I was on the web looking at one of my sites and ran into a thing called the Founding Fathers Collection. For the sale price of $300, you can the works of the great men of the colonial period.
Don’t pay any money. Those writings are all public domain. I can’t imagine anything they’ve written isn’t available on the Internet.
Let’s just take Benjamin Franklin as an example.
You can go to the Franklin Papers at Yale University and read all of his works.
How about the Federalist Papers?
Here they are at Project Gutenberg.
If you want to hear them spoken, go here.
You don’t have to just settle for their writings. At Project Gutenberg, there are usually biographies of the founding fathers. Here is a link to a biography of each of these founding fathers –
Build your own library of the great works of American History. If the writing is before 1900, it’s all public domain, so freely available. I recommend you start with Project Gutenberg and then begin examining college and university collections.
If you load these in a popular word processing format, you can annotate them with your own thoughts, mark key pages and publish your favorite selections to the Internet.
American history, its stories, the speeches, the papers, – they are our common heritage and we should cherish them.
James Pilant
Related articles
- Public-domain digitization projects increasingly have restrictive terms of use (teleread.com)
- How to add public domain books to the Kindle, by Piotr Kowalczyk (teleread.com)
- Gutenberg + Readability (johndcook.com)
- You may delay, but time will not. ~ Benjamin Franklin (freedomyear.com)
- where to find free ebooks? (manchesterlibrary.wordpress.com)
- What Could Have Been In the Public Domain Today, But Isn’t (yro.slashdot.org)
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