A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY241 start with D start with D
In 1920, socialist leader Eugene V. Debs ran for president while serving a ten-year jail term for speaking against America’s role in World War I. Though many called Debs a traitor, others praised him as a prisoner of conscience, a martyr to the cause of free speech. Nearly a million Americans agreed, voting for a man whom the government had branded an enemy to his country.
In a beautifully crafted narrative, Ernest Freeberg shows that the campaign to send Debs from an Atlanta jailhouse to the White House was part of a wider national debate over the right to free speech in wartime. Debs was one of thousands of Americans arrested for speaking his mind during the war, while government censors were silencing dozens of newspapers and magazines. When peace was restored, however, a nationwide protest was unleashed against the government’s repression, demanding amnesty for Debs and his fellow political prisoners. Led by a coalition of the country’s most important intellectuals, writers, and labor leaders, this protest not only liberated Debs, but also launched the American Civil Liberties Union and changed the course of free speech in wartime.
The Debs case illuminates our own struggle to define the boundaries of permissible dissent as we continue to balance the right of free speech with the demands of national security. In this memorable story of democracy on trial, Freeberg excavates an extraordinary episode in the history of one of America’s most prized ideals.
The Italian Risorgimento, the movement for national independence and unification, is as significant to Italian history as the American Revolution is to United States history. Liberal supporters of constitutional monarchy triumphed in the political struggles of the Risorgimento, yet democratic activists and thinkers like Mazzini, Garibaldi, Pisacane, and Ferrari were major participants in those struggles.
By reconstructing the lives and political careers of 146 such activists and thinkers, Clara M. Lovett explores the democratic movement's impact on the development of modern Italy. She shows that three main principles—secularism, political egalitarianism, and a concern for social justice—sustained the movement throughout its development and became its legacy after the unification. By exploring the social context of the movement and the specific experiences of its members, she explains why the democrats failed to lead Italy's unification in 1860 and why some of them became Italy's early professional politicians.
Winner of the Lionel Gelber Prize
National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
An Economist Best Book of the Year | A Financial Times Book of the Year | A Wall Street Journal Book of the Year | A Washington Post Book of the Year | A Bloomberg News Book of the Year | An Esquire China Book of the Year | A Gates Notes Top Read of the Year
Perhaps no one in the twentieth century had a greater long-term impact on world history than Deng Xiaoping. And no scholar of contemporary East Asian history and culture is better qualified than Ezra Vogel to disentangle the many contradictions embodied in the life and legacy of China’s boldest strategist.
Once described by Mao Zedong as a “needle inside a ball of cotton,” Deng was the pragmatic yet disciplined driving force behind China’s radical transformation in the late twentieth century. He confronted the damage wrought by the Cultural Revolution, dissolved Mao’s cult of personality, and loosened the economic and social policies that had stunted China’s growth. Obsessed with modernization and technology, Deng opened trade relations with the West, which lifted hundreds of millions of his countrymen out of poverty. Yet at the same time he answered to his authoritarian roots, most notably when he ordered the crackdown in June 1989 at Tiananmen Square.
Deng’s youthful commitment to the Communist Party was cemented in Paris in the early 1920s, among a group of Chinese student-workers that also included Zhou Enlai. Deng returned home in 1927 to join the Chinese Revolution on the ground floor. In the fifty years of his tumultuous rise to power, he endured accusations, purges, and even exile before becoming China’s preeminent leader from 1978 to 1989 and again in 1992. When he reached the top, Deng saw an opportunity to creatively destroy much of the economic system he had helped build for five decades as a loyal follower of Mao—and he did not hesitate.
Kenneth Rexroth called Denise Levertov (1923–1997) "the most subtly skillful poet of her generation, the most profound, . . . and the most moving." Author of twenty-four volumes of poetry, four books of essays, and several translations, Levertov became a lauded and honored poet. Born in England, she published her first book of poems at age twenty-three, but it was not until she married and came to the United States in 1948 that she found her poetic voice, helped by the likes of William Carlos Williams, Robert Duncan, and Robert Creeley. Shortly before her death in 1997, the woman who claimed no country as home was nominated to be America's poet laureate.
Levertov was the quintessential romantic. She wanted to live vividly, intensely, passionately, and on a grand scale. She wanted the persistence of Cézanne and the depth and generosity of Rilke. Once she acclimated herself to America, the dreamy lyric poetry of her early years gave way to the joy and wonder of ordinary life. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, her poems began to engage the issues of her times. Vehement and strident, her poetry of protest was both acclaimed and criticized. The end of both the Vietnam War and her marriage left her mentally fatigued and emotionally fragile, but gradually, over the span of a decade, she emerged with new energy. The crystalline and luminous poetry of her last years stands as final witness to a lifetime of searching for the mystery embedded in life itself. Through all the vagaries of life and art, her response was that of a "primary wonder."
In this illuminating biography, Dana Greene examines Levertov's interviews, essays, and self-revelatory poetry to discern the conflict and torment she both endured and created in her attempts to deal with her own psyche, her relationships with family, friends, lovers, colleagues, and the times in which she lived. Denise Levertov: A Poet's Life is the first complete biography of Levertov, a woman who claimed she did not want a biography, insisting that it was her work that she hoped would endure. And yet she confessed that her poetry in its various forms--lyric, political, natural, and religious--derived from her life experience. Although a substantial body of criticism has established Levertov as a major poet of the later twentieth century, this volume represents the first attempt to set her poetry within the framework of her often tumultuous life.
In 1928, the newly organized Denver Artists Guild held its inaugural exhibition in downtown Denver. Little did the participants realize that their initial effort would survive the Great Depression and World War II—and then outlive all of the group’s fifty-two charter members.
The guild’s founders worked in many media and pursued a variety of styles. In addition to the oils and watercolors one would expect were masterful pastels by Elsie Haddon Haynes, photographs by Laura Gilpin, sculpture by Gladys Caldwell Fisher and Arnold Rönnebeck, ceramics by Anne Van Briggle Ritter and Paul St. Gaudens, and collages by Pansy Stockton. Styles included realism, impressionism, regionalism, surrealism, and abstraction. Murals by Allen True, Vance Kirkland, John E. Thompson, Louise Ronnebeck, and others graced public and private buildings—secular and religious—in Colorado and throughout the United States. The guild’s artists didn’t just contribute to the fine and decorative arts of Colorado; they enhanced the national reputation of the state.
Then, in 1948, the Denver Artists Guild became the stage for a great public debate pitting traditional against modern. The twenty-year-old guild split apart as modernists bolted to form their own group, the Fifteen Colorado Artists. It was a seminal moment: some of the guild’s artists became great modernists, while others remained great traditionalists.
Enhanced by period photographs and reproductions of the founding members’ works, The Denver Artists Guild chronicles a vibrant yet overlooked chapter of Colorado’s cultural history. The book includes a walking tour of guild members’ paintings and sculptures viewable in Denver and elsewhere in Colorado, by Leah Naess and author Stan Cuba.
In honor of the book’s release, the Byers-Evans House Gallery will showcase a collection of founding guild members’ works starting June 26, 2015. The exhibit, also titled The Denver Artists Guild: Its Founding Members, contains paintings from artists such as the famed Paschal Quackenbush, Louise Ronnebeck, Albert Byron Olson, Elisabeth Spalding, Waldo Love and Vance Kirkland. The show will be on display through September 26, 2015.
Recipient of 2019 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize, Foundation for Landscape Studies
2021 On the Brinck Book Award Winner
“Burle Marx created a new and modern grammar for international landscape design.”
—Lauro Cavalcanti, quoted in the New York Times
“The real creator of the modern garden.”
—American Institute of Architects
Presenting the first English translation of Burle Marx’s “depositions,” this volume highlights the environmental advocacy of a preeminent Brazilian landscape architect who advised and challenged the country’s military dictatorship.
Roberto Burle Marx (1909–1994) is internationally known as one of the preeminent modernist landscape architects. He designed renowned public landscapes in Brazil, beginning with small plazas in Recife in the 1930s and culminating with large public parks in the early 1960s, most significantly the Parque do Flamengo in Rio de Janeiro. Depositions explores a pivotal moment in Burle Marx’s career—the years in which he served as a member of the Federal Cultural Council created by the military dictatorship in the mid-1960s. Despite the inherent conflict and risk in working with the military regime, Burle Marx boldly used his position to advocate for the protection of the unique Brazilian landscape, becoming a prophetic voice of caution against the regime’s policies of rapid development and resource exploitation.
Depositions presents the first English translation of eighteen environmental position pieces that Burle Marx wrote for the journal Cultura , a publication of the Brazilian Ministry of Education and Culture, from 1967 through 1973. Catherine Seavitt Nordenson introduces and contextualizes the depositions by analyzing their historical and political contexts, as well as by presenting pertinent examples of Burle Marx’s earlier public projects, which enables a comprehensive reading of the texts. Addressing deforestation, the establishment of national parks, the place of commemorative sculpture, and the unique history of the Brazilian cultural landscape, Depositions offers new insight into Burle Marx’s outstanding landscape oeuvre and elucidates his transition from prolific designer to prescient counselor.
“Khodasevich’s light narrative touch (as translated by Brintlinger) lends a novelistic quality to the biography, making it a genuine tour de force. All students and scholars – of history, literature, poetry, biography – will find something of interest here.”—Choice
Basket weaver, storyteller, and tribal elder, Frances Manuel is a living preserver of Tohono O’odham culture. Speaking in her own words from the heart of the Arizona desert, she now shares the story of her life. She tells of O’odham culture and society, and of the fortunes and misfortunes of Native Americans in the southwestern borderlands over the past century.
In Desert Indian Woman, Frances relates her life and her stories with the wit, humor, and insight that have endeared her to family and friends. She tells of her early childhood growing up in a mesquite brush house, her training in tribal traditions, her acquaintance with Mexican ways, and her education in an American boarding school. Through her recollections of births and deaths, heartache and happiness, we learn of her family’s migration from the reservation to the barrios and back again. In the details of her everyday life, we see how Frances has navigated between O’odham and American societies, always keeping her grandparents’ traditional teachings as her compass.
It is extraordinary to hear from a Native American woman like Frances, in her own words and her own point of view, to enter the complex and sensitive aspects of her life experience, her sorrows, and her dreams. We also become privy to her continuing search for her identity across the border, and the ways in which Frances and Deborah have attempted to make sense of their friendship over twenty-odd years. Throughout the book, Deborah captures the rhythms of Frances’s narrative style, conveying the connectedness of her dreams, songs, and legends with everyday life, bringing images and people from faraway times and places into the present.
Deborah Neff brings a breadth of experience in anthropology and Southwest Native American cultures to the task of placing Frances Manuel’s life in its broader historical context, illuminating how history works itself out in people’s everyday lives. Desert Indian Woman is the story of an individual life lived well and a major contribution to the understanding of history from a Native American point of view.
Cage captures similarities in the respective desert landscapes of both Iraq and Nevada, but it is not just a study in contrasting landscapes. The inter-connected stories explore similarities and differences in human needs from the perspectives of vastly different cultures. Specifically, the stories deftly capture the overlap in the respective desert landscapes of each region, the contrasting cultures and worldviews, and the common need for hope. Taken together, the stories represent the arc of a year-long deployment by young soldiers. Cage’s stories are bound together by the soldier’s searing experiences in the desert, bookended by leaving and returning home to Nevada, which in many ways can be just as disorienting as patrolling the Iraq desert.
Thus begins a lyrical and entirely absorbing collection of personal essays by esteemed Chicana writer and gifted storyteller Kathleen Alcalá. Loosely linked by an exploration of the many meanings of “family,” these essays move in a broad arc from the stories and experiences of those close to her to those whom she wonders about, like Andrea Yates, a mother who drowned her children. In the process of digging and sifting, she is frequently surprised by what she unearths. Her family, she discovers, were Jewish refugees from the Spanish Inquisition who took on the trappings of Catholicism in order to survive.
Although the essays are in many ways personal, they are also universal. When she examines her family history, she is encouraging us to inspect our own families, too. When she investigates a family secret, she is supporting our own search for meaning. And when she writes that being separated from our indigenous culture is “a form of illiteracy,” we know exactly what she means.
After reading these essays, we find that we have discovered not only why Kathleen Alcalá is a writer but also why we appreciate her so much. She helps us to find ourselves.
Tracing the growth of ancient biography from the fifth century to the first century B.C., Arnaldo Momigliano asks fruitful questions about the origins and development of Greek biography. By clarifying the social and intellectual implications of the fact that the Greeks kept biography and autobiography distinct from historiography, he contributes to an understanding of a basic dichotomy in the Western tradition of historical writing. The Development of Greek Biography is fully annotated, and includes a bibliography designed to serve as an introduction to the study of biography in general.
This classic study is now reissued with the addition of Momigliano’s essay “Second Thoughts on Greek Biography” (1971).
The first book-length study of one of the Civil War's most outlandish and mysterious characters
Devil's Game traces the amazing career of Charles A. Dunham, Civil War spy, forger, journalist, and master of dirty tricks. Writing for a variety of New York papers under alternate names, Dunham routinely faked stories, created new identities, and later boldly cast himself to play those roles. He achieved his greatest infamy when he was called to testify in Washington concerning Abraham Lincoln's assassination. Many parts of Dunham's career remain shadowy, but Cumming offers the first detailed tour of Dunham's convoluted, high-stakes, international deceits, including his effort to sell Lincoln on plans for a raid to capture Jefferson Davis.
Exhaustively researched and unprecedented in depth, this carefully crafted assessment of Dunham's motives, personality, and the complex effects of his schemes changes assumptions about covert operations during the Civil War.
Legend has it that twenty miles of volcanic rock rising through the landscape of northern Bohemia was the work of the devil, who separated the warring Czechs and Germans by building a wall. The nineteenth-century invention of the Devil’s Wall was evidence of rising ethnic tensions. In interwar Czechoslovakia, Sudeten German nationalists conceived a radical mission to try to restore German influence across the region. Mark Cornwall tells the story of Heinz Rutha, an internationally recognized figure in his day, who was the pioneer of a youth movement that emphasized male bonding in its quest to reassert German dominance over Czech space.
Through a narrative that unravels the threads of Rutha’s own repressed sexuality, Cornwall shows how Czech authorities misinterpreted Rutha’s mission as sexual deviance and in 1937 charged him with corrupting adolescents. The resulting scandal led to Rutha’s imprisonment, suicide, and excommunication from the nationalist cause he had devoted his life to furthering. Cornwall is the first historian to tackle the long-taboo subject of how youth, homosexuality, and nationalism intersected in a fascist environment. The Devil’s Wall also challenges the notion that all Sudeten German nationalists were Nazis, and supplies a fresh explanation for Britain’s appeasement of Hitler, showing why the British might justifiably have supported the 1930s Sudeten German cause. In this readable biography of an ardent German Bohemian who participated as perpetrator, witness, and victim, Cornwall radically reassesses the Czech-German struggle of early twentieth-century Europe.
Louis Cantor illuminates Phillips's role in turning a huge white audience on to previously forbidden race music. Phillips's zeal for rhythm and blues legitimized the sound and set the stage for both Elvis's subsequent success and the rock 'n' roll revolution of the 1950s. Using personal interviews, documentary sources, and oral history collections, Cantor presents a personal view of the disc jockey while restoring Phillips's place as an essential figure in rock 'n' roll history.
In 1937 during the Spanish Civil War, Arthur Koestler, a German exile writing for a British newspaper, was arrested by Nationalist forces in Málaga. He was then sentenced to execution and spent every day awaiting death—only to be released three months later under pressure from the British government. Out of this experience, Koestler wrote Darkness at Noon, his most acclaimed work in the United States, about a man arrested and executed in a Communist prison.
Dialogue with Death is Koestler’s riveting account of the fall of Málaga to rebel forces, his surreal arrest, and his three months facing death from a prison cell. Despite the harrowing circumstances, Koestler manages to convey the stress of uncertainty, fear, and deprivation of human contact with the keen eye of a reporter.
Winner of the 2014 Clinton Jackson Coley Award for Best Work on Alabama Local History from the Alabama Historical Association
The Adams saga takes a stride through the first half of the nineteenth century, as Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams chronicles her life with John Quincy Adams. Born in London in 1775 to a Maryland merchant and his English wife, Louisa recalls her childhood and education in England and France and her courtship with John Quincy, then U.S. minister to the Netherlands. Married in 1797, Louisa accompanied her husband on his postings to Berlin, St. Petersburg, and London. Her memoirs of Prussia and Russia vividly portray the republican couple in the courts of Europe.
Louisa came to America in 1801 and would share John Quincy’s career as U.S. senator, secretary of state, president, and congressman. Except for his presidency, her diaries for these years have been preserved, and they reveal a reluctant but increasingly canny political wife. Lamentations about loss, including the deaths of three of four children, abound. But here, too, are views of Napoleonic Europe and American sectional disputes, with witty sketches of heroes and scoundrels. John Quincy emerges in a fullness seldom seen—ambitious and exacting, yet passionate, generous, and gallant. Louisa's diaries conclude with her reckoning of an eventful life, which came to a close in 1852.
In the exploding world of citizen science, hundreds of thousands of volunteers are monitoring climate change, tracking bird migrations, finding stardust for NASA, and excavating mastodons. The sheer number of citizen scientists, combined with new technology, has begun to shape how research gets done. Non-professionals become acknowledged experts: dentists turn into astronomers and accountants into botanists.
Diary of a Citizen Scientist is a timely exploration of the phenomenon of citizen science, told through the lens of nature writer Sharman Apt Russell’s yearlong study of a little-known species, the Western red-bellied tiger beetle. In a voice both humorous and lyrical, Russell recounts her persistent and joyful tracking of an insect she calls “charismatic,” “elegant,” and “fierce.” Patrolling the Gila River in southwestern New Mexico, collector’s net in hand, she negotiates the realities of climate change even as she celebrates the beauty of a still-wild and rural landscape.
Russell’s self-awareness—of her occasionally-misplaced confidence, her quest to fill in “that blank spot on the map of tiger beetles,” and her desire to become newly engaged in her life—creates a portrait not only of the tiger beetle she tracks, but of the mindset behind self-driven scientific inquiry. Falling in love with the diversity of citizen science, she participates in crowdsourcing programs that range from cataloguing galaxies to monitoring the phenology of native plants, applauds the growing role of citizen science in environmental activism, and marvels at the profusion of projects around the world.
Diary of a Citizen Scientist offers its readers a glimpse into the transformative properties of citizen science—and documents the transformation of the field as a whole.
Exploring Ledesma’s experiences from immigrant to student to academic, Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer presents a humorous, gritty, and multilayered portrait of undocumented immigrant life in urban America. Ledesma’s vignettes about life in the midst of ongoing social trauma give voice to a generation that has long been silent about its struggles. Delving into the key moments of cultural transition throughout his childhood and adulthood—police at the back door waiting to deport his family, the ex-girlfriend who threatens to call INS and report him, and the interactions with law enforcement even after he is no longer undocumented—Ledesma, through his art and his words, provides a glimpse into the psychological and philosophical concerns of undocumented immigrant youth who struggle to pinpoint their identity and community.
In 1854 Caroline Seabury of Brooklyn, New York, set out for Columbus, Mississippi, to teach French at its Institute for Young Ladies. She lived in Columbus until 1863, through the years of mounting sectional bitterness that preceded the Civil War and through the turmoil and hardships of the war itself. During that time, her most intimate confidant was her diary. Discovered in the archives of the Minnesota State Historical Society, it is published here for the first time.
The diary is an illuminating account of southern plantation society and the “peculiar institution” of slavery on the eve of its destruction. Seabury also records her uneasy attempts to come to terms with her position as an unmarried, white, Northern woman whose job was to educate wealthy, white, Southern girls in a setting seemingly oblivious to the horrors of slavery. The diary is not simply a chronicle of daily happenings; Seabury concentrates on remarkable events and the memorable feelings and ideas they generate, shaping them into entries that reveal her as an accomplished writer. She frames her narrative with her journey south in 1854 and the hazardous and exhausting return north through battle lines in 1863.
Disapproving of slavery, yet deeply attached to friends and her life in Columbus and also painfully conscious of the fragility of her own economic and social position, Seabury condemned privately in her diary the evils that she endured silently in public. There are striking scenes of plantation life that depict the brutalities of slavery and benumbed responses to them. Seabury also successfully captures the mood of Mississippi as it changed from a fire-eating appetite to fight the Yankees to a grim apprehension of inexorable defeat. Most impressive of all is Seabury’s poignantly honest presentation of herself, caught in the middle.
These volumes begin the publication of the greatest diary, both in mass and substance, in American History. Recording a span of sixty-eight years, it has been known heretofore only in partial form. When, over a hundred years ago, Charles Francis Adams edited his grandfather’s diary, he chose to omit “the details of common life,” reduce “the moral and religious speculations,” and retain criticisms of others only if they applied to public figures “acting in the same sphere with the writer.”
Now the diary is being published complete for the first time. Starting with the entries of a twelve-year-old, the present volumes cover John Quincy Adams’ formative year—his schooling and travel broad, study at Harvard, and the first months of training for the law. Adams’ six years overseas with his father took him to a half dozen countries, with lengthy stays in Paris, the Netherlands, and St. Petersburg. On his return he stayed for a time in New York, making the acquaintance of influential congressmen. To finish preparing for college, he lived with an aunt and uncle in Haverhill, caught up in a round of social activities. Entering Harvard with junior standing in the spring of 1786, he graduated in fifteen months.
As Adams matured, diary entries became less a dutiful response to a father’s request and more a record of the young man’s perceptive observations and reflections—and thus a rich source for social history. There are accounts of play-going in Paris, evenings with Lafayette and Jefferson, the diversions of rural New England, apprenticeship in a Newburyport law office. And through the eyes of a serious but not unbending student we are given a picture of Harvard in the 1780s.
Candid opinions of preachers, writers, men of affairs, and family members accompany the closest self-scrutiny. Here is a remarkable record of the passage from adolescence to manhood of a precocious and sensitive boy torn by self-doubt and driving himself to fulfill his promise and his parents’ expectations.
and family as Nannie, began a diary. The Diary of Nannie Haskins Williams: A Southern
Woman’s Story of Rebellion and Reconstruction, 1863–1890 provides valuable insights into
the conditions in occupied Middle Tennessee. A young, elite Confederate sympathizer,
Nannie was on the cusp of adulthood with the expectation of becoming a mistress in
a slaveholding society. The war ended this prospect, and her life was forever changed.
Though this is the first time the diaries have been published in full, they are well known
among Civil War scholars, and a voice-over from the wartime diary was used repeatedly
in Ken Burns’s famous PBS program The Civil War.
Sixteen-year-old Nannie had to come to terms with Union occupation very early in
the war. Amid school assignments, young friendship, social events, worries about her
marital prospects, and tension with her mother, Nannie’s entries also mixed information
about battles, neighbors wounded in combat, U.S. Colored troops, and lawlessness in the
surrounding countryside. Providing rare detail about daily life in an occupied city, Nannie’s
diary poignantly recounts how she and those around her continued to fight long after
the war was over—not in battles, but to maintain their lives in a war-torn community.
Though numerous women’s Civil War diaries exist, Nannie’s is unique in that she also
recounts her postwar life and the unexpected financial struggles she and her family experienced
in the post-Reconstruction South. Nannie’s diary may record only one woman’s
experience, but she represents a generation of young women born into a society based
on slavery but who faced mature adulthood in an entirely new world of decreasing farm
values, increasing industrialization, and young women entering the workforce. Civil War
scholars and students alike will learn much from this firsthand account of coming-of-age
during the Civil War.
Minoa D. Uffelman is an associate professor of history at Austin Peay State University.
Ellen Kanervo is professor emerita of communications at Austin Peay State University.
Phyllis Smith is retired from the U.S. Army and currently teaches high school science in
Montgomery County, Tennessee. Eleanor Williams is the Montgomery County, Tennessee,
historian.
Jordan’s descendants worked tirelessly toward ensuring the publication of this diary. In its carefully annotated pages, readers will learn about the years of sectional conflict leading up to the war, the diarist’s dizzying array of daily activities, and her attitudes toward those she encountered. Jordan takes a caustic tone toward Union occupiers, whom she accused of “prancing round on their fine horses.” She routinely refers to the USA as “Lincolndom” and describes her contempt toward the African Americans in the blue uniforms of the Union army. She seems to have also harbored a bitter resentment toward the “elites” on the other side of the river in Clarksville. This one-of-a-kind volume not only adds a distinct female voice to the story of the Civil War, but also a unique new picture of the slow but steady disintegration of the “peculiar institution” of slavery.
With the 100th anniversary of his birth on September 7, 2015 Dick Cole has long stood in the powerful spotlight of fame that has followed him since his B-25 was launched from a Navy carrier and flown toward Japan just four months after the attack on Pearl Harbor. In recognition the tremendous boost Doolittle’s Raid gave American morale, members of The Tokyo Doolittle Raiders were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in May 2014.
Doolittle’s Raid was only the opening act of Cole’s flying career during the war. When that mission was complete and all of the 16 aircraft had crash-landed in China, many of the survivors were assigned to combat units in Europe. Cole remained in India after their rescue and was assigned to Ferrying Command, flying the Hump of the Himalayas for a year in the world’s worst weather, with inadequate aircraft, few aids to navigation, and inaccurate maps. More than 600 aircraft with their crews were lost during this monumental effort to keep China in the war, but Cole survived and rotated home in 1943. He was home just a few months when he was recruited for the First Air Commandos and he returned to India to participate in Project 9, the aerial invasion of Burma.
This volume provides insight from leading scholars who have begun to reassess the significance of Massachusetts in the author's life and work. The collection begins with a broad biographical and historical overview taken from the full-length narrative of the award-winning exhibition Dickens and Massachusetts: A Tale of Power and Transformation, which attracted thousands of visitors while on display in Lowell. Abundant images from the exhibition, many of them difficult to find elsewhere, enhance the story of Dickens's relationship with the vibrant cultural and intellectual life of Massachusetts. The second section includes essays that consider the importance of Dickens's many connections to the commonwealth.
In addition to the volume editors, contributors include Chelsea Bray, Iain Crawford, Andre DeCuir, Natalie McKnight, Lillian Nayder, and Kit Polga.
from the front at iwo jima march 5--
Then I remembered and added two words.
under fire--
They looked great."
In 1965, Wisconsin native Georgette "Dickey" Chapelle became the first female American war correspondent to be killed in action. Now, "Dickey Chapelle Under Fire" shares her remarkable story and offers readers the chance to experience Dickey's wide-ranging photography, including several photographs taken during her final patrol in Vietnam.
Dickey Chapelle fought to be taken seriously as a war correspondent and broke down gender barriers for future generations of female journalists. She embedded herself with military units on front lines around the globe, including Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the Dominican Republic, and Vietnam. Dickey sometimes risked her life to tell the story--after smuggling aid to refugees fleeing Hungary, she spent almost two months in a Hungarian prison. For twenty-five years, Dickey's photographs graced the pages of "National Geographic," the "National Observer," "Life," and others. Her tenacity, courage, and compassion shine through in her work, highlighting the human impact of war while telling the bigger story beyond the battlefield.
In "Dickey Chapelle Under Fire," the American public can see the world through Dickey's lens for the first time in almost fifty years, with a foreword by Jackie Spinner, former war correspondent for "The Washington Post."
In addition, promotional items, reviews, and correspondence relating to early publications are included, as well as some later documents that reveal the changing assessments of Dickinson’s poetry in response to evolving critical standards. These documents provide evidence that counters many popular conceptions of her life and reception, such as the belief that the writer best known for poems focused on loss, death, and immortality was herself a morose soul. In fact, those who knew her found her humorous, playful, and interested in other people.
Dickinson maintained literary and personal correspondence with major representatives of the national literary scene, developing a reputation as a remarkable writer even as she maintained extreme levels of privacy. Evidence compiled here also demonstrates that she herself made considerable provision for the survival of her poems and laid the groundwork for their eventual publication. Dickinson in Her Own Time reveals the poet as her contemporaries knew her, before her legend took hold.
In the making for almost a decade, the Dictionary of Missouri Biography is the most important reference work on Missouri biography to be published in the last half century. Written by nearly three hundred talented authors from around the country and edited by four of the leading authorities on Missouri history, this monumental work contains biographies of more than seven hundred individuals who have in some way made a contribution to the course of state and national history.
Covering all periods as well as all regions of the state, this remarkable volume illustrates the state's cultural, racial, and ethnic diversity. Although the men and women chosen for inclusion in this book came from many walks of life, all of them were either born in Missouri or through their lives touched the state in a significant way. Many of the people will be instantly recognizable, but others will be less well known. Each of them, however, achieved notoriety in some area of activity—politics, business, agriculture, the arts, entertainment, sports, education, military service, diplomacy, social reform, civic improvements, science, or religion.
Providing information on and insight into the lives, careers, personalities, and eras of all of the subjects, the book clearly presents the achievements of the featured individuals, as well as the richness of the state's heritage. Brief bibliographies after each entry direct the reader toward further research on a given subject.
Written in an easy-to-read and accessible style, the Dictionary of Missouri Biography will be an indispensable reference. Scholars, researchers, and the general reader will turn to this guide repeatedly to discover useful and reliable information about noteworthy Missourians. Every library, every school, every historian, and every Missouri family will want this important new work.
While the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century British Scientists covers those working in traditional scientific areas such as physics, astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, and biology, it also acknowledges those working in the human sciences such as anthropology, sociology, psychology, and medicine. In addition, areas often overlooked by historians of science—such as phrenology, mesmerism, spiritualism, scientific illustration, scientific journalism and publishing, instrument making, and government policy—are included here, as are the important roles of neglected "amateurs," such as women and members of the working class. By including those who worked in nontraditional areas and by considering the social and cultural context in which they lived, the dictionary reflects a richer picture of nineteenth-century science than has ever been seen before.
The life of Rudolf Diesel, a man who achieved a power plant with the potential for revolutionizing industry and transportation. Diesel demonstrated that he possessed both the scientific insight and technical skill needed to create the diesel engine.
Presenting essays on America's most reviled traitor, its worst president, and its most controversial literary ingénue (Benedict Arnold, Warren G. Harding, and Lolita), among others, sociologist Gary Alan Fine analyzes negative, contested, and subcultural reputations. Difficult Reputations offers eight compelling historical case studies as well as a theoretical introduction situating the complex roles in culture and history that negative reputations play.
Arguing the need for understanding real conditions that lead to proposed interpretations, as well as how reputations are given meaning over time, this book marks an important contribution to the sociologies of culture and knowledge.
Sargent examines the philosophical, legal, experimental, and religious traditions—among them English common law, alchemy, medicine, and Christianity—that played a part in shaping Boyle's experimental thought and practice. The roots of his philosophy in his early life and education, in his religious ideals, and in the work of his predecessors—particularly Bacon, Descartes, and Galileo—are fully explored, as are the possible influences of his social and intellectual circle. Drawing on the full range of Boyle's published works, as well as on his unpublished notebooks and manuscripts, Sargent shows how these diverse influences were transformed and incorporated into Boyle's views on and practice of experiment.
In this moving and eloquent portrait, John Heilbron describes how the founder of quantum theory rose to the pinnacle of German science. With great understanding, he shows how Max Planck suffered morally and intellectually as his lifelong habit of service to his country and to physics was confronted by the realities of World War I and the brutalities of the Third Reich.
In an afterword written for this edition, Heilbron weighs the recurring questions among historians and scientists about the costs to others, and to Planck himself, of the painful choices he faced in attempting to build an “ark” to carry science and scientists through the storms of Nazism.
Fedor Chizhov built the first railroad owned entirely by Russian stockholders, created Moscow’s first bank and mutual credit society, and launched the first profitable steamship line based in Archangel. In this valuable book, Thomas Owen vividly illuminates the life and world of this seminal figure in early Russian capitalism.
Chizhov condemned European capitalism as detrimental to the ideal of community and the well-being of workers and peasants. In his strategy of economic nationalism, Chizhov sought to motivate merchants to undertake new forms of corporate enterprise without undermining ethnic Russian culture. He faced numerous obstacles, from the lack of domestic investment capital to the shortage of enlightened entrepreneurial talent. But he reserved his harshest criticism for the tsarist ministers, whose incompetence and prejudice against private entrepreneurship proved his greatest hindrance.
Richly documented from Chizhov’s detailed diary, this work offers an insightful exploration of the institutional impediments to capitalism and the rule of law that plagued the tsarist empire and continue to bedevil post-Soviet Russia.
The place is Skull Valley in central Arizona, the time the 1930s. Taking food as his theme, Weston paints an instructive and often hilarious portrait of growing up, of rural family life under difficult circumstances, and of a remote Arizona community trying to hold body and soul together during tough times. His book recalls life in a lineman's shack, interlaced with "disquisitions on swamp life, rotting water, and the complex experience of finding enough to eat during the Great Depression."
Central to Weston's account is his mother Eloine, a valiant woman rearing a large brood in poverty with little help from her husband. Eloine cooks remarkably well—master of a small repertory from which she coaxes ideas surprising even to herself—and feeds her family on next to nothing. She is a woman whose first instinct is to cry out "Lord, what am I going to feed them" whenever visitors show up close to mealtime. Recalls Weston, "Her strength lay in a practical- and poverty-born sense that there must be more edible food in the world than most people realized," and he swears that six out of seven meals were from parts of four or five previous meals coming round again, like the buckets on a Ferris wheel.
Although Weston evokes a fond remembrance of a bygone era that moves from Depression-era Skull Valley to wartime Prescott, rest assured: food—its acquisition, its preparation, its wholehearted enjoyment—is the foundation of this book. "I did not have a deprived childhood, despite its slim pickings," writes Weston. "If I recall a boiling pig's head now and then, it is not to be read as some Jungian blip from Lord of the Flies but simply a recurring flicker of food-memory." Whether remembering his father's occasional deer poaching or his community's annual Goat Picnic, Weston laces his stories with actual recipes—even augmenting his instructions for roasted wild venison with tips for preparing jerky.
Dining at the Lineman's Shack teems with sparkling allusions, both literary and culinary, informed by Weston's lifetime of travels. Even his nagging memory of desperate boyhood efforts to trade his daily peanut-butter sandwich for bacon-and-egg, baloney, jelly, or most anything else is tempered by his acquaintance with "the insidious sa-teh sauce in Keo Sananikone's hole-in-the-wall restaurant on Kapahulu Street"—a peanut-butter-based delicacy for which he obligingly provides the ingredients (and which he promises will keep, refrigerated in a jar, for several weeks before baroque things begin to grow on it).
Through this tantalizing smorgasbord of memories, stories, and recipes, John Weston has fashioned a wholly captivating commentary on American culture, both in an earlier time and in our own. Dining at the Lineman's Shack is a book that will satisfy any reader's hunger for the unusual—and a book to savor, in every sense of the word.
In 1977, at the age of 36, Jeffrey Cohen, a physicist at the University of Pennsylvania, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. But it wasn't until 10 years later that the "dirty details" began, when the disease had progressed to the point where he could not transfer himself out of his wheelchair. That point is where his wife Marion begins her memoir of caregiving: "If I had to explain it in three words, those words would be 'nights,' 'lifting,' and 'toilet.' And then, if I were permitted to elaborate further, I would continue, 'nights' does not mean lying awake in fear listening for his breathing. 'Lifting' does not mean dragging him by the feet along the floor. And 'toilet' does not mean changing catheters."
But "dirty details," Marion Cohen teaches us, involves more than "nights," "lifting," and "toilet." There is the loss, anger, fear, and desperation that envelops the family. She reveals what it felt like to be consistently in "dire straits" with no real help or understanding, what she characterizes as society's "conspiracy of silence." Chronicling their lives in the context of her husband's progressing disease, she discusses the raging emotions, the celebrations, the day-to-day routine, the arguments, the disappointments, and the moments of closeness. During the 15 years she cared for him at home, both continued to work on various projects, share in the rearing of their four children, and be very much in love. This powerful, honest narrative also delves into the process of making the "nursing-home decision" and those decisions Cohen made to put her and her family's life together again.
Intrigued by this unusual string of coincidental disappearances, Scott Thybony set out to learn what happened. His investigations took him from Island in the Sky to Skeleton Mesa, from Texas to Tucson, and from the Green River to the Red. He traced the journey of Lucy Garrett from the murder of her father to her dramatic courtroom testimony. Using the pages of an old journal he followed the route of Dan Thrapp as he crossed an expanse of wildly rugged country with a pair of outlaws. Thrapp’s story of survival in an unforgiving land is a poignant counterpoint to the fate of the artist Everett Ruess, which the New York Times has called “one of the most enduring mysteries of the modern West.” Thybony draws on extensive research and a lifetime of exploration to create a riveting story of these three lives.
Alexander Herzen—philosopher, novelist, essayist, political agitator, and one of the leading Russian intellectuals of the nineteenth century—was as famous in his day as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. While he is remembered for his masterpiece My Past and Thoughts and as the father of Russian socialism, his contributions to the history of ideas defy easy categorization because they are so numerous. Aileen Kelly presents the first fully rounded study of the farsighted genius whom Isaiah Berlin called “the forerunner of much twentieth-century thought.”
In an era dominated by ideologies of human progress, Herzen resisted them because they conflicted with his sense of reality, a sense honed by his unusually comprehensive understanding of history, philosophy, and the natural sciences. Following his unconventional decision to study science at university, he came to recognize the implications of early evolutionary theory, not just for the natural world but for human history. In this respect, he was a Darwinian even before Darwin.
Socialism for Russia, as Herzen conceived it, was not an ideology—least of all Marxian “scientific socialism”—but a concrete means of grappling with unique historical circumstances, a way for Russians to combine the best of Western achievements with the possibilities of their own cultural milieu in order to move forward. In the same year that Marx declared communism to be the “solution to the riddle of history,” Herzen denied that any such solution could exist. History, like nature, was contingent—an improvisation both constrained and encouraged by chance.
The Disobedient Generation collects newly written autobiographies by an international cross-section of well-known sociologists, all of them "children of the '60s." It illuminates the human experience of living through that decade as apprentice scholars and activists, encountering the issues of class, race, the Establishment, the decline of traditional religion, feminism, war, and the sexual revolution. In each case the interlinked crises of young adulthood, rapid change, and nascent professional careers shaped this generation's private and public selves. This is an intensely personal collective portrait of a generation in a time of struggle.
Winner of the Richard L. Wentworth Prize in American History, Byron Caldwell Smith Book Prize, and the William Rockhill Nelson Award
On a hot summer evening in 1958, a group of African American students in Wichita, Kansas, quietly entered Dockum's Drug Store and sat down at the whites-only lunch counter. This was the beginning of the first sustained, successful student sit-in of the modern civil rights movement, instigated in violation of the national NAACP's instructions.
Dissent in Wichita traces the contours of race relations and black activism in this unexpected locus of the civil rights movement. Based on interviews with more than eighty participants in and observers of Wichita's civil rights struggles, this powerful study hones in on the work of black and white local activists, setting their efforts in the context of anticommunism, FBI operations against black nationalists, and the civil rights policies of administrations from Eisenhower through Nixon.
Through her close study of events in Wichita, Eick reveals the civil rights movement as a national, not a southern, phenomenon. She focuses particularly on Chester I. Lewis, Jr., a key figure in the local as well as the national NAACP. Lewis initiated one of the earliest investigations of de facto school desegregation by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and successfully challenged employment discrimination in the nation's largest aircraft industries.
Dissent in Wichita offers a moving account of the efforts of Lewis, Vivian Parks, Anna Jane Michener, and other courageous individuals to fight segregation and discrimination in employment, public accommodations, housing, and schools. This volume also offers the first extended examination of the Young Turks, a radical movement to democratize and broaden the agenda of the NAACP for which Lewis provided critical leadership.
Through a close study of personalities and local politics in Wichita over two decades, Eick demonstrates how the tenor of black activism and white response changed as economic disparities increased and divisions within the black community intensified. Her analysis, enriched by the words and experiences of men and women who were there, offers new insights into the civil rights movement as a whole and into the complex interplay between local and national events.
For nearly half a century, until his death in October 1948, Judah Magnes occupied a singular place in Jewish public life. He won fame early as a preacher and communal leader, but abandoned these pursuits at the height of his influence for the roles of political dissenter and moral gadfly. During World War I he became an outspoken pacifist and supporter of radical causes. Settling permanently in Palestine in 1922, he was a founder and the first president of the Hebrew University.
Increasingly, he viewed rapprochement with the Arabs as the practical and moral test of Zionism, and the formation of a bi-national state of Arabs and Jews became his chief political goal. His life interests thus focused on the core issues that confronted and still confront the Jewish people: group survival in democratic America, the direction and character of the return to Zion, and thereconciliation of universal ideals with Jewish aspirations and needs.
Dissenter in Zion draws upon a rich corpus of private letters, personal journals, and diaries to offer a moving account of an eloquent and sensitive person grappling with the great questions of the day and of an activist striving to translate private moral feelings into public deeds through politics and diplomacy. We see Magnes disagreeing with Brandeis over the leadership and direction of American Zionism and with Weizmann and Ben-Gurion over ways to achieve peaceful relations with the Arabs; defending himself against charges by Einstein that he was mismanaging the affairs of the Hebrew University; and persistently negotiating with Arab leaders, trying to reach a compromise on the eve of the establishment of the State of Israel.
Dissenter in Zion also contains a biographical essay on Magnes by Arthur Goren, assessing his ideas and motives and placing him in the context of his times. It shows Magnes's profundity without covering up his weaknesses, his lifelong tactic for courting repeated defeat in favor of long-term goals that could not come to pass in his lifetime.
How does music played and heard over many years inform one’s sense of home? Writing during the COVID-19 pandemic, when travel is forbidden and distance felt anew, Edward Dusinberre, first violinist of the world-renowned Takács Quartet, searches for answers in the music of composers whose relationships to home shaped the pursuit of their craft—Antonín Dvořák, Edward Elgar, Béla Bartók, and Benjamin Britten.
Dusinberre has lived abroad for three decades. At the age of 21, he left his native England to pursue music studies at the Juilliard School in New York. Three years later he moved to Boulder, Colorado. Drawn to the stories of Dvořák’s, Bartók’s, and Britten’s American sojourns as they tried to reconcile their new surroundings with nostalgia for their homelands, Dusinberre reflects on his own evolving relationship to England and the idea of home. As he visits and imagines some of the places crucial to these composers’ creative inspiration, Dusinberre also reflects on Elgar’s unusual Piano Quintet and the landscapes that inspired it.
Combining travel writing with revealing insights into the working lives of string quartet musicians, Distant Melodies is a moving and humorous meditation on the relationship between music and home.
During his decades living and teaching in Alabama, Brown followed his curiosity down myriad pathways about Alabama and the region, including the state’s majestic landscape, plants and animals found nowhere else, history, and rich folkways. In the tapestry of Alabama culture, Brown traces the threads of Native American, African slave, and European settler influences, woven over the centuries into novel patterns that surprise and fascinate.
Writing in the voice of a learned companion, Brown reveals insights and stories about unforgettable facets of Alabama culture, such as Sacred Harp singers and African American railroad callers, the use of handmade snares and stationary fishtraps to catch river redhorse and freshwater drum, white oak basketmaking and herbal medicine traditions, the evolution of the single-pen log cabin into the impressive two-story I-house, and a wealth of other engrossing stories.
An instant classic, Distracted by Alabama is a keepsake that readers who love, visit, or are curious about Alabama and Southern culture will return to again and again.
This insightful study places African American women's stardom in historical and industrial contexts by examining the star personae of five African American women: Dorothy Dandridge, Pam Grier, Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey, and Halle Berry. Interpreting each woman's celebrity as predicated on a brand of charismatic authority, Mia Mask shows how these female stars have ultimately complicated the conventional discursive practices through which blackness and womanhood have been represented in commercial cinema, independent film, and network television.
Mask examines the function of these stars in seminal yet underanalyzed films. She considers Dandridge's status as a sexual commodity in films such as Tamango, revealing the contradictory discourses regarding race and sexuality in segregation-era American culture. Grier's feminist-camp performances in sexploitation pictures Women in Cages and The Big Doll House and her subsequent blaxploitation vehicles Coffy and Foxy Brown highlight a similar tension between representing African American women as both objectified stereotypes and powerful, self-defining icons. Mask reads Goldberg's transforming habits in Sister Act and The Associate as representative of her unruly comedic routines, while Winfrey's daily television performance as self-made, self-help guru echoes Horatio Alger narratives of success. Finally, Mask analyzes Berry's meteoric success by acknowledging the ways in which Dandridge's career made Berry's possible.
In 1820 the Missouri controversy erupted over the issue of slavery in the newly acquired lands of the Louisiana Purchase. It fell to Jesse Burgess Thomas (1777–1853), a junior U.S. senator from the new state of Illinois, to handle the delicate negotiations that led to the Missouri Compromise. Thomas’s maturity, good judgment, and restraint helped pull the country back from the brink of disunion and created a compromise that held for thirty-four years. In Dividing the Union, Matthew W. Hall examines the legal issues underlying the controversy and the legislative history of the Missouri Compromise while focusing on the aspects of Thomas’s life and character that gave him such influence. The first in-depth biography of Thomas, Hall’s work demonstrates how the legislative battle over the Compromise reflected the underlying nuances of the larger struggle over slavery.
The text of the Missouri Compromise originated from the Northwest Ordinance. Article VI of the Ordinance purported to prohibit slavery in the Northwest Territory, but paradoxically, a provision that assured property rights in another article was used to protect slavery. People in some parts of the Northwest sought to circumvent Article VI by formulating indenture laws and various state constitutional provisions addressing slavery. Pro- and antislavery activists eventually developed quite different interpretations of the relevant language in these documents, making negotiations over slavery in the new territory extremely complicated.
As Hall demonstrates, Thomas was perfectly situated geographically, politically, and ideologically to navigate the Missouri controversy. He was the first speaker of the Indiana Territorial General Assembly, one of the first territorial judges in the Illinois Territory, and the president of the Illinois State Constitutional Convention in 1818. Because the drive for statehood in Illinois was strong, the convention managed to skirt the divisive issue of slavery, due in large part to Thomas’s efforts. That he was never required to clearly articulate his own views on slavery allowed Thomas to maintain a degree of neutrality, and his varied political career gave him the experience necessary to craft a compromise.
Thomas’s final version of the Compromise included shrewdly worded ambiguities that supported opposing interests in the matter of slavery. These ambiguities secured the passage of the Compromise and its endurance until the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. By weaving Thomas’s life story into the history of the Missouri Compromise, Hall offers new insight into both a pivotal piece of legislation and an important, previously overlooked figure in nineteenth-century American politics.
Barbara Kreiger’s intriguing narrative presents the account of Clorinda Minor, a charismatic American Christian woman whose belief in the Second Coming prompted her to leave a comfortable life in Philadelphia in 1851 and take up agriculture in Palestine.
After her disappointment in a failed prophecy that the End of Days would take place in October 1844, Mrs. Minor determined that the Holy Land was not yet adequately prepared for such an event and decided that it would be her mission to teach the poverty-stricken Jews of Palestine to work the soil. In this very American story, Mrs. Minor, like so many other pioneers of her day, looked to the land as her future.
Even as her mission was distinctly religious, her daily efforts were in the social realm. And although her work brought Jews and Arabs together, and her small farm was a unique settlement where Christians, Muslims, and Jews labored alongside one another, the events detailed in Divine Expectations had dramatic and tragic diplomatic and international repercussions.
With the deft touch of a novelist, Barbara Kreiger weaves the little-known story of Clorinda Minor into the larger context of the region and its history, presenting it in its charming eccentricity and its gripping reality.
Drawn from some 5,000 letters, six decades of daily-diary writings, and extensive interviews, Dixie Heretic: The Civil Rights Odyssey of Renwick C. Kennedy offers a life-and-times biography of the Alabama Black Belt minister, Renwick C. Kennedy (1900–1985). Here, Tennant McWilliams gives an unvarnished account of Kennedy’s tortuous efforts to make his congregants and other southern whites “better Christians.”
Kennedy came from “upcountry” South Carolina, a place rife with Scotch-Irish Associate Reformed Presbyterians—people of biblical infallibility and individual piety and salvation. In 1927, after a life-changing theology education at Princeton, he moved to Camden, Alabama, county seat of Wilcox County. There, he came to believe that God had a mandate for him: to change the “Half Christian” conservative, and the often violent, racial behaviors around him. As a neo-orthodox Protestant, Kennedy never rejected literal approaches to the Bible. Still, out of the “Full Christian” Social Gospel, he urged changed racial behavior. Ultimately this led him to publish confrontational short stories and essays in Christian Century and New Republic—most set in fictitious “Yaupon County.”
In World War II, Kennedy served as a chaplain with the famed 102nd Evacuation Hospital. He came home hoping the Allied victory would spur Americans to fight racial segregation just as they had fought racial fascism in Europe. The 1948 Dixiecrat movement dashed these hopes, turning much of his neo-orthodox optimism to cynicism. His hope found fleeting resurgence in the civil rights movement, and saw Kennedy quietly leading desegregation of Troy University, where he was an administrator. But the era’s assassinations, combined with George Wallace and the rise of southern white Republicans, regularly returned him to the frustrated hopes of 1948 and fostered a pessimism about truly changed hearts that he took to his grave in 1985.
DJ Screw, a.k.a. Robert Earl Davis Jr., changed rap and hip-hop forever. In the 1990s, in a spare room of his Houston home, he developed a revolutionary mixing technique known as chopped and screwed. Spinning two copies of a record, Screw would “chop” in new rhythms, bring in local rappers to freestyle over the tracks, and slow the recording down on tape. Soon Houstonians were lining up to buy his cassettes—he could sell thousands in a single day. Fans drove around town blasting his music, a sound that came to define the city’s burgeoning and innovative rap culture. June 27 has become an unofficial city holiday, inspired by a legendary mix Screw made on that date.
Lance Scott Walker has interviewed nearly everyone who knew Screw, from childhood friends to collaborators to aficionados who evangelized Screw’s tapes—millions of which made their way around the globe—as well as the New York rap moguls who honored him. Walker brings these voices together with captivating details of Screw’s craft and his world. More than the story of one man, DJ Screw is a history of the Houston scene as it came of age, full of vibrant moments and characters. But none can top Screw himself, a pioneer whose mystique has only grown in the two decades since his death.
This compilation is a rigorous and riveting assessment of Quinn’s legacy. In this volume, scholars examine him as a historical figure who helps us better understand modern Mormonism. They also probe his role as a historiographical titan. These essays enable us to analyze his influence on scholarship that both preceded and followed him. More than an investigation into his life and work, DNA Mormon uncovers the world in which he lived.
Methodism in the public and private lives of the politician
After more than forty contentious years in the public eye, Hillary Rodham Clinton is one of the best-known political figures in the nation. Yet the strong religious faith at the heart of her politics and personal life often remains confounding, if not mysterious, to longtime observers. Even many of her admirers would be surprised to hear Clinton state that her Methodist outlook has “been a huge part of who I am and how I have seen the world, and what I believe in, and what I have tried to do in my life.”
Gary Scott Smith’s biography of Clinton’s journey in faith begins with her Methodist upbringing in Park Ridge, Illinois, where she faithfully attended worship services, Sunday school, and youth group meetings. Like many mainline Protestants, Clinton’s spiritual commitment developed gradually throughout childhood, while her combination of missionary zeal and impressive personal talents has informed her career from the time of her pro bono work at Yale on behalf of children to the present.
Her Methodist faith has been very important to many of Clinton’s high-profile endeavors and in helping her cope with the prominent travails brought on by two presidential campaigns, never-ending conservative rancor, and her husband’s infidelity. Smith’s account examines Clinton’s faith in the context of work ranging from her 1990s pursuit of healthcare reform to a “Hillary doctrine” of foreign policy focused on her longtime goal of providing basic human rights for children and women--a project she saw as essential to United States security. The result is an enlightening reconsideration of an extraordinary political figure who has defied private doubts and public controversy to live by John Wesley’s dictum: “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.”
William McKnight was a member of the Seventh Ohio Volunteer Cavalry from September 1862 until his death in June of 1864. During his time of service, McKnight penned dozens of emotion-filled letters, primarily to his wife, Samaria, revealing the struggles of an entire family both before and during the war.
This collection of more than one hundred letters provides in-depth accounts of several battles in Kentucky and Tennessee, such as the Cumberland Gap and Knoxville campaigns that were pivotal events in the Western Theater. The letters also vividly respond to General John Hunt Morgan’s raid through Ohio and correct claims previously published that McKnight was part of the forces chasing Morgan. By all accounts Morgan did stay for a period of time at McKnight’s home in Langsville during his raid through Ohio, much to McKnight’s horror and humiliation, but McKnight was in Kentucky at the time. Tragically, McKnight was killed in action nearly a year later during an engagement with Morgan’s men near Cynthiana, Kentucky.
Autobiography of jazz elder statesman Frank “Doc” Adams, highlighting his role in Birmingham, Alabama’s, historic jazz scene and tracing his personal adventure that parallels, in many ways, the story and spirit of jazz itself.
Doc tells the story of an accomplished jazz master, from his musical apprenticeship under John T. “Fess” Whatley and his time touring with Sun Ra and Duke Ellington to his own inspiring work as an educator and bandleader.
Central to this narrative is the often-overlooked story of Birmingham’s unique jazz tradition and community. From the very beginnings of jazz, Birmingham was home to an active network of jazz practitioners and a remarkable system of jazz apprenticeship rooted in the city’s segregated schools. Birmingham musicians spread across the country to populate the sidelines of the nation’s bestknown bands. Local musicians, like Erskine Hawkins and members of his celebrated orchestra, returned home heroes. Frank “Doc” Adams explores, through first-hand experience, the history of this community, introducing readers to a large and colorful cast of characters—including “Fess” Whatley, the legendary “maker of musicians” who trained legions of Birmingham players and made a significant mark on the larger history of jazz. Adams’s interactions with the young Sun Ra, meanwhile, reveal life-changing lessons from one of American music’s most innovative personalities.
Along the way, Adams reflects on his notable family, including his father, Oscar, editor of the Birmingham Reporter and an outspoken civic leader in the African American community, and Adams’s brother, Oscar Jr., who would become Alabama’s first black supreme court justice. Adams’s story offers a valuable window into the world of Birmingham’s black middle class in the days before the civil rights movement and integration. Throughout, Adams demonstrates the ways in which jazz professionalism became a source of pride within this community, and he offers his thoughts on the continued relevance of jazz education in the twenty-first century.
Dr. George T. Mitchell of Marshall, Illinois, shares with humor and compassion stories and reflections about his medical practice of fifty years.
Having grown up in Marshall, Dr. Mitchell writes of his early experiences in midwestern America: basketball rivalries, school-boy pranks, and the traditions passed down through a family of doctors. Dr. Mitchell tells of his brief detour to obtain a degree in mechanical engineering, his decision to pursue a career in medicine, and his medical school experiences at the George Washington School of Medicine before the days of antibiotics and sophisticated medical technology. He vividly describes his subsequent service in World War II as a young surgeon at a military hospital helping injured soldiers resume normal lives while enduring the frustrations and occasional horrors of military life.
After the war, Dr. Mitchell joined his father’s practice in Marshall, where, he observes, he was among sixteen physicians in a rural county with a population of less than twenty thousand people. Within twenty-five years, the number of doctors had dropped to only four. In this memoir Dr. Mitchell conveys his unwillingness to just sit by and watch the health needs of his community increase while medical and other services decline. He, instead, became a community activist, representing rural concerns to the state medical society, organizing the first emergency medical technician teams in the county, masterminding the planning of a regional medical center, campaigning successfully for improved highway safety, and spurring the extension of reliable telephone service throughout his area.
As Dr. Mitchell recounts the house calls, farm accidents, emergency surgeries, and family counseling that comprised the life of this country doctor, he offers the keen insights of a clinician trained to look beyond what others only see.
Hatim Kanaaneh is a Palestinian doctor who has struggled for over 35 years to bring medical care to Palestinians in Galilee, against a culture of anti-Arab discrimination. This is the story of how he fought for the human rights of his patients and overcame the Israeli authorities' cruel indifference to their suffering.
Kanaaneh is a native of Galilee, born before the creation of Israel. He left to study medicine at Harvard, before returning to work as a public health physician with the intention of helping his own people. He discovered a shocking level of disease and malnutrition in his community and a shameful lack of support from the Israeli authorities. After doing all he could for his patients by working from inside the system, Kanaaneh set up The Galilee Society, an NGO working for equitable health, environmental and socio-economic conditions for Palestinian Arabs in Israel.
This is a brilliant memoir that shows how grass roots organisations can loosen the Zionist grip upon Palestinian lives.
Until fairly recently, Arab women rarely received professional health care, since few women doctors had ever practiced in Arabia and their culture forbade them from consulting male doctors. Not surprisingly, Dr. Mary Bruins Allison faced an overwhelming demand when she arrived in Kuwait in 1934 as a medical missionary of the Reformed Church of America. Over the next forty years, "Dr. Mary" treated thousands of women and children, faithfully performing the duties that seemed required of her as a Christian—to heal the sick and seek converts.
These memoirs record a fascinating life. Dr. Allison briefly describes her upbringing and her professional training at Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania. She then focuses on her experiences in Kuwait, where women of all classes, including royalty, flocked to her care. In addition to describing many of her cases, Dr. Allison paints a richly detailed picture of life in Kuwait both before and after the discovery of oil transformed the country. Her recollections include invaluable details of women's lives in the Middle East during the early and mid-twentieth century. They add a valuable chapter to the story of modern medicine, to the largely unsuccessful efforts of the Christian church to win converts in the Middle East, and to the opportunities and limitations that faced American women of the period.
Dr. Allison also worked briefly in Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and India, and she includes material on each country. The introduction situates her experiences in the context of Middle Eastern and medical developments of the period.
The Civil War was a tragic conflict that destroyed many lives, but for those trying to save lives the tragedy was often compounded. Military doctors labored through the smoke of battle where impossible conditions and fear of infection often forced them to resort to amputation, and most operations were performed without painkillers. Thomas Fanning Wood recorded his wartime experiences as a Confederate Army surgeon, and his recollections of those events allow us to hear a distinct voice of the Civil War.
As a young soldier recovering from fever at a Richmond hospital, Wood developed an interest in medicine that was encouraged by a doctor who steered him toward medical training. After only eight months of study he was made an assistant surgeon in the Third North Carolina Regiment. His narrative—drawn from his memoirs, letters from the front, and articles written for his hometown newspaper—presents a poignant and sometimes horrifying picture of what the Civil War physician had to face both under battlefield conditions and in urban hospitals.
Wood himself spent much of his time at the front, and his vivid narrative describes both a doctor’s daily activities and the campaigns he witnessed. He was present at many of the war’s major engagements: he was near Stonewall Jackson when the general fell at Chancellorsville, manned a field dressing station at the foot of Culp’s Hill at Gettysburg, and was one of the few survivors of the Union attack on the "mule shoe" at Spotsylvania when his entire division was wiped out. Wood’s account also lends new insight into Jubal Early’s 1864 campaigns in the Shenandoah Valley and against Washington.
With its observations of medical care and training not found in standard histories of the war—including a description of the examination required to become an assistant surgeon—Doctor to the Front offers a unique human perspective on the Civil War. With their additional descriptions of key figures and events, Wood’s recollections combine historical significance and human interest to show us another side of that terrible conflict.
The Author: Donald B. Koonce is the great-grandson of Thomas Fanning Wood and has served on the Board of Directors of the South Carolina Historical Society and the Historic Greenville Foundation. He is president of the Koonce Group, Inc., an award-winning communications company whose productions include Daybreak at the Cowpens, a documentary for the National Park Service.
On January 13, 1953, the official press agency Tass announced the arrest of a group of "killer doctors" who were systematically doing away with prominent public figures in the Soviet Union. Nine doctors, six of them Jews, were cited, and in the next few weeks many more were carted off to the dread prisons of Lubyanka and Lefortovo. Among them was Yakov Lvovich Rapoport, a distinguished pathologist; this book is a firsthand memoir of his imprisonment, revealing not only the suffering caused by a fabricated "plot" but also the devastating climate of antisemitism and the appalling disarray of medicine and science in the Stalinist era.
Rapoport outlines the background of the infamous incident: arrests of prominent physicians had begun in 1952 and created hysteria throughout the country. Clinics were empty, patients refused professional medical advice, rumors abounded of poisoned medicines in pharmacies and murdered infants in maternity wards. Public opinion was primed to accept the Doctors' Plot, and to this day no one knows how many hundreds or thousands of doctors, prominent and ordinary, were victimized. Rapoport himself was arrested in early February, and he recalls in meticulous detail the psychological and physical pain he endured, all the while steadfastly denying that there was any conspiracy. He was saved from certain execution only by the death of Stalin.
The Doctors' Plot of 1953 is the gripping story of a brave man that gives a dismal picture of what life—especially for intellectuals and for Jews—was like in the Soviet Union under the paranoid Stalin. There is much information on the distortion of biology by Lysenko, the demagogic elevation of such charlatans as Olga Lepeshinskaya, the fictitious murder of Gorky and the quite likely murder of Frunze, and other mind-boggling examples of the surrealistic politics of Soviet science.
Yet no definitive history of his life has been compiled. Wilson Heefner corrects that with the first authoritative biography of this distinguished American military leader. Heefner has undertaken impressive research in primary sources—as well as interviews with family members and former associates—to shed new light on this overlooked hero. He presents Truscott as a soldier who was shaped by his upbringing, civilian and military education, family life, friendships, and evolving experiences as a commander both in and out of combat.
Heefner’s brisk narrative explores Truscott’s career through his three decades in the Army and defines his roles in key operations. It also examines Truscott’s postwar role as military governor of Bavaria, particularly in improving living conditions for Jewish displaced persons, removing Nazis from civil government, and assisting in the trials of German war criminals. And it offers the first comprehensive examination of his subsequent career in the Central Intelligence Agency, where he served as senior CIA representative in West Germany during the early days of the Cold War, and later as CIA Director Allen Dulles’s deputy director for coordination in Washington.
Dogface Soldier is a portrait of a man who earned a reputation for being honest, forthright, fearless, and aggressive, both as a military officer and in his personal life—a man who, at the dedication ceremony for the Anzio-Nettuno American cemetery in 1945, turned away from the crowd and to the thousands of crosses stretching before him to address those buried there. Heefner has written a definitive biography of a great soldier and patriot.
Born in 1921, Dora, as she tells Chin her story, chronicles the shifting salience of gendered ethnic identity as she journeys through her life. Traveling through time and place, she moves from San Francisco's Chinatown -- where Koreans were a minority within a minority -- to suburban Dewey Boulevard where Dora and her family attempt to integrate into mainstream America, and where she becomes a social worker in the California State Department of Employment. As the Korean immigrant community grows in the late 1960s, Dora becomes deeply involved in community service. She remembers teaching English to senior citizens and preparing them for their naturalization exams, finding jobs for the younger Koreans, and founding a community center and meals program for seniors.
A detailed and inspiring lens through which to view Korean American history, Dora's life journey echoes the changing spaces of the American social landscape. And the grace and ease with which Dora just "does what has to be done" shows us the importance of everyday acts in making a difference.
Drawing on interviews with twenty-nine individuals, Doing What the Day Brought examines the everyday lives of women from the late nineteenth century to the present day and demonstrates the role they have played in shaping the modern Arizona community.
Focusing on "ordinary" women, the book crosses race, ethnic, religious, economic, and marital lines to include Arizona women from diverse backgrounds. Rather than simply editing each woman's words, Rothschild and Hronek have analyzed these oral histories for common themes and differences and have woven portions into a narrative that gives context to the individual lives. The resulting life-course format moves naturally from childhood to home life, community service, and participation in the work force, and concludes with reflections on changes witnessed in the lifetimes of these women.
For the women whose lives are presented here, it may have been common to gather dead saguaro cactus ribs to make outdoor fires to boil laundry water, or to give birth on a dirt floor. Their stories capture not only changes in a state where history has overlooked the role of women, but the changing roles of American women over the course of this century.
Selected as a Bank Street College of Education Best Children’s Book of the Year for 2018 (Category: Twelve–Fourteen)
“A biography for the times … An excellent read for anyone hoping to believe one person can make a difference.” —Kirkus (starred review)
“This well-told, age-appropriate account of a vital and essential activist deserves a place in all middle grade collections.” —School Library Journal (starred review)
Today, we know Dolores Huerta as the cofounder, with Cesar Chavez, of the National Farmworkers Association, which later became the United Farm Workers of America. We know her as a tireless advocate for the rights of farmworkers, Mexican American immigrants, women, and LGBTQ populations. And we know her as the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in 2012.
Before all that, though, Huerta was a child in the farming community of Stockton, California, and then a teenager whose teachers underestimated her because she was Chicana. When she became a teacher herself, she witnessed her students coming to school shoeless and hungry. Many took days off from school to work in the farm fields to help feed their families. What could she do to help them? A young mother at the time, Huerta quit her teaching job to organize their parents. That began her journey to educate a nation about who produces our food and the conditions under which they work.
Dolores Huerta Stands Strong follows Huerta’s life from the mining communities of the Southwest where her father toiled, to the vineyards and fields of California, and across the country to the present day. As she worked for fair treatment for others, Dolores earned the nation’s highest honors. More important, she found her voice.
Don Isaac Abravanel (1437–1508) was one of the great inventors of Jewish modernity. A merchant, banker, and court financier, a scholar versed in both Jewish and Christian writings, a preacher and exegete, a prominent political actor in royal entourages and Jewish communities, Abravanel was one of the greatest leaders and thinkers of Iberian Jewry in the aftermath of the expulsion of 1492. This book, the first new intellectual biography of Abravanel in twenty years, depicts his life in three cultural milieus—Portugal, Castile, and post-expulsion Italy—and analyzes his major literary accomplishments in each period. Abravanel was a traditionalist with innovative ideas, a man with one foot in the Middle Ages and the other in the Renaissance. An erudite scholar, author of a monumental exegetical opus that is still studied today, and an avid book collector, he was a transitional figure, defined by an age of contradictions. Yet, it is these very contradictions that make him such an important personality for understanding the dawn of Jewish modernity.
No one would have blamed Donald Seldin for running away. When he arrived at Southwestern Medical College in 1951, it was a collection of hastily repurposed military shacks creaking in the wind. On practically day one he became chair of the department of medicine—when the only other full-time professors departed.
By the time he stepped down thirty-six years later, Seldin had transformed a sleepy medical college into the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center—a powerhouse of research and patient care and an anchor of the city of Dallas. Raymond Greenberg, a physician-scholar, tells Seldin's story of perseverance and intellectual triumph. Drawing on interviews with Seldin's trainees and colleagues—and on Seldin's own words—Greenberg chronicles the life of the Brooklyn boy who became one of Texas's foremost citizens and taught decades of men and women to heal. A pioneering nephrologist, Seldin devoted his career to developing the specialty; educating students, residents, and fellows; caring for patients; and nurturing basic research.
Seldin was a wildcatter in the best sense. He declined the comfortable prestige of Harvard and Yale and instead embraced a worthy challenge with an unflagging sense of mission. Graceful and richly detailed, The Maestro of Medicine captures an inspiring life of achievement and service.
In this entertaining, informative book, Noel Annan is at his incisive best. Displaying his customary mastery of his subject, he describes the great dons in all their glory and eccentricities: who they were, what they were like, why they mattered, and what their legacy is. Written with love and wisdom, the great minds of the past—figures such as John Henry Newman, John Sparrrow, and Isaiah Berlin—are brought alive. In addition, Annan's often quoted article "The Intellectual Aristocracy" is included in this book.
No other work has ever explained so precisely and so intimately the significance of the dons and their important role in shaping higher education—at a time when the nature of learning is ever more the subject of dissension and uncertainty.
"With a charming mixture of analyses and anecdotes, Annan builds up a picture of the changing Oxbridge scene that keeps a reader's imagination. . . . [T]he comical-satirical narrative of which he was a master is a joy to read, and The Dons will deservedly be enjoyed as a bedside book by those who treasure English eccentricity."—Stephen Toulmin, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"[A]n affectionate elegy for a class that has largely expired."—Robert Fulford, National & Financial Post
"[A] wonderfully gifted and energetic writer. . . . Noel was one of the few figures in English public life known simply by his first name. There was no mistaking him for anyone else."—Jonathan Mirsky, New Yorker
"A sparkling collection of essays."—Michael Davie, Times Literary Supplement
"[A] highly affectionate . . . look at some of the more remarkable academic personages to distinguish-and sometimes dumbfound-Oxford and Cambridge over the last two centuries. . . . For all that it cherishes eccentricity and abounds in Oxbridge gossip, The Dons is at heart a deeply serious book, one dedicated to a conception of learning and culture that is at once increasingly rare . . . yet very far from being outmoded."—Mark Feeney, Boston Globe
"Annan writes elegantly and winningly throughout his book. . . . Leaving arguably the best for last, Annan ends The Dons with a reprinting of his celebrated essay 'The Intellectual Aristocracy,' . . . [B]oth a dazzling tour de force and a clever jeu d'esprit."—Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World
"A witty, erudite, insider account-exactly what one would expect from the best of their type."—Andrew Lycett, Sunday Times
For psychotherapist, painter, feminist, filmmaker, writer, and disability activist Harilyn Rousso, hearing well-intentioned people tell her, "You're so inspirational!" is patronizing, not complimentary.
In her empowering and at times confrontational memoir, Don't Call Me Inspirational, Rousso, who has cerebral palsy, describes overcoming the prejudice against disability--not overcoming disability. She addresses the often absurd and ignorant attitudes of strangers, friends, and family.Rousso also examines her own prejudice toward her disabled body, and portrays the healing effects of intimacy and creativity, as well as her involvement with the disability rights community. She intimately reveals herself with honesty and humor and measures her personal growth as she goes from "passing" to embracing and claiming her disability as a source of pride, positive identity, and rebellion.
A collage of images about her life, rather than a formal portrait, Don't Call Me Inspirational celebrates Rousso's wise, witty, productive, outrageous life, disability and all.
Barbara bore his children and took on a crucial job as his booking agent when the agent he was using failed to obtain show dates for the group. Female booking agents were non-existent at that time but she persevered and went on to become the first female booking agent on Music Row. She also endured years of physical and emotional abuse at Martin's hands. With courage and candor, Barbara tells of the suffering and traces the hard-won personal growth she found inside motherhood and her work. Her vivid account of Martin's explosive personality and torment over his exclusion from the Grand Ole Opry fill in the missing details on a career renowned for being stormy. Barbara also shares her own journey, one of good humor and proud achievements, and filled with fond and funny recollections of the music legends and ordinary people she met, befriended, and represented along the way.
Straightforward and honest, Don't Give your Heart to a Rambler is a woman's story of the world of bluegrass and one of its most colorful, conflicted artists.
Montell organized his material according to the topics that dominated his tape-recorded conversations with residents of the area-farming, logging and rafting, steamboating, the Civil War-topics that the people themselves saw as important in their history. In reconstructing the past, the author also illuminates the relationship between geographic and economic factors in the region; the prolonged affects of a cataclysmic event, the Civil War, on the isolated area; and the impact of modernization, in the form of “hard” roads and cheap, TVA-supplied electricity, on the traditional ways of people.
First published in 1983, this book is now available in paperback for the first time. Included with this edition is a new foreword in which Montell and Mary Robbins, executive director of the Tennessee Upper Cumberland Tourism Association, describe changes in the area that have occured since the book’s initial appearance.
The Author: William Lynwood Montell, now retired, was coordinator of programs in folk and interculturual studies at Western Kentucky University. His numerous books include Ghosts along the Cumberland and The Saga of Coe Ridge.
In a voice that is spare, factual, and unflinchingly direct, Mrs. Watt reveals how the Western Apaches carried on in the face of poverty, hardship, and disease. Her interpretation of her people’s past is a diverse assemblage of recounted events, biographical sketches, and cultural descriptions that bring to life a vanished time and the men and women who lived it to the fullest. We share her and her family’s travels and troubles. We learn how the Apache people struggled daily to find work, shelter, food, health, laughter, solace, and everything else that people in any community seek.
Richly illustrated with more than 50 photographs, Don’t Let the Sun Step Over You is a rare and remarkable book that affords a view of the past that few have seen before—a wholly Apache view, unsettling yet uplifting, which weighs upon the mind and educates the heart.
Many people dream of "someday buying a small quaint place in the country, to own two cows and watch the birds," in the words of Texas ranchwoman Amanda Spenrath Geistweidt. But only a few are cut out for the unrelenting work that makes a family ranching operation successful. Don't Make Me Go to Town presents an eloquent photo-documentary of eight women who have chosen to make ranching in the Texas Hill Country their way of life. Ranging from young mothers to elderly grandmothers, these women offer vivid accounts of raising livestock in a rugged land, cut off from amenities and amusements that most people take for granted, and loving the hard lives they've chosen.
Rhonda Lashley Lopez began making photographic portraits of Texas Hill Country ranchwomen in 1993 and has followed their lives through the intervening years. She presents their stories through her images and the women's own words, listening in as the ranchwomen describe the pleasures and difficulties of raising sheep, Angora goats, and cattle on the Edwards Plateau west of Austin and north of San Antonio. Their stories record the struggles that all ranchers face—vagaries of weather and livestock markets, among them—as well as the extra challenges of being women raising families and keeping things going on the home front while also riding the range. Yet, to a woman, they all passionately embrace family ranching as a way of life and describe their efforts to pass it on to future generations.
Dorothea Dix was the most politically engaged woman of her generation, which was itself a remarkable tapestry of activists. An influential lobbyist as well as a paragon of the doctrine of female benevolence, she vividly illustrated the complexities of the "separate spheres" of politics and femininity. Her greatest legislative initiative, a campaign for federal land grants to endow state mental hospitals, assumed a central role in the public land controversies that intertwined with the slavery issues in Congress following the Mexican War. The passage of this legislation in 1854, and its subsequent veto by President Pierce, touched off the most protracted effort to override a veto that had yet taken place.
An activist who disdained the women's rights and antislavery movements, Dix, an old-line Whig, sought to promote national harmony and became the only New England social reformer to work successfully in the lower South right up to the eve of secession. When war broke out, she sought to achieve as Superintendent of Women Nurses the sort of cultural authority she had seen Florence Nightingale win in the same role during the Crimean War. The disastrous failure of one of the most widely admired heroines in the nation provides a dramatic measure of the transformations of northern values during the war.
Dorothy West is best known as one of the youngest writers involved in the Harlem Renaissance. Subsequently, her work is read as a product of the urban aesthetics of this artistic movement. But West was also intimately rooted in a very different milieu—Oak Bluffs, an exclusive retreat for African Americans on Martha’s Vineyard. She played an integral role in the development and preservation of that community. In the years between publishing her two novels, 1948’s The Living is Easy and the 1995 bestseller The Wedding, she worked as a columnist for the Vineyard Gazette.
Dorothy West’s Paradise captures the scope of the author’s long life and career, reading it alongside the unique cultural geography of Oak Bluffs and its history as an elite African American enclave—a place that West envisioned both as a separatist refuge and as a space for interracial contact. An essential book for both fans of West’s fiction and students of race, class, and American women’s lives, Dorothy West’s Paradise offers an intimate biography of an important author and a privileged glimpse into the society that shaped her work.
An intimate biography of a great American writer.
He rose from a childhood as the illegitimate son of a financial titan to become the man Sartre called "the greatest writer of our time." A progressive writer who turned his passions into the groundbreaking U.S.A. trilogy, John Dos Passos later embraced conservative causes. At the height of his career he was considered a peer of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, yet he died in obscurity in 1970.
Award-winning biographer Virginia Spencer Carr examines the contradictions of Dos Passos's life with an in-depth study of the man. Using the writer's letters and journals, and with assistance from the Dos Passos family, Carr reconstructs an epic life, one of literary acclaim and bitter obscurity, restless wandering and happy marriage, friendship with Edmund Wilson and feuds with Hemingway. First published to acclaim in 1984, Dos Passos remains the definitive personal portrait of the author.
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