Letters between two friends, one a student in Richmond, Virginia, and the other a soldier in Washington, D.C., chronicle their experiences during the Civil War, including their work as Union spies and their reliance on God.

Letters between two young girls, one in London and the other in English settlements in Virginia, chronicle the events during the difficult early years at James Towne and Henricus and the role of Pocahontas in this period of history.

Two series of letters described as "the wellsprings of nearly all ensuing debate on the limits of governmental power in the United States" address the whole remarkable range of issues provoked by the crisis of British policies in North America out of which a new nation emerged from an overreaching empire. Forrest McDonald is Professor Emeritus of American History at the University of Alabama and author of States' Rights and the Union.

The great British statesman Edmund Burke had a genius for political argument, and his impassioned speeches and writings shaped English public life in the second half of the eighteenth century. This anthology of Burke's speeches, letters, and pamphlets, selected, introduced, and annotated by David Bromwich, shows Burke to be concerned with not only preserving but also reforming the British empire. Bromwich includes eighteen works of Burke, all but one in its complete form. These writings, among them the "Speech on Conciliation with the American Colonies," A Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol, the "Speech at Guildhall Previous to the Election" of 1780, the "Speech on Fox's India Bill," A Letter to a Noble Lord, and several private letters, demonstrate the depth of Burke's efforts to reform the empire in India, America, and Ireland. On these various fronts he defended the human rights of native peoples, the respect owed to partners in trade, and the civil liberties that the empire was losing at home while extending its power abroad.

The true story of Rhode Island Civil War soldier Sullivan Ballou, best known as the character who wrote an eloquent letter to his wife in Ken Burn's The Civil War, describes the promising law career he left to join the Union Army, his relationship with his wife and two sons, and the First Battle of Bull Run during which he lost his life.

As a rule, an author's correspondence possesses only a secondary interest, but Jacob Burckhardt's letters are of primary interest to students of history because of the nature of the man and of his major writings. It was in his letters, rather than in his lectures or longer works, that Burckhardt most directly addressed the currents of intellectual thought and social and political order-or disorder-of Europe in the nineteenth century. Not only are the letters addressed. to some of the most important thinkers of the time (Nietzsche, Burckhardt's younger colleague at the University of Basel, among them), but also they address some of the most pressing issues and the most important personages of the era. As the translator notes, the "letters, written from 1838 to 1897, have a lightness of touch, an informality and humor, and a breadth of vision that make one realize why he was the most civilized historian of his century. Their contents range across a vast field of interests. Art architecture, history, poetry, music, religion--all stirred him to contagious enthusiasm. His travels led him to Italy, Germany, France, and England, and to his letters we owe delightful and penetrating insights into the character of each country."