Universally recognized today as one of the most important and influential Americans of the nineteenth century, Frederick Douglass rose to prominence in the national abolitionist movement before and during the Civil War by virtue of the vividness and power with which, drawing on his personal experiences of enslavement and freedom, he spoke and wrote against American slavery—and he continued to propound his vision of an America that would afford freedom, equality, and opportunity to all long after slavery was formally abolished. This edition offers a selection of Douglass’s most significant writing and oratory from throughout his long career, including the complete texts of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, which has become a classic example of the slave narrative genre, and The Heroic Slave, Douglass’s only published work of fiction, together with excerpts from Douglass’s other autobiographical writings and key speeches he gave both before and after the Civil War. The edition also provides clear and thorough annotations for the assistance of the student reader and a range of contextual materials, including responses to Douglass’s Narrative and photographs of Douglass. As an introduction to Douglass’s life and work that balances breadth and concision, this edition is well suited for a variety of undergraduate courses in American history and literary studies.

In addition to a thoughtful selection of the essays, speeches, and autobiographical writings of Frederick Douglass, this anthology provides an illuminating Introduction; a timeline of Douglass' life; footnotes that introduce individuals, quotations, and events; and a selected bibliography.

One of the greatest African American leaders and one of the most brilliant minds of his time, Frederick Douglass spoke and wrote with unsurpassed eloquence on almost all the major issues confronting the American people during his life—from the abolition of slavery to women's rights, from the Civil War to lynching, from American patriotism to black nationalism. Between 1950 and 1975, Philip S. Foner collected the most important of Douglass's hundreds of speeches, letters, articles, and editorials into an impressive five-volume set, now long out of print. Abridged and condensed into one volume, and supplemented with several important texts that Foner did not include, this compendium presents the most significant, insightful, and elegant short works of Douglass's massive oeuvre.

This anthology contains some of the African-American rights advocate's most noted writings and speeches, among them "Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World" and "Africa for the Africans."

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.

This inexpensive compilation of the great abolitionist's speeches includes "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" (1852), "The Church and Prejudice" (1841), and "Self-Made Men" (1859).