Frederick Douglass' 1845 Narrative is accompanied by a preface and explanatory footnotes. Included are contemporary perspectives, along with essays, a chronology and bibliography.

Born into but escaped from slavery, Frederick Douglass-orator, journalist, autobiographer; revolutionary on behalf of a just America-was a towering figure, at once consummately charismatic and flawed. His Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) galvanised the antislavery movement and is one of the truly seminal works of African-American literature. In this Lincoln Prize- winning biography, William S. McFeely captures the many sides of Douglass- his boyhood on the Chesapeake; his self-education; his rebellion and rising expectations; his marriage, affairs, and intense friendships; his bitter defeat and transcendent courage-and re-creates the high drama of a turbulent era.

C. Vann Woodward, who died in 1999 at the age of 91, was America's most eminent Southern historian, the winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Mary Chestnut's Civil War and a Bancroft Prize for The Origins of the New South. Now, to honor his long and truly distinguished career, Oxford is pleased to publish this special commemorative edition of Woodward's most influential work, The Strange Career of Jim Crow.

The Strange Career of Jim Crow is one of the great works of Southern history. Indeed, the book actually helped shape that history. Published in 1955, a year after the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education ordered schools desegregated, Strange Career was cited so often to counter arguments for segregation that Martin Luther King, Jr. called it "the historical Bible of the civil rights movement." The book offers a clear and illuminating analysis of the history of Jim Crow laws, presenting evidence that segregation in the South dated only to the 1890s. Woodward convincingly shows that, even under slavery, the two races had not been divided as they were under the Jim Crow laws of the 1890s. In fact, during Reconstruction, there was considerable economic and political mixing of the races. The segregating of the races was a relative newcomer to the region.

Hailed as one of the top 100 nonfiction works of the twentieth century, The Strange Career of Jim Crow has sold almost a million copies and remains, in the words of David Herbert Donald, "a landmark in the history of American race relations."

Former slave, orator, journalist, autobiographer; revolutionary on behalf of a just America, Frederick Douglass was a towering figure, at once consummately charismatic and flawed. His Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) galvanized the antislavery movement and is one of the truly seminal works of African-American literature. In this masterful and compelling biography, William S. McFeely captures the many sides of Douglass his boyhood on the Chesapeake; his self-education; his rebellion and rising expectations; his marriage, affairs, and intense friendships; his bitter defeat and transcendent courage and recreates the high drama of a turbulent era."

On a misty September morning in rural Georgia, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian found himself cast in a role that he had never imagined for himself: an expert witness in the sentencing trial of a convicted kidnapper, rapist, and murderer. His brief testimony that day would ultimately lead him on a personal journey into the criminal justice system, to confront the actions and decisions of lawyers battling for and against the death penalty, convicts whose lives are at stake, and jurors forced to decide who shall live and who shall die.

In this moving and original work, William S. McFeely, one of this country's most distinguished historians, retells the history and enters into the current-day lives of the people who inhabit Sapelo's Island off the coast of Georgia, descendants of slaves who once worked its huge cotton plantations. It is at once a richly detailed work of historical reconstruction, a sensitive portrait of the lives of black Americans in this particular place and in our own time, and a moving meditation on race by a writer who has made its painful dilemmas his life's work as a historian."

"Combines scholarly exactness with evocative passages....Biography at its best."—Marcus Cunliffe, New York Times Book Review

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize. The seminal biography of one of America's towering, enigmatic figures. From his boyhood in Ohio to the battlefields of the Civil War and his presidency during the crucial years of Reconstruction, this Pulitzer Prize-winning biography traces the entire arc of Grant's life (1822-1885).

"A moving and convincing portrait....profound understanding of the man as well as his period and his country."—C. Vann Woodward, New York Review of Books

"Clearsightedness, along with McFeely's unfailing intelligence and his existential sympathy...informs his entire biography."—Justin Kaplan, The New Republic

At the close of the Civil War, Congress established the Freedmen's Bureau formally, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands to deal with the question of the place in society of its new black citizens. General Oliver Otis Howard, known both admiringly and derisively as the "Christian General," was given the responsibility of defining the nation's commitment to four million former slaves. Instructed by Congress to divide lands abandoned to the Union army into forty-acre plots and award them to freedmen, Howard began a program that might have given many families farms of their own. The effort had barely begun when it ran into President Andrew Johnson's policy of returning such lands to former white owners. Soon Howard and his agents were under pressure not to assist the free people, but to coerce them into working for landlords. And yet, however tarnished the record, the Bureau was still recalled by W. E. B. DuBois for its "bright promise." Yankee Stepfather provides a revealing, and troubling, picture of the complex relationship of African Americans to their government at a crucial juncture in American history. In a new foreword to this edition, William S. McFeely places his book, first published in 1968, in its place in the scholarship on race relations of the past quarter-century. "

William McFeely was called upon, as an historian, to be an expert witness in the trial, in rural Georgia, of a convicted kidnapper, rapist and murderer. This was not a role in which he had ever imagined himself. He had no idea that the brief testimony he gave would take him deeply into the criminal justice system, to many courtrooms where unequal struggles take place between those who would condemn prisoners to death and those fighting to the overturn the Biblical injuction of an eye for and eye. On the first day in court, when he came face to face with the defendant, "murderer" ceased to be a category of criminal. Here was a particular person, whose life was in his lawyer's hands. This book began to take shape in McFeely's mind and he set our on a journey out of history into the reality of the death penalty. In this book he tells of his encounters with lawyers battling to end lives and to save them, jurors caught in between, and convicts whose lives were at stake.

The Philadelphian artist Thomas Eakins painted two worlds: one sure of its values - the surgeons, inventors, musicians and athletes of his time - and another that reflected his own struggles with depression and sexual identity. In this evenhanded account of those struggles, William S. McFeely sheds new light on Eakins' genius and on the evocative melancholy of his portraits, particularly of women, which include many of his remarkable wife, Susan McDowell Eakins. Those deeply perceptive paintings may be the greatest expressions of his art. One of America's leading historians, McFeely has long been an interpreter of nineteenth-century American writing. A fascinating aspect of this narrative is how he brings the painter into the company of Thoreau, Melville and Whitman, with whom Eakins formed a deep friendship.