A Model of Christian Charity

Author	Washington Irving
ISBN	0809594080

“I recollect that, when a stripling, my first exploit in squirrel-shooting was in a grove of tall walnut-trees that shades one side of the valley. I had wandered into it at noon time, when all nature is peculiarly quiet, and was startled by the roar of my own gun, as it broke the Sabbath stillness around,...

Author	Olaudah Equiano
ISBN	0312442033

Widely admired for its vivid accounts of the slave trade, Olaudah Equiano's autobiography -- the first slave narrative to attract a significant readership -- reveals many aspects of the eighteenth-century Western world through the experiences of one individual. The second edition reproduces...

Author	Nathaniel Hawthorne
ISBN	1557423628

Such a wonderfully (and eerily) subversive story of a man who sees what lies behind the virtuous facade. A classic "dark romance," it's got all the hallmarks of another kind of classic: that of the "hero cycle" (to use Joseph Campbell's famous phrase), where the hero has to leave society to gain wisdom,...

Author	Phillis Wheatley
ISBN	1557092338

“Some view our sable race with scornful eye, ‘Their colour is a diabolic dye.’ Remember, Christians... Negros, black as Cain, May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.”

This was a for-school-read that I really ended up enjoying. First published in 1770, Phillis Wheatley was...

Author	Hannah Webster Foster
ISBN	0195042395

The Coquette tells the much-publicized story of the seduction and death of Elizabeth Whitman, a poet from Hartford, Connecticut.

Written as a series of letters--between the heroine and her friends and lovers--it describes her long, tortuous courtship by two men, neither of whom perfectly...