front cover of Autobiography, Volume 1
Autobiography, Volume 1
1907-1937, Journey East, Journey West
Mircea Eliade
University of Chicago Press, 1990
"Here finally are Eliade's memoirs of the first thirty years of his life in Mac Linscott Rickett's crisp and lucid English translation. They present a fascinating account of the early development of a Renaissance talent, expressed in everything from daily and periodical journalism, realistic and fantastic fiction, and general nonfiction works to distinguished contributions to the history of religions. Autobiography follows an apparently amazingly candid report of this remarkable man's progression from a mischievous street urchin and literary prodigy, through his various love affairs, a decisive and traumatic Indian sojourn, and active, brilliant participation in pre-World War II Romanian cultural life."—Seymour Cain, Religious Studies Review
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Cotton Patch Schoolhouse
Susie Powers Tompkins
University of Alabama Press, 1992

Cotton-Patch Schoolhouse is a memoir of the author’s year as a young and inexperienced teacher in rural Marengo County, several miles from Linden, Alabama, in 1926. Seeking to earn money to continue college after her freshman year at Alabama College in Montevallo, the author welcomed the opportunity to teach eight children at five different grade levels in a one-room schoolhouse in the middle of a cotton field. Youthful enthusiasm, native wit, and a sense of adventure helped her transform the simple schoolhouse into a place of learning and excitement.

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Desegregating Texas Schools
Eisenhower, Shivers, and the Crisis at Mansfield High
By Robyn Duff Ladino
University of Texas Press, 1996

In the famous Brown v. the Board of Education decisions of 1954 and 1955, the United States Supreme Court ruled that "separate but equal" schools for black and white students were unconstitutional. Yet history records that it took more than a decade of legal battles, civil rights protests, and, tragically, violent confrontations before black students gained full access to previously white schools.

Mansfield, Texas, a small community southeast of Fort Worth, was the scene of an early school integration attempt. In this book, Robyn Duff Ladino draws on interviews with surviving participants, media reports, and archival research to provide the first full account of the Mansfield school integration crisis of 1956.

Ladino explores how power politics at the local, state, and federal levels ultimately prevented the integration of Mansfield High School in 1956. Her research sheds new light on the actions of Governor Allan Shivers—who, in the eyes of the segregationists, actually validated their cause by his political actions—and it underscores President Dwight Eisenhower's public passivity toward civil rights during his first term of office.

Despite the short-term failure, however, the Mansfield school integration crisis helped pave the way for the successful integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. Thus, it deserves a permanent place in the history of the civil rights movement, which this book amply provides.

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Luis Leal
An Auto/Biography
By Mario T. García
University of Texas Press, 2000

Professor Luis Leal is one of the most outstanding scholars of Mexican, Latin American, and Chicano literatures and the dean of Mexican American intellectuals in the United States. He was one of the first senior scholars to recognize the viability and importance of Chicano literature, and, through his perceptive literary criticism, helped to legitimize it as a worthy field of study. His contributions to humanistic learning have brought him many honors, including Mexico's Aquila Azteca and the United States' National Humanities Medal.

In this testimonio or oral history, Luis Leal reflects upon his early life in Mexico, his intellectual formation at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago, and his work and publications as a scholar at the Universities of Illinois and California, Santa Barbara. Through insightful questions, Mario García draws out the connections between literature and history that have been a primary focus of Leal's work. He also elicits Leal's assessment of many of the prominent writers he has known and studied, including Mariano Azuela, William Faulkner, Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, Juan Rulfo, Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Tomás Rivera, Rolando Hinojosa, Rudolfo Anaya, Elena Poniatowska, Sandra Cisneros, Richard Rodríguez, and Ana Castillo.

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Memoirs of an Indo Woman
Twentieth Century Life in the East Indies and Abroad
Marguérite Schenkhuizen
Ohio University Press, 1993

The memoirs of Marguérite Schenkhuizen provide an overview of practically the whole of the twentieth century as experienced by persons of mixed Dutch and Indonesian ancestry who lived in the former Dutch East Indies. The memoirs provide vignettes of Indonesian life, both rural and urban, as seen through the eyes of the author first as a girl, then as a wife separated from her husband during the Japanese occupation, finally as an immigrant to the United States after World War II.

This self-portrait gives glimpses of the life of Indos from inside their society, glimpses that are valuable for their descendents as well as for outsiders. Written with humor and a positive town, Schenkhuizen’s story sets aside the myth that Indos were denied access to the upper layers of Dutch colonial society or were otherwise disadvantaged. Instead, her life story provides an authentic view of a vital Indo culture and experience that has been unavailable to the general reader of English.

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Mice in the Freezer, Owls on the Porch
The Lives of Naturalists Frederick and Francis Hamerstrom
Helen M. Corneli
University of Wisconsin Press, 2006

    Mice in the Freezer, Owls on the Porch is in many ways a love story—about a quiet scientist and his flamboyant wife, but also about their passions for hunting, for wild lands, and for the grouse and raptor species that they were instrumental in saving from destruction.
    From the papers and letters of Frederick and Frances Hamerstrom, the reminiscences of contemporaries, and her own long friendship with this extraordinary couple who were her neighbors, Helen Corneli draws an intimate picture of Fran and "Hammy" from childhood through the genesis and maturation of a romantic, creative, and scientific relationship. Following the Hamerstroms as they give up a life of sophisticated convention and comfort for the more "civilized" (as Aldo Leopold would have it) pleasures of living and conducting on-the-spot research into diminishing species, Corneli captures the spirit of the Hamerstroms, their profession, and the natural and human environments in which they worked. A nuanced account of the labors, adventures, and achievements that distinguished the Hamerstroms over the years—and that inspired a generation of naturalists—this book also provides a dramatic account of conservation history over the course of the twentieth century, particularly in Wisconsin during the eventful years from the 1920s through the 1970s.

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Patterns of Behavior
Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and the Founding of Ethology
Richard W. Burkhardt, Jr.
University of Chicago Press, 2005
It is hard to imagine, by their very name, the life sciences not involving the study of living things, but until the twentieth century much of what was known in the field was based primarily on specimens that had long before taken their last breaths. Only in the last century has ethology—the study of animal behavior—emerged as a major field of the life sciences.

In Patterns of Behavior, Richard W. Burkhardt Jr. traces the scientific theories, practices, subjects, and settings integral to the construction of a discipline pivotal to our understanding of the diversity of life. Central to this tale are Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, 1973 Nobel laureates whose research helped legitimize the field of ethology and bring international attention to the culture of behavioral research. Demonstrating how matters of practice, politics, and place all shaped "ethology's ecologies," Burkhardt's book offers a sensitive reading of the complex interplay of the field's celebrated pioneers and a richly textured reconstruction of ethology's transformation from a quiet backwater of natural history to the forefront of the biological sciences.
 
Winner of the 2006 Pfizer Awad from the History of Science Society
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The Poet and the Sailor
The Story of My Friendship with Carl Sandburg
Kenneth Dodson. Edited by Richard Dodson. Foreword by Penelope Niven
University of Illinois Press, 2006
Two friends, a lifetime of letters, and an intimate look at a literary icon

Carl Sandburg first encountered Kenneth Dodson through a letter written at sea during World War II. Though Dodson wrote the letter to his wife, Letha, Sandburg read it in tears and told her, "I've got to meet this man." Composed primarily of their correspondence that continued until Sandburg's death in 1967, The Poet and the Sailor is a chronicle of the deep friendship that followed. Ranging over anything they found important, from writing to health and humor, the letters are arranged by Richard Dodson and are accompanied by a foreword from Sandburg's noted biographer, Penelope Niven.

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The Red Earth
A Vietnamese Memoir of Life on a Colonial Rubber Plantation
Binh Tu Tran
Ohio University Press, 1985

Phu Rieng was one of many French rubber plantations in colonial Vietnam; Tran Tu Binh was one of 17,606 laborers brought to work there in 1927, and his memoir is a straightforward, emotionally searing account of how one Vietnamese youth became involved in revolutionary politics. The connection between this early experience and later activities of the author becomes clear as we learn that Tran Tu Binh survived imprisonment on Con Son island to help engineer the general uprising in Hanoi in 1945.

The Red Earth is the first of dozens of such works by veterans of the 1924–45 struggle in Vietnam to be published in English translation. It is important reading for all those interested in the many-faceted history of modern Vietnam and of communism in the non-Western world.

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Representation Rights and the Burger Years
Nancy Maveety
University of Michigan Press, 1991
In Representation Rights and the Burger Years, political scientist Nancy Maveety tackles the constitutional meaning of "fair and effective" representation rights and evaluates the specific contributions that the Supreme Court made to this definition during the Burger era.
 
The Court of Chief Justice Warren Burger has been described as one that made no distinctive jurisprudential contributions.  It has been dismissed as a court overshadowed by both its predecessor and its successor.  By contrast, Maveety argues that the Burger Court in fact revolutionized constitutional understandings of political representation, expanding, in particular, the judicial scrutiny of political institutions.  Moving beyond the "one person, one vote" reapportionment initiated by the Warren Court, it opened the way for the articulation of group-based constitutional representation rights.
 
This group-based approach to representation questions broadened groups' constitutional claims to equal political influence.  Yet, as Maveety perceptively shows, this broader interpretation of "representable interests" was grounded in mainstream American conceptions of political representation.  The great value of Maveety's study is the presentation of a "typology of group representation," which explains and validates the Burger Court's work on representation rights.  This typology, drawn from American history, political theory, and political practice, offers a new approach for evaluating the precedental record of the Burger years and a sophisticated framework for understanding the interaction between constitutional law and politics.
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Robert Clifton Weaver and the American City
The Life and Times of an Urban Reformer
Wendell E. Pritchett
University of Chicago Press, 2008
From his role as Franklin Roosevelt’s “negro advisor” to his appointment under Lyndon Johnson as the first secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Robert Clifton Weaver was one of the most influential domestic policy makers and civil rights advocates of the twentieth century. This volume, the first biography of the first African American to hold a cabinet position in the federal government, rescues from obscurity the story of a man whose legacy continues to affect American race relations and the cities in which they largely play out.

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. 

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Travels and Archaeology in South Chile
Bird, Junius B.
University of Iowa Press, 1988
"This is a remarkable book by one of the true geniuses in the field of anthropology during this century and one who provided valuable data for specialists in other disciplines as well."--H. M. Wormington "An engaging manuscript that should charm a broad audience."--Thomas F. Lynch "The field notes of Junius, and Peggy's diary, are valuable records of the excavations, artifacts, and interpretations of the best archaeologists to work in the southern tip of South America."--James G. Griffin Junius Bird's three great archaeological field achievements--at the Strait of Magellan in Chilean Patagonia, in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, and at the sites of early coastal dwellers in northern Peru--made his reputation as a New World prehistorian. His work in south Chile is especially important, since it established the great antiquity of human populations in South America. Until now, most of Bird's Chilean data remained unpublished, but this rich collection of field notebooks from his 1936 and 1937 excavations makes this primary information available for the first time. Included in this volume are new data from Bird's excavations at Palli Aike, Fell's Cave, and Cañadon Leona as well as Cerro Sota and Mylodon caves. Excerpts from his published articles plus contributions by Juliet Clutton-Brock and Vera Markgraf reinforce the book with major new information about these truly pioneering investigations. Complementing the technical data are excerpts from the field journal kept by Margaret (Peggy) Bird. Witty, charming, and personable, her writings convey the more human aspects of Bird's research while interpreting his theoretical ideas. Finally, the many photographs taken by the Birds add a striking visual dimension to this volume. The Birds' fieldwork took place under conditions, and with a spirit, vastly different from those of most researchers today. The texts and teamwork revealed in Travels and Archaeology in South Chilewill appeal to everyone concerned with the heavily debated question of earliest peopling in the Americas, with South American anthropology and archaeology, and with the days when archaeology truly meant exploration. TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Background and Departure Overview South Chile and the Canoe Indians Daily Life Sailing the Channels 2. Chronological Synthesis and Dating The Periods The Radiocarbon Dates 3. Canadon Leona General Description Excavation Information The Artifacts Faunal Remains Possible Age of Deposit Burials Summary Daily Life 4. Palli Aike General Description Excavation in Two Phases Excavation Information The Artifacts Possible Age of Deposit Faunal Remains Human Remains Daily Life 5. Fell's Cave General Description Excavation Information, 1936-1937 The Artifacts Faunal Remains Daily Life Excavations by John Fell and the French Mission Excavations, 1969-1970 The Carnivore Remains Excavated at Fell's Cave in 1970. By Juliet Clutton-Brock Fell's Cave: 11,000 Years of Changes in Paleoenvironments, Fauna, and Human Occupation. By Vera Markgraf 6. Cerro Sota Cave General Description Excavation Information The Artifacts Faunal Remains A Group Burial Probable Dating of the Deposit Daily Life 7. Mylodon Cave Background Structure of the Floor Deposit Results and Conclusions Human Remains Sloth Skin Broken or "Cut" Bone Domestication of the Sloth Summary of Evidence Age of Remains Two Additional Specimens
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