A landmark collection documenting the social, political, and artistic lives of African American women throughout the tumultuous nineteenth century. Named one of NPR's Best Books of 2017. The Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers is the most comprehensive anthology of its kind: an extraordinary range of voices offering the expressions of African American women in print before, during, and after the Civil War. Edited by Hollis Robbins and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., this collection comprises work from forty-nine writers arranged into sections of memoir, poetry, and essays on feminism, education, and the legacy of African American women writers. Many of these pieces engage with social movements like abolition, women’s suffrage, temperance, and civil rights, but the thematic center is the intellect and personal ambition of African American women. The diverse selection includes well-known writers like Sojourner Truth, Hannah Crafts, and Harriet Jacobs, as well as lesser-known writers like Ella Sheppard, who offers a firsthand account of life in the world-famous Fisk Jubilee Singers. Taken together, these incredible works insist that the writing of African American women writers be read, remembered, and addressed. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Why do the earliest representations of cowboy-figures symbolizing the highest ideals of manhood in American culture exclude male-female desire while promoting homosocial and homoerotic bonds? Evidence from the best-known Western writers and artists of the post-Civil War period - Owen Wister, Mark Twain, Frederic Remington, George Catlin - as well as now-forgotten writers, illustrators, and photographers, suggest that in the period before the word 'homosexual' and its synonyms were invented, same-sex intimacy and erotic admiration were key aspects of a masculine code. These males-only clubs of journalists, cowboys, miners, Indian vaqueros defined themselves by excluding femininity and the cloying ills of domesticity, while embracing what Roosevelt called 'strenuous living' with other bachelors in the relative 'purity' of wilderness conditions. Queer Cowboys recovers this forgotten culture of exclusively masculine, sometimes erotic, and often intimate camaraderie in fiction, photographs, illustrations, song lyrics, historical ephemera, and theatrical performances.

Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: An Anthology is a multicultural, multigenre collection celebrating the quality and diversity of nineteenth century American women's expression.

The West has figured in the American imagination under many guises: as the last best place on earth, a refuge, an escape, a land of opportunity, but also as a place of conquest and failure. Where Lewis and Clark saw great possibilities, Native cultures found disappointment and loss. This collection presents the diverse and often contradictory accounts that make up the mosaic of the nineteenth-century American West. From Thomas Hart Benton?s famous speech in the Senate when he argued that non-white civilizations must fall before the western expansion of white Americans to Black Elk?s story of a way of life lost on the frozen ground at Wounded Knee, Gary Noy offers a representative sampling of the many Wests that historians have strug-gled to define for over a century. Distant Horizon chronicles the dusty world of the cowboy, the hard-scrabble existence of the farmer and the settler, and the miner?s vision of golden glory. It examines the independent nature of the explorer and mountain man and the sometimes heroic, sometimes cruel existence of the soldier. We hear the voices of those outside the mainstream of power?women and Westerners of color?and explore the most tragic element of Western history: the confinement, subjugation, and extermination of Native Americans. No other single volume provides as many readings on as many topics in the history of the American West.

This comprehensive study by leading scholars in an important new field-the history of letters and letter writing-is essential reading for anyone interested in nineteenth-century American politics, history or literature. Because of its mass literacy, population mobility, and extensive postal system, nineteenth-century America is a crucial site for the exploration of letters and their meanings, whether they be written by presidents and statesmen, scientists and philosophers, novelists and poets, feminists and reformers, immigrants, Native Americans, or African Americans. This book breaks new ground by mapping the voluminous correspondence of these figures and other important American writers and thinkers. Rather than treating the letter as a spontaneous private document, the contributors understand it as a self-conscious artefact, circulating between friends and strangers and across multiple genres in ways that both make and break social ties.

Covering the decades from the 1830s through the end of the century, as well as the eastern, southern, and western regions of the United States, these essays, by a diverse group of scholars, examine a variety of periodicals from the well-known Atlantic Monthly to small papers such as The National Era. They illustrate how literary analysis can be enriched by consideration of social history, publishing contexts, the literary marketplace, and the relationships between authors and editors.

Walker examines the rhetoric and writings of nineteenth-century Native Americans, including William Apess, Black Hawk, George Copway, John Rollin Ridge, and Sarah Winnemucca. Demonstrating with unique detail how these authors worked to transform venerable myths and icons of American identity, Indian Nation chronicles Native American participation in the forming of an American nationalism in both published texts and speeches that were delivered throughout the United States. Pottawattomie Chief Simon Pokagon's "The Red Man's Rebuke," an important document of Indian oratory, is published here in its entirety for the first time since 1893.

Films possess virtually unlimited power for crafting broad interpretations of American history. Nineteenth-century America has proven especially conducive to Hollywood imaginations, producing indelible images like the plight of Davy Crockett and the defenders of the Alamo, Pickett’s doomed charge at Gettysburg, the proliferation and destruction of plantation slavery in the American South, Custer’s fateful decision to divide his forces at Little Big Horn, and the onset of immigration and industrialization that saw Old World lifestyles and customs dissolve amid rapidly changing environments. Balancing historical nuance with passion for cinematic narratives, Writing History with Lightning confronts how movies about nineteenth-century America influence the ways in which mass audiences remember, understand, and envision the nation’s past. In these twenty-six essays—divided by the editors into sections on topics like frontiers, slavery, the Civil War, the Lost Cause, and the West—notable historians engage with films and the historical events they ostensibly depict. Instead of just separating fact from fiction, the essays contemplate the extent to which movies generate and promulgate collective memories of American history. Along with new takes on familiar classics like Young Mr. Lincoln and They Died with Their Boots On, the volume covers several films released in recent years, including The Revenant, 12 Years a Slave, The Birth of a Nation, Free State of Jones, and The Hateful Eight. The authors address Hollywood epics like The Alamo and Amistad, arguing that these movies flatten the historical record to promote nationalist visions. The contributors also examine overlooked films like Hester Street and Daughters of the Dust, considering their portraits of marginalized communities as transformative perspectives on American culture. By surveying films about nineteenth-century America, Writing History with Lightning analyzes how movies create popular understandings of American history and why those interpretations change over time.

The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century American Literature will offer a cutting-edge assessment of the period's literature, offering readers practical insights and proactive strategies for exploring novels, poems, and other literary creations.

Winner of the Herbert Feis Award from the American Historical Association and named one of the best religion books of the year by Publishers Weekly, D. Michael Quinn's Same-Sex Dynamics among Nineteenth-Century Americans has elicited critical acclaim as well as controversy. Using Mormonism as a case study of the extent of early America's acceptance of same-sex intimacy, Quinn examines several examples of long-term relationships among Mormon same-sex couples and the environment in which they flourished before the onset of homophobia in the late 1950s.