Twenty-one full and lengthy selections from John Smith, Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, Francis Parkman, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Parson Weems, Washington Irving, Alexis de Tocqueville, Red Jacket, George Catlin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David Thoreu, and Margaret Leech.