Narrative of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, by Frederick Douglass, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: • New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars • Biographies...

Written by one of the founders of modern political philosophy, Thomas Hobbes, during the English civil war, Leviathan is an influential work of nonfiction. Regarded as one of the earliest examples of the social contract theory, Leviathan has both historical and philosophical importance. Social contract theory prioritizes the state over the individual, claiming that individuals have consented to the surrender of some of their freedoms by participating...

“Up from Slavery” is the 1901 autobiography of American educator Booker T. Washington (1856—1915). The book describes his experience of working to rise up from being enslaved as a child during the Civil War, the obstacles he overcame to get an education at the new Hampton Institute, and his work establishing vocational schools like the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama to help Black people and other persecuted people of color learn useful, marketable...

When a schoolgirl gets separated from her tour of the White House and finds herself in the Lincoln bedroom, she also discovers the ghost of the great man himself.

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading. Army Life in a Black Regiment is a riveting and empathetic account of the lessons learned from an encounter between a New England intellectual and nearly a thousand newly freed slaves. In the fall of 1862, Thomas Wentworth Higginson was asked to take command of the 1st Regiment of South Carolina Volunteers, and he immediately understood the significance of the experiment...

Balanced and in-depth military coverage (all theaters, North and South) in a non-partisan format with detailed notes, offering meaty, in-depth articles, original maps, photos, columns, book reviews, and indexes. CW-Era Marine Corps — Dahlgren's Marine Battalions to Carolina — Parsons' Texas Cavalry chasing Banks — Final March to Appomattox, eyewitness account, 12th VA Infantry.

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading. On May 10, 1865 Jefferson Davis was caught by Federal troops. It was not until he was in jail that he decided the war must really be over. In this second volume of his memoirs, Davis discusses the specifics of that war, offering his own vantage point of the brutal conflict in hopes that everyone else would come to see it his way. During the war, Davis faced enormous...

Before her wider fame as the author of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott achieved recognition for her accounts of her work as a volunteer nurse in an army hospital. Written during the winter of 1862—63, her lively dispatches appeared in the newspaper Commonwealth, where they were eagerly read by soldiers' friends and families. Then, as now, these chronicles revealed the desperate realities of battlefield medicine as well as the tentative first steps...

Cynthia Ann Parker, first published in 1959, is a fascinating account of the life of a girl of European descent, who at the age of about ten, was captured (along with her brother) in Texas by raiding Comanche. Cynthia would then grow up with her captors and live among the Comanche for the next 24 years. Parker was recaptured during the Battle of Pease River in 1860 and would spend the remaining 11 years with various members of her birth family. During...

To commemorate the 150th Anniversary of the end of the Civil War, Diversion Books is publishing seminal works of the era: stories told by the men and women who led, who fought, and who lived in an America that had come apart at the seams. Thomas Jonathan Jackson earned his famous moniker during the Battle of Manassas, when an entire brigade was commanded to rally behind Jackson, whose own company was fighting like a stone wall. One of the finest generals...