READERS ARE LEADERS: The Libraries of Great Men, Frederick Douglass
Art of Manliness – The eminent men of history were often voracious readers and their own philosophy represents a distillation of all the great works they fed into their minds. This series seeks to trace the stream of their thinking back to the source. For, as David Leach, a now retired business executive put it: “Don’t follow your mentors; follow your mentors’ mentors.”
Frederick Douglass was born into slavery. Before him, many white men didn’t think it was possible for a black man to have any intellectual rigor; for a black man to be able to think for himself in an intelligent way. When Douglass was around 20, he escaped his shackles and began life anew as a free man. From that point on, he gave his full attentions to educating himself, which he believed was a necessary component of all individual achievements and the ability to create real change in the world. It was a truth he understood from his own personal, hard-fought struggle: up from slavery, he rose to become one the foremost leaders in America in the abolitionist and women’s rights movements, as well as one of the most celebrated orators and writers of his era.
None of that would have been possible without his personal library.
…
A Selection of Books from Frederick Douglass’s Personal Library
| Title | Author |
| Cosmos: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe | Alexander von Humboldt |
| The Count of Monte Cristo | Alexandre Dumas |
| The Three Musketeers | Alexandre Dumas |
| Poems | Alfred Lord Tennyson |
| A Thousand and One Nights | |
| Henrietta Temple: A Love Story | Benjamin Disraeli |
| Bleak House | Charles Dickens |
| Cricket on the Hearth | Charles Dickens |
| ‘Three Score Years and Ten’ Life-Long Memories of Fort Snelling, Minnesota, and Other Parts of the West | Charlotte Van Cleve |
| Orations | Cicero |
| Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa | David Livingstone |
| Hesiod and Theognis | (Davies translation) |
| The Steam Engine Explained & Illustrated | Dionysius Lardner |
| History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire | Edward Gibbon |
| Journal of a Residence on a Georgian 1863 Plantation | Frances Anne Kemble |
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