A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY36 start with R start with R
William Butler Ogden was a pioneer railroad magnate, one of the earliest founders and developers of the city of Chicago, and an important influence on U.S. westward expansion. His career as a businessman stretched from the streets of Chicago to the wilds of the Wisconsin lumber forests, from the iron mines of Pennsylvania to the financial capitals in New York and beyond. Jack Harpster’s The Railroad Tycoon Who Built Chicago: A Biography of William B. Ogden is the first chronicle of one of the most notable figures in nineteenth-century America.
Harpster traces the life of Ogden from his early experiences as a boy and young businessman in upstate New York to his migration to Chicago, where he invested in land, canal construction, and steamboat companies. He became Chicago’s first mayor, built the city’s first railway system, and suffered through the Great Chicago Fire. His diverse business interests included real estate, land development, city planning, urban transportation, manufacturing, beer brewing, mining, and banking, to name a few. Harpster, however, does not simply focus on Ogden’s role as business mogul; he delves into the heart and soul of the man himself.
The Railroad Tycoon Who Built Chicago is a meticulously researched and nuanced biography set against the backdrop of the historical and societal themes of the nineteenth century. It is a sweeping story about one man’s impact on the birth of commerce in America. Ogden’s private life proves to be as varied and interesting as his public persona, and Harpster weaves the two into a colorful tapestry of a life well and usefully lived.
In this modern account of the genesis of a great medieval myth, celebrated science fiction author Robert Silverberg’s explores the mysterious origins of Prester John, the astonishing Christian potentate of the East.
Prester John was a legendary figure who cast a powerful spell over Latin Christendom for almost five centuries. Rumors of the warrior-king-prelate’s fabulous realms first reached Europe in the eleventh century and quickly assumed an exalted status alongside such fabled wonders as El Dorado, The Fountain of Youth, and the Holy Grail.
The defeat of a Moslem Turkish tribe by a Buddhist Chinese warlord seems to have been the unlikely historical nugget around which the Prester John myth grew, but contributions to this strange saga have also been traced all around the globe to the Apostle Thomas' apocryphal preaching in India, to the actual existence of small colonies of Nestorian schismatics in central Asia, and even to Genghis Khan.
The Red Bird All-Indian Traveling Band is part mystery, part community chronicle. Shaped by a cast of skillfully drawn characters, all of whom at one time or another are potential suspects, at the core of the story is smart and compassionate Sissy. Four years past high school, Sissy’s wry humor punctuates descriptions of reservation life as she learns more about Ames’s potential killer, and as she embarks on a personal search for ways to buck expectations and leave rural South Dakota to attend college.
Ames’s death is just an example of the undercurrents of violence and passions that run through this fast-moving novel of singing, loving, and fighting. Following Sissy as she unravels the mystery of both Buffalo Ames’s death and her own future, The Red Bird All-Indian Traveling Band is the story of Indian Country on the verge of historic change and a woman unwilling to let change pass her by.
In 1908 Ellen Wilkinson, a fiery adolescent from a working-class family in Manchester, was “the only girl who talks in school debates.” By midcentury, Wilkinson had helped found Britain’s Communist Party, earned a seat in Parliament, and become a renowned advocate for the poor and dispossessed at home and abroad. She was one of the first female delegates to the United Nations, and she played a central role in Britain’s postwar Labour government. In Laura Beers’s account of Wilkinson’s remarkable life, we have a richly detailed portrait of a time when Left-leaning British men and women from a range of backgrounds sought to reshape domestic, imperial, and international affairs.
Wilkinson is best remembered as the leader of the Jarrow Crusade, the 300-mile march of two hundred unemployed shipwrights and steelworkers to petition the British government for assistance. But this was just one small part of Red Ellen’s larger transnational fight for social justice. She was involved in a range of campaigns, from the quest for official recognition of the Spanish Republican government, to the fight for Indian independence, to the effort to smuggle Jewish refugees out of Germany.
During Wilkinson’s lifetime, many British radicals viewed themselves as members of an international socialist community, and some, like her, became involved in socialist, feminist, and pacifist movements that spanned the globe. By focusing on the extent to which Wilkinson’s activism transcended Britain’s borders, Red Ellen adjusts our perception of the British Left in the early twentieth century.
This compelling and often traumatic book is the memoir of one of the most important figures in modern Russian history, Dmitry S. Likhachev, revered as ‘a guardian of national culture’. Reflections on the Russian Soul is an incredible account of an intellectual’s turbulent journey through twentieth century Russia. Likhachev re-counts the fortunes of people with whom he came into contact and reproduces the air of passed years in Russia.
Likhachev vividly portrays his childhood years in St. Petersburg and continues into his student life at Leningrad University that led to an agonizing period of imprisonment and near death. He describes how a harmless prank caught the attention of the Secret Police, resulting in his exile and confinement within the infamous prison island of Solovki. He describes his first-hand experience of brutality in prison during the early Stalin years and the incident that not only saved him but also haunted him for the rest of his life.
He reflects on the years after his release from prison and the events leading up to the Second World War. His powerful recollection of the blockade of Leningrad provides the reader with a horrific insight into the harsh effects of war, hunger and survival. Lichachev goes on to describe post-war Russia and how his own livelihood developed from literary editor to a return to Leningrad University as Professor of History. This compelling autobiography finishes with Likhachev’s poignant return to Solovki as a free man.
Henry Marten—soldier, member of parliament, organizer of the trial of Charles I, and signatory of the King’s death warrant—is today a neglected figure of the seventeenth century. Yet his life was both extraordinary and emblematic: he was at the fulcrum of English history during the turbulent years of the civil war, the protectorate, and the restoration. Imprisoned in the Tower of London and tried at the Old Bailey, Marten was found guilty of high treason, only to be held captive for years on the equivalent of death row. While he was in prison, his letters to his mistress Mary Ward were stolen and published in an attempt to destroy his reputation. Witty, clever, loving, sardonic, and never despairing, the letters offer a rare and extraordinary insight into the everyday life of a man in the Tower awaiting a sentence of death. The attempt to expose him as immoral revealed him instead as a tender and brave man. In John Worthen’s revelatory biography, Marten emerges from the shadows as a brilliantly clever, lively-minded man, free of the fundamentalist zeal so common in many of his republican contemporaries. Marten never abandoned his beliefs in equality, in a representative parliament under a constitution (which he had helped to write) without a monarch or a House of Lords, and in that way can be seen as a very modern man.
John’s journey to understand the roots of his compulsion to “save” those around him is both aided and thwarted by his relationship with his colleague Jeremy Crawford. Alena’s closest confidant, Jeremy shares an intimacy with her that fuels John's jealousy. Meanwhile, Jeremy finds himself drawn to John and, as his confidant too, participates in the drama of John and Alena’s relationship. As John slowly begins to understand the flawed and wounded experience of love that has followed him through life, he learns how to open himself to true friendship—and to true loss. Set in the midst of cultural upheaval, this powerful novel reverberates across the decades.
Remembering Leningrad captures the story of a beautiful city and lifelong friendships. We follow McAuley as she walks through the streets downtown and examines politics in the 1960s, describes the hazards of furnishing an apartment in the 1990s, and learns about the challenges her friends have faced during these turbulent years. By weaving history and anecdotes to create a picture of Russia’s cultural center, McAuley underscores the impact of time and place on the Russian intelligentsia who lived through the transition from Soviet to post-Soviet life. The result is a remarkable group portrait of a generation.
Liebling recorded the litigation over the fate of the Pyramid Lake Reservation lands in a series of articles published in The New Yorker in 1955. Reprinted here in their entirety, the essays discuss the affair in detail, following it from the shores of the lake to the halls of Congress, and introducing readers to the colorful world of 1950s Nevada. This is a valuable record of one of Nevada’s most enduring and significant debates over the uses of the land and the precious water that nourishes it. Introduction by Elmer R. Rusco.
As Karl Marx the icon has fallen along with so many communist regimes, we are left with the mystery of Karl Marx the man, the complexities of a life that has profoundly affected millions. A Requiem for Karl Marx is Frank Manuel's searching meditation on that life, a learned and elegantly written engagement with the man and his work.
Manuel gives us a psychological portrait rendered with sympathy and critical detachment, a probing look at the connections between the private drama of Marx's life and his revolutionary ideas. Manuel pursues these connections from Marx's adolescence and education in Trier through his university studies, marriage to a German baroness, and early affiliation with French and German radical groups. Here we see Marx in moments of youthful rapture, in periods of despair, in maneuvers of blatant hypocrisy, in outbursts of self-mockery. We follow his involuted response to his status as a converted Jew, observe the psychic toll of debilitating bouts of illness, and witness the shattering effects of his aggressive, often brutal conduct toward friend and foe alike. Manuel analyzes in intricate detail the central role of Marx's enduring relationship with Friedrich Engels, which appears to transcend the bounds of friendship, and his changing behavior toward his wife, Jenny, the neurotic and tragic figure who shared his dismal London exile.
What becomes clear in this narrative is the link between Marx's personal life and his ideas about class struggle, revolutionary strategy, and utopia--as well as the impact of his personal vision and political tactics on the movements that followed him, down to our day.
This is the story of a Holocaust rescuer, Pierre Toureille, a French Protestant pastor whose efforts resulted in the rescue of hundreds of refugees, most of them Jewish. Inspired by his Huguenot heritage, Pastor Toureille participated in international Protestant church efforts to combat Nazism during the 1930s and headed a major refugee aid organization in Vichy France during World War II. After the war, Pastor Toureille was honored by the Jewish organization Yad Vashem as one of the "Righteous Among the Nations."
In telling Toureille’s story, Tela Zasloff also depicts the wide-ranging network of Protestant pastors and lay people in southern French villages who participated in an aggressive rescue effort. She delves into their motivations, including their heritage as members of a religious minority. Toureille’s rescue work under the Vichy regime, partly official and then increasingly clandestine as the war progrressed. was a crucial part of the French non-violent "spiritual resistance" against Nazism.
The clever peasant Arnaud du Tilh had almost persuaded the learned judges at the Parlement of Toulouse when, on a summer’s day in 1560, a man swaggered into the court on a wooden leg, denounced Arnaud, and reestablished his claim to the identity, property, and wife of Martin Guerre. The astonishing case captured the imagination of the continent. Told and retold over the centuries, the story of Martin Guerre became a legend, still remembered in the Pyrenean village where the impostor was executed more than 400 years ago.
Now a noted historian, who served as consultant for a new French film on Martin Guerre, has searched archives and lawbooks to add new dimensions to a tale already abundant in mysteries: we are led to ponder how a common man could become an impostor in the sixteenth century, why Bertrande de Rols, an honorable peasant woman, would accept such a man as her husband, and why lawyers, poets, and men of letters like Montaigne became so fascinated with the episode.
Natalie Zemon Davis reconstructs the lives of ordinary people, in a sparkling way that reveals the hidden attachments and sensibilities of nonliterate sixteenth-century villagers. Here we see men and women trying to fashion their identities within a world of traditional ideas about property and family and of changing ideas about religion. We learn what happens when common people get involved in the workings of the criminal courts in the ancien régime, and how judges struggle to decide who a man was in the days before fingerprints and photographs. We sense the secret affinity between the eloquent men of law and the honey-tongued village impostor, a rare identification across class lines.
Deftly written to please both the general public and specialists, The Return of Martin Guerre will interest those who want to know more about ordinary families and especially women of the past, and about the creation of literary legends. It is also a remarkable psychological narrative about where self-fashioning stops and lying begins.
A deep dive into the myth and history surrounding England’s crusader king.
How did Richard the Lionheart, who once said he would sell London if he found a buyer, become celebrated as the ideal of English chivalry? This book examines the life of Richard I (1157–1199) through the captivating stories told about him, from the Middle Ages to today.
Tales of Richard’s exploits were as colorful as they were varied, ranging from tales of wielding King Arthur’s sword to his descent from the devil (or just a cannibal). Instead of separating fact from fiction, this book explores how tales about Richard I shaped his legacy in his time and ours. Valuable to general readers and scholars alike, and combining medieval and modern literature, this book is the only account to study Richard I from the perspective of history and literature.
"This is truly an epic work, an absolute standard for any Southwestern collection."—Book Talk
Select maps from the 1984 edition of Rim of Christendom are now available online through the UA Campus Repository.
Based on actual events from 1989 in International Falls, Minnesota, Riot tells the story of sixth-grader Bryan, whose family becomes stressed when nonunion labor “rats” are hired by the local paper mill, leaving his father, a union worker, angry and out of a job. Tension erupts into daily fights at school and nightly acts of vandalism with no solution in sight. Already torn between his parents’ opposing viewpoints on how to handle the escalating situation, Bryan’s growing feelings for the daughter of a nonunion worker only complicate matters.
Bryan tries to understand the turmoil affecting his home and his town, but it is becomes harder and harder to separate his friends from his enemies. And when he witnesses a violent act that implicates his father, he must wrestle with family loyalty and telling the truth.
The Rise of Jonas Olsen is at once an immigrant novel, business novel, political novel, and a western, offering a rich and panoramic view of Scandinavian immigrant life in the Upper Midwest. Wist combines realism and satire to depict the role Norwegian Americans played in the economic, political, and cultural life of the Upper Midwest.
Originally published serially in the Norwegian-language newspaper the Decorah Posten in the 1920s, The Rise of Jonas Olsen illustrates an immigrant’s struggle to preserve his identity and heritage while striving to become fully accepted as an American.
Johannes B. Wist (1864–1923) was a journalist and editor of the Decorah Posten from 1900 to 1923.
Orm Øverland is professor of American literature at the University of Bergen, Norway, and the author of The Western Home: A Literary History of Norwegian America and Immigrant Minds, American Identities: Making the United States Home, 1870-1930.
Todd W. Nichol is editor of the Norwegian-American Historical Association publication program.
Published in cooperation with the Norwegian-American Historical Association.
"I've traveled a lot of roads, but never alone. My relations are with me," says Billie McKenney, one of the matriarchs of the complex family of Choctaws searching for peace as the white world rapidly encroaches on their tribal land, politics, and values. In her first collection of stories, Native American writer Devon A. Mihesuah chronicles the lives of several generations of a close-knit Choctaw family as they are forced from their traditional homeland in nineteenth-century Mississippi and endure unspeakable sorrows during their journey before settling in southeastern Oklahoma.
Blending family lore, stark realism, and vivid imagination, The Roads of My Relations relays a strong sense of Choctaw culture and world view in absorbing tales of history and legend. Unfolding through the voices and actions of family members, confused half-bloods, and unlikely heroes—not all of them living or even human—the stories tell of the horrors of forced removal, the turbulence of post Civil War Indian Territory, the terrifying violence suffered at the hands of immortal Crow witches, and the family's ultimate survival against forces of evil. Time-traveling ghosts, mysterious medicine men, and eerie shape-shifters share the pages with proud matriarchs, mischievous schoolgirls, and loving siblings.
Together, these interwoven stories express the strength and persistence of a tribe whose identity and pride have survived the disruptions of colonialism. With The Roads of My Relations, Devon A. Mihesuah has created a universal and timeless exploration of heritage, spirituality, and the importance of preserving and passing on tradition.
Tracing Weaver’s career through the creation, expansion, and contraction of New Deal liberalism, Wendell E. Pritchett illuminates his instrumental role in the birth of almost every urban initiative of the period, from public housing and urban renewal to affirmative action and rent control. Beyond these policy achievements, Weaver also founded racial liberalism, a new approach to race relations that propelled him through a series of high-level positions in public and private agencies working to promote racial cooperation in American cities. But Pritchett shows that despite Weaver’s efforts to make race irrelevant, white and black Americans continued to call on him to mediate between the races—a position that grew increasingly untenable as Weaver remained caught between the white power structure to which he pledged his allegiance and the African Americans whose lives he devoted his career to improving.
The centerpiece of the book is the remarkable political partnership that formed between Robert and John. As the manager of John's political campaigns Robert proved himself "hard as nails" (in his father's admiring words), relentless in securing his brother's victory and unforgiving in overseeing his brother's presidency. Hilty marshals a great deal of evidence to show that while they did not always see eye to eye -- Lyndon Johnson's selection as John's running mate being a notable disagreement -- Robert and John discussed virtually every issue, gauging the likely political effects of every position. Robert was so close to the President that insiders called him "number one and a-half"; their consultations were so intimate that they spoke in a kind of code, barely intelligible to those around them. In Hilty's evocative but unsentimental recounting of the political crises of the Kennedy Administration, Robert and John prove to have been more calculating and astute leaders than today's pundits allow. Theirs was a partnership that was unprecedented and, thanks to an act signed into law by Lyndon Johnson, is never to be equaled.
The Kennedy family's story seems to have been lived in the public eye and Americans apparently never tire of the photographs and familiar anecdotes. Most of the written accounts, however, either highlight the multiple tragedies and scandals, preserve the latter-day Camelot myth, or follow the elusive traces of some conspiracy.
In contrast, Hilty's concern is for historical perspective -- for accuracy, plausibility, and thoroughness. With facts and reasoned conclusions, he challenges the stories about the Kennedys in relation to Marilyn Monroe, J. Edgar Hoover, and Martin Luther King, Jr. that have passed into American folklore. He develops a portrait of Robert Kennedy as a complex public figure, a man of centrist political allegiances and firm moral convictions who easily adapted to the crusader's role in working for Joseph McCarthy or pursuing James Hoffa for racketeering. Hilty's great care in sifting through the evidence and weighing competing theories gives us a sense of Kennedy as a public servant whose dedication to social justice intensified after he was in office and further deepened after his brother's assassination.
Even as he took charge of family matters and supported Jacqueline during the long ordeal of the state funeral, Robert's own crushing pain was evident to the world. It was then that "Bobby" ceased being a disparaging term and became a mark of respect and affection.
The main issues arising from the encounter between Roma people and surrounding European society since the time of their arrival in Medieval Europe until today are discussed in this work. The history of their persecution and genocide during the Nazi era, in particular, is central to the present volume. Significantly, some authors sought to emphasize the continuing history of prejudice and persecution, which reached a peak during the Nazi era and persisted after the war. Current questions of social integration in Europe, as well as that of ethnic definition and the construction of ethnic-national identity constitute another principal pillar of the book. The complexity of issues involved, such as collective memory, myth-making and social constructionism, trigger intense debate among researchers dealing with Romani studies.
Beginning its narrative in 1961, when Albanian King Zog I died in a Paris hospital after 22 years in exile, this book tells the colourful story of this Balkan country's first and only monarch. The road to becoming Europe's youngest president in 1925 and then king of Albania in 1928 was paved with feuds and assassinations, a political career-path common in the region. He craved the throne for several reasons; the Balkans were mostly run by kings, and Zog wanted to impress his mother and also give his six sisters an easy social rise.
Once king, his accomplishments were decidedly meagre. He spent most of his time keeping up appearances as a monarch despite the obvious fraud he had imposed on an illiterate and uninterested population. His one great success was that he had almost all his opponents assassinated, usually in broad daylight abroad.
Zog retained his power until his "friend" Mussolini ousted him in 1939. On the surface a Westernizer, this self-proclaimed ruler left Albania almost as he found it, with almost no roads or trains, thoroughly uneducated and utterly impoverished.
In his book, Robert Austin combines Zog’s adventurous life story with a studious analysis of Albania's political history from the fall of the Ottoman Empire to the threshold of Euro-Atlantic integration.
Rudolf II offers a fresh perspective on the Habsburg ruler, shedding new light on a reign often colored by myths of madness. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann argues that, contrary to popular belief, Rudolf was not a passive recluse but an engaged monarch, navigating the complexities of state affairs with a moderate hand amid turbulent times. By contextualizing Rudolf’s interests in astrology, alchemy, and magic, this book offers new insights into the emperor’s support for scientific endeavors and his quest for power. Kaufmann also demonstrates that Rudolf’s assembling of the greatest Kunstkammer and painting collection of his time and his patronage of artists were essential elements of Renaissance rulership.
Every May, for more than a decade, an ever-increasing number of motorcyclists have made the “Run for the Wall,” a cross-country journey from Southern California to the “Wall,” the Vietnam war memorial in Washington, D.C. While the journey’s avowed purpose is political — to increase public awareness about those who remain either prisoners of war or missing in action in Southeast Asia — it also serves as a healing pilgrimage for its participants and as a “welcome-home” ritual many veterans feel they never received.
Run for the Wall is a highly readable ethnographic account of this remarkable American ritual. The authors, themselves motorcyclists as well as Run participants, demonstrate that the event is a form of secular pilgrimage. Here key concepts in American culture— “freedom,” and “brotherhood,” for example—are constructed and deployed in a variety of rituals and symbols to enable participants to come to terms with the consequences of the Vietnam war. While the focus is the journey itself, the book also explores other themes related to American culture and history, including the nature of community, the Vietnam war, and the creation of American secular ritual.
In moving, first-hand accounts, the book tells how participation in the POW-MIA social movement helps individuals find personal and collective meaning in America’s longest and most divisive conflict. Above all, this is a story of a uniquely American form of political action, ritual, pilgrimage, and the social construction of memory.
Using their shared Jewish heritage as a starting point, Jergovic constructs a fictional family history populated by historical figures with the precocious Ruta at the center. Stephen Dickey’s translation masterfully captures Jergovic´’s colloquial yet deeply observed style, which animates the tangled and troubled history of persecution and war in Croatia.
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