Selected Speeches
Assigned by 2 of the 9 reading lists, catalogue entry only
- Written
- 1841-1894
- Language
- English
- Length
- Long · 650 pp300 to 700 pages
- Difficulty
- Demanding3 of 5 for a first-year reader
We recommendFrederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and WritingsLawrence Hill Books, 1999Philip Foner's edition, abridged by Yuval Taylor, is the standard single volume and the one most courses use.
These links go straight to Amazon and Bookshop.org and earn this site nothing today. Prices are the same either way. How this works.
Fifty years of Douglass's public writing and speaking, from his first abolitionist lectures in the 1840s to his last addresses on lynching. The pieces most often assigned include What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?, which turns the holiday against its celebrants; The Trials and Triumphs of Self-Made Men, on work and merit; the oration at the unveiling of the Freedmen's Monument to Abraham Lincoln, which praises Lincoln while calling him the white man's president; and his defence of woman suffrage. Together they show his argument shift from ending slavery to securing citizenship.
No reading guide yet
The catalogue entry above is complete: the dates, the form, the themes and every program that assigns Selected Speeches are verified against each program's published list.
What is missing is the part that takes real work: the summary, the key passages, and a recommended translation. The edition named below is the one most programs assign, so the buy links are useful already.