Threads of 19th Century American Literature

Transcendentalism Virtual Literature Box Resources:

The Dial(a collection of writings by Emerson, Thoreau, Bronson Alcott)

“Brahma” by Ralph Waldo Emerson

a history of Concord, Massachusetts

biographies, letters, journals, and newspaper articles from the time period.

biographical information on Kant

selections of work by Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Orestes Brownson, Bronson Alcott

 a history of Brook Farm and other utopian communities.

 “Transcendental Wild Oats” by L.M. Alcott

 “Brook Farm” by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Abolitionism Virtual Literature Box Resources:

excerpts from The Liberator and other works by William Lloyd Garrison

excerpts from the writings and speeches of Fredrick Douglass and Maria W. Stewart

Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass; America’s First Black Woman Political Writer

 An Eyewitness of Slavery in America from Colonial Times to the Civil War

 “The Underground Railroad” by American History Illustrated

 “Harriet Tubman: The Moses of Her People” by Langston Hughes

biographies, letters, diaries, and newspaper articles of the time period

speeches of Sojourner Truth

history of Nat Turner’s Rebellion and John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry

Feminism Virtual Literature Box Resources:

biographical information on Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, Dorthea Dix and other leading feminist.

background on women’s colleges founded in the 19th century, such as Troy Female Seminary ( later the Emma Willard School), Mt. Holyoke Seminary, and Hartford Female Seminary.

Women in the 19th Century by Margaret Fuller

Declaration of Sentiments and ResolutionsWoman's Rights Convention, Held at Seneca Falls, 19-20 July 1848

 Massachusetts legislature address by the Grimke sisters (1830)

 New York’s “Married Women’s Property Act” (1848)

prints of painting by Mary Cassatt

works of Louis May Alcott

 “This is My Letter to the World” by Emily Dickinson

 “A Pair of Silk Stockings” by Kate Chopin

additional biographies, letters, diaries, and newspapers of the time period

Industrialism Virtual Literature Box Resources:

 biographies or major inventors and entrepreneurs, including Samuel Morse, Thomas Edison, Andrew Carnegie, Charles Goodyear, Alexander Graham Bell, John D, Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and others.

biographies of major labor leaders of the period, including Uriah S. Stephens, Eugene V. Dabs, and Samuel Gompers.

excerpts from the writing of the “muckruckers” Ida M. Tarbell, Frank Norris, Gustavus Myers, Upton Sinclair, and Ray Stannard Baker

biography of Theodore Roosevelt

additional biographies, letters, diaries, and newspapers of the time period

histories of the Pullman Strike (1893) and the Haymarket Affair (1886)

photographs of factories and workers; photographs by Louis Hines

 Autobiography of Lucy Larkham

 “Paradise for Bachelors” by Herman Melville