The John Harvard Library

Wayne Franklin’s introduction to The Pathfinder describes the personal and financial circumstances that led James Fenimore Cooper to the resurrection of his most popular character, underscoring the author’s aim to offer Natty Bumppo as a “Pathfinder” for a nation he feared had lost its moral bearings.

Davis gathers together important selections from Williams’s public and private writings on religious liberty, illustrating how this renegade Puritan radically reinterpreted Christian moral theology and the events of his day in a powerful argument for freedom of conscience and the separation of church and state.

Dark, weird, psychologically complex, Hawthorne’s short fiction continues to fascinate readers. Brenda Wineapple has made a generous selection of Hawthorne’s stories, including some of his best-known tales as well as other, less-often anthologized gems.

In 1892, unrepentant anarchists Alexander Berkman, Henry Bauer, and Carl Nold were sent to the Western Pennsylvania State Penitentiary for the attempted assassination of steel tycoon Henry Clay Frick. Searching for a way to continue their radical politics and to proselytize among their fellow inmates, these men circulated messages of hope and engagement via primitive means and sympathetic prisoners. On odd bits of paper, in German and in English, they shared their thoughts and feelings in a handwritten clandestine magazine called “Prison Blossoms.” This extraordinary series of essays on anarchism and revolutionary deeds, of prison portraits and narratives of homosexuality among inmates, and utopian poems and fables of a new world to come not only exposed the brutal conditions in American prisons, where punishment cells and starvation diets reigned, but expressed a continuing faith in the "beautiful ideal" of communal anarchism.

Most of the "Prison Blossoms" were smuggled out of the penitentiary to fellow comrades, including Emma Goldman, as the nucleus of an exposé of prison conditions in America’s Gilded Age. Those that survived relatively unrecognized for a century in an international archive are here transcribed, translated, edited, and published for the first time. Born at a unique historical moment, when European anarchism and American labor unrest converged, as each sought to repel the excesses of monopoly capitalism, these prison blossoms peer into the heart of political radicalism and its fervent hope of freedom from state and religious coercion.

“In Common Sense a writer found his moment to change the world,” Alan Taylor writes in his introduction. When Paine’s attack on the British mixed constitution of kings, lords, and commons was published in January 1776, fighting had already erupted between British troops and American Patriots, but many Patriots still balked at seeking independence. “By discrediting the sovereign king,” Taylor argues, “Paine made independence thinkable—as he relocated sovereignty from a royal family to the collective people of a republic.” Paine’s American readers could conclude that they stood at “the center of a new and coming world of utopian potential.” The John Harvard Library edition follows the text of the expanded edition printed by the shop of Benjamin Towne for W. and T. Bradford of Philadelphia.

One of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s great romances, The Blithedale Romance draws upon the author’s experiences at Brook Farm, the short-lived utopian community where Hawthorne spent much of 1841. Blithedale (“Happy Valley”), another would-be modern Arcadia, is the stage for Hawthorne’s grimly comic tragedy (Henry James famously called the novel “the lightest, the brightest, the liveliest” of Hawthorne’s “unhumorous fictions”). In his introduction, Robert S. Levine considers biographical and historical contexts and offers a fresh appreciation of the novel’s ironic first-person narrator.The John Harvard Library edition reproduces the authoritative text of The Blithedale Romance in The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

This novel was intended to be far sunnier than The Scarlet Letter and to illustrate “the folly” of tumbling down on posterity “an avalanche of ill-gotten gold, or real estate.” Critics have faulted the book for explaining away hereditary guilt or for a contradictory denial of it, but Denis Donoghue offers fresh appreciation of the novel.

Published serially in New York papers between October 1787 and August 1788, the 85 Federalist Papers written by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay under the pseudonym “Publius” advocated ratification of the proposed U.S. Constitution. The John Harvard Library text reproduces that of the first book edition (1788), modernizing spelling and capitalization.

No book more vividly explains the horror of American slavery and the emotional impetus behind the antislavery movement than Douglass's Narrative. In his Introduction, Robert B. Stepto reexamines the extraordinary life and achievement of a man who escaped slavery to become a leading abolitionist and one of America's most important writers.

The John Harvard Library presents the first American edition of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, one of the first non-romantic novels of the Civil War—and the first account to gain wide popularity. Paul Sorrentino introduces Red Badge to a new generation of readers for a fuller appreciation of the novel and its effects.

Much more than an historical examination of liability, criminal law, torts, bail, possession and ownership, and contracts, The Common Law articulates the ideas and judicial theory of one of the greatest justices of the Supreme Court.

The most controversial antislavery novel written in antebellum America, and a best-seller of the 19th century, this novel is credited with intensifying sectional conflict leading to the Civil War. In his introduction, Bromwich places the book in its Victorian contexts and reminds us why it is an enduring work of literary and moral imagination.

This document—the first African American biography and a work predating Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by almost 30 years—is an historical treasure. Paul’s portrayal of Jackson’s Christian sensibility, his idealism, and his racial awareness emphasizes his humanity and exemplary American character over his racial identity.

Born into the first family of the British stage, Fanny Kemble was one of the most famous woman writers of the English-speaking world, a best-selling author on both sides of the Atlantic. Her autobiographical writings are compelling evidence of Kemble's wit and talent, and they also offer a dazzling overview of her transatlantic world.

The nineteenth century was the heyday of furious contention between American political parties, and Joel Silbey has recaptured the drama and substance of those battles in a representative sampling of party pamphlets. The pamphlets demonstrate how, for this fifty-year period, political parties were surrogates for American demands and values.

The 19th century was the heyday of furious contention between American political parties, and Silbey has recaptured the drama and substance of those battles in a sampling of party pamphlets. The nature of political controversy, as well as the substance of politics, is embedded in these party documents which both united and divided Americans.

George Perkins Marsh's Man and Nature was the first book to attack the American myth of the superabundance and the inexhaustibility of the earth. It was, as Lewis Mumford said, "the fountainhead of the conservation movement," and few books since have had such an influence on the way men view and use land.

Fitzhugh (1806–1881) offers a stinging attack on free society, laissez-faire economy, and wage slavery, and their philosophical underpinnings, using socialist doctrine to defend slavery. Drawing on the same evidence Marx used in his indictment of capitalism, he holds that socialism is only “the new fashionable name for slavery.”