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Washington Irving (1783-1859) was a short-story writer, essayist, biographer, historian, and diplomat. The short story "The Devil and Tom Walker" is about a miserly man who makes a deal with the devil. Irving’s fictional character Diedrich Knickerbocker is a Dutch-American historian and narrator of "The Conspiracy of the Cocked Hats" and the “golden age” of Wouter van Twiller, the Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam.

Kate Chopin (1850-1904) was a Louisiana-based author of short stories and novels, and is considered a forerunner of 20th-century feminist authors from the South. In "The Storm", a man seeks shelter at the home of his former lover, a visit which reignites their passion, while "Her Letters" is a story about the husband of a woman who dies before she is able to destroy the letters written to her by a lover. In "Unexpected", Randall and Dorothea fall in and out of love; "The Locket" tells the tale of two young lovers during the American Civil War; and "Kiss" has a humorous twist.

John Locke (1632 - 1704), the English philosopher and physician, is widely regarded as one of the Enlightenment's most influential thinkers. "A Letter Concerning Toleration" (1689) addresses the problem of religion and government by proposing religious toleration as the answer. In the "Second Treatise", Locke claims that civil society was created for the protection of life, liberty, and estate.

Theodore Roosevelt Jr. (1858-1919), the 26th president of the United States, was a conservationist and writer. Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail - published in 1888 - is the account of his adventures as a cowboy, hunter, herder, and deputy sheriff. The Rough Riders was the nickname given to the First United States Volunteer Cavalry, raised in 1898 for the Spanish-American War. The Rough Riders are best remembered for their charge up San Juan Hill, east of Santiago de Cuba, on July 1, 1898.

William Wells Brown (1814-1884) was a prominent abolitionist, historian, novelist, and playwright. Brown was an African-American pioneer in various literary genres. His novel Clotel; or, The President's Daughter (1853), was published in London, England in 1853. It is the story of Clotel and her sister Althesa who are fictional slave daughters of Thomas Jefferson, and explores the destructive effects of slavery on African-American families, the difficult lives of people of mixed-race, and the degraded and immoral relationship between master and slave.

Samuel Davies (1723-1761) was an evangelist, Presbyterian minister, composer of hymns, and prolific author. Davies was one of the first Puritan preachers in Virginia, and one of earliest missionaries to slaves in the British colonies. Davies’ sermons were infused by eschatological fervor as he proclaimed the need for the liberation of the soul from the claws of sin. Sins like avarice, prodigality, evil diversions, vanity, sensuality, and popery had for 150 years afflicted the land, he complains....

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) had a profound influence on the shape of 19th-century thought and political discourse. His view of liberty justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to the unrestricted state. Mill favoured decentralised forms of socialism because he thought that a centralised model would discourage competition, neglect talent, and disregard freedom.

Daniel Defoe (c. 1660-1731) was an English trader, author, and journalist. Defoe was a prolific writer, publishing more than 300 works on a range of topics including economics, politics, crime, religion, marriage, psychology, and the supernatural. He is most famous for his novel Robinson Crusoe (1719).

Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932) is considered the first important Black American novelist. The Conjure Woman is a collection of seven stories that began appearing in magazines in 1887 and were first published together in 1899. The narrator of The Conjure Woman is a White man from the North living in the South who passes along the stories told to him by the ex-slave Julius McAdoo. The narratives provide a realistic picture of the pre-Civil War South, including descriptions of brutish slave owners.

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (1810-1865) was a writer, a minister’s wife, and mother of four daughters who worked among the poor and traveled widely. In the novel The Moorland Cottage, Maggie Browne, the daughter of a deceased clergyman, gives up her own life to devote herself to her brother, Edward. The nonfiction work An Accused Race is Gaskell’s reformist treatise on the oppression of the Cagots in Europe.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) was a prominent sociologist, novelist, and writer of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. In the short story "If I Were a Man", a married woman named Mollie Mathewson yearns with all her heart to be a man and is suddenly transported into the body and mind of her husband, Gerald. Through the character of Mollie, Gilman illustrates the roles and attitudes of women in early 19th-century society. The utopian novel Herland describes an isolated society composed entirely of women, with an ideal social order free of war, conflict, and domination.

Booker Taliaferro Washington (1856-1915) was an educator, author, intellectual and orator, who founded Tuskegee University in 1881. Between 1890 and 1915, Washington was the most prominent leader in the African American community.

An epic poem is a lengthy narrative poem, usually set in a time beyond living memory in which the extraordinary ancestors, in their dealings with the gods or other superhuman forces, gave shape to the mortal universe for their descendants, the poet, and his audience in order to understand themselves as a people.

Pandemics have afflicted human civilizations throughout history, yet these health crises have also led to progress in medicine and society that improved people’s lives. History shows that scientific innovation often proceeds from the collaboration of researchers across disciplines, nations, and institutions.

One of the most studied and written about episodes in US history, the American Civil War remains the subject of cultural and historiographical debate. The conflict was one of the earliest industrial wars in which mass-produced weapons were employed. The mobilization of civilian factories, shipyards, transportation, and food supplies all foreshadowed the impact of industrialization in World War I, World War II, and subsequent conflicts.