The extended version of Frederick Douglass's Life and Times was published in 1892 with chapters additional to those of the earlier editions. These later chapters deal with Douglass's tour of Europe and North Africa, and with his Haitian diplomatic experiences. Their inclusion in the final version of his last autobiography illustrates the importance of Douglass's engagement with the realities of US expansion and the underpinning myths of empire to his construction of nationhood and representative identity. Another autobiographical publication of Douglass's latter years was a text that reworked his early transatlantic experience, entitled ‘Thoughts and Recollections of a Tour in Ireland’. Published in the AME Review in 1886, just before he embarked on the journey that would retrace and extend the path of his earlier travels, this piece is more or less contemporaneous with Douglass's Egyptian writing. It reveals some of the political views that fed into his autobiographical project at the time. It also allows for a comparison between Douglass's political stance on Irish Home Rule, and his views on Haiti, to whose history and current condition Douglass had previously compared Ireland.

For Douglass, the issues of emancipation, racial equality and citizenship were directly and inextricably linked to questions of nationhood and identity. The traditions and tropes in which that identity was encoded were also crucial to his own self-fashioning throughout his career.