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    History's Greatest Letters - The Complete Collection - From the Ancient World to the Twentieth Century
    History's Greatest Letters - The Complete Collection - From the Ancient World to the Twentieth Century
    History's Greatest Letters - The Complete Collection - From the Ancient World to the Twentieth Century
    Ebook184 pages2 hours

    History's Greatest Letters - The Complete Collection - From the Ancient World to the Twentieth Century

    By Thomas Jefferson, Jane Austen and Martin Luther King

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    About this ebook

    Of the billions of pieces of correspondence that have been sent through the ages- via messenger, pony express, post office, email and carrier pigeon - many have proved to be either significant, historic, inspiring, fascinating, heartbreaking...or some combination of them all.


    Collected here is a sampling of these letters; some

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFt. Raphael Publishing Company
    Release dateMay 27, 2024
    ISBN9798892820806
    History's Greatest Letters - The Complete Collection - From the Ancient World to the Twentieth Century
    Author

    Thomas Jefferson

    Thomas Jefferson was the 3rd president of the United States. William Peden is professor emeritus of English at the University of Missouri.

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      History's Greatest Letters - The Complete Collection - From the Ancient World to the Twentieth Century - Thomas Jefferson

      Table of Correspondents

      The Ancient World

      Philip II of Macedon

      St. Paul

      Pliny the Younger

      1400-1800

      Christopher Columbus

      Martin Luther

      King Henry VIII

      Mary, Queen of Scots

      Galileo Galilei

      Benjamin Franklin

      Thomas Jefferson

      Napoleon Bonaparte

      1800-1900

      Jane Austen

      Ludwig Von Beethoven

      Charles Dickens

      Charles Darwin

      Charlotte Brontë

      Emily Dickenson

      Sullivan Ballou

      Abraham Lincoln

      Bram Stoker and Walt Whitman

      Vincent Van Gogh

      Francis Carr-Gomm

      Francis Pharcellus Church

      1900-Present

      Mark Twain

      Sigmund Freud

      Srinivasa Ramanujan

      W.E.B. DuBois

      Lt. Siefried Sassoon

      Dorothy Parker

      Amelia Earhart

      Thomas Wolfe

      Albert Einstein

      Mohandas K. Gandhi

      Winston Churchill

      Virginia Woolf

      Lt. Richard Helms

      Richard Feynman

      Frida Kahlo

      Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

      William Safire

      Captain Vijayant Thapar

      Philip II of Macedon

      If

      Correspondence between Philip II of Macedon

      and the Spartans

      346BC

      When Philip II of Macedon invaded southern Greece in 346BC, his forces proved to be successful and a result of his overwhelming victory, several of the other key city-states in the region immediately surrendered. The exception was Laconia, which contained the city of Sparta. Relying on the reputation of his army, Philip sent a message to the Spartans, asking if they wished for him to come as a friend or foe.

      The Spartans’ famous one word reply was:

      Neither.

      Upon receiving this message, Philip, losing patience, issued one final threat:

      If I invade Laconia, I shall turn you out.

      The Spartan once again replied with a single word:

      If.

      Unfortunately, the Spartans’ bravado would prove to be just that. Philip did, in fact, invade Laconia and drive the Spartans from the region.

      St. Paul

      Welcome him as you would me.

      Letter from St. Paul to Philemon

      51-62 AD

      Following the death of Jesus Christ, word of his life, death and reported resurrection began to spread throughout the ancient world and Christianity - as a religion - was born. Saul of Tarsus was a Pharisee who helped to persecute some of these early Christians until - as legend has it - the Risen Christ appeared to Paul on the road to Damascus and struck him blind. Upon his recovery, he changed his name to Paul and proclaimed that he was a convert who now believed in Christ’s divinity.

      Consequently, Paul became an early advocate for the Christian faith and he wrote a number of letters to various Christian sects all around the ancient world. These foundational epistles (some of which are in dispute as to authorship) are the earliest exploration of Christian theology and ethics.

      Towards the end of his life, while imprisoned in Rome and awaiting trial for his purported crimes, Paul penned the following letter to Philemon, the leader of the Colossian church, urging him to welcome a former slave, Onesimus, as a brother.

      Paul’s letters now make up no less than thirteen books of the New Testament.

      * * * * * * * *

      1 Paul, a prisoner for Christ Jesus, and Timothy our brother, to Philemon, our beloved and our co-worker,

      2 to Apphia our sister, to Archippus our fellow soldier, and to the church at your house.

      3 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

      4 I give thanks to my God always, remembering you in my prayers,

      5 as I hear of the love and the faith you have in the Lord Jesus and for all the holy ones,

      6 so that your partnership in the faith may become effective in recognizing every good there is in us that leads to Christ.

      7 For I have experienced much joy and encouragement from your love, because the hearts of the holy ones have been refreshed by you, brother.

      8 Therefore, although I have the full right in Christ to order you to do what is proper,

      9 I rather urge you out of love, being as I am, Paul, an old man, and now also a prisoner for Christ Jesus.

      10 I urge you on behalf of my child Onesimus, whose father I have become in my imprisonment,

      11 who was once useless to you but is now useful to both you and me.

      12 I am sending him, that is, my own heart, back to you.

      13 I should have liked to retain him for myself, so that he might serve me on your behalf in my imprisonment for the gospel,

      14 but I did not want to do anything without your consent, so that the good you do might not be forced but voluntary.

      15 Perhaps this is why he was away from you for a while, that you might have him back forever,

      16 no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a brother, beloved especially to me, but even more so to you, as a man and in the Lord.

      17 So if you regard me as a partner, welcome him as you would me.

      18 And if he has done you any injustice or owes you anything, charge it to me.

      19 I, Paul, write this in my own hand: I will pay. May I not tell you that you owe me your very self.

      20 Yes, brother, may I profit from you in the Lord. Refresh my heart in Christ.

      21 With trust in your compliance I write to you, knowing that you will do even more than I say.

      22 At the same time prepare a guest room for me, for I hope to be granted to you through your prayers.

      Pliny the Younger

      There were no gods left.

      Pliny the Younger to Cornelius Tacitus Describing the Eruption of Mount Vesuvius

      104 AD

      On August 24 of 79 AD, the Roman resort city of Pompeii was consumed by fire and ash when nearby Mount Vesuvius violently erupted. Few eyewitness accounts survive the disaster, but, twenty-five years after the event, the Roman magistrate Pliny the Younger (nephew of Pliny the Elder, who died in the cataclysm) described the eruption and its aftermath in great detail in two letters to the historian Cornelius Tacitus. In his first letter, Pliny describes the death of his uncle but here, in Pliny’s second letter, he goes into great detail about the eruption itself. The description is so detailed and so helpful to volcanologists that they now refer to such events as Plinian eruptions.

      * * * * * * * *

      My dear Tacitus,

      You say that the letter I wrote for you about my uncle's death made you want to know about my fearful ordeal at Misenum (this was where I broke off). The mind shudders to remember ... but here is the tale.

      After my uncle's departure I finished up my studies, as I had planned. Then I had a bath, then dinner and a short and unsatisfactory night. There had been tremors for many days previously, a common occurrence in Campania and no cause for panic. But that night the shaking grew much stronger; people thought it was an upheaval, not just a tremor. My mother burst into my room and I got up. I said she should rest, and I would rouse her. We sat out on a small terrace between the house and the sea. I sent for a volume of Livy; I read and even took notes from where I had left off, as if it were a moment of free time; I hardly know whether to call it bravery, or foolhardiness (I was seventeen at the time). Up comes a friend of my uncle's, recently arrived from Spain. When he sees my mother and me sitting there, and me even reading a book, he scolds her for her calm and me for my lack of concern. But I kept on with my book.

      Now the day begins, with a still hesitant and almost lazy dawn. All around us buildings are shaken. We are in the open, but it is only a small area and we are afraid, nay certain, that there will be a collapse. We decided to leave the town finally; a dazed crowd follows us, preferring our plan to their own (this is what passes for wisdom in a panic). Their numbers are so large that they slow our departure, and then sweep us along. We stopped once we had left the buildings behind us. Many strange things happened to us there, and we had much to fear.

      The carts that we had ordered brought were moving in opposite directions, though the ground was perfectly flat, and they wouldn't stay in place even with their wheels blocked by stones. In addition, it seemed as though the sea was being sucked backwards, as if it were being pushed back by the shaking of the land. Certainly the shoreline moved outwards, and many sea creatures were left on dry sand. Behind us were frightening dark clouds, rent by lightning twisted and hurled, opening to reveal huge figures of flame. These were like lightning, but bigger. At that point the Spanish friend urged us strongly: If your brother and uncle is alive, he wants you to be safe. If he has perished, he wanted you to survive him. So why are you reluctant to escape? We responded that we would not look to our own safety as long as we were uncertain about his. Waiting no longer, he took himself off from the danger at a mad pace. It wasn't long thereafter that the cloud stretched down to the ground and covered the sea. It girdled Capri and made it vanish, it hid Misenum's promontory. Then my mother began to beg and urge and order me to flee however I might, saying that a young man could make it, that she, weighed down in years and body, would die happy if she escaped being the cause of my death. I replied that I wouldn't save myself without her, and then I took her hand and made her walk a little faster. She obeyed with difficulty, and blamed herself for delaying me.

      Now came the dust, though still thinly. I look back: a dense cloud looms behind us, following us like a flood poured across the land. Let us turn aside while we can still see, lest we be knocked over in the street and crushed by the crowd of our companions. We had scarcely sat down when a darkness came that was not like a moonless or cloudy night, but more like the black of closed and unlighted rooms. You could hear women lamenting, children crying, men shouting. Some were calling for parents, others for children or spouses; they could only recognize them by their voices. Some bemoaned their own lot, other that of their near and dear. There were some so afraid of death that they prayed for death. Many raised their hands to the gods, and even more believed that there were no gods any longer and that this was one last unending night for the world. Nor were we without people who magnified real dangers with fictitious horrors. Some announced that one or another part of Misenum had collapsed or burned; lies, but they found believers. It grew lighter, though that seemed not a return of day, but a sign that the fire was approaching. The fire itself actually stopped some distance away, but darkness and ashes came again, a great weight of them. We stood up and shook the ash off again and again, otherwise we would have been covered with it and crushed by the weight. I might boast that no groan escaped me in such perils, no cowardly word, but that I believed that I was perishing with the world, and the world with me, which was a great consolation for death.

      At last the cloud thinned out and dwindled to no more than smoke or fog. Soon there was real daylight. The sun was even shining, though with the lurid glow it has after an eclipse. The sight that met our still terrified eyes was a changed world, buried in ash like snow. We returned to Misenum and took care of our bodily needs, but spent the night dangling between hope and fear. Fear was the stronger, for the earth was still quaking and a number of people who had gone mad were mocking the evils that had happened to them and others with terrifying prognostications. We still refused to go until we heard news of my uncle, although we had felt danger and expected more.

      You will read what I have written, but will not take up your pen, as the material is not the stuff of history. You have only yourself to blame if it seems not even proper stuff for a letter.

      Farewell

      Christopher Columbus

      See the man from Heaven!

      Letter from Christopher Columbus to Luis De Sant Angel Announcing His Discovery -

      February 15, 1493

      On his return voyage to Spain in early 1493, Christopher Columbus penned this letter describing his discovery of what he believed to be a series of islands off the coast of mainland China or Cathay as it was called. He had yet to realize that instead of traveling from Europe to Asia, he had actually stumbled upon a new continent. The letter is addressed to Luis De Sant Angel, ostensibly King Ferdinand’s Finance Minister and

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