Thomas Wentworth Higginson

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading. Army Life in a Black Regiment is a riveting and empathetic account of the lessons learned from an encounter between a New England intellectual and nearly a thousand newly freed slaves. In the fall of 1862, Thomas Wentworth Higginson was asked to take command of the 1st Regiment of South Carolina Volunteers, and he immediately understood the significance of the experiment...

Higginson was a radical member of the Boston Vigilance Committee that plucked captured slave runaways from the hands of sheriffs or Federal Marshalls bent on returning them to Southern masters; he rode with abolitionist riflemen in "Bleeding Kansas;" in 1859 he was one of the "Secret Six" who sponsored John Brown's raid. During the Civil War he was the logical choice to lead the First South Carolina Colored Volunteers; he earned the respect of his...

This volume contains a collection of some of Emily Dickinson's poetry that illustrates not only her talent as a writer, but her profound love of language, nature, and life. Composing first in a fairly conventional style, the poetess soon began to experiment with her writing; her frequent use of dashes, sporadic capitalization of nouns, broken meter, and idiosyncratic metaphors made her work unparalleled for its time. Dickinson's poetry dealt not only...

From the distinguished "English Men of Letters" series comes this biography of Quaker author and activist John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892). A member of nineteenth century New England's family-friendly Fireside Poets School, Whittier was frequently mobbed for his outspoken antislavery beliefs. Written by a fellow abolitionist, this 1902 life story is a wealth of anecdote and reminiscence from Whittier's boyhood to his death.