Robert Bethune

"The canonical American masterpiece of sin, guilt, and revenge, in an authoritative new edition from Penguin Classics with a foreword by Tom Perrotta. At once retrospective and radically new, [this book] portrays seventeenth-century Puritan New England, a time period irreversibly encoded in the American identity. Hawthorne built one of the most incisive and devastating human dramas ever written out of a community and its outcasts: Hester Prynne...

There exists, of course, few more famous figures in the field of psychology than Sigmund Freud. As the founding father of psychoanalysis, or the clinical method for treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst, his impact on the field of psychology cannot be overstated. In 1898 Sigmund Freud published a short essay on the psychology of forgetfulness. It is from this essay that the following work would grow out of....

Featuring prominent figures in education, religion, science, and war, Eminent Victorians is a fascinating collection of Victorian biographies. Beginning with a discussion of the achievements of Cardinal Manning, Strachey provides insight on the Cardinal's rise to power and follows the creation of the Oxford Movement, which began the development of the Anglo-Catholic church. Sparing no detail, Manning's feud with the influential theologian John Henry...

A Shropshire Lad' is a collection of sixty-three poems by the English poet Alfred Edward Housman. The book contains several repeated themes. It is not a connected narrative; though the "I" of the poems is in two cases named as Terence (VIII, LXII), the "Shropshire Lad" of the title, he is not to be identified with Housman himself. Not all the poems are in the same voice and there are various kinds of dialogue between the speaker and others, including...

Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932) presented an essay at the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893 that would change the study of American History forever. This essay would ultimately be published with twelve supporting articles to form "The Frontier in American History". Turner was an innovator in that he was one of the first to call attention to the Frontier as an integral part of the study of The United States of America. Turner himself grew up on...

Penned by American philosopher and transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience examines the role of the individual's conscience in governmental rule. Thoreau argues that individual citizens must not simply be subject to the decisions of government, but should question every political act to ensure that the system remains a tool for justice and morality-a message that continues to resonate powerfully in modern times. ...

The most incisive comment on politics today is indifference. When men and women begin to feel that elections and legislatures do not matter very much, that politics is a rather distant and unimportant exercise, the reformer might as well put to himself a few searching doubts. Indifference is a criticism that cuts beneath oppositions and wranglings by calling the political method itself into question. Leaders in public affairs recognize this. They...

Published in 1921, this book-length poem has been interpreted by some as a ghost story, by others as a tale of revenge, and by others still as the record of a mind reduced to madness. The narrator is an old friend of Avon's, a successful lawyer plagued by a mysterious sense of guilt.

An experiment. A declaration. A spiritual awakening. Noted transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau spent two years, two months and two days chronicling his near-isolation in a small cabin he built in the woods near Walden Pond, on land owned by his mentor and the father of Transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Immersing himself in nature and solitude, Thoreau sought to develop a greater understanding of society amidst a life of self-reliance and simplicity....

Love Songs (1917) is a poetry collection by Sara Teasdale. The poet's fourth collection, for which she was awarded the 1918 Pulitzer Prize, is a masterful collection of lyric poems meditating on life, romance, and the natural world. Somber and celebratory, symbolic and grounded in experience, Love Songs revels in the mystery of existence itself. From despair to elation, confusion to security, Sara Teasdale captures the many emotions at work in the...