A fresh English translation of five Alberti works that illuminate new aspects of the literary aims and development of the first “Renaissance man.”

Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) was one of the most famous figures of the Italian Renaissance. His extraordinary range of abilities as a writer, architect, art theorist, and even athlete earned him the controversial title of the first “Renaissance man.”

The works collected in Biographical and Autobiographical Writings reflect Alberti’s lived experiences and his interests in the genre. This volume includes On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Literature, which partly reflects his experiences as a student in Bologna; The Life of St. Potitus, the biography of a Christian martyr, which also contains autobiographical projections and was to have been the first in a series of lives of saints; My Dog, a mock funeral oration for his dead dog; My Life, one of the first autobiographies of the early modern period and the main source for Jacob Burckhardt’s portrait of Alberti; and a comic encomium, The Fly. In particular, the last three works—My Dog, My Life, and The Fly—constitute a kind of trilogy, as the humanist finds one of his main themes, the portrait of the ideal life, with a strong emphasis on humor.

This edition presents the first collected English translations of these works alongside an authoritative Latin text.

What happened to the Indians of the Old Northwest Territory? Conflicting portraits emerge and answers often depend on who’s telling the story, with each participant bending and stretching the truth to fit their own view of themselves and the world. This volume presents biographical sketches and first-person narratives of Native Americans, Indian traders, Colonial and American leaders, and events that shaped the Indians’ struggle to maintain possession of their tribal lands in the face of the widespread advancement of white settlement. It covers events and people in the Old Northwest Territory from before the American Revolution through the removal of the Miami from Indiana in 1846. As America’s Indian policy was formed, and often enforced by the U.S. military, and white settlers pushed farther west, some Indians fought the white intruders, while others adopted their ways. In the end, most Indians were unable to hold their ground, and the evidence of their presence now lingers only in found relics and strange-sounding place names.