). African American children star in one new and one reissued title added to HarperFestival's Let's Read Aloud series: Eloise Greenfield's Honey, I Love, originally published in 1978, receives homey new illustrations by Jan Spivey Gilchrist, who also provides the artwork for Greenfield's bucolic On My Horse ($7.95 each, ages 2-5, 20p, ISBN 0-694-00579-7; -00583-5, Jan.).

Formats

  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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