The first Texas-based writer to gain national attention, J. Frank Dobie proved that authentic writing springs easily from the native soil of Texas and the Southwest. In best-selling books such as Tales of Old-Time Texas, Coronado's Children, and The Longhorns, Dobie captured the Southwest's folk history, which was quickly disappearing as the United States became ever more urbanized and industrial. Renowned as "Mr. Texas," Dobie paradoxically has almost disappeared from view—a casualty of changing tastes in literature and shifts in social and political attitudes since the 1960s.

In this lively biography, Steven L. Davis takes a fresh look at a J. Frank Dobie whose "liberated mind" set him on an intellectual journey that culminated in Dobie becoming a political liberal who fought for labor, free speech, and civil rights well before these causes became acceptable to most Anglo Texans. Tracing the full arc of Dobie's life (1888–1964), Davis shows how Dobie's insistence on "free-range thinking" led him to such radical actions as calling for the complete integration of the University of Texas during the 1940s, as well as taking on governors, senators, and the FBI (which secretly investigated him) as Texas's leading dissenter during the McCarthy era.

James Milton Turner, Missouri's most prominent nineteenth-century African American political figure, possessed a deep faith in America. The Civil War, he believed, had purged the land of its sins and allowed the country to realize what had always been its promise: the creation of a social and political environment in which merit, not race, mattered.

Born a slave, Turner gained freedom when he was a child and received his education in clandestine St. Louis schools, later briefly attending Oberlin College. A self-taught lawyer, Turner earned a statewide reputation and wielded power far out of proportion to Missouri's relatively small black population.

After working nearly a decade in Liberia, Turner never regained the prominence he had enjoyed during Reconstruction.

Experience the adventures and tough life of a lumberjack in this newest addition to the Badger Biographies Series. Author John Zimm leads young readers on a journey through the lumbering heyday of Wisconsin’s North Woods as witnessed by lumberman John Nelligan, whose writings were the basis for John Nelligan: Wisconsin Lumberjack.
 
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!

Born on the eve of the Civil War, Charles W. Chesnutt grew up in Fayetteville, North Carolina, a county seat of four or five thousand people, a once-bustling commercial center slipping into postwar decline. Poor, black, and determined to outstrip his modest beginnings and forlorn surroundings, Chesnutt kept a detailed record of his thoughts, observations, and activities from his sixteenth through his twenty-fourth year (1874-1882). These journals, printed here for the first time, are remarkable for their intimate account of a gifted young black man's dawning sense of himself as a writer in the nineteenth century.
Though he achieved literary success in his time, Chesnutt has only recently been rediscovered and his contribution to American literature given its due. The only known private diary from a nineteenth-century African American author, these pages offer a fascinating glimpse into Chesnutt's everyday experience as he struggled to win the goods of education in the world of the post-Civil War South. An extraordinary portrait of the self-made man beset by the urgencies and difficulties of self-improvement in a racially discriminatory society, Chesnutt's journals unfold a richly detailed local history of postwar North Carolina. They also show with great force how the world of the postwar South obstructed--and, unexpectedly, assisted--a black man of driving intellectual ambitions.

In 1830, a young woman named Juliette Magill Kinzie moved from her fancy home in Connecticut to a rustic log cabin in what would later be called Wisconsin. Juliette lived there with her husband, John, who worked as an Indian agent at Fort Winnebago, one of Wisconsin’s earliest settlements. While living at the fort, Juliette came to know the Indian communities that called the land home, as well as the non-Indian settlers who were moving in. She later wrote a best-selling book about her experiences, Wau-Bun: The ‘Early Day’ in the Northwest, an important first-person account of life on the frontier.
 
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.