A more wide ranging selection of literary works in Volume One include Choctaw, Potawatomi, and Navajo origin and creation stories, Richard Frethorne’s letter to his parents, and poems by Sarah Pierce, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell. New selections also include works by Anne Bradstreet, William Apess, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Fanny Fern, and Walt Whitman.
An increased emphasis on complete and expanded selections. The anthology now includes the complete texts for the following longer works: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s
Nature, Sarah Kemble Knight’s
The Private Journal of a Journey from Boston to New York, Elizabeth Ashbridge’s
Some Account of the Fore Part of the Life of Elizabeth Ashbridge, and Frederick Douglass’s
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. In addition the selections from Benjamin Franklin’s
Autobiography and Olaudah Equiano’s
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano have been expanded.
New American Contexts section on "The Salem Witchcraft Trials" includes illustrations and the writings of Deodat Lawson, Cotton Mather, Thomas Brattle, and Samuel Sewell, illuminating the most notorious episode in the history of colonial New England.
More value options than ever before for assigning the novels of your choice in print or e-book format. For maximum flexibility in course planning and for the sake of pleasurable reading, key novels and novellas are published separately as part of the Bedford College Edition series. Titles such as Charlotte Temple, The Scarlet Letter, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Benito Cereno are available in print or as Bedford E-Books to Go, which are downloadable to e-readers, and can be economically packaged with the anthology. The first print novel (an $8 value) can be packaged for free; subsequent print volumes can be packaged for $3 net. All E-Books to Go can be packaged for free. See the Literary Reprints Tab for more information.