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Latin Inscriptions in Oxford
Compiled with Translations by Reginald H. Adams
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2015
For six centuries following its foundation, Latin was the main language written and spoken at the University of Oxford. Today, one can still find Latin inscriptions carved into many of its monuments, as well those of the city, dating from the medieval period to the present day. But few of us can discern what all of these inscriptions mean.
           
For Latin Inscriptions in Oxford, Reginald H. Adams, a former scholar at St. John’s College, University of Oxford, has translated a selection of Latin inscriptions. Among them, he finds a great many tributes and memorials—to Queen Anne, Cardinal Wolsey, and T. E. Lawrence, but also to Irene Frude, a “most kindly landlady” on Little Clarendon who “provided each day for almost thirty-five years enormous breakfasts.” Some of the inscriptions offer concise commentary—“Without experiment, it is not possible to know anything adequately.” While others are instructive like the Rhodes House’s warning, “Let no one who is smoke-bearing enter here.”
           
Evocative mementoes of the past, the inscriptions collected by Adams bring insight to the vivid history of Oxford, the city and the university.
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The Armenian Inscriptions from the Sinai
Michael Stone
Harvard University Press, 1982

This is the first publication of inscriptions left in the Sinai desert by medieval Armenian and Georgian pilgrims to the Holy Land. The book contains the evidence discovered in 1979 and 1980 on the routes leading to Mount Sinai (Uebel Musa) from East and West.

The Armenian and Georgian inscriptions, which date from the seventh to later than the fifteenth century, are of prime importance for historical and paleographical studies. This edition gives original photographs of the inscriptions, transcriptions with transliteration and English translation, and elaborate notes on the paleography. The Introduction deals in a fully comparative manner with the epigraphic evidence, and studies the itineraries of the pilgrims through the Sinai peninsula.

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The Confederate Battle Flag
America’s Most Embattled Emblem
John M. Coski
Harvard University Press, 2006

In recent years, the Confederate flag has become as much a news item as a Civil War relic. Intense public debates have erupted over Confederate flags flying atop state capitols, being incorporated into state flags, waving from dormitory windows, or adorning the T-shirts and jeans of public school children. To some, this piece of cloth is a symbol of white supremacy and enduring racial injustice; to others, it represents a rich Southern heritage and an essential link to a glorious past. Polarizing Americans, these "flag wars" reveal the profound--and still unhealed--schisms that have plagued the country since the Civil War.

The Confederate Battle Flag is the first comprehensive history of this contested symbol. Transcending conventional partisanship, John Coski reveals the flag's origins as one of many banners unfurled on the battlefields of the Civil War. He shows how it emerged as the preeminent representation of the Confederacy and was transformed into a cultural icon from Reconstruction on, becoming an aggressively racist symbol only after World War II and during the Civil Rights movement. We gain unique insight into the fine line between the flag's use as a historical emblem and as an invocation of the Confederate nation and all it stood for. Pursuing the flag's conflicting meanings, Coski suggests how this provocative artifact, which has been viewed with pride, fear, anger, nostalgia, and disgust, might ultimately provide Americans with the common ground of a shared and complex history.

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Catfish, Fiddles, Mules, and More
Missouri's State Symbols
John C. Fisher
University of Missouri Press, 2003
Throughout history symbols have been used in a variety of ways, often playing important roles. Each state has its own representative symbols—ranging from seals, flags, and buildings to rocks, minerals, plants, and animals—but how did they come to be chosen? In Catfish, Fiddles, Mules, and More, John C. Fisher provides an answer to that question for Missourians with a handy reference on the various official symbols of the state.
Fisher explores each of the symbols adopted by the legislature as well as the state nickname and the legislative process in Missouri. A chapter is devoted to each symbol, providing information about when it was adopted, why it came to be considered as a state symbol, and how it relates to and is representative of the state. For those symbols that are items of economic importance to the state, the nature of their contribution is also explained. In the case of animal and plant symbols, their biology and where they occur within the state is presented.
This important work, which includes thirty illustrations, will be helpful in acquainting Missourians and others interested in the state with not only the state’s symbols but the history of Missouri as well. Because the symbols were adopted over a long period of time, much of Missouri’s history has been included in the course of discussing them.
Thoroughly researched and well written, Catfish, Fiddles, Mules, and More fills a niche for this kind of information in a way no other work has done. It will be valuable to anyone with an interest in Missouri, and it will be particularly useful to elementary and high school students in their study of the state.
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Honor and Respect
The Official Guide to Names, Titles, and Forms of Address
Robert Hickey
University of Chicago Press, 2023
From addressing letters to local officials to sending formal invitations to foreign chiefs of state, this complete guide provides the correct usage of names, titles, and forms of address for anyone on any occasion.
 
For any personal or professional situation where formality is of the essence and proper decorum is the expectation, this book offers critical information on how to address, introduce, and communicate with officials, functionaries, and dignitaries from all walks of life. From presidents to pastors, ambassadors to attorneys general to your local alderperson, Honor and Respect offers clear explanations and examples of the official honorifics of thousands of federal, state, and municipal officials; corporate executives; clergy; tribal officials; and members of the armed services in the United States, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. It also includes titles and guidance on addressing high officials from more than 180 countries.
 
This updated third edition reflects the nuanced changes in language, protocol, and conventions that have been implemented by the State Department, Armed Forces, and myriad other government offices in the United States and beyond. With its all-encompassing scope and quick-reference format, Honor and Respect provides easy access for all who seek the proper protocols of forms of address. This book is an indispensable reference for individuals and offices working in government, foreign affairs, diplomacy, law, the military, training and consulting, and public relations, among others.
 
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The Contested Crown
Repatriation Politics between Europe and Mexico
Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll
University of Chicago Press, 2022
Following conflicting desires for an Aztec crown, this book explores the possibilities of repatriation.
 
In The Contested Crown, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll meditates on the case of a spectacular feather headdress believed to have belonged to Montezuma, emperor of the Aztecs. This crown has long been the center of political and cultural power struggles, and it is one of the most contested museum claims between Europe and the Americas. Taken to Europe during the conquest of Mexico, it was placed at Ambras Castle, the Habsburg residence of the author’s ancestors, and is now in Vienna’s Welt Museum. Mexico has long requested to have it back, but the Welt Museum uses science to insist it is too fragile to travel.
 
Both the biography of a cultural object and a history of collecting and colonizing, this book offers an artist’s perspective on the creative potentials of repatriation. Carroll compares Holocaust and colonial ethical claims, and she considers relationships between indigenous people, international law and the museums that amass global treasures, the significance of copies, and how conservation science shapes collections. Illustrated with diagrams and rare archival material, this book brings together global history, European history, and material culture around this fascinating object and the debates about repatriation.
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Chivalry in Medieval England
Nigel Saul
Harvard University Press, 2011

Popular views of medieval chivalry—knights in shining armor, fair ladies, banners fluttering from battlements—were inherited from the nineteenth-century Romantics. This is the first book to explore chivalry’s place within a wider history of medieval England, from the Norman Conquest to the aftermath of Henry VII’s triumph at Bosworth in the Wars of the Roses.

Saul invites us to view the world of castles and cathedrals, tournaments and round tables, with fresh eyes. Chivalry in Medieval England charts the introduction of chivalry by the Normans, the rise of the knightly class as a social elite, the fusion of chivalry with kingship in the fourteenth century, and the influence of chivalry on literature, religion, and architecture. Richard the Lionheart and the Crusades, the Black Death and the Battle of Crecy, the Magna Carta and the cult of King Arthur—all emerge from the mists of time and legend in this vivid, authoritative account.

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Down the River
or Practical Lessons Under The Code Duello
George W Hooper
University of Alabama Press, 2007
This delightful divertissement is a lampoon of dueling culture set in southeastern Alabama, penned by a cousin of the better known humorist Johnson Jones Hooper. Interestingly George W. Hooper did not identify himself as the author, perhaps for fear that some enterprising duelist would decide he had been personally lampooned and take umbrage.
 
The main character is a figure familiar in outline to readers of John Gorman Barr, J. J. Hooper, Joseph G. Baldwin, and other practitioners of what is known as the humor of the Old Southwest. This tetchy blowhard is able to find a personal slight in every social circumstance of the most casual nature, to determine the only resolution that could preserve his personal honor is a duel, and then to find elaborate reasons why the affair d’honneur must be postponed indefinitely. The protagonist is accompanied by a Watson-like admirer of comparable wooden-headedness, who admiringly keeps track of all this punctilio—and constantly just barely avoids offending his patron at every turn.
 
The work ends with the provisions of the real “Code Duello,” which cede nothing to the fiction in sheer ridiculousness.
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Politics of the Sword
Dueling, Honor, and Masculinity in Modern Italy
Steven C. Hughes
The Ohio State University Press, 2007
            Following its creation as a country in 1861, Italy experienced a wave of dueling that led commentators to bemoan a national “duellomania” evidenced by the sad spectacle of a duel a day. Pamphlets with titles like “Down with the Duel” and “The Shame of the Duel” all communicated the passion of those who could not believe that a people supposedly just returned to the path of progress and civilization had wholeheartedly embraced such a “barbaric” custom. Yet these critics were consistently countered by sober-minded men of rank and influence who felt that the duel was necessary for the very health of the new nation.
            Steven C. Hughes argues that this extraordinary increase in chivalric combat occurred because the duel played an important role in the formation, consolidation, and functioning of united Italy. The code of honor that lay at the heart of the dueling ethic offered a common model and bond of masculine identity for those patriotic elites who, having created a country of great variety and contrast for often contradictory motives, had to then deal with the consequences. Thus dueling became an iconic weapon of struggle during the Risorgimento, and, as Italy performed poorly on the stage of great power politics, it continued to offer images of martial valor and manly discipline. It also enhanced the social and political power of the new national elites, whose monopoly over chivalric honor helped reinforce the disenfranchisement of the masses. Eventually, the duel fed into the hypermasculinity and cult of violence that marked the early fascist movement, but in the end it would prove too individualistic in its definition of honor to stand up to the emerging totalitarian state. Although Mussolini would himself fight five duels at the start of his career, the duel would disappear along with the liberal regime that had embraced it.
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Duels and the Roots of Violence in Missouri
Dick Steward
University of Missouri Press, 2000

In early-nineteenth-century Missouri, the duel was a rite of passage for many young gentlemen seeking prestige and power. In time, however, other social groups, influenced by the ruling class, engaged in a variety of violent acts and symbolic challenges under the rubric of the code duello. In Duels and the Roots of Violence in Missouri, Dick Steward takes an in-depth look at the evolution of dueling, tracing the origins, course, consequences, and ultimate demise of one of the most deadly art forms in Missouri history. By focusing on the history of dueling in Missouri, Steward details an important part of our culture and the long-reaching impact this form of violence has had on our society.

Drawing upon accounts of at least a hundred duels—from little-known encounters to those involving celebrated figures such as Senator Thomas Hart Benton, Charles Lucas, Thomas Biddle, Spencer Pettis, and John Smith T—Steward shows how the roots of violence have penetrated our modern culture. He traces the social and cultural changes in the nature of the duel from its earliest form as a defense of honor to its use as a means of revenge. By the latter part of the nineteenth century, the formal southern duel had for the most part given way to the improvised western duel, better known as the gunfight. Involving such gunslingers as Wild Bill Hickok and Jesse James, these violent acts captivated people not only in the state but also across the nation. Although the violence entailed different methods of killing, its allure remained as strong as ever.

Steward re-creates the human drama and tragedy in many of these hostile encounters, revealing how different groups operating under the code duello justified family and clan feuds, vigilante justice, and revenge killings. This often-glamorized violence, Steward argues, was viewed as a symbol of honor and courage throughout the century and greatly influenced behavior and attitudes toward violence well into the twentieth century.

While this work centers mainly on Missouri and the history of dueling in the state, its inferences extend well past the region itself. Well-written and thoroughly researched, Duels and the Roots of Violence in Missouri provides valuable insight into the violent social climate of yesterday.

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Family Trees
A History of Genealogy in America
François Weil
Harvard University Press, 2013

The quest for roots has been an enduring American preoccupation. Over the centuries, generations have sketched coats of arms, embroidered family trees, established local genealogical societies, and carefully filled in the blanks in their bibles, all in pursuit of self-knowledge and status through kinship ties. This long and varied history of Americans’ search for identity illuminates the story of America itself, according to François Weil, as fixations with social standing, racial purity, and national belonging gave way in the twentieth century to an embrace of diverse ethnicity and heritage.

Seeking out one’s ancestors was a genteel pursuit in the colonial era, when an aristocratic pedigree secured a place in the British Atlantic empire. Genealogy developed into a middle-class diversion in the young republic. But over the next century, knowledge of one’s family background came to represent a quasi-scientific defense of elite “Anglo-Saxons” in a nation transformed by immigration and the emancipation of slaves. By the mid-twentieth century, when a new enthusiasm for cultural diversity took hold, the practice of tracing one’s family tree had become thoroughly democratized and commercialized.

Today, Ancestry.com attracts over two million members with census records and ship manifests, while popular television shows depict celebrities exploring archives and submitting to DNA testing to learn the stories of their forebears. Further advances in genetics promise new insights as Americans continue their restless pursuit of past and place in an ever-changing world.

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Family History Record Book
James Bell
University of Minnesota Press, 1980
The Family History Record Book was first published in 1980.The Family History Record Book is designed to provide tools for research into your family’s history. Following the principles outlined in Searching for Your Ancestors, James B. Bell, a historian and lecturer, has collected charts and forms that will help organize your information. He provides detailed instructions on how to request specific information from various sources (census, immigration and naturalization, land, military, and church records) and how to use the forms for simple and efficient record keeling. This step-by-step system will be a valuable aid for both beginning and experienced genealogists.
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The Genealogical Sublime
Julia Creet
University of Massachusetts Press, 2020
Since the early 2000s, genealogy has become a lucrative business, an accelerating online industry, a massive data mining project, and fodder for reality television. But the fact remains that our contemporary fascination with family history cannot be understood independently of the powerful technological tools that aid and abet in the search for traces of blood, belonging, and difference.

In The Genealogical Sublime, Julia Creet traces the histories of the largest, longest-running, most lucrative, and most rapidly growing genealogical databases to delineate a broader history of the industry. As each unique case study reveals, new database and DNA technologies enable an obsessive completeness—the desire to gather all of the world's genealogical records in the interests of life beyond death. Archival research and firsthand interviews with Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints officials, key industry players (including Ancestry.com founders and Family Search executives), and professional and amateur family historians round out this timely and essential study.
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The Cadottes
A Fur Trade Family on Lake Superior
Robert Silbernagel
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2023
The Great Lakes fur trade spanned two centuries and thousands of miles, but the story of one particular family, the Cadottes, illuminates the history of trade and trapping while exploring under-researched stories of French-Ojibwe political, social, and economic relations. Multiple generations of Cadottes were involved in the trade, usually working as interpreters and peacemakers, as the region passed from French to British to American control. Focusing on the years 1760 to 1840—the heyday of the Great Lakes fur trade—Robert Silbernagel delves into the lives of the Cadottes, with particular emphasis on the Ojibwe–French Canadian Michel Cadotte and his Ojibwe wife, Equaysayway, who were traders and regional leaders on Madeline Island for nearly forty years. In The Cadottes: A Fur Trade Family on Lake Superior, Silbernagel deepens our understanding of this era with stories of resilient, remarkable people.
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The Dukes of Durham, 1865-1929
Robert F. Durden
Duke University Press, 1987
This is the history of Washington Duke and two of his sons, Benjamin Newton Duke and James Buchanan Duke. Although numerous other members of the family play their parts in the story it focuses primarily on the three men who were at the center of the economic and philanthropic activities which made the Dukes of Durham one of America's famous families. The Dukes operated closely and constantly as a family, and only in that context is their full story told.

In the years after the Civil War, Washington Duke proved to be an unusually able industrialist and a conscientious, Methodist philanthropist. He was, in fact, a major Southern pioneer in both industry and philanthropy. His two sons by a second marriage were remarkably devoted to each other as well as to their father. Both sons also reflected traits of thier father. While Benjamin N. Duke and James B. Duke had life-long involvement with the business world—first in tobacco, then textiles, and finally electric power—as well as with philanthropy, they actually developed complementary specializations. Benjamin N. Duke, the older of the two, served as the family's primary agent for philanthropy from his early manhood in the late 1800's until he gradually became semi-invalid after 1915. James B. Duke, on the other hand, early displayed a marked talent, even a genius, for business. Toward the end of his life, with the establishment of The Duke Endowment late in 1924, he emerged as one of the nation's major philanthropists, ranking alongside Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. A central theme of this book is, however, that the Endowment, despite its magnitude and far-reaching scope, was essentially the institutionalization and culmination of a pattern of family philanthropy that emerged in the 1890's and for which the older brother, Benjamin N. Duke, had always been the primary agent. Thus, the story of James B. Duke, who was and has remained much the more well-known of the two brothers, cannot properly be told out of the family context from which he emerged and in which occurred most of the important phases of his life.

Washington Duke, as a small, land-owning yeoman farmer, was typical of the great majority class not only in antebellum North Carolina but in the South as a whole. Only after the war, when he and his sons emerged as large-scale industrialists and philanthropists, did the Dukes become atypical. Their story is, then, both agricultural and industrial, both Southern and national. Born North Carolinians, they moved onto a national, even global, stage. Yet all the while they kept deep roots, as well as vast investments of capital, in the Old North State, and they poured many millions into philanthropy, largely in the two Carolinas. Based largely on manuscript sources, many of them hitherto unused, this is the first study of the Duke family. The "New South," as recent historians have told us, may not have been so new—but it was certainly different in important ways, and the Dukes loomed large among those who helped to make it so.

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The Search for Ancestors
A Swedish-American Family Saga
H. Arnold Barton
Southern Illinois University Press, 1979

A metaphor for the Swedish migration to America in the mid-nineteenth century, the Sven Svensson family, traced here by historian H. Arnold Barton, a descendant, provides a model for genealogical research with which all persons inter­ested in ancestors can identify and from which anyone can learn.

The field of migration history has taken on new importance as a result of accelerating interest in ethnicity and genealogical research. Though a family history, and in a sense an inner voyage of self-discovery, the search for ancestors told here reveals the broader contours of Swedish and American history in the nineteenth century.

The Search for Ancestors is a microanal­ysis of those social, economic, and cultural developments that led to the grad­ual breakup of an ancient way of life in the Swedish countryside and the migra­tion of growing numbers of Swedish peasants across the Atlantic to America.

Barton’s personal odyssey took him to Gowrie, Iowa, the heart of Swedish America, and to the province of Småland in southern Sweden. Research in the Swedish Statistical Central Bureau in Stockholm, contacts with emigration historians in Stockholm, and search in Swedish provincial and national ar­chives, finally gave him the impressive mass of information and statistical data with which to chart his family’s history—over four centuries, back to the 1530s.

A kind of “history with the works showing” or do-it-yourself genealogical kit, the book will be fascinating as well as informative for general readers as well as students of history.

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Common People
In Pursuit of My Ancestors
Alison Light
University of Chicago Press, 2015
“Family history begins with missing persons,” Alison Light writes in Common People. We wonder about those we’ve lost, and those we never knew, about the long skein that led to us, and to here, and to now. So we start exploring.
 
Most of us, however, give up a few generations back. We run into a gap, get embarrassed by a ne’er-do-well, or simply find our ancestors are less glamorous than we’d hoped. That didn’t stop Alison Light: in the last weeks of her father’s life, she embarked on an attempt to trace the history of her family as far back as she could reasonably go. The result is a clear-eyed, fascinating, frequently moving account of the lives of everyday people, of the tough decisions and hard work, the good luck and bad breaks, that chart the course of a life. Light’s forebears—servants, sailors, farm workers—were among the poorest, traveling the country looking for work; they left few lasting marks on the world. But through her painstaking work in archives, and her ability to make the people and struggles of the past come alive, Light reminds us that “every life, even glimpsed through the chinks of the census, has its surprises and secrets.”
 
What she did for the servants of Bloomsbury in her celebrated Mrs. Woolf and the Servants Light does here for her own ancestors, and, by extension, everyone’s: draws their experiences from the shadows of the past and helps us understand their lives, estranged from us by time yet inextricably interwoven with our own. Family history, in her hands, becomes a new kind of public history.
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Wills from Late Medieval Venetian Crete, 1312–1420
Sally McKee
Harvard University Press, 1998

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Genealogy and Status
Hereditary Office Holding and Kinship in North China under Mongol Rule
Tomoyasu Iiyama
Harvard University Press, 2023

By shedding light on a long-forgotten epigraphic genre that flourished in North China during the Mongol Empire, or Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368), Genealogy and Status explores the ways the conquered Chinese people understood and represented the alien Mongol ruling principles through their own cultural tradition. This epigraphic genre, which this book collectively calls “genealogical steles,” was quite unique in the history of Chinese epigraphy.

Northern Chinese officials commissioned these steles exclusively to record a family’s extensive genealogy, rather than the biography or achievements of an individual. Tomoyasu Iiyama shows how the rise of these steles demonstrates that Mongol rule fundamentally affected how northern Chinese families defined, organized, and commemorated their kinship. Because most of these inscriptions are in Classical Chinese, they appear to be part of Chinese tradition. In fact, they reflect a massive social change in Chinese society that occurred because of Mongol rule in China.

The evolution of genealogical steles delineates how local elites, while thinking of themselves as the heirs of traditional Chinese culture, fully accommodated to Mongol imperial rule and became instead one of its cornerstones in eastern Eurasia.

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Onomastic Reforms
Family Names and State Building in Iran
H. E. Chehabi
Harvard University Press, 2020

In the mid-1920s, the Iranian state legislated a wide-ranging reform of the citizenry’s naming practices. Honorary titles and honorifics were abolished, family names were made obligatory, and an office for registering names and citizens’ life events (birth, marriage, divorce, and death) was established. The main motivation for this onomastic reform was conscription, which necessitated knowledge of young men’s ages, identities, and whereabouts. The introduction of conscription was itself part of the state-building efforts that followed the weakening of the central government induced by the First World War.

In Onomastic Reforms, H. E. Chehabi explains the traditional naming practices of Iranians before the reform, describes the public debates surrounding their obsolescence, traces the legislative measures and decrees that constituted the reform, and explores the ways Iranians chose or invented surnames for themselves.

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How to Make It as a Woman
Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present
Alison Booth
University of Chicago Press, 2004
How to Make It as a Woman outlines the history of prosopography or group biography, focusing on the all-female collections that took hold in nineteenth-century Britain and America. The queens, nurses, writers, reformers, adventurers, even assassins in these collective female biographies served as models to guide the moral development of young women. But often these famous historical women presented untrustworthy examples.

Beginning in the fifteenth century with Christine de Pizan, Alison Booth traces the long tradition of this genre, investigating the varied types and stories most often grouped together in illustrated books designed for entertainment and instruction. She claims that these group biographies have been instrumental in constructing modern subjectivities as well as relations among classes, races, and nations.

From Joan of Arc to Virginia Woolf, Booth examines a host of models of womanhood—both bad and good. Incorporating a bibliography that includes more than 900 all-female collections published in English between 1830 and 1940, Booth uses collective biographies to decode the varied advice on how to make it as a woman.
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The ABC of Modern Biography
Nigel Hamilton
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
In this book - an ABC of the genre, with 26 entries - two renowned biographers and teachers take us on a tour, from A for Authorization to Z for Zigzagging to the End. In trenchant, witty entries they explore the good, the bad and the plain ugly in modern 'life writing' and the portrayal of real lives today - and how, across history and continents, we got here. This book will fascinate general readers interested in how real lives are approached by biographers today in a multitude of media. It will make a much-needed contribution in academia, as well as providing an important text for students of history, language and literature, the arts, science and media. And, not least, for biographers trying to avoid the pitfalls of ignorance or ineptitude.
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The ABC of Modern Biography
Nigel Hamilton
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
In this book - an ABC of the genre, with 26 entries - two renowned biographers and teachers take us on a tour, from A for Authorization to Z for Zigzagging to the End. In trenchant, witty entries they explore the good, the bad and the plain ugly in modern 'life writing' and the portrayal of real lives today - and how, across history and continents, we got here.This book will fascinate general readers interested in how real lives are approached by biographers today in a multitude of media. It will make a much-needed contribution in academia, as well as providing an important text for students of history, language and literature, the arts, science and media. And, not least, for biographers trying to avoid the pitfalls of ignorance or ineptitude.
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The Rhetorics of Life-Writing in Early Modern Europe
Forms of Biography from Cassandra Fedele to Louis XIV
Thomas Mayer and D. R. Woolf, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1995
Lives as lived and lives as written are never one and the same. To turn the first into the second one must introduce "fiction" into the "fact" of the actual existence; this is never more true than during the Renaissance, when multiformity was the rule. The Rhetorics of Life-Writing in Early Modern Europe explores the ways in which authors and their subjects constructed images for themselves, and some of the ways in which those images worked.
The volume is especially timely in light of the growing interest in "microhistory," and in the histories that are emerging from nonliterary documents. Chapters consider numerous genres, including hagiography, epistolary and verse biography, and less familiar forms such as parodic prosopography, life-writing in funeral sermons, and comic martyrology.
Contributors to the volume come from history, art history, and literature, and they include F.W. Conrad, Sheila ffolliott, Robert Kolb, James Mehl, Diana Robin, T.C. Price Zimmerman, and Elizabeth Goldsmith and Abby Zanger, among others.
Thomas F. Mayer is Associate Professor of History, Augustana College. D. R. Woolf is Professor of History, Dalhousie University.
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Studies in Biography
Daniel Aaron
Harvard University Press, 1978
The eleven essays that make up this volume point to some of the new directions biography and biographical criticism have taken in recent years. Among the subjects treated are the responsibilities of the authorized biographer, the practice of biography as it intersects ethnography, biographies of historians by historians, the eulogy as a biographical form, the challenge of rendering the uneventful life, and the biographical implications of a single piece of writing. The essays range from general discussions of biographical aims to fresh examinations of particular biographical works. Despite the diversity of their topics, the authors suggest—if only inadvertently—why so many scholars and writers are taking a biographical approach to human experience.
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Writing Lives in the Eighteenth Century
Tanya M. Caldwell
Bucknell University Press, 2020
Writing Lives in the Eighteenth Century is a collection of essays on memoir, biography, and autobiography during a formative period for the genre. The essays revolve around recognized male and female figures—returning to the Boswell and Burney circle—but present arguments that dismantle traditional privileging of biographical modes. The contributors reconsider the processes of hero making in the beginning phases of a culture of celebrity. Employing the methodology William Godwin outlined for novelists of taking material “from all sources, experience, report, and the records of human affairs,” each contributor examines within the contexts of their time and historical traditions the anxieties and imperatives of the auto/biographer as she or he shapes material into a legacy. New work on Frances Burney D’Arblay’s son, Alexander, as revealed through letters; on Isabelle de Charriere; on Hester Thrale Piozzi; and on Alicia LeFanu and Frances Burney’s realignment of family biography extend current conversations about eighteenth century biography and autobiography.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 
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How To Do Biography
A Primer
Nigel Hamilton
Harvard University Press, 2012

It is not surprising that biography is one of the most popular literary genres of our day. What is remarkable is that there is no accessible guide for how to write one. Now, following his recent Biography: A Brief History (from Harvard), award-winning biographer and teacher Nigel Hamilton tackles the practicalities of doing biography in this first succinct primer to elucidate the tools of the biographer’s craft.

Hamilton invites the reader to join him on a fascinating journey through the art of biographical composition. Starting with personal motivation, he charts the making of a modern biography from the inside: from conception to fulfillment. He emphasizes the need to know one’s audience, rehearses the excitement and perils of modern research, delves into the secrets of good and great biography, and guides the reader through the essential components of life narrative.

With examples taken from the finest modern biographies, Hamilton shows how to portray the ages of man—birth, childhood, love, life’s work, the evening of life, and death. In addition, he suggests effective ways to start and close a life story. He clarifies the difference between autobiography and memoir—and addresses the sometimes awkward ethical, legal, and personal consequences of truth-telling in modern life writing. He concludes with the publication and reception of biography—its afterlife, so to speak.

Written with humor, insight, and compassion, How To Do Biography is the manual that would-be biographers have long been awaiting.

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Telling Women's Lives
The New Biography
Wagner-Martin, Linda
Rutgers University Press, 1996

Placing herself in the avid reader’s chair, Linda Wagner-Martin writes about women’s biography from George Eliot and Virginia Woolf to Eleanor Roosevelt and Margaret Mead, and even to Cher and Elizabeth Taylor. Along the way, she looks at dozens of other life stories, probing at the differences between biographies of men and women, prevailing stereotypes about women’s lives and roles, questions about what is public and private, and the hazy margins between autobiography, biography, and other genres. In quick paced and wide-ranging discussions, she looks at issues of authorial stance (who controls the narrative? who chooses which story to tell?), voice (is this story told in the traditional objective tone? and if it is, what effect does that telling have on our reading?), and the politics of publishing (why aren’t more books about women’s lives published? and when they are, what happens to their advertising budgets?). She discusses the problems of writing biography of achieving women who were also wives (how does the biographer balance the two?), of daughters who attempt to write about their mothers, and of husbands trying to portray their wives.

Telling Women’s Lives  is the first overview of  the writing and the history of biographies about women. It is a significant contribution to the reassessment of the work of the hundreds of women writers who have made a difference in our conception of what women’s stories--and women’s lives--have been, and are becoming. The book is a must read for anyone who loves reading biographies, particularly biographies of women.

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Autobiographical Writing Across the Disciplines
A Reader
Diane P. Freedman and Olivia Frey, eds.
Duke University Press, 2003
Autobiographical Writing Across the Disciplines reveals the extraordinary breadth of the intellectual movement toward self-inclusive scholarship. Presenting exemplary works of criticism incorporating personal narratives, this volume brings together twenty-seven essays from scholars in literary studies and history, mathematics and medicine, philosophy, music, film, ethnic studies, law, education, anthropology, religion, and biology. Pioneers in the development of the hybrid genre of personal scholarship, the writers whose work is presented here challenge traditional modes of inquiry and ways of knowing. In assembling their work, editors Diane P. Freedman and Olivia Frey have provided a rich source of reasons for and models of autobiographical criticism.

The editors’ introduction presents a condensed history of academic writing, chronicles the origins of autobiographical criticism, and emphasizes the role of feminism in championing the value of personal narrative to disciplinary discourse. The essays are all explicitly informed by the identities of their authors, among whom are a feminist scientist, a Jewish filmmaker living in Germany, a potential carrier of Huntington’s disease, and a doctor pregnant while in medical school. Whether describing how being a professor of ethnic literature necessarily entails being an activist, how music and cooking are related, or how a theology is shaped by cultural identity, the contributors illuminate the relationship between their scholarly pursuits and personal lives and, in the process, expand the boundaries of their disciplines.

Contributors:

Kwame Anthony Appiah
Ruth Behar
Merrill Black
David Bleich
James Cone
Brenda Daly
Laura B. DeLind
Carlos L. Dews
Michael Dorris
Diane P. Freedman
Olivia Frey
Peter Hamlin
Laura Duhan Kaplan
Perri Klass
Muriel Lederman
Deborah Lefkowitz
Eunice Lipton
Robert D. Marcus
Donald Murray
Seymour Papert
Carla T. Peterson
David Richman
Sara Ruddick
Julie Tharp
Bonnie TuSmith
Alex Wexler
Naomi Weisstein
Patricia Williams

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Interpreting the Self
Two Hundred Years of American Autobiography
Diane Bjorklund
University of Chicago Press, 1998
In this ambitious study, Diane Bjorklund explores the historical nature of self-narrative. Examining over 100 American autobiographers published in the last two centuries, she discusses not only well-known autobiographies such as Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie but also many obscure ones such as a traveling book peddler, a minstrel, a hotel proprietress, an itinerant preacher, a West Point cadet, and a hoopskirt wire manufacturer. Bjorklund draws on the colorful stories of these autobiographers to show how their historical epoch shapes their understandings of self.

"A refreshingly welcome approach to this intriguing topic. . . . [Bjorklund's] extensive and systematic approach to her source material is impressive and enriches our understanding of this essential subject."—Virginia Quarterly Review

"Bjorklund studies both famous and obscure writers, and her clear prose style and copious quotations provide insight into the many aspects of the changing American self." —Library Journal

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Writing Desire
Sixty Years of Gay Autobiography
Bertram J. Cohler
University of Wisconsin Press, 2007
     Exploring nearly sixty years of memoir and autobiography, Writing Desire examines the changing identity of gay men writing within a historical context. Distinguished scholar and psychoanalyst Bertram J. Cohler has carefully selected a diverse group of ten men, including historians, activists, journalists, poets, performance artists, and bloggers, whose life writing evokes the evolution of gay life in twentieth-century America. 
     By contrasting the personal experience of these disparate writers, Cohler illustrates the social transformations that these men helped shape. Among Cohler's diverse subjects is Alan Helms, whose journey from Indiana to New York's gay society represents the passage of men who came of age in the 1950s and 1960s, when homosexuality was considered a hidden "disease." The liberating effects of Stonewall's aftermath are chronicled in the life of Arnie Kantrowitz, the prototypical activist for gay rights in the 1970s and the founder the Gay and Lesbian Alliance against Defamation. The artistic works of Tim Miller and Mark Doty evoke loss and shock during of the early stages of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. Cohler rounds out this collective group portrait by looking at the newest generation of writers in the Internet age via the blog of BrYaN, who did the previously unthinkable: he "outed" himself to millions of people. 
     A compelling mix of social history and personal biography, Writing Desire distills the experience of three generations of gay America.
 
 
Finalist, LGBT Studies, Lambda Literary Foundation
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Artful Truths
The Philosophy of Memoir
Helena de Bres
University of Chicago Press, 2021
Offers a philosophical perspective on the nature and value of writing a memoir.
 
Artful Truths offers a concise guide to the fundamental philosophical questions that arise when writing a literary work about your own life. Bringing a philosopher’s perspective to a general audience, Helena de Bres addresses what a memoir is, how the genre relates to fiction, memoirists’ responsibilities to their readers and subjects, and the question of why to write a memoir at all. Along the way, she delves into a wide range of philosophical issues, including the nature of the self, the limits of knowledge, the idea of truth, the obligations of friendship, the relationship between morality and art, and the question of what makes a life meaningful.
 
Written in a clear and conversational style, it offers a resource for those who write, teach, and study memoirs, as well as those who love to read them. With a combination of literary and philosophical knowledge, de Bres takes the many challenges directed at memoirists seriously, while ultimately standing in defense of a genre that, for all its perplexities—and maybe partly because of them—continually proves to be both beloved and valuable. 
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Don't Look Now
Things We Wish We Hadn't Seen
Edited by Kristen Iversen and David Lazar
The Ohio State University Press, 2020
Would that our memories were self-selecting. But often what we remember most, and most vividly, are those moments that caught us unawares: the things we wish we hadn’t seen and have never been able to shake. This group of prominent American writers tries to come to grips with obsessive memory, the uncanny, and the bad dreams that accompany the moments in our lives when we wish we’d looked away, the places we wish we’d never been, and the scenes we wish we’d never stumbled upon.
Featuring essays by Jericho Parms, XU XI, Jerald Walker, José Orduña, Kristen Iversen, Nicole Walker, Mary Cappello, Lina Ferreira, Colleen O’Connor, Sonya Huber, Paul Crenshaw, Alyce Miller, Patrick Madden, Amelia María de la Luz Montes, Yalie Kamara, Emily Heiden, Lee Martin, and David Lazar,
this collection bares all. The authors invite readers into a dream that resurrects a departed mother each night, only to lose her again each morning upon waking; the post-mortem newspaper photos of a former student; kaleidoscope childhood memories of the mundane mixed up together with the traumatic; an unplanned pregnancy; a bullfight and a spouse’s mortality; a teen witnessing the suicide of her father; a parent trying to shield his children from witnessing a violent death. What these writers are after, though, is not the melancholic/grotesque/violent moment itself, but the process of remembering—and trying to forget. They examine the way these memories take hold, resurface, and never leave, and what it means for a life lived long after these moments have passed. These scenes, slowly enfolding us like bad dreams or flying by like trains on elevated platforms, demand we reach some kind of accommodation with them—make peace or make sense or make amends. The one thing they insist with certainty is this
: they cannot—will not—be unseen.
 
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Early Modern Autobiography
Theories, Genres, Practices
Ronald Bedford, Lloyd Davis and Philippa Kelly, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2006
Why, and in what ways, did late medieval and early modern English people write about themselves, and what was their understanding of how "selves" were made and discussed? This collection goes to the heart of current debate about literature and autobiography, addressing the contentious issues of what is meant by early modern autobiographical writing, how it was done, and what was understood by self-representation in a society whose groupings were both elaborate and highly regulated. Early Modern Autobiography considers the many ways in which autobiographical selves emerged from the late medieval period through the seventeenth century, with the aim of understanding the interaction between those individuals’ lives and their worlds, the ways in which they could be recorded, and the contexts in which they are read. In addressing this historical arc, the volume develops new readings of significant autobiographical works, while also suggesting the importance of texts and contexts that have rarely been analyzed in detail, enabling the contributors to reflect on, and challenge, some prevailing ideas about what it means to write autobiographically and about the development of notions of self-representation.

“The idea of the self, as seen from diverse and fascinating perspectives on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century life: this is what readers can expect from Early Modern Autobiography. A beautifully edited collection, genuinely far-reaching and insightful, Early Modern Autobiography makes known to us a great deal about how people saw themselves four hundred years ago."
—Derek Cohen, Professor of English, McLaughlin College, York University

"Acutely addressing a range of central issues from subjectivity to theatricality to religion, these essays will be of great interest to specialists in early modern studies and students of autobiographical writings from all eras."
—Heather Dubrow, Tighe-Evans Professor and John Bascom Professor, Department of English, University of Wisconsin

"The essays in this volume show where archival discoveries—memoirs, letters, account books, wills, and marginalia—can take us in understanding early modern mentalities. They document the interdependence of the abstract and the everyday, the social constructedness of self-awareness, local contexts for self-recordation, and impulses that range from legal purpose to imaginative escape. The sixteen chapters open many fascinating new perspectives on identity and personhood in Renaissance England."—Lena Cowen Orlin, Executive Director, The Shakespeare Association of America and Professor of English, University of Maryland Baltimore County
Ronald Bedford is Reader in the School of English, Communication and Theatre at the Unversity of New England in Armidale, New South Wales, and author of The Defence of Truth: Herbert of Cherbury and the Seventeenth Century and Dialogues with Convention: Readings in Renaissance Poetry. The late Lloyd Davis was Reader in the School of English at the University of Queensland, and author of Guise and Disguise: Rhetoric and Characterization in the English Renaissance (1993) and editor of Sexuality and Gender in the English Renaissance (1998) and Shakespeare Matters: History, Teaching, Performance (2003). Philippa Kelly is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of New South Wales, and has published widely in the areas of Shakespeare studies, cultural studies, feminism, and postcolonial studies.
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The Female Autograph
Theory and Practice of Autobiography from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century
Edited by Domna C. Stanton
University of Chicago Press, 1987
These original essays comprise a fascinating investigation into women's strategies for writing the self—constructing the female subject through autobiography, memoirs, letters, and diaries. The collection contains theoretical essays by Donna Stanton, Sandra Gilbert, and Susan Gilbert, and Susan Gubar; chapters on specific issues raised by women's autographs, such as Richard Bowring's study of tenth-century Japanese diaries or Janel Mueller's on The Book of Margery Kempe; and annotated autobiographical fragments, including texts by Julia Kristeva, by a woman who became a czarist cavalry officer, and by a contemporary Palestinian poet. There are also chapters on the seventeenth-century painter Artemisia Gentileschi; Mme de. Sévigné; Mendelssohn's sister, Fanny Hensel; the black minister Jarena Lee; Virginia Woolf; and Eva Peron. The result is a "conversation" between writers and critics across cultural and temporal boundaries. Stanton's essay plays off Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. Kristeva begins with a reading of de Beauvoir, while a self-published French woman writes to defend the joys of family life against the author of Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter.
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Threads of Life
Autobiography and the Will
Richard Freadman
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Many autobiographers share profound questions about human life with their readers—questions like: To what extent was my life imposed on me? To what extent did I bring it about through particular choices and actions, through the activity of my own will? Indeed, the issue of the will is central to autobiographical writing, and some of the greatest autobiographies give extended consideration to the will—its nature; its powers; its limitations; the forms of freedom, constraint, and expression it finds in various cultures; its role in particular human lives.

In this new study, unprecedented in subject and scope, Richard Freadman offers the first sustained account of how changing theological, philosophical, and psychological accounts of the human will have been reflected in the writing of autobiography, and of how autobiography in its turn has helped shape various understandings of the will. Early chapters trace narrative representations of the will from antiquity (the Greeks and Augustine) to postmodernism (Derrida and Barthes), with particular emphasis on late modernity's culture of the will. Later chapters then present detailed and powerfully original readings of autobiographical texts by Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, B. F. Skinner, Ernest Hemingway, Simone de Beauvoir, Arthur Koestler, Stephen Spender, and Diana Trilling.

Freadman's interdisciplinary approach to autobiography and the will includes a theoretical defense of the view that autobiographers are, in varying degrees, agents in their own texts. Threads of Life argues that late modernity has inherited deeply conflicted attitudes to the will. Freadman suggests that these attitudes, now deeply embedded in contemporary cultural discourse, need reexamining. In this, he contends, 'reflective autobiography' has an important part to play.
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Getting A Life
Everyday Uses of Autobiography
Sidonie Smith
University of Minnesota Press, 1996

front cover of Autobiography and Decolonization
Autobiography and Decolonization
Modernity, Masculinity, and the Nation-State
Philip Holden
University of Wisconsin Press, 2008
Philip Holden reveals deeply gendered connections between the writing of individual lives and of the narratives of nations emerging from colonialism. Autobiography and Decolonization is the first book to give serious academic attention to autobiographies of nationalist leaders in the process of decolonization, attending to them not simply as partial historical documents, but as texts involved in remaking the world views of their readers.
            Holden examines Mohandas K. Gandhi’s An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Marcus Garvey’s fragmentary Autobiography,Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayford’s Ethiopia Unbound, Lee Kuan Yew’s The Singapore Story, Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, Jawaharlal Nehru’s An Autobiography, and Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana:The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah.
            Holden argues that these examples of life writing have had significant influence on the formation of new, and often profoundly gendered, national identities. These narratives constitute the nation less as an imagined community than as an imagined individual. Moving from the past to the promise of the future, they mediate relationships between public and private, and between individual and collective stories. Ultimately, they show how the construction of modern selfhood is inextricably linked to the construction of a postcolonial polity.
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Identity Technologies
Constructing the Self Online
Edited by Anna Poletti and Julie Rak
University of Wisconsin Press, 2013
Identity Technologies is a substantial contribution to the fields of autobiography studies, digital studies, and new media studies, exploring the many new modes of self-expression and self-fashioning that have arisen in conjunction with Web 2.0, social networking, and the increasing saturation of wireless communication devices in everyday life.
            This volume explores the various ways that individuals construct their identities on the Internet and offers historical perspectives on ways that technologies intersect with identity creation. Bringing together scholarship about the construction of the self by new and established authors from the fields of digital media and auto/biography studies, Identity Technologies presents new case studies and fresh theoretical questions emphasizing the methodological challenges inherent in scholarly attempts to account for and analyze the rise of identity technologies. The collection also includes an interview with Lauren Berlant on her use of blogs as research and writing tools.
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The Autobiographical Documentary in America
Jim Lane
University of Wisconsin Press, 2002

Since the late 1960s, American film and video makers of all genres have been fascinated with themes of self and identity. Though the documentary form is most often used to capture the lives of others, Jim Lane turns his lens on those media makers who document their own lives and identities. He looks at the ways in which autobiographical documentaries—including Roger and Me, Sherman’s March, and Silverlake Life—raise weighty questions about American cultural life. What is the role of women in society? What does it mean to die from AIDS? How do race and class play out in our personal lives? What does it mean to be a member of a family? Examining the history, diversity, and theoretical underpinnings of this increasingly popular documentary form, Lane tracks a fundamental transformation of notions of both autobiography and documentary.

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