The Library of America
Writings
Alexander Hamilton

Joanne B. Freeman, Editor

One of the most vivid, influential, and controversial figures of the American founding, Alexander Hamilton was an unusually prolific and vigorous writer. As a military aide to George Washington, forceful critic of the Articles of Confederation, persuasive proponent of ratification of the Constitution, first Secretary of the Treasury, and leader of the Federalist party, Hamilton devoted himself to the creation of a militarily and economically powerful American nation guided by a strong, energetic republican government. His public and private writings demonstrate the perceptive intelligence, confident advocacy, driving ambition, and profound concern for honor and reputation that contributed both to his astonishing rise to fame and to his tragic early death.

Arranged chronologically, Writings contains more than 170 letters, speeches, essays, reports, and memoranda written between 1769 and 1804. Included are all 51 of Hamilton’s contributions to The Federalist, as well as subsequent writing calling for a broad construction of federal power under the Constitution; his famous speech to the Constitutional Convention, which gave rise to accusations that he favored monarchy; early writings supporting the Revolutionary cause and a stronger central government; his visionary reports as Treasury secretary on the public credit, a national bank, and the encouragement of American manufactures; the “Reynolds Pamphlet,” in which Hamilton made a detailed confession of adultery in order to defend himself against charges of official misconduct; and his self-destructive attack on John Adams during the 1800 campaign. An extensive selection of private letters illuminate Hamilton’s complex relationship with George Washington, his deep affection for his wife and children, his mounting fears during the 1790s regarding the Jeffersonian opposition and the French Revolution, and his profound distrust of Aaron Burr. Appendix includes conflicting eyewitness accounts of the Hamilton-Burr duel.

Writings editor Joanne B. Freeman is assistant professor of history at Yale University, author of Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the Early Republic, and has appeared on PBS’s American Experience documentary The Duel.

Hardcover - 1108 pages (September 27, 2001)
ISBN: 1-931082-04-9
Series Number: 129
List Price: $40.00

The American Revolution: Writings from the War of Independence

John Rhodehamel, Editor

Drawn from letters, diaries, newspaper articles, public declarations, contemporary
narratives, and private memoranda, The American Revolution brings together over 120 pieces by more than 70
participants and eyewitnesses to create a unique literary panorama of the War of Independence. Beginning with Paul
Revere’s own narrative of his legendary ride in April 1775 and ending with a moving account of George
Washington’s resignation from the command of the Continental Army in December 1783, the volume contains
writing that describes the major events of the conflict—the early battles of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill; the
failed American invasion of Canada; the 1776 campaign in New York and New Jersey; the crucial battle of Saratoga;
the bitter fighting in the South and along the western frontier; and the decisive triumph at Yorktown.

Included are writings by famous figures—Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Benedict Arnold, John and Abigail
Adams—and by lesser known participants: Samuel Blachley Webb describing courage and panic at Bunker Hill;
Sarah Hodgkins writing longingly to her absent soldier husband; Jabez Fitch recounting the last hours of a wounded
American officer in Brooklyn; Albigence Waldo chronicling the privations and miseries of Valley Forge; Otho
Holland Williams recording with appealing candor American defeats and victories in South Carolina. The volume
also contains writings by American Loyalists and by British officers and officials serving in America that provide
provocative insights into the losing side of an epochal conflict. All selections are written by people who were in
America at the time of the conflict.

The American Revolution also includes a chronology of events, biographical and explanatory notes, and an index.
Editor John Rhodehamel is Norris Foundation Curator of Early American Historical Manuscripts at the Huntington
Library in San Marino, California. He is the author of The Great Experiment: George Washington and the American
Republic and editor of George Washington: Writings for The Library of America.

ISBN: 1-883011-91-4
Series Number: 123

List Price: $40.00

PREVIOUS TITLES

History of the United States: During the Administrations of Jefferson

Adams, Henry

Also by this author:

Novels, Mont Saint Michel, The Education
History of the United States: During the Administrations of Madison Earl N. Harbert, editor. 1308 pages.

Judged one of the greatest histories in English, this monumental work culminated Adams' lifelong fascination with the intertwined pasts of his family and his country. The original 9-volume edition, long out of print, is complete in these two volumes. In Adams' ironic narrative, personalities like Napoleon Bonaparte, Aaron Burr, Andrew Jackson, and Thomas Jefferson act their glittering parts against a background of inexorable historical forces that transform the United States from a pre-industrial backwater into an emergent world power. "A master of English prose_a history yet to be replaced."
—C. Vann Woodward, The New York Times Book Review.

List Price: $45.00
(Available at $24.95
via subscription.)
ISBN: 0-940450-34-8
Series Number: 31
History of the United States: During the Administrations of Madison

Adams, Henry

Also by this author:

Novels, Mont Saint Michel, The Education
History of the United States: During the Administrations of Jefferson Earl N. Harbert, editor. 1436 pages. This monumental work, complete in two volumes, culminated Henry Adams' lifelong fascination with the American past. This second volume chronicles the War of 1812. The President and Congress procrastinate while the United States is bullied and insulted by both England and France, then they plunge the country into the war without troops, monies, or fleets to wage it. Written in a strong, lively style pointed with Adams' wit, the History describes the consolidation of American character, and poses questions about the future course of democracy.

List Price: $45.00
(Available at $24.95
via subscription.)
ISBN: 0-940450-35-6
Series Number: 32
Travels and Other Writings

Bartram, William

Thomas Slaughter, editor. Artist, writer, botanist, gardener, explorer, and ethnographer, William Bartram was the most significant American nature writer before Thoreau. Includes: Travels Through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida (1791); Bartram_s report to his English patron; scientific and ethnographic papers; an extensive gathering of Bartram_s beautiful drawings, many in full color; and an index, glossary of fauna and flora, and map. "Travels...remains an intoxicatingly dreamlike journey, an achingly beautiful bible of what the American landscape once was."—Philadelphia Inquirer.

List Price: $40.00
(Available at $24.95
via subscription.)
ISBN: 1-883011-11-6
Series Number: 84
Three Gothic Novels

Brown, Charles Brockden

Sydney J. Krause, editor. Before Poe, and Hawthorne, and Stephen King, there was Charles Brockden Brown. Published literature: madness and murder, suicide and religious obsession, the seduction of innocence and the dangers of wilderness and settlement alike. Written in a nervous and effusive style in which rational discourse and hysterical rant contend for control, often narrated by characters on the brink of in the final years of the 18th century, Brown's startlingly prophetic novels are a virtual r_sum_ of themes that would recur in American emotional breakdown, these works open onto dark recesses and turbulent conflict in the recently founded American nation.

In Three Gothic Novels, The Library of America collects the most significant of Brown's works: Wieland, or The Transformation (1798), his novel of a religious fanatic preyed upon by a sinister ventriloquist, often considered his masterpiece; Arthur Mervyn; or Memoirs of the Year 1793 (1799), with its indelible scenes of Philadelphia devastated by a yellow fever epidemic; and Edgar Huntly; or Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799), which fuses traditional Gothic themes with motifs drawn from the American wilderness.

Charles Brockden Brown: Three Gothic Novels contains a newly researched chronology of Brown's life, explanatory notes, and an essay on the texts.

Sydney J. Krause is professor emeritus of English at Kent State University and general editor of the Kent State University Press Bicentennial Edition of the multi-volume Novels and Related Works of Charles Brockden Brown.


List Price: $40.00
(Available at $24.95
via subscription.)
ISBN: 1-883011-57-4
Series Number: 103
The Debate on the Constitution: Volume One: September 1787 to February 1788
The Debate on the Constitution

Also by this author:

The Debate on the Constitution: Volume Two: January to August 1788

Bernard Bailyn, editor. Part One: September 1787 to February 1788. The Debate on the Constitution charts the course of the bloodless revolution that created the government of the United States and the world's oldest working national charter. The extraordinary energy and eloquence of the ratification struggle is captured here firsthand in a unique collection of speeches, newspaper articles, pamphlets and letters. Part One presents press polemics and private commentaries from September 1787 to January 1788. Highlights include the state ratifying convention in Pennsylvania, where James Wilson confronted the deep democratic skepticism of the frontier delegates, and in Massachusetts, where John Hancock and Samuel Adams forged a crucial compromise that saved the country from political convulsion. A detailed chronology of events, biographical profiles, and notes provide fascinating background. An appendix prints the complete text of the Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, and Constitution with all amendments. "The best resource for understanding the morning headlines I've seen in a long time."—Bill Moyers
1214 pages


List Price: $35.00
(Available at $24.95
via subscription.)
ISBN: 0-940450-42-9
Series Number: 62
The Debate on the Constitution: Volume Two: January to August 1788
The Debate on the Constitution

Also by this author:

The Debate on the Constitution: Volume One: September 1787 to February 1788

Bernard Bailyn, editor. Part Two: January to August 1788 charts the course of the bloodless revolution that created the government of the United States and the world's oldest working national charter. In speeches, newspaper articles, pamphlets and letters, this unique collection captures firsthand the energy and eloquence of the stormy ratification struggle. Part Two features press polemics and private commentaries from January to August 1788, along with amendments proposed by state ratifying conventions. Highlights include dramatic confrontations from the Virginia convention, where Patrick Henry pitted his legendary oratorical skills against the incisive logic of Madison. A detailed chronology of events, biographical profiles, and notes provide fascinating background. An appendix prints the complete text of the Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, and Constitution with all amendments.
1175 pages

List Price: $35.00
(Available at $24.95
via subscription.)
ISBN: 0-940450-64-X
Series Number: 63
Writings
Franklin, Benjamin

J.A. Leo Lemay, editor. The most complete one-volume collection ever published of a brilliant public figure and the most powerful writer of his time, including The Autobiography in a new edition based on Franklin_s manuscript. "The reader seems to see many Franklins, one emerging from another like those brightly painted Russian dolls which, ever smaller, disclose yet one more."_John Updike, The New Yorker. "The indispensable edition of Frankliniana."—American Studies International
1605 pages


List Price: $45.00
(Available at $24.95
via subscription.)
ISBN: 0-940450-29-1
Series Number: 37
Writings
Jefferson, Thomas

Merrill D. Peterson, editor. The most comprehensive one-volume selection of Jefferson ever published. Contains the Autobiography, Notes on the State of Virginia, public and private papers, including the original and revised drafts of the Declaration of Independence, addresses, and 287 letters. "Writings gives the reader a chance to assess the power of the man's pen and, by this standard, his character and mind." —The New York Times

1600 pages
List Price: $35.00
(Available at $24.95
via subscription.)
ISBN: 0-940450-16-X
Series Number: 17
Writings
Madison, James

Jack N. Rakove, editor. Over 200 years after the founding of the federal republic, James Madison remains the most important political thinker in American history. The prime framer of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, Madison was also a brilliant expositor of the new republican government and its underlying principles. His eloquent and insightful writing on freedom of religion, freedom of speech and the press, the rights of minorities under majority rule, the role of the states in the federal system, and the separation of powers are central to American political thought and speak to the controversies of the present day.

Arranged chronologically, Writings contains 197 essays, addresses, speeches, private memoranda, and letters written between 1772 and 1836. Included are all 29 of Madison's contributions to The Federalist, as well as revealing letters and speeches from the Constitutional Convention, the crucial Virginia ratifying convention, and the first federal Congress that illuminate his central role in framing and ratifying the Constitution and adopting the Bill of Rights. Early letters from the Revolution and the Confederation record Madison's strong commitment to religious freedom, his acute observations on the weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation, and the beginning of his historic political collaboration with Thomas Jefferson.

Selections from the 1790s include eloquent denunciations of the Alien and Sedition Acts and candid private appraisals of George Washington and John Adams. Writings from his terms as secretary of state and president record his determination to uphold American independence during the conflicts of the Napoleonic era and his leadership of the nation during the fiercely controversial War of 1812. Letters and memoranda from his retirement demonstrate his opposition to nullification and secession, his illusory hopes for African colonization as a solution to the dilemma of slavery, and his deepening concern over the sectional threat to the federal union he loved.

James Madison, Writings includes a chronology of Madison's life, an essay on the texts, explanatory notes, and an index. Jack N. Rakove, editor, is Coe Professor of History at Stanford University and the author of The Beginnings of the National Politics, James Madison and the Creation of the American Republic, and Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for history.

List Price: $40.00
(Available at $24.95
via subscription.)
ISBN: 1-883011-66-3
Series Number: 109
American Sermons: The Pilgrims to Martin Luther King Jr.

American Sermons

Listen to streaming audio readings from American Sermons, including Martin Luther King Jr's I Have Seen the Mountaintop in the Featured Excerpts section.

Michael Warner, editor. The sermon is the first and most enduring genre of our literature. The 58 sermons collected in this volume display the form's eloquence, intellectual rigor, and spiritual fervor. Ranging from the first New England settlement to mass-media evangelism and the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. Public and private, radical and conservative learned and vernacular, famous and neglected, these texts reclaim a neglected form of American literary art.
The sermons of the Puritan tradition are extraordinary in their richness of imagery, force of argument, and probing psychological insights. From John Winthrop's visionary injunction that "wee must consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, " to Samuel Danforth's admonition not to deviate from the divine "errand into the wilderness," the early sermons first explored what it means to be an American.

Jonathan Edwards' remarkable "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," which stirred its 18th-century audiences to frenzy, shows the intensity to which the sermon could rise, while Jonathan Mayhew's "Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission" heralds the political thinking that led to the American Revolution. The ferment of the 19th century—the Mexican War, the struggle against slavery, the Civil War—inevitably affected the sermon. Orthodoxies were challenged, and a new diversity emerged in the Unitarianism of William Ellery Channing, the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the new Church of Latter Day Saints, and the gathering strength of the African-American sermon tradition.

The 20th-century sermons collected here continue to wrestle with fundamental spiritual and civic concerns. They range from a homily on charity by the popular evangelist Billy Sunday to a discourse on interfaith cooperation by Abraham Joshua Heschel, and from Harry Emerson Fosdick's controversial "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" to John Gresham Machen's uncompromising riposte. The achievement of the African-American sermon attains a new breadth of influence in the inspiring oratory of Martin Luther King, Jr.

This volume is edited by Michael Warner, professor of English at Rutgers University and author of The Letters of the Republic: Publication and Public Sphere in Eighteenth Century America.

List Price: $40.00
(Available at $24.95
via subscription.)
ISBN: 1-883011-65-5
Series Number: 108
November 14, 2005