Frederick Douglass: Speeches & Writings (loa #358)

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Edited by Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer David W. Blight, this Library of America edition offers the largest single-volume collection of Frederick Douglass’s writings, featuring thirty-four speeches and sixty-seven journalistic pieces. These works vividly illustrate Douglass’s evolving views on slavery, the U.S. Constitution, and his eventual split with William Lloyd Garrison and other abolitionists regarding disunion. The collection also delves into his complex relationship with Abraham Lincoln and his commitment to women's suffrage. Notable pieces include “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” which critiques the hypocrisy of a slaveholding nation; “The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered,” a rebuttal to racial pseudoscience; and “Is it Right and Wise to Kill a Kidnapper?,” advocating for resistance against the Fugitive Slave Act. Douglass also argues for the enlistment of Black troops in “How to End the War” and confronts the “Lost Cause” narrative in “There Was a Right Side in the Late War.” Additionally, “Lessons of the Hour” passionately denounces lynching and disenfranchisement in the Jim Crow South. The volume includes Douglass’s only fictional work, the novella “The Heroic Slave,” and features editorial notes, a revised chronology of his life, and an index.