Best of
19th-Century

1971

The Christmas Books, Volume 1: A Christmas Carol/The Chimes


Charles Dickens - 1971
    "The Christmas Carol" was the result. "The Chimes" is a topical satire set on New Year's Eve.

Selected Short Stories


Guy de Maupassant - 1971
    A fair selection of the master's short story output. Roger Colet has written the introduction for the Penguin Classic edition..

Selected Letters


Emily Dickinson - 1971
    It provides crucial texts for the appreciation of America literature, women's experience in the ninteenth century, and literature in general.

Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War


Eric Foner - 1971
    A key work in establishing political ideology as a major concern of modern American historians, it remains the only full-scale evaluation of the ideas of the early Republican party. Now with a new introduction, Eric Foner puts his argument into the context of contemporary scholarship, reassessing the concept of free labor in the light of the last twenty-five years of writing on such issues as work, gender, economic change, and political thought. A significant reevaluation of the causes of the Civil War, Foner's study looks beyond the North's opposition to slavery and its emphasis upon preserving the Union to determine the broader grounds of its willingness to undertake a war against the South in 1861. Its search is for those social concepts the North accepted as vital to its way of life, finding these concepts most clearly expressed in the ideology of the growing Republican party in the decade before the war's start. Through a careful analysis of the attitudes of leading factions in the party's formation (northern Whigs, former Democrats, and political abolitionists) Foner is able to show what each contributed to Republican ideology. He also shows how northern ideas of human rights--in particular a man's right to work where and how he wanted, and to accumulate property in his own name--and the goals of American society were implicit in that ideology. This was the ideology that permeated the North in the period directly before the Civil War, led to the election of Abraham Lincoln, and led, almost immediately, to the Civil War itself. At the heart of the controversy over the extension of slavery, he argues, is the issue of whether the northern or southern form of society would take root in the West, whose development would determine the nation's destiny. In his new introductory essay, Foner presents a greatly altered view of the subject. Only entrepreneurs and farmers were actually "free men" in the sense used in the ideology of the period. Actually, by the time the Civil War was initiated, half the workers in the North were wage-earners, not independent workers. And this did not account for women and blacks, who had little freedom in choosing what work they did. He goes onto show that even after the Civil War these guarantees for "free soil, free labor, free men" did not really apply for most Americans, and especially not for blacks. Demonstrating the profoundly successful fusion of value and interest within Republican ideology prior to the Civil War, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men remains a classic of modern American historical writing. Eloquent and influential, it shows how this ideology provided the moral consensus which allowed the North, for the first time in history, to mobilize an entire society in modern warfare.

Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature


M.H. Abrams - 1971
    H. Abrams definitively studies the Romantic Age (1789–1835)—the age in which Shelley claimed that "the literature of England has arisen as it were from a new birth." Abrams shows that the major poets of the age had in common important themes, modes of expression, and ways of feeling and imagining; that the writings of these poets were an integral part of a comprehensive intellectual tendency which manifested itself in philosophy as well as poetry, in England and in Germany; and that this tendency was causally related to drastic political and social changes of the age.But Abrams offers more than a work of scholarship, for he ranges before and after, to place the age in Western culture. he reveals what is traditional and what is revolutionary in the period, providing insights into those same two forces in the ideas of today. He shows that central Romantic ideas and forms of imagination were secularized versions of traditional theological concepts, imagery, and design, and that modern literature participates in the same process. Our comprehension of this age and of our own time is deepened by a work astonishing in its learning, vision, and humane understanding.

The Story of the Ingalls


William Anderson - 1971
    Tells the story of the Ingalls family from the Little House on the Prairie series.

The War for the Union: The Organized War, 1863-1864


Allan Nevins - 1971
    This overview of our national history from Fort Sumter through Appomattox and the death of Abraham Lincoln takes a rightful place among the classics accounts of the war that tore America apart.The present volume, complete in itself, opens with a survey of the condition of the nation midway through the warÐa balance-sheet of the strengths of the opposing armiesÐbut soon we stand outside Vicksburg as, after several false starts, Grant closes in around that city and prepares to seize control of the Mississippi River and cut the Confederacy in two. Coincident with these mighty operations, we are shown the fumbling and uncertainty that followed the Union defeat at Chancellorsville and the eventual conflict at Gettysburg, the high tide of the Confederacy in one sense and its doom in another. Allan Nevins won the National Book Award for The Organized War: 1863-1864 and The Organized War to Victory: 1864-1865, the succeeding volume in The War for the Union.All four volumes of the War for the Union are currently available from Konecky & Konecky.

Another Place Another Spring


Adrienne Jones - 1971
    Marya's journey into Siberian exile turns into a dash for freedom in the arms of strong and silent Boris Branov — ostensibly an agent of the Tsar's secret police, actually an unreconstructed Decembrist devoted to rescuing political prisoners.

The Victorian Country House


Mark Girouard - 1971
    "In-depth look at thirty individual houses...built as the centres of sizeable country estates"--Preface

The Eagle and The Nightingale


Juliette Benzoni - 1971
    

The Tamarack Tree


Betty Underwood - 1971
    She befriends Miriam, a student at Prudence Crandall's school for black girls, but the community destroys the school.

The Lunatic Express: An Entertainment In Imperialism


Charles Miller - 1971
    It is the narrative of the building of the Mombasa-Nairobi-Lake Victoria Railway itself - the colossal six-year enterprise that was to cost #5,000,000 and countless lives, from derailments, collisions, disease, tribal raids and the assaults of wild animals. It is a diorama of an earlier Africa of slave and ivory empires, of sultans and tribal monarchs and the vast lands that they ruled. Above all, it is the story of the white intruders whose combination of avarice, honour and tenacious courage made them a breed apart.

More Than a Queen: The Story of Josephine Bonaparte


Frances Mossiker - 1971
    A biography for young adults of the Creole girl from the island of Martinique who became Empress of France.

The Complete Poems of Anne Bronte


Anne Brontë - 1971
    Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone.