Library of America

Across a turbulent history, Black poets created a rich and multifaceted tradition that has been both a reckoning with American realities and an imaginative response to them. One of the great American art forms, African American poetry encompasses many kinds of verse: formal, experimental, vernacular, lyric, and protest. The anthology opens with moving testaments to the power of poetry as a means of self-assertion, as enslaved people voice their passionate...

"For the first time, here is the full, definitive story of the movement for voting rights in all its diversity and intersectionality, told through the voices of the women and men who lived it: the most recognizable figures in the campaign for women's suffrage, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, but also the black, Chinese, and American Indian women and men who were not only essential to the movement but expanded its directions and aims,...

"For the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower's arrival, a landmark collection of firsthand accounts charting the history of the English newcomers and their fateful encounters with the region's native peoples. For centuries the story of the Pilgrims and the Mayflower has been told and retold -- the landing at Plymouth Rock and the first Thanksgiving, and the decades that followed, as the colonists struggled to build an enduring and righteous community...