Lippincott's Monthly Magazine from September 19888 begins with the play Herod and Mariamne, by Amelie Rivers, and includes articles on famous hoaxes and the Temperance Reform Movement, a recital of things that happened on September dates in history, and contemporary advertisements.

This book examines emancipation after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. Focusing on the making and meaning of the Thirteenth Amendment, Final Freedom looks at the struggle among legal thinkers, politicians, and ordinary Americans in the North and the border states to find a way to abolish slavery that would overcome the inadequacies of the Emancipation Proclamation. The book tells the dramatic story of the creation of a constitutional amendment and reveals an unprecedented transformation in American race relations, politics, and constitutional thought. Using a wide array of archival and published sources, Professor Vorenberg argues that the crucial consideration of emancipation occurred after, not before, the Emancipation Proclamation; that the debate over final freedom was shaped by a level of volatility in party politics underestimated by prior historians; and that the abolition of slavery by constitutional amendment represented a novel method of reform that transformed attitudes toward the Constitution.

The definitive biography of a pivotal figure in American literary history A major poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906) was one of the first African American writers to garner international recognition in the wake of emancipation. In this definitive biography, the first full-scale life of Dunbar in half a century, Gene Andrew Jarrett offers a revelatory account of a writer whose Gilded Age celebrity as the “poet laureate of his race” hid the private struggles of a man who, in the words of his famous poem, felt like a “caged bird” that sings. Jarrett tells the fascinating story of how Dunbar, born during Reconstruction to formerly enslaved parents, excelled against all odds to become an accomplished and versatile artist. A prolific and successful poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and Broadway librettist, he was also a friend of such luminaries as Frederick Douglass and Orville and Wilbur Wright. But while audiences across the United States and Europe flocked to enjoy his literary readings, Dunbar privately bemoaned shouldering the burden of race and catering to minstrel stereotypes to earn fame and money. Inspired by his parents’ survival of slavery, but also agitated by a turbulent public marriage, beholden to influential benefactors, and helpless against his widely reported bouts of tuberculosis and alcoholism, he came to regard his racial notoriety as a curse as well as a blessing before dying at the age of only thirty-three. Beautifully written, meticulously researched, and generously illustrated, this biography presents the richest, most detailed, and most nuanced portrait yet of Dunbar and his work, transforming how we understand the astonishing life and times of a central figure in American literary history.

Philadelphia's Washington Square, a shaded 6.6-acre plot near the nation's birthplace at Independence Hall, has been a focal point of the city's history for more than 300 years. Designated by William Penn in 1683 as an open space, the square served as a potter's field for its first 100 years. The remains of more than 2,000 indigents, soldiers, and yellow fever victims rest beneath its sod. By 1825, the graveyard was closed and the square was redesigned as a public promenade. Rude huts on its periphery gave way to fashionable middle-class homes. Washington Square became a destination for publishing and advertising, home to the likes of J. B. Lippincott, W. B. Saunders, Curtis Publishing Company, Farm Journal, and advertising giant N. W. Ayer. In the 1950s, its Society Hill neighborhood was restored, and a memorial to the unknown soldier of the American Revolution was dedicated in the square. Today the square is again attracting the affluent with condominiums in its converted publishing houses.