12 Years a Slave narrates Solomon Northup's kidnapping from freedom into slavery and his eventual restoration to his family. Northup is a literate, skilled violinist and laborer living as a free Black man in Saratoga Springs, New York.
Theme
Race Slavery
57 works in the library take up race slavery, from St. Patrick's Writings to Washington: A Life.
Works
A Disquisition on Government is John C. Calhoun's general theory of constitutional government, completed in 1849 in the last year of his life and published in 1851 by his editor Richard K. Crallé as the first part of volume one of his Works. It was meant as the theoretical introduction to a companion study, A Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States, which the library text omits.
A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia is one of the most important public-health and Black-authored documents of the early United States. Written by Richard Allen and Absalom Jones after the devastating yellow fever epidemic of 1793, it answers Mathew Carey's published accusations that Black Philadelphians profited from disaster or behaved badly during the crisis.
Huckleberry Finn tells his own story in the speech of a half-schooled Missouri boy, some forty or fifty years before the book appeared. After the treasure found at the end of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the Widow Douglas has taken Huck in to civilize him, while her sister Miss Watson drills him in manners and spelling.
Amos Fortune, Free Man is a biographical novel about a real man who was born in Africa around 1710, enslaved in Massachusetts, and died free in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, in 1801. Its ten chapters carry dates.
On 18 September 1895 the Cotton States and International Exposition opened in Atlanta, a fair meant to display the industrial recovery of the South thirty years after the Civil War. Its organizers, who had included a Negro Building among the exhibits, invited Booker T. Washington, principal of Tuskegee Institute, to speak at the opening ceremonies.
This collection pairs Melville's posthumous novella Billy Budd, Sailor with the best of the short fiction he published in magazines in the 1850s, usually including Bartleby, the Scrivener, Benito Cereno and The Encantadas (contents vary by edition). Bartleby (1853) is narrated by a comfortable Wall Street lawyer who hires a pale, quiet copyist.
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483, decided on 17 May 1954, held that state laws requiring or permitting separate public schools for black and white children deny the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.
Candide, ou l'Optimisme follows a guileless young man raised in the castle of the Baron of Thunder-ten-tronckh in Westphalia, where the tutor Pangloss teaches that this is the best of all possible worlds and that everything is for the best. Candide is kicked out of the castle for kissing the Baron's daughter Cunégonde behind a screen, and the rest of the tale tests Pangloss's doctrine against an avalanche of catastrophe.
Democracy in America is Tocqueville's great comparative study of democratic society. The first volume examines American political institutions: township government, federalism, courts, associations, parties, newspapers, religion, and the habits that sustain self-government.
Dred Scott was held as a slave by Dr. John Emerson, an army surgeon who took him in the 1830s to the free state of Illinois and then to Fort Snelling, in a part of the Wisconsin Territory where the Missouri Compromise of 1820 forbade slavery. There Scott married Harriet Robinson, and the family later returned to Missouri.
Early Black Church Sermons and Addresses is an anthology concept rather than one single-author book: it gathers public religious speech from Black Christian leaders before 1950, using only public-domain sermons, convention addresses, ordination sermons, and printed appeals. Its center is the Black church as pulpit, school, refuge, protest platform, mutual-aid network, and political institution.
Washington's Farewell Address and selected letters present leadership as restraint, reputation, and institutional precedent. The Farewell Address, published in 1796 near the end of his presidency, warns against sectional division, party spirit, foreign entanglement, public debt, and attacks on constitutional authority.
Robert Y. Hayne's speech on Foot's resolution is the South Carolina side of the Webster-Hayne debate, the most celebrated exchange in the history of the United States Senate. In December 1829 Senator Samuel Foot of Connecticut proposed an inquiry into limiting the sale of public lands in the West.
Heart of Darkness is told by an unnamed narrator aboard the yawl Nellie, anchored in the Thames estuary at dusk, who reports a story told by his companion, the seaman Charles Marlow. Marlow begins by observing that the Thames, too, was once one of the dark places of the earth when the Romans came.
On the evening of 16 June 1858 the Illinois Republican state convention, meeting in the Hall of Representatives of the State House at Springfield, resolved that Abraham Lincoln was its first and only choice for the United States Senate against the Democratic incumbent, Stephen A. Douglas. Lincoln answered with a carefully written acceptance speech that opened the campaign and set its terms.
I Am Prepared to Die is Nelson Mandela's statement from the dock during the Rivonia Trial in 1964. Facing charges that could lead to death, Mandela uses the courtroom not primarily to plead for mercy but to explain the political history and moral logic of resistance to apartheid.
Martin Luther King Jr. gave this address on 28 August 1963 from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, near the end of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The march, led by A. Philip Randolph and organized chiefly by Bayard Rustin, drew roughly a quarter of a million people to the Mall to press for civil rights legislation then before Congress and for economic opportunity.
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is Harriet Jacobs's account of her life in slavery and escape, told under the name Linda Brent with the names of people and places changed. Linda grows up in a North Carolina town believing herself free until, at six, her mother dies and she learns she is a slave.
Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214, decided on 18 December 1944, upheld the criminal conviction of an American citizen for remaining in his home area after the Army ordered all persons of Japanese ancestry to leave it.
Long Walk to Freedom is Mandela's memoir of childhood, political awakening, resistance, imprisonment, negotiation, and democratic transition. It begins in rural Transkei, with family, Thembu traditions, mission schooling, and the gradual widening of Mandela's world through education and urban life.
Mansfield Park follows Fanny Price, the timid daughter of a poor, overburdened family in Portsmouth, who at ten is taken in by her wealthy aunt and uncle, Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram, at Mansfield Park in Northamptonshire. Her other aunt, the officious and mean Mrs Norris, never lets her forget her dependent status, and her cousins Tom, Maria and Julia treat her with indifference.
Madison's Memorial and Remonstrance and Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention show him as both principled advocate and institutional anatomist. Memorial and Remonstrance, written in 1785 against a Virginia religious assessment bill, argues that religion must be free from state coercion because conscience is prior to civil society and cannot be surrendered to government.
This Douglass entry pairs the 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass with the 1852 speech commonly known as What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? The Narrative tells Douglass's movement from enslaved childhood in Maryland through violence, literacy, skilled labor, resistance, escape, and public abolitionist identity.
On 29 March 1960 the New York Times printed a full-page advertisement titled Heed Their Rising Voices. Paid for by the Committee to Defend Martin Luther King and the Struggle for Freedom in the South, it described student demonstrations, accused unnamed Southern violators of meeting Dr. King's peaceful protests with intimidation, and asked for money.
No Exit and Three Other Plays is an American collection of four of Jean-Paul Sartre's plays from the years of the German occupation and just after it, in which his philosophy of freedom and responsibility is worked out on the stage. Stuart Gilbert translated No Exit and The Flies, and Lionel Abel translated Dirty Hands and The Respectful Prostitute.
No Treason is a series of pamphlets that Lysander Spooner, a Boston lawyer and long-time abolitionist, published at his own expense after the Civil War. He planned a longer series but issued only three numbers, No. I and No. II in 1867 and No. VI, The Constitution of No Authority, in 1870; Nos.
Jefferson's selected writings show the range and tensions of the revolutionary Enlightenment in America. Notes on the State of Virginia began as answers to questions from a French diplomat, but it became Jefferson's most sustained book: a survey of Virginia's geography, natural history, laws, economy, population, slavery, Indigenous peoples, education, religion, and politics.
Of Mice and Men takes place over a few days on a ranch near Soledad in California's Salinas Valley during the Depression. George Milton, small and sharp, and Lennie Small, a huge, immensely strong man with an intellectual disability and the mind of a child, are itinerant ranch hands who travel together, unusual among solitary migrant workers.
Othello is the tragedy of a Moorish general in the service of Venice who is brought, step by step, to murder the wife who loves him. The play opens at night in a Venetian street, where the ensign Iago, furious that Othello has promoted the Florentine Michael Cassio over him, rouses the senator Brabantio with crude news that his daughter Desdemona has eloped with the Moor.
Passing is a short novel in three parts, told in close third person through the consciousness of Irene Redfield, a light-skinned Black woman married to a Harlem physician. It opens with a letter that stirs Irene's memory of an encounter two years earlier.
The Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant were written in a race against death. In the spring of 1884 the brokerage firm of Grant & Ward collapsed through his partner's fraud, leaving the former president living on borrowed money.
In 1890 Louisiana passed the Separate Car Act, requiring railways to provide "equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races" and making it a crime for a passenger to sit in a coach assigned to the other race. A group of New Orleans citizens of color, the Comité des Citoyens, organized a test case.
Abraham Lincoln took the oath for his second term on 4 March 1865 on the East Portico of the Capitol, under a newly finished dome, before a crowd standing in mud after a morning of rain. The war was nearly won: Sherman had marched through Georgia and the Carolinas, Grant held Lee at Petersburg, and Congress had sent the Thirteenth Amendment to the states five weeks earlier.
The Second Treatise, subtitled 'An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government', is the constructive half of Locke's Two Treatises. The First Treatise demolishes Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha, which derived the absolute power of kings from Adam's fatherly dominion.
Whitefield's Selected Sermons preserve the voice of the eighteenth century's most famous evangelical itinerant. His preaching emphasized new birth, heartfelt conversion, human sin, Christ's mercy, and the immediate demand that hearers respond.
Sermons and Letter from Birmingham Jail brings together Martin Luther King Jr.'s public theology and civil-rights argument at their most concentrated. The sermon tradition behind King includes the Black church, biblical prophecy, social gospel, liberal theology, and the cadences of African American sacred speech.
In March 1869 the Louisiana legislature passed an act entitled "An act to protect the health of the city of New Orleans," which chartered the Crescent City Live-Stock Landing and Slaughter-House Company and gave it for twenty-five years the sole right to maintain stock landings and slaughterhouses in the parishes of Orleans, Jefferson and St. Bernard. Every butcher in that district of over a thousand square miles had to bring his animals to the company's slaughterhouse below the city and pay its fees.
These three Senate speeches were the central statements in the long debate of 1850 over the lands won from Mexico, and the last great addresses of the three statesmen of their generation. The Mexican War had added California and the Southwest.
Patrick's own writings are the narrow bridge between the global St. Patrick's Day figure and a real late Roman Christian voice. The Confessio begins with a self-portrait of abasement: Patrick calls himself a sinner, unlearned, rustic, and contemptible to many.
In February 1946 Heman Marion Sweatt, a Houston mail carrier and a graduate of Wiley College, applied to the University of Texas Law School in Austin. The university's president, Theophilus S. Painter, refused him admission because state law reserved the university for white students, and at that time no law school in Texas admitted Black applicants.
The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories is a selection of Lovecraft's tales, edited with notes by the Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi, tracing his development from early Poe-influenced pieces to the 'cosmic horror' for which he is known. Lovecraft's central idea is that humanity is an insignificant accident in a vast, indifferent universe, and that knowledge of this truth is enough to destroy sanity.
The Founding Documents gathers the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights as one civic anthology. The Declaration, adopted by the Continental Congress in July 1776, announces separation from Britain by appealing to the laws of nature and of nature’s God, to the self-evident truths that all men are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights, and to government deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed.
The Institutes of Justinian is a short official textbook of Roman law, issued at Constantinople on 21 November 533 and given the force of law, together with the Digest, from 30 December of that year. It was written for first-year law students: the preface, addressed to the youth desirous of studying the law, explains that the emperor, having reconquered Africa and set in order both the imperial constitutions and the writings of the old jurists, has commissioned Tribonian, Theophilus and Dorotheus to compose an elementary book so that beginners may learn the law as it is actually in force.
The Journal of John Woolman is the spiritual autobiography of a New Jersey Quaker tailor and minister, begun in his thirty-sixth year and continued until a few days before his death. He opens in Northampton, Burlington County, where as a child he reads the twenty-second chapter of Revelation by the roadside and, soon after, kills a mother robin with a stone and then her nestlings, an act whose horror teaches him that God has placed in every mind a principle of goodness toward all creatures.
The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 is set in the wilderness of northern New York during the French and Indian War. Colonel Munro, the Scottish commander of Fort William Henry on Lake George, which the scout calls the Horican, is threatened by the French general Montcalm and his Native allies.
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates are the seven joint debates held between Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate, and Senator Stephen A. Douglas, the Democratic incumbent, during the 1858 contest for a United States Senate seat from Illinois. Senators were then chosen by the state legislature, so the two men were campaigning for legislative candidates of their parties.
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket begins as a sea adventure told by a young Nantucketer whose craving for forbidden experience repeatedly overrides judgment. Pym and his friend Augustus Barnard first make a disastrous drunken voyage in the Ariel, a small boat nearly destroyed before rescue.
The Origins of Totalitarianism is Hannah Arendt's attempt to understand how the Nazi and Soviet regimes, which she treats as a new form of government without precedent, could arise out of European history. It was published in New York by Harcourt, Brace in 1951 (in Britain as The Burden of Our Time).
The Portable Faulkner is not a single work in the usual sense but an edited map of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fiction. Malcolm Cowley arranged stories, novel excerpts, genealogical material and commentary so that readers could see Faulkner's invented county as one continuous historical field.
The Souls of Black Folk is a book of fourteen chapters framed by a short Forethought and Afterthought, in which W. E. B. Du Bois sets out to show readers what it meant to be Black in the United States at the opening of the twentieth century. He announces his subject at once: the great problem of the new century is the color line.
Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws (De l'esprit des lois), published anonymously at Geneva in 1748 after many years of reading and travel, asks why the laws of different peoples differ and what makes them fit or unfit for those who live under them. His answer is that laws are relations: they must suit the form of government and also the climate and soil, the religion, commerce, manners and size of a nation.
To Kill a Mockingbird is narrated by Jean Louise Finch, called Scout, looking back as an adult on three years of her childhood, from the summer she was nearly six, in Maycomb, a small, poor county seat in Alabama during the Depression of the 1930s. She lives with her older brother Jem, their widowed father Atticus, a lawyer and state legislator, and Calpurnia, the Black cook who helps raise them.
Twelve Angry Men takes place almost entirely in a jury room after a murder trial. Twelve male jurors must decide whether a young defendant is guilty of killing his father; a guilty verdict will mean death.
Uncle Tom's Cabin follows two lines of story that begin on the Kentucky farm of Arthur Shelby, a kindly but indebted master who agrees to sell two slaves to the trader Haley: Uncle Tom, his faithful and devout manager, and Harry, the small son of Eliza, Mrs. Shelby's maid. Overhearing the bargain, Eliza flees north with Harry that night, and with the slave-catchers close behind she crosses the Ohio River by leaping from one floating cake of ice to another.
Up from Slavery is Booker T. Washington's account of his rise from a slave cabin in Virginia to the leadership of Tuskegee Institute. He begins with what he does not know: the exact date of his birth, about 1858 or 1859 as he gives it, and the name of his white father.
Washington: A Life is Ron Chernow's single-volume biography of George Washington, published in October 2010 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2011. Chernow's central aim is to replace the remote, marble figure of patriotic legend with a man of strong passions, ambition and a fierce temper, held in check by a lifelong discipline of self-command.