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"While life needs the services of history, it must just as clearly be comprehended that an excess measure of history will do harm to the living," declares Friedrich Nietzsche in this cautionary polemic. The iconoclastic philosopher warns us about the dangers of an uncritical devotion to the study of the past, which leads to destructive and limiting
results - particularly in cases where long-ago events are exploited for nationalistic purposes.
Nietzsche...
102) Selected Poems
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The leading English literary figure of the latter half of the 17th century, John Dryden (1631-1700) wrote dramas and critical works, but his reputation stands on his mastery of verse, in particular the heroic couplet. Encompassing political, religious, philosophic, and artistic issues, Dryden's poetry offers rich evidence of his social consciousness. "Annus Mirabilis," a celebration of the tumultuous events of 1666, casts the catastrophic effects...
103) A John Brown Reader
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This original collection gathers a remarkably diverse body of literature about John Brown, the strident anti-slavery leader. Besides a selection of letters by the abolitionist himself, the book includes a significant excerpt from W. E. B. Du Bois's biography, John Brown, addresses by Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau, poetry by Louisa May Alcott and Herman Melville, and much more.
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Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) was a Jesuit priest whose poetry combined an awareness of material sensuousness with the asceticism of religious devotion. His collected poems, published posthumously in 1918, exercised a profound influence on modern poetry. This volume features all of Hopkins's mature work, offering a sampler of the poet's striking originality, intellectual depth, and perceptive vision. Featured works include his well-known elegy,...
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Fourteen short works of fiction by noteworthy American women authors offer entrancing tales of redemption, betrayal, tradition, and rebellion. Dating from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, these narratives range in mood from "Heat," Joyce Carol Oates's chilling tale of murder, to "Why I Live at the P.O.," Eudora Welty's comic monologue in the Southern Gothic tradition. Other contributors include Flannery O'Connor, Kate Chopin, and Edna Ferber...
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A sermon preached by Jonathan Edwards to his Enfield, Connecticut, congregation in July 1741, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" is particularly noted for its vivid descriptions of the torments of Hell and mankind's natural depravity. At the same time, it was also an appeal to man's need for salvation and a reminder of the agonies that awaited the unreformed. Coming during the height of the Great Awakening--a period of religious fervor in the...
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"America's first power couple," John and Abigail Adams enjoyed a relationship of mutual respect and affection. Their exchange of more than 1,000 letters - from their 1762 courtship to the end of John's political career in 1801 - covers topics ranging from politics and military strategy to household matters and family health. "An extraordinarily personal view of our country's founding." - The New York Times.
108) Selected Poems
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Richly varied in mood and content, this collection captures the essence of Byron's great poetic achievement. Among the 31 selections: convivial song-like poems, love poems, travel poems, humorous and satiric poems. Included are shorter works such as the famous "She Walks in Beauty," "Stanzas to Augusta" and "So We'll Go No More a Roving," as well as longer works: "The Prisoner of Chillon," "Beppo," and "The Vision of Judgment," all unabridged. Also...
109) Short Stories
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Described by literary critic Robert Morss Lovett as "a novelist of civilization, absorbed in the somewhat mechanical operations of civilization, absorbed in the somewhat mechanical operations of culture, preoccupied with the upper ('and inner') class," Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edith Wharton (1862-1937) also wrote superbly crafted works of short fiction. The seven stories in this excellent collection demonstrate the author's ability to create...
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Best known as the author of Lady Chatterley's Lover and Women In Love, D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) also wrote some of the twentieth century's finest poetry. Lawrence is noted for his use of words in a richly textured manner that produces vivid images and expresses deep emotion. This ample collection of his verse covers a wide thematic range, including love, marriage, family, class, art, and culture, all treated with extraordinary exuberance, intensity,...
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Collection of more than 80 poems by 50 American and British masters celebrates travel, adventure and the many real and metaphorical journeys each of us take in the course of our lives. Works by Whitman, Byron, Millay, Sandburg, Service, Bliss Carman, Robert Louis Stevenson, Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Shelley, Tennyson, Yeats, many others. Note.
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Author, abolitionist, political activist, and philosopher, Frederick Douglass was a pivotal figure in the decades of struggle leading up to the Civil War and the Reconstruction era. This inexpensive compilation of his speeches adds vital detail to the portrait of a great historical figure.
Featured addresses include "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" which was delivered on July 5, 1852, more than ten years before the Emancipation Proclamation....
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In 1937, Marcus Garvey, founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and one of the most controversial figures in the history of race relations, assembled his most trusted organizers to impart his life's lessons. For one month he instructed this elite student body - at its peak the largest international mass movement of African peoples - on topics ranging from universal knowledge and how to attain it to leadership, character, God, and the...
114) Selected Writings
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This concise collection of the Founding Father's public and private writings provides an introduction to his life, personality, political career, and influence on the early history of the United States. Contents include Hamilton's political essays, selections from the Federalist Papers, First Report on the Public Credit and Report on a National Bank, and personal correspondence with his wife, friends, and political colleagues.
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Derived from the journals of an empress's tutor and companion, this unique book offers rare glimpses of court life in eleventh-century Japan. Lady Murasaki recounts episodes of drama and intrigue among courtiers as well as the elaborate rituals related to the birth of a prince. Her observations, expressed with great subtlety, offer penetrating and timeless insights into human nature.
Murasaki Shikibu (circa AD 973-1025) served among the gifted poets...
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During the 1850s and 1860s more than 100,000 people escaped slavery in the American South by following the Underground Railroad, a complex network of secret routes and safe houses. This inexpensive compilation of firsthand accounts offers authentic insights into the Civil War era and African-American history with compelling narratives by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and lesser-known refugees. Thirty selections include the story...
117) Songs of Milarepa
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A Buddhist holy man whose songs have been sung and studied since the twelfth century, Milarepa exchanged a life of sin and maliciousness for one of contemplation and love, eventually reaching-according to his disciples-the ultimate state of enlightenment. His thousands of extemporaneously composed songs communicate complex ideas in a simple, lucid style. This volume features the religious leader's best and most highly esteemed songs of love and compassion....
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As chief advisor to the emperor Nero, Lucius Annaeus Seneca was most influential in ancient Rome as a power behind the throne. His lasting fame derives from his writings on Stoic ideology, in which philosophy is a practical form of self-improvement rather than a matter of argument or wordplay. Seneca's letters to a young friend advise action rather than reflection, addressing the issues that confront every generation: how to achieve a good life; how...
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John Stuart Mill (1806—73) was the most influential English philosopher of the nineteenth century. His vast intellectual output covered a range of subjects - traditional philosophy and logic, economics, political science - and included this work, a founding document in the area now known as social science.
In The Logic of the Moral Sciences, Mill applied his considerable talents to examining how the study of human behavior, society, and history...
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Best known today as the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Count Leo Tolstoy also is acknowledged as a skilled playwright. His five-act drama The Power of Darkness offers a cold and unsparing look at Russian peasant life that illustrates the costs of pursuing personal desires rather than the dictates of morality. The grimly realistic tragedy is based on a real incident, centering on a peasant's confession to a party of wedding guests of his...