A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY196 start with J start with J
More than any other person, Jack C. Ellis notes, John Grierson, a Scot, was responsible for the documentary film as it has developed in English-speaking countries.
While in the United States in the 1920s, Grierson first applied the term documentary to Robert Flaherty's Moana. In 1927, Grierson returned to Britain, where he was hired to promote the marketing of products of the British Empire. The first practical application of Grierson’s theory of documentary film was Drifters, a 1929 short feature about herring fishing in the North Sea. That success led Grierson to establish the Empire Marketing Board Film Unit (later the General Post Office Film Unit).
In 1939, Grierson moved to Canada, leaving behind a legacy of some sixty British filmmakers who spread his ideas and techniques to other countries. In Canada, he progressed beyond national concerns to global problems. The National Film Board of Canada stands as the largest and most impressive monument to Grierson's concepts and actions in regard to the use of film by governments in communicating with citizens.
Ellis examines Grierson's accomplishments in detail, probing the complexities of Grierson's motivations and personality. His subject, a true titan in the world of documentary film, was the first filmmaker to use public and private institutional sponsorship—not the box office—to pay for his films. He also employed nontraditional distribution techniques, going outside the movie theaters to reach audiences in schools and factories, union halls, and church basements. Essentially, Grierson created documentary film and established an audience for it.
A legend in his own lifetime, John Hance (1837–1919) was synonymous with early Grand Canyon tourism. Between the late 1880s and early 1900s, to say “John Hance” was to say “Grand Canyon.” Hance was well known to travelers and visiting dignitaries alike, men such as William “Buffalo Bill” Cody and Theodore Roosevelt, the president who affectionately referred to him as “the greatest liar on earth.” It was said that Hance tried to jump the canyon on his horse Darby only to turn back when he was halfway over and realized he would never make it across.
The truth behind Hance’s life is remarkable even without embellishment. In this book, Shane Murphy chronicles Hance’s childhood in Tennessee and Missouri, his service in the Confederacy during the Civil War, his time in Union prisons as a POW, and his later adventures with the Hickok brothers crossing the plains. Settling in Arizona’s fruitful Verde Valley, Hance farmed and filled military contracts before taking up residence as Grand Canyon’s first permanent Euro-American settler, trail builder, guide, and renowned storyteller.
Hance left no correspondence, personal memoirs, or other writings. Only informal portraits from magazines and newspaper accounts remain. Murphy investigated assessors’ rolls, rare mercantile ledgers, and mining claims to create a full and compelling narrative of a man who was once an icon of the American West and should be remembered as the founding father of Grand Canyon tourism.
Honorable Mention, 2017 Scribes Book Award, The American Society of Legal Writers
At the dawn of the twentieth century, the United States was reeling from the effects of rapid urbanization and industrialization. Time-honored verities proved obsolete, and intellectuals in all fields sought ways to make sense of an increasingly unfamiliar reality. The legal system in particular began to buckle under the weight of its anachronism. In the midst of this crisis, John Henry Wigmore, dean of the Northwestern University School of Law, single-handedly modernized the jury trial with his 1904-5 Treatise onevidence, an encyclopedic work that dominated the conduct of trials. In so doing, he inspired generations of progressive jurists—among them Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Benjamin Cardozo, and Felix Frankfurter—to reshape American law to meet the demands of a new era. Yet Wigmore’s role as a prophet of modernity has slipped into obscurity. This book provides a radical reappraisal of his place in the birth of modern legal thought.
Jonah Horry Dent was born on 5 August 1815 in Newport, Rhode Island, the son of John Herbert Dent and Elizabeth Anne Horry Dent. Dent grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, and spent summers with his family on a plantation in Colleton County, South Carolina. When he was still a young child, his name was changed from “Jonah” to “John” when an older brother, named John, died, leaving little Jonah as the oldest living son. He was known as John Horry Dent the rest of his life.
Dent married Mary Elizabeth Morrison in 1835 and moved to Barbour County, Alabama, in 1836. He purchased 360 acres of land on Cowikee Creek, paying $15 an acre, and named the new plantation “Good Hope.” Dent amassed a good fortune but lost most of it after the Civil War when slavery was abolished and his slaves became freemen. In 1866 he sold his properties in Barbour County and moved to Cave Springs, Floyd County, Georgia.
Dent kept detailed records about his crops and properties until very late in life. He died in Cave Springs on 17 May 1892.
The "Great John L." reigned supreme as world heavyweight champion from his victory over Paddy Ryan in 1882 until James J. Corbett knocked him out in 1892. A drunkard, a wastrel, an adulterer, a wife beater, and a bully, Sullivan still became American's first national sports hero and represented the hopes and aspirations of millions of people.
Michael Isenberg traces Sullivan's eventful life from his humble beginnings in Boston to the height of his immense popularity. The boxer moved as easily in the world of reputable workingmen as he did in the shadowlands on the margins of the sport while his success played a major role in transforming boxing into a profitable and ultimately legitimate business. Tapping previously unexplored archival material--including the notorious National Police Gazette and the other sporting papers of the day--Isenberg tells us why presidents, princes, and turn-of-the-century Americans accepted Sullivan as a hero, even as others vilified him for his drunken and belligerent behavior.
Richard Neupert explores Lasseter's signature aesthetic and storytelling strategies and details how he became the architect of Pixar's studio style. Neupert contends that Lasseter's accomplishments emerged from a unique blend of technical skill and artistic vision, as well as a passion for working with collaborators. In addition, Neupert traces the director's career arc from the time Lasseter joined Pixar in 1984. As Neupert shows, Lasseter's ability to keep a foot in both animation and CGI allowed him to thrive in an unconventional corporate culture that valued creative interaction between colleagues. The ideas that emerged built an animation studio that updated and refined classical Hollywood storytelling practices--and changed commercial animation forever.
Candidly, with a mixture of joy, poignancy, and gratitude, the chairman and president of the John Templeton Foundation reflects on the learning and growing he has experienced and the perspectives he has gained throughout his life. In so doing, he continues the legacy of his father, Sir John Templeton, who has used stories from his life to provide instruction for his children, grandchildren, and other future descendants, just as he has drawn on those stories in his many books of inspiration and guidance for the general public.
Dr. Templeton shares stories about his personal life, his career in medicine, his early involvement with philanthropy, and his commitment to the John Templeton Foundation and its mission. Events and circumstances in his youth opened him to spirituality, taught him about altruistic love, and introduced him to values he would cultivate throughout his life: thrift, saving, hard work, creativity, and responsibility.
His journey takes him from his early life in Winchester, Tennessee, to New Jersey, Yale University, medical school, the Navy, the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, and the John Templeton Foundation. Along the way, there were lessons learned from his disruptive behavior in elementary school; the deaths of his grandmother and mother; travel to Europe, Africa, and throughout the U.S.; marriage and fatherhood; his growing commitment as a Christian; and his family's experience with an armed robbery. It continues with his experiences in pediatric surgery at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, including work with conjoined twins; experience with the mutual fund industry and a role with the Templeton Growth Fund; an intensely rewarding medical specialty in trauma; philanthropy and fund-raising efforts, including a sad experience with fraud; the pride of professorship; and serving as chairman and president of the John Templeton Foundation.
With gratitude he credits his many mentors for the wisdom they passed on to him. Among them are John Galbraith, Dr. C. Everett Koop, Dr. Albert Schweitzer, and, of course, always and above all, his father. With appreciation, he recounts the blessings of a full and productive life that continue today as he provides leadership to the diverse programs and initiatives of the John Templeton Foundation.
John Mackay offers new insight into the life and achievements of this remarkable man. It also places Mackay in the broader context of his time, an era of robber barons and rampant corruption, rapidly advancing technology, national and international capitalism, and flagrant displays of newfound wealth. Even in this context, he stood out, not only for his contributions to Nevada and mining history, but also for his reputation as an important business leader fighting the consolidation and venality of corporate power in the Gilded Age. His actions freed the Comstock from a financial monopoly, resulting in moderated rates for the milling, timber, shipping, transportation, and water that made mining possible and precipitated the discovery and development of the ore field known as the “Big Bonanza.”
Makley’s book recounts the life and career of one of the most successful men of his age, a capitalist of immense wealth who generously helped those around him and worked diligently in the public interest. This engaging biography will appeal to readers interested in the Comstock Lode and mining in the West during the latter part of the nineteenth century as well as general western history enthusiasts.
Feared by the government, adored by workers, celebrated by Lenin and Trotsky. The head of British Military Intelligence called John Maclean (1879–1923) “the most dangerous man in Britain.”
This new biography explores the events that shaped the life of a momentous man—from the Great War and the Great Unrest to the Rent Strike and the Russian Revolution. It examines his work as an organizer and educator, his imprisonment and hunger strike, and his rise to the position of Britain’s most famous revolutionary. At a moment when radical politics is drawing renewed attention and support, Maclean’s example of activism and commitment is as timely as ever.
Privileged beyond other members of his race, yet sharing their disadvantages, the young John Mercer Langston stood in an uncertain position in the years before the Civil War. His confrontation with a critical personal question was tempered by a crucial national reality: from what sources could he derive his model of manhood and human dignity? This book explores John Mercer Langston's decisions to work out his destiny through the resources and fortunes of the northern black community.
Although Langston, who died in 1897, was a black Politician, orator, lawyer, intellectual, diplomat, and congressman, he has never before been accorded fullscale biographical treatment. Born free on a Virginia plantation, Langston graduated from Oberlin College in 1849, gained admission to the Ohio bar, and by the age of twenty-five, became the first black American to hold elective office. Still in the years of his political apprenticeship, he promoted black civil rights, helped shape the nascent Republican party, aided in the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue and John Brown's raid, and recruited black soldier for the Union cause. In 1864 he became the first president of the National Equal Rights League.
From an extensive search of primary sources, the authors construct a richly textured picture of the beginnings of Langston's career as a national black leader. More than a biography, the work also incorporates social and political history. Embedded firmly in a study of northern black community life and activism, it reveals the degree to which Langston and his cohorts set the terms of the fight for freedom and citizenship.
When John Muir died in 1914, the pre-eminent American naturalist, explorer, and conservationist had not yet written the second volume of his autobiography, in which he planned to cover his Yosemite years. Editors Robert Engberg and Donald Wesling have here provided a remedy.
Their account begins in 1863, the year Muir left the University of Wisconsin for what he termed the "University of the Wilderness." Following an accident in 1867 that nearly left him blind, he vowed to turn from machines and continue to study nature. That led, in 1868, to his first visit to Yosemite Valley, where he began his glacier studies. Muir spent much time exploring the Yosemite region, Tuolumne, and both the southern and northern Sierras, publishing articles, and keeping extensive journals through 1875, when he began to write for the San Francisco Bulletin and expanded his travels to areas throughout the west.
Mining a rich vein of sources—Muir’s letters, journals, articles, and unpublished manuscripts, as well as selections drawn from biographical pieces written about Muir by people who met him in Yosemite in the early 1870s—Engberg and Wesling have assembled what they term a "composite autobiography," providing brief interpretive and transitional passages throughout the book. This work is especially valuable because it documents Muir’s formative years, when he is maturing away from "conventional cultural paradigms of work and materialism toward new ways of thinking about nature and its impact on human development."
Born in 1852, Nelligan rose through the lumberjack ranks, starting out as a humble laborer and working his way up to foreman. He worked and lived in Maine, Pennsylvania, and even Canada before coming to Wisconsin in 1871. Learn what surviving and sawing wood for a living was like many years ago—from the story of one Wisconsin man who lived it!
With a range that spans the lyrical, heartfelt songs “Angel from Montgomery,” “Sam Stone,” and “Paradise” to the classic country music parody “You Never Even Called Me by My Name,” John Prine is a songwriter’s songwriter. Across five decades, Prine has created critically acclaimed albums—John Prine (one of Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time), Bruised Orange, and The Missing Years—and earned many honors, including two Grammy Awards, a Lifetime Achievement Award for Songwriting from the Americana Music Association, and induction into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. His songs have been covered by scores of artists, from Johnny Cash and Miranda Lambert to Bette Midler and 10,000 Maniacs, and have influenced everyone from Roger McGuinn to Kacey Musgraves. Hailed in his early years as the “new Dylan,” Prine still counts Bob Dylan among his most enthusiastic fans.
In John Prine, Eddie Huffman traces the long arc of Prine’s musical career, beginning with his early, seemingly effortless successes, which led paradoxically not to stardom but to a rich and varied career writing songs that other people have made famous. He recounts the stories, many of them humorous, behind Prine’s best-known songs and discusses all of Prine’s albums as he explores the brilliant records and the ill-advised side trips, the underappreciated gems and the hard-earned comebacks that led Prine to found his own successful record label, Oh Boy Records. This thorough, entertaining treatment gives John Prine his due as one of the most influential songwriters of his generation.
With a range that spans the lyrical, heartfelt songs “Angel from Montgomery,” “Sam Stone,” and “Paradise” to the classic country music parody “You Never Even Called Me by My Name,” John Prine is a songwriter’s songwriter. Across five decades, Prine has created critically acclaimed albums—John Prine (one of Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time), Bruised Orange, and The Missing Years—and earned many honors, including two Grammy Awards, a Lifetime Achievement Award for Songwriting from the Americana Music Association, and induction into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. His songs have been covered by scores of artists, from Johnny Cash and Miranda Lambert to Bette Midler and 10,000 Maniacs, and have influenced everyone from Roger McGuinn to Kacey Musgraves. Hailed in his early years as the “new Dylan,” Prine still counts Bob Dylan among his most enthusiastic fans.
In John Prine, Eddie Huffman traces the long arc of Prine’s musical career, beginning with his early, seemingly effortless successes, which led paradoxically not to stardom but to a rich and varied career writing songs that other people have made famous. He recounts the stories, many of them humorous, behind Prine’s best-known songs and discusses all of Prine’s albums as he explores the brilliant records and the ill-advised side trips, the underappreciated gems and the hard-earned comebacks that led Prine to found his own successful record label, Oh Boy Records. This thorough, entertaining treatment gives John Prine his due as one of the most influential songwriters of his generation.
The Mason County “Hoo Doo” War in Texas began as a war over range rights, but it swiftly deteriorated into blood vengeance and spiraled out of control as the body count rose. In this charnel house Ringo gained a reputation as a dangerous gunfighter and man killer. He was proclaimed throughout the state as a daring leader, a desperate man, and a champion of the feud. Following incarceration for his role in the feud, Ringo was elected as a lawman in Mason County, the epicenter of the feud’s origin.
The reputation he earned in Texas, further inflated by his willingness to shoot it out with Victorio’s raiders during a deadly confrontation in New Mexico, preceded him to Tombstone in territorial Arizona. Ringo became immersed in the area’s partisan politics and factionalized violence. A champion of the largely Democratic ranchers, Ringo would become known as a leader of one of these elements, the Cowboys. He ran at bloody, tragic odds with the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday, finally being part of the posse that hounded these fugitives from Arizona. In the end, Ringo died mysteriously in the Arizona desert, his death welcomed by some, mourned by others, wrongly claimed by a few. Initially published in 1996, John Ringo has been updated to a second edition with much new information researched and uncovered by David Johnson and other Ringo researchers.
In the summer of 1807 more than a thousand subscribers from New England to Tennessee paid for the initial printing of The Life and Travels of John Robert Shaw: A Narrative of the Life and Travels of the Well-Digger, now resident of Lexington, Kentucky, Written by Himself. Shaw had come to Rhode Island as a British redcoat to put down the colonial rebellion. Through various quirks of fate, including being taken a prisoner of war, he ended up fighting with the Americans. Shaw was an exuberant spirit whose rowdy drinking bouts and related predicaments alternated with periods of wholehearted efforts at reform. His autobiography, written while he recuperated from injuries from one of several explosions (an occupational hazard for the frontier well-digger), is an articulate and entertaining record of the Revolutionary War era.
A 1930 printing of Shaw’s autobiography was rescued from the trash by an alert librarian in Kentucky in 1950. She passed the tattered copy on to journalist Oressa M. Teagarden, who became intrigued with Shaw’s story and spent much of her free time over the next two decades finding out more about the ebullient American. On Teagarden’s death, co-editor Jeanne Crabtree assumed the task of making Shaw’s authentic and colorful view of early America available to a new generation of readers.
John Steinbeck - American Writers 94 was first published in 1971. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
John Venn (1834–1923) is remembered today as the inventor of the famous Venn diagram. The postmortem fame of the diagram has until now eclipsed Venn’s own status as one of the most accomplished logicians of his day. Praised by John Stuart Mill as a “highly successful thinker” with much “power of original thought,” Venn had a profound influence on nineteenth-century scientists and philosophers, ranging from Mill and Francis Galton to Lewis Carroll and Charles Sanders Peirce. Venn was heir to a clerical Evangelical dynasty, but religious doubts led him to resign Holy Orders and instead focus on an academic career. He wrote influential textbooks on probability theory and logic, became a fellow of the Royal Society, and advocated alongside Henry Sidgwick for educational reform, including that of women’s higher education. Moreover, through his students, a direct line can be traced from Venn to the early analytic philosophy of G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, and family ties connect him to the famous Bloomsbury group.
This essential book takes readers on Venn’s journey from Evangelical son to Cambridge don to explore his life and work in context. Drawing on Venn’s key writings and correspondence, published and unpublished, Lukas M. Verburgt unearths the legacy of the logician’s wide-ranging thinking while offering perspective on broader themes in religion, science, and the university in Victorian Britain. The rich picture that emerges of Venn, the person, is of a man with many sympathies—sometimes mutually reinforcing and at other times outwardly and inwardly contradictory.
“John Wesley Powell: explorer, writer, geologist, anthropologist, land planner, bureaucrat. Which one do we focus on?” This is the question author James M. Aton poses at the beginning of his biography of Powell, though he soon decides that it is impossible to ignore any facet of Powell’s life. Powell was a polymath, one whose “divergent interests resemble one of those braided streambeds in his beloved canyon country, branching out in many directions, but ultimately beginning and ending in the same stream."
Aton beautifully tells the multidimensional stories of Powell’s childhood, his military and teaching careers, his famous and exciting explorations of the Colorado River, and the battles he waged from his influential positions within the Smithsonian’s Bureau of Ethnology and the United States Geological Survey. This new edition of John Wesley Powell: His Life and Legacy, first printed as an issue of the Boise State University Western Writers Series, includes the original biography, but also features Aton’s new interpretations of Powell’s writings on exploration, land-planning, anthropology, and irrigation, and incorporates the author’s distinguished faculty lecture on Powell and cash-register dams in the Colorado River Basin.
The man popularly credited with planting apple trees throughout the Midwest, John "Appleseed" Chapman epitomizes the American folk hero and pioneer: a man of humble origins who headed west to seek his destiny.
The essays in this collection bring to life the real Johnny Appleseed (1774-1845). A courageous, God-fearing, peaceful, and spartan figure, Chapman was welcomed by settlers and Native Americans alike. He was an unusual businessman -- one who believed that his "wealth" was sown in the trees he planted rather than in banks.
But most of all, Johnny Appleseed was a lover of nature whose respect for all living things was born of his faith. An itinerant "missionary," he provided settlers with "news fresh from heaven" -- pages from the works of eighteenth-century theologian Emanuel Swedenborg.
Editor William Ellery Jones has updated historical essays that explore how Chapman's legend grew both during and after his life.
The actor's image is studied in terms of its ambiguities and its many strange nuances: Depp's ethnicity, his smoking, his tranquility, his unceasing motion, his links to the Gothic, the Beats, Simone de Beauvoir, the history of rationality, Impressionist painting, and more. In a series of treatments of his key roles, including Rafael in The Brave, Bon Bon in Before Night Falls, Jack Kerouac in The Source, and the long list of acclaimed performances from Gilbert Grape to Cap'n Jack Sparrow, we learn of Johnny onscreen in terms of male sexuality, space travel, optical experience, nineteenth-century American capitalism, Orientalism, the vulnerability of performance, the perils of sleep, comedy, the myth of the West, Scrooge McDuck, Frantois Truffaut, and more.
Johnny's face, Johnny's gaze, Johnny's aging, and Johnny's understatement are shown to be inextricably linked to our own desperate need to plumb performance, style, and screen for a grounding of reality in this ever-accelerating world of fragmentation and insecurity. Both deeply intriguing and perpetually elusive, Depp is revealed as the central screen performer of the contemporary age, the symbol of performance itself.
No thinker has meditated on Johnny Depp this way before-and surely not in a manner worthy of the object of scrutiny.
Murphy shows how Fisher, as pastor of the Congregational church in Blue Hill from 1796 to 1837, helped spearhead the transformation of a frontier settlement on the eastern shores of the Penobscot Bay into a thriving port community; how he used his skills as an architect, decorative painter, surveyor, and furniture maker not only to support himself and his family, but to promote the economic growth of his village; and how the fluid professional identity that enabled Fisher to prosper on the eastern frontier could only have existed in early America where economic relations were far less rigidly defined than in Europe.
Among the most important artifacts of Jonathan Fisher's life is the house he designed and built in Blue Hill. The Jonathan Fisher Memorial, as it is now known, serves as a point of departure for an examination of social, religious, and cultural life in a newly established village at the turn of the nineteenth century. Fisher's house provided a variety of spaces for agricultural and domestic work, teaching, socializing, artmaking, and more.
Through the eyes of Jonathan Fisher, we see his family grow and face the challenges of the new century, responding to religious, social, and economic change—sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing. We appreciate how an extraordinarily energetic man was able to capitalize on the wide array of opportunities offered by the frontier to give shape to his personal vision of community.
One of the best-educated of the colonialists, Odell, a physician turned Anglican minister and then writer, lived the gamut of experience: powerful friends sustained him and the British commanders-in-chief Sir William Howe, Henry Clinton, and Sir Guy Carleton employed him; nevertheless, during the war he was a lonely exile ("Tory hunters" forced him from his home in 1775), and, at the end of the war, when his hope for reconciliation between the Loyalists and the Americans came to nothing, he reluctantly emigrated to Canada.
Here is a voice, all but silenced for over two hundred years, that must now be heard if we are to better understand the American Revolution.
“Through the years, a man peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face.”
These words, inseparably marrying Jorge Luis Borges's life and work, encapsulate how he interwove the two throughout his legendary career. But the Borges of popular imagination is the blind, lauded librarian and man of letters; few biographers have explored his tumultuous early life in the streets and cafes of Buenos Aires, a young man searching for his path in the world. In Jorge Luis Borges, Jason Wilson uncovers the young poet who wrote, loved, and lost with adventurous passion, and he considers the later work and life of the writer who claimed he never created a character other than himself. As Borges declared, “It’s always me, subtly disguised.”
Born in Buenos Aires in 1899, Borges was a voracious reader from childhood, perhaps in part because he knew he lived under an inescapable sentence of adult-onset blindness inherited from his father. Wilson chronicles Borges’s life as he raced against time and his fated blindness, charting the literary friendships, love affairs, and polemical writings that formed the foundation of his youth. Illuminating the connections running between the biography and fictions of Borges, Wilson traces the outline of this self-effacing literary figure.
Though in his later writings Borges would subjugate emotion to the wild play of ideas, this bracing book reminds us that his works always recreated his life in subtle and delicate ways. Restoring Borges to his Argentine roots, Jorge Luis Borges will be an invaluable resource for all those who treasure this modern master.
Educated in Vienna just after the turn of the century, Frank became the leader of the younger generation of architects in Austria after the First World War. But Frank fell from grace when he emerged as a forceful critic of the extremes of modern architecture and design during the early 1930s. Dismissing the demands for a unified modern style, Frank insisted that it was pluralism, not uniformity, that most characterized life in the new machine age. He called instead for a more humane modernism, one that responded to people's everyday needs and left room for sentimentality and historical influences. He was able to put these ideas into practice when, in 1933, he was forced to leave Vienna for Sweden. There his work came to define Swedish (or Scandinavian) modern design. For more than thirty years he was the chief designer for the Stockholm furnishings firm Svenskt Tenn, producing colorful, cozy, and eclectic designs that provided a refreshing alternative to the architectural mainstream of the day and presaged the coming revolt against modernism in the 1960s.
In this sensitive study of one of the twentieth century's seminal architects and thinkers, Christopher Long offers new insight into Josef Frank's work and ideas and provides an important contribution to the understanding of modernist culture and its history.
"It is in his description of that arduous three-year voyage [on the ship Endeavor] that Mr. O'Brian is at his most brilliant. . . . He makes us understand what life within this wooden world was like, with its 94 male souls, two dogs, a cat and a goat."—Linda Colley, New York Times
"An absorbing, finely written overview, meant for the general reader, of a major figure in the history of natural science."—Frank Stewart, Los Angeles Times
"[This book is] the definitive biography of an extraordinary subject."—Robert Taylor, Boston Globe
"His skill at narrative and his extensive knowledge of the maritime history . . . give him a definite leg up in telling this . . . story."—Tom Clark, San Francisco Chronicle
Having operated now for more than 140 years, the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff (UAPB) was founded in 1875 as Branch Normal College by Joseph Carter Corbin, a native of Ohio and the son of former slaves. Corbin, who had a classical education, was the first African American superintendent of public education in Arkansas and literally built the school from the ground up. There was a desperate need for teachers in Arkansas, as there was a great desire for education by former slaves who had been prohibited from learning to read and write.
Corbin himself cleared the land that would soon house the college and then set about to create a school that would produce the first African American teachers following the Reconstruction years. For almost three decades, he worked tirelessly on behalf of Arkansas’s black community to meet the need for educators.
In the early days, Corbin worked both as the president and the janitor so that he could control costs and keep the school going. He often waived matriculation fees and other expenses to allow impoverished students the opportunity to graduate and become qualified to teach throughout Arkansas.
Although he might not have realized it at the time, Corbin was a member of the so-called aristocrats of color, the African American elite of national prominence and a group that included such luminaries as Booker T. Washington. Corbin was a true giant in the history of education in Arkansas. His story, told by a former UAPB student, is monumental for the scope of what one man was able to accomplish.
LeRoy Anderson in 1981 first published, under the title For Christ Will Come Tomorrow, his definitive study of a charismatic, millenarian prophet and the Church of Jesus Christ of the Most High. He told there of a Mormon posse’s 1862 attack on the Morrisite compound, killing Joseph Morris, and of the continuing Morrisite movement, which survived into the mid-twentieth century. In this newly revised edition, Anderson revisits his subject by referring to more recently discovered documents, considering other scholars’ continuing work on Morris’s sect and related subjects, and examining a 1980s messianic sect that claimed a direct connection to the Morrisites.
New documentary sources include a holograph “History of George Morris,” written by Joseph Morris’s brother, which Anderson quotes at length. What was once a little-studied subject has since received attention from a number of scholars. Anderson references such current work on Mormon schismatic movements and broader subjects, much of which drew on his work. Perhaps the book’s most interesting and unintended influence was on that obscure 1980s messianic sect, in Montana, which learned of Morris through Joseph Morris and the Saga of the Morrisites.
Ronald O. Barney, a former editor of the Joseph Smith Papers, applies new interpretations to Smith in history and memory, re-examining both his writings and contemporary accounts of him. The book explores the best methodologies for appraising the historical record, including a review of Smith’s world and its contextual background, an analysis of his foundational experiences, and a characterization of Smith as a man and prophet. Though the premise of re-evaluation may be unsettling to traditionalists, a modern reconsideration of the historical record’s entire range of sources is necessary to fashion a strategy for evaluating Smith and his enduring but complex legacy.
Musser’s devotion to Joseph Smith’s vision and the faith’s foundational texts reflected a widespread uneasiness with, and reaction against, changes taking place across society. Rosetti analyzes how Musser’s writing and thought knit a disparate group of outcast LDS believers into a movement. She also places Musser’s eventful life against the backdrop of a difficult period in LDS history, when the Church strained to disentangle itself from plural marriage and leaders like Musser emerged to help dissident members make sense of their lives outside the mainstream.
The first book-length account of the Mormon thinker, Joseph White Musser reveals the figure whose teachings helped mold a movement.
Creating a sensation with her risqué nightclub act and strolls down the Champs Elysées, pet cheetah in tow, Josephine Baker lives on in popular memory as the banana-skirted siren of Jazz Age Paris. In Josephine Baker and the Rainbow Tribe, Matthew Pratt Guterl brings out a little known side of the celebrated personality, showing how her ambitions of later years were even more daring and subversive than the youthful exploits that made her the first African American superstar.
Her performing days numbered, Baker settled down in a sixteenth-century chateau she named Les Milandes, in the south of France. Then, in 1953, she did something completely unexpected and, in the context of racially sensitive times, outrageous. Adopting twelve children from around the globe, she transformed her estate into a theme park, complete with rides, hotels, a collective farm, and singing and dancing. The main attraction was her Rainbow Tribe, the family of the future, which showcased children of all skin colors, nations, and religions living together in harmony. Les Milandes attracted an adoring public eager to spend money on a utopian vision, and to worship at the feet of Josephine, mother of the world.
Alerting readers to some of the contradictions at the heart of the Rainbow Tribe project—its undertow of child exploitation and megalomania in particular—Guterl concludes that Baker was a serious and determined activist who believed she could make a positive difference by creating a family out of the troublesome material of race.
Josephine Baker (1906-1975) was a dancer, singer, actress, author, politician, militant, and philanthropist, whose images and cultural legacy have survived beyond the hundredth anniversary of her birth. Neither an exercise in postmodern deconstruction nor simple biography, Josephine Baker in Art and Life presents a critical cultural study of the life and art of the Franco-American performer whose appearances as the savage dancer Fatou shocked the world.
Although the study remains firmly anchored in Josephine Baker’s life and times, presenting and challenging carefully researched biographical facts, it also offers in-depth analyses of the images that she constructed and advanced. Bennetta Jules-Rosette explores Baker’s far-ranging and dynamic career from a sociological and cultural perspective, using the tools of sociosemiotics to excavate the narratives, images, and representations that trace the story of her life and fit together as a cultural production.
Though Gibson is best remembered as "the black Babe Ruth," Ruth became a beloved symbol of the national pastime, while Gibson lived a life veiled in the darkness that came both from the shadow world of the Negro leagues and from within his own tortured soul.
Mark Ribowsky, the widely acclaimed biographer of Satchel Paige, pulls no punches in his portrait of this magnificent, troubled athlete. This is the most complete, thorough, and authoritative account of the life of black ball's greatest hitter, and one of its most important stars.
While African National Congress narratives dominate much of the scholarship on South Africa’s freedom struggle, Josie Mpama/Palmer’s political life offers a different perspective. Highly critical of the patriarchal attitudes that hindered black women from actively participating in politics, Mpama/Palmer was an outspoken advocate for women’s social equality and encouraged black women to become more involved in national conversations. The first black woman to join the Communist Party of South Africa and an antiapartheid activist, Josie Mpama/Palmer remained involved in critical issues all her life, especially protests against Bantu Education and other forms of racial and sexist discrimination. She was an integral figure in establishing the Federation of South African Women, an organization open to women of all races. Mpama/Palmer’s activism and political legacy would become an inspiring example for women in South Africa and around the world to get up and get moving.
José Martí (1853–1895) was the founding hero of Cuban independence. In all of modern Latin American history, arguably only the “Great Liberator” Simón Bolívar rivals Martí in stature and legacy. Beyond his accomplishments as a revolutionary and political thinker, Martí was a giant of Latin American letters, whose poetry, essays, and journalism still rank among the most important works of the region. Today he is revered by both the Castro regime and the Cuban exile community, whose shared veneration of the “apostle” of freedom has led to his virtual apotheosis as a national saint.
In José Martí: A Revolutionary Life, Alfred J. López presents the definitive biography of the Cuban patriot and martyr. Writing from a nonpartisan perspective and drawing on years of research using original Cuban and U.S. sources, including materials never before used in a Martí biography, López strips away generations of mythmaking and portrays Martí as Cuba’s greatest founding father and one of Latin America’s literary and political giants, without suppressing his public missteps and personal flaws. In a lively account that engrosses like a novel, López traces the full arc of Martí’s eventful life, from his childhood and adolescence in Cuba, to his first exile and subsequent life in Spain, Mexico City, and Guatemala, through his mature revolutionary period in New York City and much-mythologized death in Cuba on the battlefield at Dos Ríos. The first major biography of Martí in over half a century and the first ever in English, José Martí is the most substantial examination of Martí’s life and work ever published.
Lu Xun (1881–1936) is widely considered the greatest writer of twentieth-century China. Although primarily known for his two slim volumes of short fiction, he was a prolific and inventive essayist. Jottings under Lamplight showcases Lu Xun’s versatility as a master of prose forms and his brilliance as a cultural critic with translations of sixty-two of his essays, twenty of which are translated here for the first time.
While a medical student in Tokyo, Lu Xun viewed a photographic slide that purportedly inspired his literary calling: it showed the decapitation of a Chinese man by a Japanese soldier, as Chinese bystanders watched apathetically. He felt that what his countrymen needed was a cure not for their physical ailments but for their souls. Autobiographical accounts describing this and other formative life experiences are included in Jottings, along with a wide variety of cultural commentaries, from letters, speeches, and memorials to parodies and treatises.
Lu Xun was remarkably well versed in Chinese tradition and playfully manipulated its ancient forms. But he also turned away from historical convention, experimenting with new literary techniques and excoriating the “slave mentality” of a population paralyzed by Confucian hierarchies. Tinged at times with notes of despair, yet also with pathos, humor, and an unparalleled caustic wit, Lu Xun’s essays chronicle the tumultuous transformations of his own life and times, providing penetrating insights into Chinese culture and society.
Andrews was an intelligent, sharp-witted, and skilled observer, and these qualities shine through her engaging memoir. She records her reactions to Newark society and the economic base on which it stood, comparing southern gentility and agriculture to northern brusqueness and industry. Moreover, while the diary reveals clearly the social and cultural attitudes of aristocratic southerners of the period, it also foreshadows the beginning of change as, for example, a visit to a factory opens Andrews’s eyes to the advantages of the new economy. She also recounts her frustrations with the role of southern women, exalted on the one hand but severely restricted on the other. These stark contrasts and Andrews’s own mixed feelings give the diary much of its power.
Also included in this volume are six of Andrews’s magazine and newspaper articles that appeared in the national press around the time she was keeping this journal. Taken together, her private and public writings from this period show a maturing nineteenth-century woman confronting a culture turned upside down in the new world of the Reconstruction-era South.
Andrews’s memoir, with accompanying introduction and commentary by Kit Rushing, will appeal to general readers with an interest in the nineteenth-century South as well as to historians of women, the Civil War era, and nineteenth-century America.
"He was a man of fair learning, and more than average accomplishment; not at all intolerant of opinions at issue with his own; in religion a Dissenter of the class still prevalent in New England: in his tastes scholarly and refined, not ill read in general literature, prone to social enjoyments, a reasonably good critic of what he saw, altogether an excellent example of the class of men out of whom the fathers and founders of that great republic sprang..."
-Charles Dickens, in summing up the character of Samuel Curwen
This unabridged two-volume edition of Samuel Curwen's journal supersedes the only version previously available to historians: a fragmentary and inaccurate mid-nineteenth-century work published by George Atkinson Ward, which nevertheless was celebrated by Charles Dickens.
Andrew Oliver, combining painstaking documentation with an abundance of illustrations, provides a colorful, complete work which ranks as a valuable source of English social history from 1775 to 1784. It was during these years that Curwen, a Salem merchant, after fleeing from the harassment incurred by his loyalist activities, migrated to England and kept this journal. A man small in size, physically timid, mentally brave, and remarkably injudicious, Curwen felt that he was "unhappily though unjustly ranked" as a tory. Thus his observations and thoughts are useful in understanding the attitudes and experiences of the loyalist exiles.
Set primarily in England and sparked throughout with engaging reports on personalities, places, and even the weather, the journal traces Curwen's nine years of exile. It also briefly details his departure from Salem, his short and alarming sojourn in Philadelphia where he found the political climate no less unfavorable, and his subsequent sea voyage to England.
The Journal of Samuel Curwen, Loyalist is the first in a series of Loyalist Papers, a long-term program to be undertaken independently by a number of publishers in Britain, Canada, and the United States. The program will locate, gather, and make available documents that place in perspective those Americans who, at the time of the Revolution, remained loyal to the Crown.
"He often shows bravery and shrewdness; the book is full of fine criticism and psychological insight. As always, his prose has that ease and transparency that make one forget one is reading; one seems simply to hear a voice speaking. Nemerov's improvised self-analysis has weaknesses, but few that he himself doesn't eventually recognize."—New York Times Book Review
"In an age of explicitness, Nemerov's Journal of the Fictive Life is explicitly without vulgarity; in an age of revelation, it reveals only what counts. More then a book about creativity, it is a beautiful creation."—Richard G. Stern
In-depth and dramatic, Andrew E. Stoner's biography follows the remarkable life of the brash, pioneering journalist. Shilts's reporting on AIDS in San Francisco broke barriers even as other gay writers and activists ridiculed his overtures to the mainstream and labeled him a traitor to the movement, charges the combative Shilts forcefully answered. Behind the scenes, Shilts overcame career-threatening struggles with alcohol and substance abuse to achieve the notoriety he had always sought, while the HIV infection he had purposely kept hidden began to take his life.
Filled with new insights and fascinating detail, The Journalist of Castro Street reveals the historic work and passionate humanity of the legendary investigative reporter and author.
In Journey into Personhood Ruth Webb tells the story of an individual born with severe cerebral palsy who struggles to become a person in her own eyes as well as in the opinion of those around her. By developing both the inner ability to learn, live, and work independently and the outer ability to convince others to give her the freedom to do so—physically and emotionally—Webb earned her Ph.D. in counseling and guidance. With that validation of her intelligence and competence, she entered upon a fulfilling career working with mentally retarded people and other people with disabilities.
Journey of an American Pianist presents an extensive examination of Johannesen’s artistic commitment and the importance of certain kinds of training and experience, framed in large part as advice to the young pianist seeking a concert career. At the same time, it has plenty of everyday-living experience, showing what pianists do and think about when they are not actually playing or performing.
Journey of Five Capuchin Nuns contains all the elements of a riveting adventure story. Through the eyes of the Mother Abbess, María Rosa, the reader is taken along on this journey through wars, pirates, disease, travel on the high seas, and treacherous mountain passes in the Andes. Five nuns set out in the early 1700s from their cloistered convent in Madrid, Spain, to travel halfway around the world to Lima, Peru. The journey lasted three years—an odyssey not all of them would complete. Yet, this unique historical document is so much more than a typical travel narrative. It illuminates the eighteenth-century way of life of religious women on both sides of the Atlantic basin. María Rosa’s lively prose attests to the literary connection among women religious writers of Spain and Latin America. This annotated edition and first-ever English translation of the manuscript will be of interest to scholars, students and anyone who wants to learn more about women’s history.
Ak'é Nýdzin, or Navajo Oshley, was born sometime between 1879 and 1893. His oral memoir is set on the northern frontier of Navajo land, principally the San Juan River basin in southeastern Utah, and tells the story of his early life near Dennehetso and his travels, before there were roads or many towns, from Monument Valley north along Comb Ridge to Blue Mountain. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Anglos and Navajos expanded their use and settlement of lands north of the San Juan. Grazing lands and the Anglo wage economy drew many Navajos across the river. Oshley, a sheepherder, was among the first to settle there. He cared for the herds of his extended family, while also taking supplemental jobs with the growing livestock industry in the area.
His narrative is woven with vivid and detailed portraits of Navajo culture: clan relationships, marriages and children, domestic life, the importance of livestock, complex relations with the natural world, ceremonies, trading, and hand trembling.
Themes with which the reader of his previous works would be well acquainted recur in this volume. The dedicated Catholic philosopher, who preferred his independence as a trainer of teachers to the less independent role of a professor in a Catholic university, was quite prepared to criticize developments in the Church which resulted from Vatican II. In his defense of the sacred, which he deemed threatened by popularizing trends in the Church, he criticized what he saw as the watered down language in modern German translations of Church liturgical texts; the growing preference for secular garb; and the compromising developments which saw the sacramental signs – surrounding baptism, for instance – being reduced to such an extent that they no longer had the power to signify their sacred meaning even to a well-intentioned congregation.
A great lover of the philosophy of Plato, Augustine, and Aquinas – among many others –, Pieper highlighted the need for living a life of truth. He did not consider truth to be merely something abstract but as something to be lived existentially. While he could explain his philosophy in clear rational terms, something which especially stood to him in his post-war lectures to eager students who were hungry for intellectual guidance and leadership, the great interest of his philosophy was, possibly, his preoccupation with mystery – that which impinges on our inner lives but frustrates all our attempts to account for it in purely rational terms.
As a philosopher – one might say a Christian philosopher – Pieper seems to have observed the traditional boundaries drawn between philosophy and theology. His generation was exposed to the modernist debates in the Church. It would have been deemed heretical to say that the Divine could be grasped by our purely human thought processes – access to the Divine being only possible through faith and grace. Pieper was no heretic. But he was also not altogether conservative. In fact, his philosophy, closely allied to existentialism – despite his care, for instance, to distance himself from the negative existentialism of Sartre – focused on the individual’s inner existential grasp of the most profound reality. Truth is to be found within us, even if it remains a mystery. What lies beyond death is, for the individual, the ultimate mystery.
Four early American women tell their own stories: Mary Rowlandson on her capture by Indians in 1676, Boston businesswoman Sarah Kemble Knight on her travels in New England, Elizabeth Ashbridge on her personal odyssey from indentured servant to Quaker preacher, and Elizabeth House Trist, correspondent of Thomas Jefferson, on her travels from Philadelphia to Natchez. Accompanied by introductions and extensive notes.
"The writings of four hearty women who braved considerable privation and suffering in a wild, uncultivated 17th- and 18th-century America. Although confined by Old World patriarchy, these women, through their narratives, have endowed the frontier experience with a feminine identity that is generally absent from early American literature."—Publishers Weekly
In 1918 Prokudin-Gorsky escaped an increasingly chaotic, violent Russia and regained nearly 2,000 of his bulky glass negatives. His subsequent peripatetic existence before settling in Paris makes his collection's survival all the more miraculous. The U.S. Library of Congress acquired Prokudin-Gorsky's collection in 1948, and since then it has become a touchstone for understanding pre-revolutionary Russia. Now digitized and publicly available, his images are a sensation in Russia, where people visit websites dedicated to them.
William Craft Brumfield—photographer, scholar, and the leading authority on Russian architecture in the West—began working with Prokudin-Gorsky's photographs in 1985. He curated the first public exhibition of them in the United States and has annotated the entire collection. In Journeys through the Russian Empire, Brumfield—who has spent decades traversing Russia and photographing buildings and landscapes in their various stages of disintegration or restoration—juxtaposes Prokudin-Gorsky's images against those he took of the same buildings and areas. In examining the intersections between his own photography and that of Prokudin-Gorsky, Brumfield assesses the state of preservation of Russia's architectural heritage and calls into question the nostalgic assumptions of those who see Prokudin-Gorsky's images as the recovery of the lost past of an idyllic, pre-Soviet Russia.
This lavishly illustrated volume—which features some 400 stunning full-color images of ancient churches and mosques, railways and monasteries, towns and remote natural landscapes—is a testament to two brilliant photographers whose work prompts and illuminates, monument by monument, questions of conservation, restoration, and cultural identity and memory.
Because Gardner’s primary research since 1962 has been with hunter-gatherers, much of his story transpires either in the equatorial jungle of south India or more than one hundred miles beyond the end of the road in Canada’s Northwest Territories. Other ventures transport readers to Japan and back to India, allowing them to savor ancient sights and sounds. Gardner closes the book with a journey of quite another sort, as he takes us into the world of nature, Taoist philosophy, and the experimental treatment of advanced cancer.
Throughout this fast-moving book, Gardner deftly describes the goals and techniques of his research, as well as his growing understanding of the cultures to which he was exposed. Few personal accounts of fieldwork describe enough of the research to give a complete sense of the experience in the way this book does. Anyone with an interest in travel and adventure, including the student of anthropology as well as the general reader, will be totally intrigued by Gardner’s story, one of a daily existence so very different from our own.
Combining biography, poetry, and anthropology, Wilmsen vividly portrays the intense realities of life in the Kalahari and carries the reader across space and time as events in the present trigger emotions and memories. Images of apartheid, for example, evoke memories of Wilmsen's childhood in the segregated South. Poems, journal entries, and moving accounts of deepening personal relationships all intertwine as Wilmsen conveys the experiences he shares with his "subjects" in spite of vast differences in their backgrounds—extreme thirst under the desert sun, grief over the death of a child, and the constant irritation of ubiquitous flies.
"Our understanding of other peoples," he writes, "lies not in themselves or in anything that they do but in our experience of them. Experience that is lived partly in their world and partly in a shell of our world that we wear when we meet them."
Sophisticated, lyrical, and passionately written, Journeys with Flies will inspire all those who travel to places far from home.
Joyce Westerman grew up on a farm in Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin. As a kid, she cleaned the barn, picked vegetables, and helped her father cut down trees. But what she really loved to do was play baseball. Joyce played ball at recess and with friends whenever she could. She even joined her aunt’s adult softball team when she was only twelve.
As Joyce got older, she went to work at a factory in Kenosha. But when World War II broke out, she got a chance to try out for the All American Girls Professional Baseball League. Women from all over the country signed up to show off their skills. Only a few were good enough, and Joyce was one of them. For eight years, Joyce travelled around the United Stated playing ball, winning the league championship in her last season.
This addition to the Badger Biographies series for young readers tells the story of a woman who lived her dream of becoming a professional athlete. In a time when women had few opportunities for careers, and next to none in professional sports, Joyce and her teammates showed that women have what it takes.
The first biography of an eighteenth-century Basque immigrant who became a silver miner, a cattle rancher, and commander of the cavalry in Sonora, Mexico. The name of Juan Bautista de Anza the younger is a fairly familiar one in the contemporary Southwest because of the various streets, schools, and other places that bear his name. Few people, however, are familiar with his father, the elder Juan Bautista de Anza, whose activities were crucial to the survival of the tenuous and far-flung settlements of Spain’s northernmost colonial frontier. For this first comprehensive biography of the elder Anza, Donald T. Garate spent more than ten years researching archives in Spain and the Americas. The result is a lively picture of the Spanish borderlands and the hardy, ambitious colonists who peopled them.
Palechor's lively memoir is complemented by Jimeno's reflections on autobiography as an anthropological tool and on the oppressive social and political conditions faced by Colombia's indigenous peoples. A faithful and fluent transcription of Palechor's life story, this work is a uniquely valuable resource for understanding the contemporary indigenous rights movements in Colombia.
Juana Briones was born in 1802 and spent her early youth in Santa Cruz, a community of retired soldiers who had helped found Spanish California, Native Americans, and settlers from Mexico. In 1820, she married a cavalryman at the San Francisco Presidio, Apolinario Miranda. She raised her seven surviving sons and daughters and adopted an orphaned Native American girl. Drawing on knowledge she gained about herbal medicine and other cures from her family and Native Americans, she became a highly respected curandera, or healer.
Juana set up a second home and dairy at the base of then Loma Alta, now Telegraph Hill, the first house in that area. After gaining a church-sanctioned separation from her abusive husband, she expanded her farming and cattle business in 1844 by purchasing a 4,400-acre ranch, where she built her house, located in the present city of Palo Alto. She successfully managed her extensive business interests until her death in 1889. Juana Briones witnessed extraordinary changes during her lifetime. In this fascinating book, readers will see California’s history in a new and revelatory light.
Like many capitals the city of Mexico is a place of monuments-large monuments, small, ancient monuments, and new, representational monuments, and allegorical monuments—each bearing a message from the past. Among them is the Hemiciclo. It stands in a spacious, old, beautiful park, the Alameda Central, where the young and old of the city still promenade on Sundays and holidays as people do in the plazas throughout the country and, indeed, as people do in many parts of the world. Amid green trees and a great variety of flowers and shrubs and flanked by a semicircle of twelve doric columns of white Carrara marble stands the central pedestal of the Hemiciclo supporting the statues of three figures. One statue represents a former president of the republic, Benito Juarez, who appears solemn and grim as a Roman proconsul administering justice. Juarez the Lawgiver is seated, and surrounding him are two allegorical figures, also of marble, one representing Glory, who is placing a crown on Juarez’s head, and the other, the Republic, who stands behind, resting her sword on the ground to signify the end of a gigantic struggle. The letters of the pedestal read: “Al Benemerito Benito Juarez. La Patria.” Many years have passed since 1910, when the Mexican government built and dedicated the Hemiciclo after a design by the architect Guillermo Heredia.
Like many other such monuments it is the embodiment of a myth. In life Juarez offered little to the mythologizers-he was never able to boast a military career, he often impressed people as reserved or even impassive. he stood a little over five feet; with small hands and feet and dark staring eyes, a coppery complexion that helped disguise a large scar across his face, of Zapotec Indian parentage, he was no striking figure. He did, however, lead Mexican liberals in the I 850s and 1860s in their titanic struggle against formidable opposition, both foreign and domestic, and in the years since his death his worshipers have gathered at the Hemiciclo, at his tomb, or in many other places in Mexico sacred to his memory, usually on anniversaries of his birth or death. For them Juarez is, in agreement with the golden inscription on the central pedestal of the Hemiciclo, “Benemerito de la Patria” or even “Benemerito de las Americas.”
Development of a Juarez myth has had all the classic characteristics of myths and mythmaking, especially the subjective view or image of a reality, whether it be of an historical figure, as in the case of Juarez, an event, an institution, or even a geographical region. Image or meaning ascribed to what is assumed to be a reality constitutes one of the main elements of myth and when manipulated to promote a cause assumes a reality of its own. The apotheosis of Juarez projected a subjective view or image of the historical reality. In all myths, to be sure, the assumed reality is a feature useful to an individual or a group.
Judaism and Story documents a chapter of rabbinic tradition that explored the possibility of historical orientation by means of stories. As Neusner demonstrates, this experiment with narrative went beyond the borders of rabbinic preoccupation with rhetorical argumentation focused on the explication of the Torah. The sage story moved in the direction of biography, but without allowing biography to emerge. This development, in Neusner's account, parallels the movement from epistle to Gospel in early Christianity and thus has broad implications for the history of religions.
Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr., Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Alabama until his elevation to the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in 1979, was perhaps President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s most significant appointment to a lower court. His selection to the bench in 1955 followed by only a few months the Supreme Court’s historic decision in Brown vs. Board of Education.
Disponible por primera vez en español, Julia de Burgos cuenta la destacada historia de la poeta y activista puertorriqueña.
Julian Hawthorne (1846-1934), Nathaniel Hawthorne's only son, lived a long and influential life marked by bad circumstances and worse choices. Raised among luminaries such as Thoreau, Emerson, and the Beecher family, Julian became a promising novelist in his twenties, but his writing soon devolved into mediocrity.
What talent the young Hawthorne had was spent chasing across the changing literary and publishing landscapes of the period in search of a paycheck, writing everything from potboilers to ad copy. Julian was consistently short of funds because--as biographer Gary Scharnhorst is the first to reveal--he was supporting two households: his wife in one and a longtime mistress in the other.
The younger Hawthorne's name and work ethic gave him influence in spite of his haphazard writing. Julian helped to found Cosmopolitan and Collier's Weekly. As a Hearst stringer, he covered some of the era's most important events: McKinley's assassination, the Galveston hurricane, and the Spanish-American War, among others.
When Julian died at age 87, he had written millions of words and more than 3,000 pieces, out-publishing his father by a ratio of twenty to one. Gary Scharnhorst, after his own long career including works on Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and other famous writers, became fascinated by the leaps and falls of Julian Hawthorne. This biography shows why.
Julian Steward and the Great Basin is a critical assessment of Steward’s work, the factors that influenced him, and his deep effect on American anthropology. Steward (1902–1972) was one of the foremost American exponents of cultural ecology, the idea that societies evolve in adaptation to their human and natural environments. He was also central in shaping basic anthropological constructs such as "hunter-gatherer" and "adaptation." But his fieldwork took place almost entirely in the Great Basin.
In one sense, the phases of Steward’s career epitomize the successive schools of anthropological theory and practice. Each chapter explores a different aspect of his work ranging from early efforts at documenting trait distributions to his later role in the development of social transformation theory, area studies, and applied anthropology.
Julian Steward and the Great Basin also corrects long-standing misperceptions that originated with Steward about lifeways of the Indians living between the Great Plains and California. It charts new directions for research, demanding a more exacting study of environmental conditions, material adaptations, and organizational responses, as well as an appreciation of the ideological and humanistic dimensions of Basin Life.
This new biography in the Badger Biographies Series turns the lens on the writer herself, detailing her life as she detailed the lives of those she encountered in the 1830s and 1840s. Juliette Kinzie: Frontier Storyteller details war, hunger, and the rapidly changing times Juliette witnessed on the Midwestern frontier, following the pioneering woman through her own changes from socialite to pioneer to famous writer and even to the work of her granddaughter, Juliette Gordon Low, who founded the Girl Scouts of the USA in 1912.
With vision, hard-nosed judgment, and biting humor, Julius Nyerere confronted the challenges of nation building in modern Africa. Constructing Tanzania out of a controversial Cold War union between Tanganyika and Zanzibar, Nyerere emerged as one of independent Africa’s most influential leaders. He pursued his own brand of African socialism, called Ujamaa, with unquestioned integrity, and saw it profoundly influence movements to end white minority rule in Southern Africa. Yet his efforts to build a peaceful nation created a police state, economic crisis, and a war with Idi Amin’s Uganda. Eventually—unlike most of his contemporaries—Nyerere retired voluntarily from power, paving the way for peaceful electoral transitions in Tanzania that continue today.
Based on multinational archival research, extensive reading, and interviews with Nyerere’s family and colleagues, as well as some who suffered under his rule, Paul Bjerk provides an incisive and accessible biography of this African leader of global importance. Recognizing Nyerere’s commitment to participatory government and social equality while also confronting his authoritarian turns and policy failures, Bjerk offers a portrait of principled leadership under the difficult circumstances of postcolonial Africa.
An eye-opening account of time served in the great battles of our century— for workers’ rights, against Fascism, Communism, and racism—Jumping the Line is the life story of an American original. William Herrick chronicles his adventures and misadventures on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War, in (and very much out of) the Communist Party, driving a tractor on a communal farm in Michigan, jumping the line as a hobo, organizing African American sharecroppers in Georgia, at work with Orson Welles, and immersed in his own writing.
Herrick chronicles a life of great conviction and great disillusion. He went to Spain in 1936 to fight against the Fascists and there witnessed the horrifying acts that Fascists and Communists alike committed, before he was felled by a near-fatal wound. Here he tells about the life that led him, a working-class Jewish kid from New York, into the idealism and then the murky politics of this internecine conflict. From the bloody fight in Spain he takes us to the battlefields of the Communist movement in the U.S., where he found himself parading up and down the garment district of Manhattan, denouncing his former comrades.
When Paul Berman interviewed Herrick in the Village Voice in 1986, for the fiftieth anniversary of the Spanish Civil War, Herrick’s remarks so incensed other veterans of the Abraham Lincoln battalion that they picketed the paper. What William Herrick has to say doesn’t always go down easily. But for those who like the truth, with a dash of wit and a healthy dose of history, it can be exhilarating.
In this, the first thoroughly researched scholarly biography of British actor Junius Brutus Booth, Stephen M. Archer reveals Booth to have been an artist of considerable range and a man of sensitivity and intellect. Archer provides a clear account of Booth’s professional and personal life and places him in relationship to his contemporaries, particularly Edmund Kean and William Charles Macready.
The worldwide fame assured for the Booth family of actors by John Wilkes Booth’s bone-shattering leap from the President’s box had eluded Junius Brutus Booth throughout his lifelong exile in America. But from that event until today, no American family of actors has stimulated such scrutiny as the Booths.
Eight years of research, pursuing Booth from Amsterdam to San Francisco, has resulted in an accurate, fascinating narrative that both records and illuminates the actor’s life.
In the first biography of this fascinating figure, Sander Gilman tells the story of Becker's life in five worlds: the Polish-Jewish middle-class neighborhood where Becker was born; the Warsaw ghetto and the concentration camps where Becker spent his childhood; the socialist order of the GDR, which Becker idealized, resisted, and finally was forced to leave; the isolated world of West Berlin, where he settled down to continue his writing; and the new, reunified Germany, for which Becker served as both conscience and inspiration.
Gilman was close friends with Becker for nearly thirty years, and his biography is based on unprecedented access to both the man and his papers. As Gilman reveals, Becker's story encapsulates the fractured experience of life in twentieth-century Europe, a time and place in which political systems and national borders were constantly in flux. The life of Becker, we learn, was one of great literary achievement and notoriety, but it was also one of profound cultural dislocation. An important theme in the book is Becker's struggle with his Jewishness, an identity he repressed in socialist East Germany, but embraced after reunification, when he found himself at the center of Jewish culture and literature.
Sander Gilman's story of Jurek Becker is biography of the highest order, a portrait of an extraordinarily gifted artist whose hope and courage are manifested in his legacy as one of the greatest German writers of the past century.
General Benjamin H. Grierson is most widely known as the brilliant cavalryman whose actions in the Civil War's Mississippi Valley campaign facilitated Ulysses S. Grant's capture of Vicksburg. There is, however, much more to this key Union officer than a successful raid into Confederate-held Mississippi. In A Just and Righteous Cause: Benjamin H. Grierson's Civil War Memoir, edited by Bruce J. Dinges and Shirley A. Leckie, Grierson tells his story in forceful, direct, and highly engaging prose.
A Just and Righteous Cause paints a vivid picture of Grierson's prewar and Civil War career, touching on his antislavery views, Republican Party principles, and military strategy and tactics. His story begins with his parents' immigration to the United States and follows his childhood, youth, and career as a musician; the early years of his arriage; his business failures prior to becoming a cavalry officer in an Illinois regiment; his experiences in battle; and his Reconstruction appointment. Grierson also provides intimate accounts of his relationships with such prominent politicians and Union leaders as Abraham Lincoln, Richard Yates, Andrew Johnson, William T. Sherman, Ulysses S.
Grant, John C. Frémont, and Benjamin Prentiss.
Because Grierson wrote the memoir mainly with his family as the intended audience, he manages to avoid the self-promotion that plagues many of his contemporaries' chronicles. His reliance on military records and correspondence, along with family letters, lends an immediacy rarely found in military memoirs. His reminiscences also add fuel to a reemerging debate on soldiers' motivations for enlisting—in Grierson's case, patriotism and ideology—and shed new light on the Western theater of the Civil War, which has seen a recent surge in interest among Civil War enthusiasts.
A non-West Point officer, Grierson owed his developing career to his independent studies of the military and his connections to political figures in his home state of Illinois and later to important Union leaders. Dinges and Leckie provide a helpful introduction, which gives background on the memoir and places Grierson's career into historical context. Aided by fourteen photos and two maps, as well as the editors' superb annotations, A Just and Righteous Cause is a valuable addition to Civil War history.
Winner, 2019 Booker Worthen Prize from the Central Arkansas Library System.
A dedicated advocate for social justice long before the term entered everyday usage, Rabbi Ira Sanders began striving against the Jim Crow system soon after he arrived in Little Rock from New York in 1926. Sanders, who led Little Rock’s Temple B’nai Israel for nearly forty years, was a trained social worker as well as a rabbi and his career as a dynamic religious and community leader in Little Rock spanned the traumas of the Great Depression, World War II and the Holocaust, and the social and racial struggles of the 1950s and 1960s.
Just and Righteous Causes—a full biographical study of this bold social-activist rabbi—examines how Sanders expertly navigated the intersections of race, religion, and gender to advocate for a more just society. It joins a growing body of literature about the lives and histories of Southern rabbis, deftly balancing scholarly and narrative tones to provide a personal look into the complicated position of the Southern rabbi and the Jewish community throughout the political struggles of the twentieth-century South.
During the predawn hours of December 9, 2008, an FBI team swarmed the home of Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich and took him away in handcuffs. The shocking arrest, based on allegations of corruption and extortion, launched a chain of political events never before seen in Illinois. In A Just Cause, Bernard H. Sieracki delivers a dynamic firsthand account of this eight-week political crisis, beginning with Blagojevich’s arrest, continuing through his impeachment and trial, and culminating in his conviction and removal from office. Drawing on his own eyewitness observations of the hearings and trial, the comments of interviewees, trial transcripts, and knowledge gained from decades of work with the Illinois legislature, Sieracki tells the compelling story of the first impeachment and removal from office of an Illinois governor, while providing a close look at the people involved.
A Just Cause depicts Blagojevich as a master of political gamesmanship, a circus ringmaster driven by personal ambition and obsessed with private gain. Sieracki examines in depth the governor’s unethical behavior while in office, detailing a litany of partisan and personal hostilities that spanned years. He thoroughly covers the events leading to Blagojevich’s downfall and the reactions of the governor’s cohorts. The author discusses the numerous allegations against Blagojevich, including attempts to “sell” appointments, jobs, and contracts in exchange for financial contributions. Sieracki then exhaustively recounts Blagojevich’s senate trial and the governor’s removal from office.
This engrossing volume is both a richly detailed case study of the American checks-and-balances system and an eyewitness account of unprecedented events. It will appeal to anyone interested in the stunning, true tale of a state upholding the maxim “The welfare of the people is the supreme law.”
Murphy is best remembered for his immense legal contributions supporting individual liberty and fighting discrimination, particularly discrimination against the most vulnerable. Despite being a loyal ally of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, when FDR ordered the removal of Japanese Americans during World War II, Supreme Court Justice Murphy condemned the policy as “racist” in a scathing dissent to the Korematsu v. United States decision—the first use of the word in a Supreme Court opinion. Every American, whether arriving by first class or in chains in the galley of a slave ship, fell under Murphy’s definition of those entitled to the full benefits of the American dream.
Justice and Faith explores Murphy’s life and times by incorporating troves of archive materials not available to previous biographers, including local newspaper records from across the country. Frank Murphy is proof that even in dark times, the United States has extraordinary resilience and an ability to produce leaders of morality and courage.
Databases of both convicted offenders and no-suspect cases demonstrate the power of DNA testing to solve the unsolvable. George “Woody” Clarke is a leading authority in legal circles and among the news media because of his expertise in DNA evidence. In this memoir, Clarke chronicles his experiences in some of the most disturbing and notorious sexual assault and murder court cases in California. He charts the beginnings of DNA testing in police investigations and the fight for its acceptance by courts and juries. He illustrates the power of science in cases he personally prosecuted or in which he assisted, including his work with the prosecution team in the trial of O. J. Simpson.
Clarke also covers cases where DNA evidence was used to exonerate. He directed a special project in San Diego County, proactively examining over six hundred cases of defendants convicted and sentenced to prison before 1993, with the goal of finding instances in which DNA typing might add new evidence and then offered testing to those inmates.
As Clarke tells the story of how he came to understand and use this new form of evidence, readers will develop a new appreciation for the role of science in the legal system.
Civil rights leader and legislator Lloyd A. Barbee frequently signed his correspondence with "Justice for All," a phrase that embodied his life’s work of fighting for equality and fairness. An attorney most remembered for the landmark case that desegregated Milwaukee Public Schools in 1972, Barbee stood up for justice throughout his career, from defending University of Wisconsin students who were expelled after pushing the school to offer black history courses, to representing a famous comedian who was arrested after stepping out of a line at a protest march. As the only African American in the Wisconsin legislature from 1965 to 1977, Barbee advocated for fair housing, criminal justice reform, equal employment opportunities, women’s rights, and access to quality education for all, as well as being an early advocate for gay rights and abortion access.
This collection features Barbee’s writings from the front lines of the civil rights movement, along with his reflections from later in life on the challenges of legislating as a minority, the logistics of coalition building, and the value of moving the needle on issues that would outlast him. Edited by his daughter, civil rights lawyer Daphne E. Barbee-Wooten, these documents are both a record of a significant period of conflict and progress, as well as a resource on issues that continue to be relevant to activists, lawmakers, and educators.
The struggle to accommodate both individual freedom and community welfare shaped modern America. American have disagreed about whether federal protection of national welfare could be reconciled with defense of individual rights; however, no public figure worked longer or more consistently to meet this challenge than Alabama’s Hugo L. Black
-Sister Helen Prejean
Justice Imperiled is the story of the brilliant lawyer Max Hirschberg, one of Germany's most courageous defenders of justice in the face of Hitler's rise to power.
Hirschberg lived an extraordinary life at a defining moment in German and European history. By the time he fled Nazi Germany in 1934, he had argued a series of cases in Munich's courtrooms that shed light on the history of political justice in pre-Nazi Germany and, by extension, the miscarriage of justice in all Western democracies.
Hirschberg was a rare figure: he fought for cases that reflected the new democracy rather than the old monarchy, that valued equality rather than hierarchy, and that showed respect for workers as well as aristocrats.
Throughout the Weimar period Hirschberg squared off in court against Munich's conservatives, reactionaries, and Nazis-twice facing Hitler himself. As he litigated politically charged disputes, he also began fighting to reverse the criminal convictions of innocent defendants and to study what mistaken verdicts teach us about the criminal justice system as a whole.
In a unique blend of biography and courtroom drama, Justice Imperiled captures the excitement of Hirschberg's actual cases and presents legal battles that still rage, in different circumstances, to this day.
Smith Morrill: Almost every land-grant college or university in the United States has a building named for him; but are his contributions truly recognized and understood? Here is the first biography on this renowned statesman in six decades. Representative and then senator from Vermont, Morrill began his tenure in Congress in 1855 and served continuously for forty-three years. His thirty- one years in the upper chamber alone earned him the title "Father of the Senate." Coy F. Cross reveals a complex and influential political figure who, as chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, and then the Senate Finance Committee, influenced American economic policy for nearly fifty years.
Morrill's most-recognized achievements are the pieces of legislation that bear his name: the Morrill land-grant college acts of 1862 and 1890. His legacy, inspired by the Jeffersonian ideal of an educated electorate, revolutionized American higher education. Prior to this legislation, colleges and universities were open primarily to affluent white men and studies were limited largely to medicine, theology, and philosophy. Morrill's land-grant acts eventually opened American higher education to the working class, women, minorities, and immigrants. Since 1862, more than 20 million people have graduated from the 104 land-grant colleges and universities spawned by his grand vision. In this long-overdue study, Cross shows the "Father of Land-Grant Colleges" to be one of America's formative nineteenth- century political figures.
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