History

This collection of more than 150 speeches aims to capture the essence of American oration, presented in chronological order from 1900 across a range of themes and experience.

A powerful account of life and loss in the Great War, as told by British soldiers in their letters home

The memoirs and accounts of the Black educator are presented with letters, speeches, personal documents, and other writings reflecting his life and career.

An indefatigable letter writer, the Marquis de Lafayette carried on a correspondence with an extraordinary range of people involved with the fate of revolutionary America.

The Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies in the War of the Rebellion, commonly known as the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies or Official Records (OR or ORs), is the most extensive collection of American Civil War land warfare records available to the general public.

This is an annotated collection of rare Japanese documents translated into English, which provides an invaluable resource for historians and students of World War II. The documents include diary extracts and candid, short monographs written by high-ranking Japanese officers immediately after the war.

The view that slavery could best be described by those who had themselves experienced it personally has found expression in several thousand commentaries, autobiographies, narratives, and interviews with those who "endured." Although most of these accounts appeared before the Civil War, more than one-third are the result of the ambitious efforts of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to interview surviving ex-slaves during the 1930s. The result of these efforts was the Slave Narrative Collection, a group of autobiographical accounts of former slaves that today stands as one of the most enduring and noteworthy achievements of the WPA. Compiled in seventeen states during the years 1936-38, the collection consists of more than two thousand interviews with former slaves, most of them first-person accounts of slave life and the respondents' own reactions to bondage. The interviews afforded aged ex-slaves an unparalleled opportunity to give their personal accounts of life under the "peculiar institution," to describe in their own words what it felt like to be a slave in the United States.--Norman R. Yetman, American Memory, Library of CongressThis paperback edition of selected Alabama narratives is reprinted in facsimile from the typewritten pages of the interviewers, just as they were originally typed.