Here are 100 books that Margaret Fuller fans have personally recommended if you like
Margaret Fuller.
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I am fascinated by historical figures who were deemed marginal, outcast, or eccentric and also by experiences (like sleep or madness) that usually fall beneath historical scrutiny. I am drawn to nineteenth-century literature and history because I find such a rich store of strange and poignant optimism and cultural experimentation dwelling alongside suffering, terror, and despair. As a writer, I feel a sense of responsibility when a great story falls into my hands. I try to be as respectful as I can to the life behind it, while seeking how it fits into a larger historical pattern. I am always on the lookout for books that do the same!
This 1834 novel written by a physician/writer from Philadelphia holds its own with anything Poe or Melville ever wrote in terms of weirdness, psychological complexity, and sheer literary panache.
It tells the story of a singularly unambitious young man who accidentally kills himself and then discovers that he has the power to reanimate the corpses of others who have just died. And so our hero finds himself living the lives of a rich man with terrible gout, a playboy, a misguided Quaker philanthropist, and – most shockingly – a rebel slave.
Through it all, Sheppard Lee still maintains a sense of his own identity, even as his spirit becomes something of a puppet for its new physical manifestations. Both philosophical and darkly comic, this recently rediscovered work should be a classic.
Sheppard Lee, Written By Himself is a work of dark satire from the early years of the American Republic. Published as an autobiography and praised by Edgar Allan Poe, this is the story of a young idler who goes in search of buried treasure and finds instead the power to transfer his soul into other men's bodies. What follows is one increasingly practiced body snatcher's picaresque journey through early American pursuits of happiness, as each new form Sheppard Lee assumes disappoints him anew while making him want more and more. When Lee's metempsychosis draws him into…
I am fascinated by historical figures who were deemed marginal, outcast, or eccentric and also by experiences (like sleep or madness) that usually fall beneath historical scrutiny. I am drawn to nineteenth-century literature and history because I find such a rich store of strange and poignant optimism and cultural experimentation dwelling alongside suffering, terror, and despair. As a writer, I feel a sense of responsibility when a great story falls into my hands. I try to be as respectful as I can to the life behind it, while seeking how it fits into a larger historical pattern. I am always on the lookout for books that do the same!
If you think the 1960s tops the list of eras that experimented with counter-cultural protest movements, utopian societies, and radical social experimentation, think again.
There are more free love advocates, anti-racist rebels, anti-capitalist communes, oversexed vegans, and messianic prophets in this book than you could shake a staff at. Jackson tells their stories with verve, wit, and a perfectly measured assessment of their contributions and failures.
A dynamic, timely history of nineteenth-century activists—free-lovers and socialists, abolitionists and vigilantes—and the social revolution they sparked in the turbulent Civil War era
“In the tradition of Howard Zinn’s people’s histories, American Radicals reveals a forgotten yet inspiring past.”—Megan Marshall, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life and Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast
NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST HISTORY BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SMITHSONIAN
On July 4, 1826, as Americans lit firecrackers to celebrate the country’s fiftieth birthday, both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were on their deathbeds. They would leave behind a groundbreaking…
I am a biographer and literary scholar who loves to resurrect stories otherwise lost to history. I first felt this calling on football Saturdays at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, when I would sneak into the Rare Book Room to pore over old records, while my friends all went to the game. There I checked out manuscript boxes that told stories of the communities I inhabited. On these Saturdays, I started to see the invisible forces that created my physical world and marked my presence. Every book I picked below does the same precise work—they make visible a past that shapes our present.
Taking only names and a few verses stitched onto a cotton sack discovered at a flea market near Nashville, Tiya Miles uncovers a stunning story of love, resilience, and triumph in the lives of family members who carried this cotton sack out of slavery.
This National Book Award Winner is not to be missed, not only for its powerful storytelling, but for the tools it teaches about reaching back into history and recovering lives otherwise consigned to oblivion.
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER * NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * WINNER OF THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE
'A remarkable book' - Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times 'A brilliant exercise in historical excavation and recovery' - Annette Gordon-Reed, author of The Hemingses of Monticello 'A history told with brilliance and tenderness and fearlessness' - Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States
In 1850s South Carolina, Rose, an enslaved woman, faced a crisis: the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag with a few items. Soon after, the nine-year-old girl was…
I am fascinated by historical figures who were deemed marginal, outcast, or eccentric and also by experiences (like sleep or madness) that usually fall beneath historical scrutiny. I am drawn to nineteenth-century literature and history because I find such a rich store of strange and poignant optimism and cultural experimentation dwelling alongside suffering, terror, and despair. As a writer, I feel a sense of responsibility when a great story falls into my hands. I try to be as respectful as I can to the life behind it, while seeking how it fits into a larger historical pattern. I am always on the lookout for books that do the same!
Not technically a “nineteenth-century” book, this 1902 novel is the most surprising work of fiction from the period that you’ll ever read.
Written by a Black woman from Boston who had achieved success first as an actress and then as a magazine editor, this wild fantasy reads like a cross between the film The Black Panther and a Verdi opera. It concerns a Black physician who passes for white (until he can’t), then joins an archeological expedition to discover the remains of an ancient civilization in Ethiopia.
The plot unfolds at breakneck speed, and there are so many twists you might get whiplash. But if you slow down and focus on the details of the story you’ll find an extraordinarily complex picture of politics, spirituality, psychology, music, history, and science.
“Mysticism, horror, and racial identity merge fluidly in this thrilling tale of love, obsession, and power” (Publishers Weekly) written by one of the lesser-known literary figures of the much-lauded Harlem Renaissance.
Pauline Hopkins is considered by some to be the most prolific African-American woman writer and the most influential literary editor of the first decade of the twentieth century, and Of One Blood is the last of four novels she wrote.
Mixed-race medical student Reuel Briggs doesn't give a damn about being Black and cares less for African history. When he arrives in Ethiopia on an archeological trip, his only…
Service and leadership have been a primary focus of my life and work for many years. Though today these are matters of academic study, they weren’t when I was in school. I’ve written and spoken extensively on these topics to corporate, military, academic, governmental, and NGO organizations. I strive to narrow the gap between those who study leadership and management and those who apply the principles in practice. My approach is to pose questions and share the experiences of those who have made significant contributions throughout history into the present moment. The books on my list have meant a lot to me and many others. I hope you’ll find value in them, too.
Ralph Waldo Emerson is recalled as one of the great essayists and speakers of the nineteenth century.
In a time of extraordinary change, Emerson helped forge a universal voice through the prism of the emerging American experience. Emerson ultimately conjured a unique, unmistakable American narrative.
This renders his work timeless. His essays—such as “Self-Reliance”—have been rediscovered by new audiences in the early 21st century.
In another moment of tumult and evolution, Emerson continues to offer actionable inspiration, encouraging everyone to cultivate the courage to experience life and work as a great adventure.
Our most eloquent champion of individualism, Emerson acknowledges at the same time the countervailing pressures of society in American life. Even as he extols what he called “the great and crescive self,” he dramatizes and records its vicissitudes.
Here are all the indispensable and most renowned works, including “The American Scholar” (“our intellectual Declaration of Independence,” as Oliver Wendell Holmes called it), “The Divinity School Address,” considered atheistic by many of his listeners, the summons to “Self-Reliance,” along with the more embattled realizations of “Circles” and, especially, “Experience.” Here, too, are his wide-ranging portraits of Montaigne, Shakespeare, and other “representative…
My name is Mechal Roe and I have loved creating fun and colorful art to inspire the inner child in all of us. I began my journey in children's print design and worked my way up to Clothing Designer. It was quite rewarding, and I learned so much. After, I left to create a children's book and toys to serve underrepresented youth. Creating the book was a form of introspection to move me along my heart's path. It was also a gift to those young ones who also struggle with understanding themselves in the world.
I recommend this book because it had a great influence on me as a young child. Moving through the world, particularly as a black woman, requires a great deal of self-reliance and resourcefulness. This book/essay speaks to universal truths that are often forgotten.
I found myself equipping my toolbox with quotes that have been relevant to my present day working life. I learned how to relate in a deeper way to myself and society while crafting a value system that, as I age, is allowed to become malleable.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays and poems on the transcendental movement in the United States became some of the most important literary pieces in American History. In this culmination of essays, Emerson takes the reader through different forms of philosophies that attempt to explain the world and man's purpose within it.
Heavily vested in the philosophy of transcendentalism, though not one to label himself a true follower of the movement, Emerson believed that spirituality and wholeness were central to the ways in which humans could place themselves within nature. Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson is a collection of integral works that…
Though I’ve always found the idea of survival after death fascinating, it was my interest in Modern Spiritualism that really sparked the desire to write Chasing Ghosts. That era (mid-1800s to the early 1900s) was a time when millions confidently believed they could communicate with the dead. Of course, this was only the tip of the paranormal iceberg. So I continued the journey into the lore of haunted places, ancient cultural beliefs, and scientific endeavors to find evidence for paranormal experiences or to debunk it. As a historian of the weirder pages of the past, this topic endlessly fascinates me. I hope it will for you as well.
This obscure 1896 book is a collection of interviews with dead luminaries. At least, that’s what the psychic author alleges. Inside you’ll find conversations with Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, and others. Discover their wisdom from beyond the veil, and in the case of Ben Franklin, you can enjoy a new set of his famous aphorisms, including this one: “Spiritual knowledge, like gems hidden in the bowels of the earth, is only to be reached by patient upturning of the soil.”
A previous volume, given through the mediumship of Mrs. Horn, entitled Strange Visitors, was so interesting, that it gave pleasure to learn that another volume of a similar kind was in preparation, and that the Spirit editor, Judge Edmonds, desired that it Should be placed in our hands for publication. The matter was found to be insufficient to form a volume of the kind intended, and during the movements of the medium, to secure favourable conditions for receiving further communications, much time was exhausted, as the dates appended indicate. The localities subjoined to the…
I’ve been rather fixated with money and finances since I was a kid beating my friend's parents at Monopoly. I majored in economics and had a few rough years financially graduating into the depths of the great recession in 2010. In 2013 I completed my Master’s in finance and economics, took a day job in economic research, and have been moonlighting as a finance writer for the past five years.
You might be thinking, what is a philosophy book doing on a list of books to make me a better investor?
Here’s a bit of a secret about investing; learning the technical details about how to build a portfolio is the easy part. The hard part is staying cool during market crashes, bear markets, and recessions. The easiest way to lose money as an investor is to panic sell at the worst possible time.
The philosophy of stoicism is defined by focusing our attention on only the things we can control and making peace with the things we can’t. That is also the definition of a great long-term investor. You can’t control the markets but you can control how you react.
The beloved classic daily devotional of Stoic meditations—the only authorized print edition in the US and complete with a ribbon marker—with more than two million copies sold!
Why have history's greatest minds—from George Washington to Frederick the Great to Ralph Waldo Emerson, along with today's top performers from Super Bowl-winning football coaches to CEOs and celebrities—embraced the wisdom of the ancient Stoics? Because they realize that the most valuable wisdom is timeless and that philosophy is for living a better life, not a classroom exercise.
The Daily Stoic offers 366 days of Stoic insights and exercises, featuring all-new translations from…
As both a scholar and a citizen I have spent my adult life seeking to better understand the dynamics of power, especially power wielded in flagrantly unjust fashion in societies otherwise founded on notions of life, liberty, and happiness for all. This has led me to study the history of the economy, not just as a material but as a cultural system that encodes the categories of modern life: self and society, private and public, body and soul, and needs and desires.
Jeffrey Sklansky is that rare academic with a writer’s literary imagination, which serves the reader well in engagingThe Soul’s Economy, a riveting and dense intellectual history of the market’s emergence as the organizing principle of not only economic life, but of a distinctly new moral sensibility between 1820 and 1920.
Sklansky explores this far-reaching turn of events through a series of dedicated readings of America’s leading philosophers and pundits of the times, ranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson to John Dewey, who collectively recast the pursuit of wealth into an ethic of personal rectitude and even the source of society’s general welfare.
Socializing the psyche; Tracing a seismic shift in American social thought, Jeffrey-Sklansky offers a new synthesis of the intellectual transformation entailed in the rise of industrial capitalism. For a century after Independence, the dominant American understanding of selfhood and society came from the tradition of political economy, which defined freedom and equality in terms of ownership of the means of self-employment. However, the gradual demise of the household economy rendered proprietary independence an increasingly embattled ideal. Large landowners and industrialists claimed the right to rule as a privilege of their growing monopoly over productive resources, while dispossessed farmers and workers…
I’m a writer and a Shakespeare and critical race studies scholar who’s always been intrigued by the invisible, artificial race-based boundaries in our world. I love analyzing the lives of literary characters and seeing how they can serve as mirrors for us along lines of gender, mental health, and more. My critical interests are informed by the fact that I grew up in a predominantly Black/Latino low-income neighborhood and attended an affluent, predominantly white private school from the sixth to twelfth grade. My adolescent experiences with inclusion/exclusion dynamics required me to reflect on race, for example, so I could understand and navigate the kinds of socio-cultural dynamics that affect us all.
I love this book, which was published in 1903, because of how timeless it is and because of how relevant Du Bois’ words are to our present moment in which racial inequality and racism persist.
I appreciate the historical perspective Du Bois provides his readers so the past is not forgotten, so the past helps us understand the historical trajectory that led us to right now. The writing is clear, smart, and beautiful, offering a blend of genres—from music to memoir—that keeps readers engaged as they read Du Bois’ astute analyses of the past and his suggestive projections about the future.
As an English professor, I love introducing my students to this classic text, which inevitably evokes empathy from them and, in some, elicits a desire for activism. This is a text that moves people.
The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches is a 1903 work of American literature by W. E. B. Du Bois. It is a seminal work in the history of sociology and a cornerstone of African-American literature.
The book contains several essays on race, some of which had been published earlier in The Atlantic Monthly. To develop this work, Du Bois drew from his own experiences as an African American in American society. Outside of its notable relevance in African-American history, The Souls of Black Folk also holds an important place in social science as one of the early works…
