A historian and former presidential speechwriter presents an unprecedented two-volume collection of the greatest speeches in American history.

Abraham Lincoln measured the promise—and cost—of American freedom in lucid and extraordinarily moving prose, famous for its native wit, simple dignity of expressions, and peculiarly American flavor. This volume, with its companion, Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writing 1859–1865, comprises the most comprehensive selection ever published. over 240 speeches, letters, and drafts take Lincoln from rural law practice to national prominence, and chart his emergence as an eloquent antislavery advocate and defender of the constitution. included are the complete Lincoln-Douglas debates, perhaps the most famous confrontation in American political history. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Collects the unabridged texts of important speeches, including Patrick Henry's "liberty or death" speech, women's rights speeches by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Grover Cleveland's address dedicating the Statue of Liberty.

The most comprehensive Mark Twain collection—over 150 short stories, sketches, burlesques, hoaxes, tall tales, speeches, satires, and maxims from America’s greatest humorist. Arranged chronologically and containing many pieces restored to the form in which Twain intended them to appear, this special Library of America volume shows with unprecedented clarity the literary evolution of Mark Twain over six decades of his career. The nearly two hundred separate items in this volume cover Twain's writings from the years 1852 to 1890. As a riverboat pilot, Confederate irregular, silver miner, frontier journalist, and publisher, Twain witnessed the tragicomic beginning of the Civil War in Missouri, the frenzied opening of the West, and the feverish corruption, avarice, and ambition of the Reconstruction era. He wrote about political bosses, jumping frogs, robber barons, cats, women's suffrage, temperance, petrified men, the bicycle, the Franco-Prussian War, the telephone, the income tax, the insanity defense, injudicious swearing, and the advisability of political candidates preemptively telling the worst about themselves before others get around to it. Among the stories included here are “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” which won him instant fame when published in 1865, “Cannibalism in the Cars,” “The Invalid's Story,” and the charming “A Cat's Tale,” written for his daughters’ private amusement. This volume also presents several of his famous and successful speeches and toasts, such as “Woman — God Bless Her,” “The Babies,” and “Advice to Youth.” Such writings brought Twain immense success on the public lecture and banquet circuit, as did his controversial “Whittier Birthday Speech,” which portrayed Boston's most revered men of letters as a band of desperadoes. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

The five novels in The Leatherstocking Tales (collected in two Library of America volumes), Cooper's great saga of the American wilderness, form a pageant of the American frontier. Cooper's hero, Natty Bumppo, is forced ever farther into the heart of the continent by the advance of civilization that he inadvertently serves as advance scout, missionary, and critic. Leatherstocking first appears in The Pioneers (1823), as an aged hunter living on the fringe of settlement near Templeton (Cooperstown), New York, at the end of the eighteenth century. There he becomes caught in the struggles of party, family, and class to control the changing American land and to determine what sort of civilization will replace the rapidly vanishing wilderness. When Natty Bumppo started an American tradition by setting off into the sunset at the novel's close, one early reader said, "I longed to go with him." The Last of the Mohicans (1826) is a pure unabashed narrative of adventure. It looks back to the earlier time of the French and Indian Wars, when Natty and his two companions, Chingachgook and Uncas, survivors of a once-proud Indian nation, attempt a daring rescue and seek to forestall the plan of the French to unleash their Mingo allies on a wave of terror through the English settlements. The Prairie (1827) takes up Natty in his eighties, driven by the continuous march of civilization to his last refuge on the Great Plains across the Mississippi. On this vast and barren stage, the Sioux and Pawnee, the outlaw clan of Ishmael Bush, and members of the Lewis and Clark expedition enact a romantic drama of intrigue, pursuit, and biblical justice that reflects Cooper's historical dialectic of culture and nature, of the American nation and the American continent. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

An exclusive new translation of the most perceptive and influential book ever written about American politics and society—“the bible on democracy” (The Texas Observer) This Library of America volume presents de Tocqueville’s masterpiece in an entirely new translation—the first to fully capture his style and provide a rigorous, faithful rendering of his profound ideas and observations Alexis de Tocqueville, a young aristocratic French lawyer, came to the United States in 1831 to study its penitentiary systems. His nine-month visit and subsequent reading and reflection resulted in this landmark masterpiece of political observation and analysis. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville vividly describes the unprecedented social equality he found in America and explores its implications for European society in the emerging modern era. His book provides enduring insight into the political consequences of widespread property ownership, the potential dangers to liberty inherent in majority rule, the vital role of religion in American life, and the importance of civil institutions in an individualistic culture dominated by the pursuit of material self-interest. He also probes the deep differences between the free and slave states, writing prophetically of racism, bigotry, and prejudice in the United States. Brought to life by Arthur Goldhammer’s clear, fluid, and vigorous translation, this volume of Democracy in America is the first to fully capture Tocqueville’s achievements both as an accomplished literary stylist and as a profound political thinker.