Complete and unabridged, with 36 full-page plates by Thomas Doughty, George Inness and Frederic Edwin Church. New England history told to children by a grandfather from his old oak chair, and a set of famous lives besides: Benjamin West and the cat's tail, Franklin, Queen Christina, Samuel Johnson standing bareheaded in the rain at Uttoxeter. Hawthorne wrote these in the 1840s for a schoolbook trade he despised and needed, and they are better than the work he did it for. The Johnson chapter is the one that has stayed in anthologies for a hundred and fifty years. Thirty-six plates, among them Turner and Bierstadt, follow Hawthorne's own New England: Hester on the scaffold, John Eliot preaching to the Indians.