Since his death in 1837, Alexander Pushkin—often called the “father of Russian literature”—has become a timeless embodiment of Russian national identity, adopted for diverse ideological purposes and reinvented anew as a cultural icon in each historical era (tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet). His elevation to mythic status, however, has led to the celebration of some of his writings and the shunning of others. Throughout the history of Pushkin studies, certain topics, texts, and interpretations have remained officially off-limits in Russia—taboos as prevalent in today’s Russia as ever before.
    The essays in this bold and authoritative volume use new approaches, overlooked archival materials, and fresh interpretations to investigate aspects of Pushkin’s biography and artistic legacy that have previously been suppressed or neglected. Taken together, the contributors strive to create a more fully realized Pushkin and demonstrate how potent a challenge the unofficial, taboo, alternative Pushkin has proven to be across the centuries for the Russian literary and political establishments.

Prime minister of Sweden and leader of the Social Democratic party from 1946-1969, Tage Erlander enjoyed a career that was remarkable both for its major accomplishments and longevity. Under his leadership, Sweden became an exemplary welfare state following World War II. Universal pensions, child support, health insurance, extended paid vacations, subsidized housing, and many other benefits made Sweden's standard of living the envy of the world.

This definitive political biography is both the study of an individual style of leadership and the role of the prime minister in a parliamentary state. It shows Erlander as a complex and engaging intellectual fiercely loyal to his party, agitative yet dedicated to cooperation between parties.

Olof Ruin analyzes Erlander's various roles as Riksdag caucus leader, cabinet organizer, party leader, promoter of domestic consensus, and foreign policy maker. Ruin is the first scholar to be given unrestricted access to Erlander's diaries.
 

Tahoe Heritage is a lively chronicle of four generations of the pioneering Bliss family, beginning with Duane L. Bliss, a visionary who built an impressive lumbering business and later the renowned Glenbrook Inn. The inn was completed in 1907 and quickly became a destination for the elite of San Francisco. The hotel register contains the names of national figures who loved and frequented Glenbrook: Ulysses Grant, Joaquin Miller, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Clark Gable, and Rita Hayworth, to name a few. The Bliss family closed the inn in 1976. Anyone who has visited the Tahoe area, now a very different place from the idyllic days of Bliss family management, will enjoy this account of its growth and the remarkable family which brought it about.

Crafted from George Hoshida’s diary and memoir, as well as letters faithfully exchanged with his wife Tamae, Taken from the Paradise Isle is an intimate account of the anger, resignation, philosophy, optimism, and love with which the Hoshida family endured their separation and incarceration during World War II.

George and Tamae Hoshida and their children were a Japanese American family who lived in Hawai‘i. In 1942, George was arrested as a “potentially dangerous alien” and interned in a series of camps over the next two years. Meanwhile, forced to leave her handicapped eldest daughter behind in a nursing home in Hawai‘i, Tamae and three daughters, including a newborn, were incarcerated at the Jerome Relocation Center in Arkansas. George and Tamae regularly exchanged letters during this time, and George maintained a diary including personal thoughts, watercolors, and sketches. In Taken from the Paradise Isle these sources are bolstered by extensive archival documents and editor Heidi Kim’s historical contextualization, providing a new and important perspective on the tragedy of the incarceration as it affected Japanese American families in Hawai‘i.

This personal narrative of the Japanese American experience adds to the growing testimony of memoirs and oral histories that illuminate the emotional, psychological, physical, and economic toll suffered by Nikkei as the result of the violation of their civil rights during World War II. 

In Taking Root, Latin American women of Jewish descent, from Mexico to Uruguay, recall their coming of age with Sabbath candles and Hebrew prayers, Ladino songs and merengue music, Queen Esther and the Virgin of Guadalupe. Rich and poor, Sephardi and Ashkenazi, Jewish immigrant families searched for a new home and identity in predominantly Catholic societies. The essays included here examine the religious, economic, social, and political choices these families have made and continue to make as they forge Jewish identities in the New World.

Marjorie Agosín has gathered narratives and testimonies that reveal the immense diversity of Latin American Jewish experience. These essays, based on first- and second-generation immigrant experience, describe differing points of view and levels of involvement in Jewish tradition. In Taking Root, Agosín presents us with a contemporary and vivid account of the Jewish experience in Latin America.

Taking Root documents the sadness of exile and loss but also a fierce determination to maintain Jewish traditions. This is Jewish history but it is also part of the untold history of Brazil, Argentina, El Salvador, Ecuador, Chile, Peru, and all of Latin America.

"Reefer Charlie" Fox rode the rails from 1928 to 1939; from 1939 to 1965 he hitched rides in automobiles and traveled by foot. From Indiana to British Columbia, from Arkansas to Texas, from Utah to Mexico, he was part of the grand hobo tradition that has all but passed away from American life.

He camped in hobo jungles, slept under bridges and in sand houses at railroad yards, ate rattlesnake meat, fresh California grapes, and fish speared by the Indians of the Northwest. He quickly learned both the beauty and the dangers of his chosen way of life. One lesson learned early on was that there are distinct differences among hoboes, tramps, and bums. As the all-time king of hoboes, Jeff Davis, used to say, "Hoboes will work, tramps won't, and bums can't."

Tales of an American Hobo is a lasting legacy to conventional society, teaching about a bygone era of American history and a rare breed of humanity who chose to live by the rails and on the road.

Leroy Daniels was born in 1882 near Adair, Iowa. When he was ten, his father gave him a pony and a checkbook and sent him out to buy cattle. By the time he was sixteen, he was alone on a ranch in Montana with a herd of seventy wild horses to break. At twenty-one, he was trading horses in the Chicago stockyards, where he told Henry Ford that a horse was better than a car any day. At one hundred, he retired to tell his memoirs.

The years in between are well worth reading about. Lee Daniels followed a plow all day long, worked coal to make ends meet, raised and traded and sold all manner of four-legged stock. But horses were always part of his life. Daniels traded them in Chicago for decades, sold them to Italy, England, France, and Belgium during World War I, inspected them for the army once the U.S. joined the Allies, bought them for eighty dollars in the morning and sold them for thousands by noon. He handled show horses, work horses, and trick horses, traveled the country over to fill his show barn with the best of them, befriended, understood, and loved them.

These pages tell the tale of a unique and vigorous American whose every word reveals his love of this land and its animals. If you weren't lucky enough to live like Lee Daniels, reading about his life is the next best thing.

 (Tarpleywick description) “When Tarpley Early Taylor came of age on August 2, 1858, his father gave him a horse, a saddle, and a bridle and wished him well…His first independent move was to go on horseback to Louisiana, Missouri, to visit his maternal grandparents, the Zumwalts. He stayed with them for some time, probably through the winter…We do not know what he did from the spring of 1859 to the spring of 1860 except that he had been earning money and saving it. We do know that he had returned to Van Buren County by Juy 24, 1860, because on that date he paid $800 for sixty acres of land a mile south of his father’s house…This was the beginning of Tarpleywick.” Born in Iowa in 1873, he was 96 years old when he died in May 1969. Taylor received his undergraduate training from Drake University and Iowa State University, his M.S. degree from Iowa State, and his Ph.D. degree from the University of Wisconsin. He was the first professor of agricultural economics in a land grant institution, the author of the first American textbook dealing with the principles of agricultural economics, the organizer and first Chief of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics in the USDA, and the first Managing Director of the Farm Foundation.

 Octavius Valentine Catto was an orator who shared stages with Frederick Douglass, a second baseman on Philadelphia’s best black baseball team, a teacher at the city’s finest black school and an activist who fought in the state capital and on the streets for equal rights. With his racially-charged murder, the nation lost a civil rights pioneer—one who risked his life a century before Selma and Birmingham. 

In Tasting Freedom Murray Dubin and Pulitzer Prize winner Dan Biddle painstakingly chronicle the life of this charismatic black leader—a “free” black whose freedom was in name only. Born in the American south, where slavery permeated everyday life, he moved north where he joined the fight to be truly free—free to vote, go to school, ride on streetcars, play baseball and even participate in July 4th celebrations.   

Catto electrified a biracial audience in 1864 when he proclaimed, “There must come a change,” calling on free men and women to act and educate the newly freed slaves. With a group of other African Americans who called themselves a “band of brothers,” they challenged one injustice after another. Tasting Freedom presents the little-known stories of Catto and the men and women who struggled to change America.

Grand Duchess Tatiana Nikolaevna of Russia was the second of the four daughters of Tsar Nicholas II and his wife, the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna. Long recognized by historians as the undisputed “beauty” of the family, Tatiana was acknowledged for her poise, her elegance, and her innate dignity within her own family. Helen Azar, translator of the diaries of Olga Romanov, and Nicholas B. A. Nicholson, Russian Imperial historian, have joined together to present a truly comprehensive picture of this extraordinarily gifted, complex, and intelligent woman in her own words. Tatiana Romanov, Daughter of the Last Tsar: Diaries and Letters, 1913–1918, presents translations of material never before published in Russian or in English, as well as materials never published in their entirety in the West.

Theodore Roosevelt was a man of wide interests, strong opinions, and intense ambition for both himself and his country. When he met Leonard Wood in 1897, he recognized a kindred spirit. Moreover, the two men shared a zeal for making the United States an imperial power that would challenge Great Britain as world leader. For the remainder of their lives, their careers would intertwine in ways that shaped the American nation.

When the Spanish American War came, both men seized the opportunity to promote the goals of American empire. Roosevelt resigned as assistant secretary of the navy in William McKinley’s administration to serve as a lieutenant colonel of the Rough Riders, a newly organized volunteer cavalry. Wood, then a captain in the medical corps and physician to McKinley, was promoted to colonel and given charge of the unit.

Roosevelt later took over command of the Rough Riders. In the Battle of San Juan Hill, he led it in a charge up Kettle Hill that would end in victory for the American troops and make their daring commander a household name, a war hero, and, eventually, president of the United States.

At the Treaty of Paris in 1898, Spain ceded Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines to the United States. The next year, Wood became military governor of Cuba. He remained in the post until 1902. By that time Roosevelt was president. One of the major accomplishments of his administration was reorganization of the War Department, which the war with Spain had proved disastrously outdated. In 1909, when William Howard Taft needed a strong army chief of staff to enforce the new rules, he appointed Leonard Wood.

Both Wood and Roosevelt were strong proponents of preparedness, and when war broke out in Europe in August 1914, Wood, retired as chief of staff and backed by Roosevelt, established the “Plattsburg camps,” a system of basic training camps. When America entered the Great War, the two men’s foresight was justified, but their earlier push for mobilization had angered Woodrow Wilson, and both were denied the command positions they sought in Europe.

Roosevelt died in 1919 while preparing for another presidential campaign. Wood made a run in his place but was never taken seriously as a candidate. He retired from the army and spent the last seven years of his life as civilian governor of the Philippines.

It was a quiet end for two men who had been giants of their time. While their modernization of the army is widely admired, they were not without their critics. Roosevelt and Wood saw themselves as bold leaders but were regarded by some as ruthless strivers. And while their shared ambitions for the United States were tempered by a strong sense of duty, they could, in their certainty and determination, trample those who stood in their path. Teddy Roosevelt and Leonard Wood: Partners in Command is a revealing and long overdue look at the dynamic partnership of this fascinating pair and will be welcomed by scholars and military history enthusiasts alike.

"Virginia Sutter uses an interesting technique to write the history of her people, the Northern Arapaho Indian Nation. She constructs her work as a series of conversations between herself and her paternal great-grandmother. . . . [T]hrough this device, the history of the Arapaho people is traced from the early nineteenth-century years, when the buffalo ran aplenty and the prairies were boundless, through present-day living conditions in American Indian tribal reservations."
- Moira Richards, www.WomenWriters.net

"Emblematic of the struggle of so many Native Americans of the twentieth century, who seek to reconcile modernity with tradition, and who struggle to recast, reframe, and restore what is Native, even as the majority culture has done its best to uproot, separate, and tell Natives that they can be either modern or Native, but certainly not both."
- Brian Hosmer, Studies in American Indian Literatures (SAIL)

Tell Me, Grandmother is at once the biography of Goes-in-Lodge, a traditional Arapaho woman of the nineteenth century, and the autobiography of her descendant, Virginia Sutter, a modern Arapaho woman with a Ph.D. in public administration. Sutter adeptly weaves her own story with that of Goes-in-Lodge - who, in addition to being Sutter's great-grandmother, was first wife of Sharpnose, the last chief of the Northern Arapaho nation.

Writing in a question-and-answer format between twentieth-century granddaughter and matriarchal ancestor, Sutter discusses four generations of home life, including details about child rearing, education, courtship, marriage, birthing, and burial. Sutter's portrait of Goes-in-Lodge is based on tribal history and interviews with tribal members. Goes-in-Lodge speaks of social and ceremonial gatherings, the Sun Dance, the sweat lodges, and the changes that took place on the Great Plains throughout her lifetime. Sutter details her own life as a child born in a teepee to a white mother and Indian father and the discrimination and injustice she faced struggling to make her way in an increasingly Euro-American world.

He found friends among some of Colorado's more colorful characters, people who taught him much about life on the frontier. Jake Chisolm taught him how to shoot after rescuing him from two men preparing to skin him at poker. Wild Bill of Colorado taught him the meaning of "the drop" and warned him against wearing a gun in town unless he wanted trouble. Capturing the Western vernacular more accurately than any other writer, Townshend includes vivid details of life in the West, where he killed a buffalo, prospected for gold, and was present for the official government conference with the Ute Indians after gold was discovered on their lands.

For a director who has made a limited number of feature films over four-plus decades, Terrence Malick sustains an extraordinary reputation as one of America’s most original and independent directors. Lloyd Michaels analyzes Malick’s first four features in depth, emphasizing both repetitive formal techniques such as voiceover and long lens cinematography as well as recurrent themes drawn from the director’s academic training in modern philosophy. Like Heidegger, Malick seems to regard the human experience of nature as a mystery revealed primarily through moods rather than cognition. Like Wittgenstein, he is less concerned with apprehending the world than with simply acknowledging its beingness 

Michaels's critical approach explores Malick’s synthesis of the romance of mythic American experience and the aesthetics of European art film. He pays particular attention to paradigmatic moments: the billboard sequence in Badlands, the opening credits for Days of Heaven, the philosophical colloquies between Witt and Welsh in The Thin Red Line, and the epilogue of The New World. Michaels also sheds light on the two dark decades separating Days of Heaven from The Thin Red Line, when the director mostly lived as an expatriate in Paris. Two 1975 interviews with the famously elusive Malick round out the volume.

In December of 1937, the Japanese Imperial Army marched into China's capital city of Nanjing and launched six weeks of carnage that would become known as the Rape of Nanjing. In addition to the deaths of Chinese POWs and civilians, tens of thousands of women were raped, tortured, and killed by Japanese soldiers. In this traumatic environment, both native and foreign-born inhabitants of Nanjing struggled to carry on with their lives.

This volume collects the diaries and correspondence of Minnie Vautrin, a farmgirl from Illinois who had dedicated herself to the education of Chinese women at Ginling College in Nanjing. Faced with the impending Japanese attack, she turned the school into a sanctuary for ten thousand women and girls. Vautrin's firsthand accounts of daily life in Nanjing and the intensifying threat of Japanese invasion reveal the courage of the occupants under siege--Chinese nationals as well as Western missionaries, teachers, surgeons and business people--and the personal costs of violence in wartime.

Thanks to Vautrin's painstaking effort in keeping a day-to-day account, present-day readers are able to examine this episode of history at close range through her eyes. With detailed maps, photographs, and carefully researched in-depth annotations, Terror in Minnie Vautrin's Nanjing: Diaries and Correspondence, 1937-38 presents a comprehensive and detailed daily account of the events and of life during the horror-stricken days within the city walls and in particular on the Ginling campus. Through chronologically arranged diaries, letters, reports, documents, and telegrams, Vautrin bears witness to those terrible events and to the magnitude of trauma that the Nanjing Massacre exacted on the populace.

Since the 2002 implementation of No Child Left Behind, the American public education system has been fundamentally changed. Excessive testing, standardized curriculums, destructive demands on children, corporate-­style evaluations, and top-­down mandates have become the norm. In response, record numbers of demoralized educators have quit, and millions of students have been left educationally impoverished. This troubling transformation has been exhaustively critiqued by scholars and commentators. Yet one crucial voice has been missing, until now.

In Testing Education, Kathy Greeley recounts the impact of education reform from a teacher’s point of view. Based on a teaching career spanning nearly forty years, Greeley details how schools went from learning communities infused with excitement, intellectual stimulation, and joy to sterile spaces of stress, intimidation, and fear. In this ultimately hopeful memoir, Greeley asks us to learn from the past to reimagine the future of public education.

Born in 1916 at the northern end of New Zealand’s South Island, the teenaged Robert William Lane became obsessed with the singing and expressive yodeling of country music’s Jimmie Rodgers. By the 1940s, his obsession and subsequent focus on his own guitar playing, singing, and yodeling led him to achieve musical stardom as Tex Morton, master showman and influential progenitor of Australian country music. Tex Morton: From Australian Yodeler to International Showman offers the first full-length biography of this country music phenomenon from down under.

“From the time he first left the security of his home and set out to discover the world, life was a continual journey for Tex Morton,” Smith writes in chapter 1. And it was: Beginning with Morton’s early life and chronicling his burgeoning career and ultimate stardom, Smith’s study showcases Morton’s multi-faceted creative endeavors over the years, from showman and sharpshooter to hypnotist and academic. His talents took him all over the world, from Australia and New Zealand and countries throughout Asia to the United States, Canada, and England. Smith’s carefully constructed narrative captures the nuance of a versatile yet driven, flawed yet talented figure who ultimately became both an influential country artist and an entertainer of international standing over the course of an almost fifty-year career.

An important contribution to music history scholarship, this volume not only establishes Morton’s significance in the history of Australian country music, but it also draws deep connections between Morton’s Australasian influence and country music in the United States, exploring Morton’s legacy in the wider context of the genre worldwide. Complete with a comprehensive discography of Tex Morton’s works, Smith’s in-depth biography claims for Morton his rightful place as a major founding figure in the history of Australian country music.

Former South African president Thabo Mbeki is a complex figure. He was a committed young Marxist who, while in power, embraced conservative economic policies and protected white corporate interests; a rational and dispassionate thinker who was particularly sensitive to criticism and dissent; and a champion of African self-reliance who relied excessively on foreign capital.

As a key liberation leader in exile, he was instrumental in the ANC’s antiapartheid struggle. Later, he helped build one of the world’s most respected constitutional democracies. As president, though, he was unable to overcome inherited socioeconomic challenges, and his disastrous AIDS policies will remain a major blotch on his legacy.

Mbeki is the most important African political figure of his generation. He will be remembered as a foreign policy president for his peacemaking efforts and his role in building continental institutions, not least of which was the African Union. In this concise biography, ideally suited for the classroom, Adekeye Adebajo seeks to illuminate Mbeki’s contradictions and situate him in a pan-African pantheon.

Thaddeus “Thad” Mosley is a self-taught African American sculptor.  Earning a living throughout his adult life as a postal worker in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, so that he could support his family by day and work as a sculptor by night, he has evolved an individual and powerful African American voice.  He worked alone, patiently developing a sculptural language absolutely his own, yet traceable to his primary sources of inspiration, the vitality of African art and American jazz on the one hand, and on the other, two twentieth-century artists, the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi and the Asian American sculptor Isamu Noguchi.

From the beginning Thad Mosley has been a carver.  His materials have always been those “at hand,” logs from the trees of his native Western Pennsylvania, stones from the sites of demolished buildings in Pittsburgh, and metals from local scrapyards.  Finding within each log or block of stone an essential vitality, his carvings invariably bear a syncopation of chisel marks evoking the rhythms and surging freedoms of jazz.  Mosley’s perseverence and his pride in who he is offer an inspiring example of the unquenchable spirit of a true artists.

This short book introduces the life and work of this remarkable man.  Davis Lewis, architect, writer, and painter, has been a friend of the artist for twenty-five years.  His narrative is distilled from hours of taped interviews with Thad Mosley, as well as from a deep understanding of his art and influences.  Lonnie Graham is a nationally known African-American photographer.

“Although of a relatively scarce breed,” the Arkansas Times observed in the obituary of the itinerant writer it had once employed, “Mike Trimble was Arkansas’s and perhaps the country’s greatest self-deprecating journalist.” Readers will find in this fifty-year inventory of Trimble’s wit and wisdom all the vindication they might seek for that quaint judgment—the rare humble author. Whether he was chronicling, in the 1980s, rising political worthies like the far-into-the-future governors Asa Hutchinson and Mike Beebe, or, more often, the ordinary and feckless people that he encountered every day, befriended, and spent most of his career writing about, Trimble usually found a way, subtly or artlessly, to bring up his own failings, such as identifying the wrong person as the dead woman in an obituary he had written in his earliest days for his first employer, the Texarkana Gazette. Like the yokels in the vaudeville duos Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Rowan and Martin, and Fey and Poehler, Trimble’s confessed bumblings were purposeful and studied instruments of his humor.

Arkansas produced more than its quota of weirdos, fabulists, con men, oleaginous politicians, charlatans, creeps, visionaries, and fantastical creatures—from Albert Pike, Arvin the Wino, Dr. Brinkley the Great Depression’s goat-gland sex therapist, Editor Weston, and the salty riverboat queen Ray Dorthy all the way to Say McIntosh and Red the Irish Setter. Mike Trimble, the South’s best and funniest storyteller, put them all down on paper for some of the best reading since Catch-22. Trimble turned humor into art and history into vaudeville.

In this groundbreaking study, Joyce Hoffmann examines a critical twenty-five-year period in the work of one of the most influential journalists of the twentieth century. Theodore H. White was already a celebrated reporter when Jacqueline Kennedy summoned him for an exclusive interview in the aftermath of her husband's assassination. With her help, White would preserve what the First Lady claimed had been John F. Kennedy's vision of the New Frontier as an incarnation of that wistful, romantic kingdom--Camelot. Over the years, friends and advisers to Kennedy declared that they had never heard the president speak of Camelot. But White's article, which ran in Life magazine, created a myth that still endures in the popular consciousness.

That story was just one of many by Theodore White that had a lasting impact on the nation. As a correspondent for several of the country's most popular magazines, he covered the crucial events of the 1940s, '50s, and '60s. His best-selling book The Making of the President 1960 changed political reporting forever.

A gifted and likable man with a remarkable skill for ingratiating himself with others, White earned the confidence of key political, military, and diplomatic leaders. First in the Far East, later in Europe, and finally in Washington, D.C., he became a confidant and adviser rather than an adversary to the figures he covered for the news, following a pattern set by elite journalists. Even as he played the impartial reporter, White kept secrets in order to maintain access to his important sources, and he occasionally allowed his subjects, including John F. Kennedy and Nelson Rockefeller, to make changes in his work before publication.

Clinging to the illusion of objectivity, White--like other leading journalists in the postwar years--wrote about the world not as it was but as he believed it ought to be. Hoffmann relates the little-known episode in White's career when he intentionally obscured the truth about Chiang Kai-shek's corrupt and inept Nationalist government because he believed that undermining China's cause would be "a disservice to democracy."

No other book so thoroughly documents how a first-rank journalist can become a political insider and distort the news without losing the gloss of impartiality that is supposed to accompany the profession. Impressively researched, skillfully written, Theodore H. White and Journalism as Illusion is an unflinching look at a key figure in the history of American journalism and at the profession itself.

Rowe examines James from the perspectives of the psychology of literary influence, feminism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, literary phenomenology and impressionism, and reader-response criticism, transforming a literary monument into the telling point of intersection for modern critical theories.

Examining the case that inspired a pop culture phenomenon

In 1924 Beulah Annan was arrested and incarcerated for kill­ing her lover, Harry Kalsted. Six weeks later, a jury acquitted her of murder. Inspired by the sordid event, trial, and acquittal, Maurine Watkins, a reporter at the time, wrote the play Chicago, a Broadway hit that was adapted several times. Through a fresh retelling of the story of Annan and of Watkins’s play, Charles H. Cosgrove provides a critical examination of the crim­inal case and an exploration of the era’s social assump­tions that made the message of the play so plausible in its own time. His careful historical research challenges the received portrait of Annan as a killer who got away with murder and of Watkins as a savvy cub reporter and precocious playwright.
 
In They Both Reached for the Gun, Charles H. Cosgrove expertly combines meticulous research into inquest transcripts, police records, and interviews with Annan’s relatives with detailed analysis to shed new light on the participants, the trial, and the subsequent play and musical. Although no one will ever know what really happened in the south side apartment one hundred years ago, Cosgrove’s interrogation shows how sensationalized Watkins’s writing was. Her reporting on the Annan case perpetuated falsehoods about Annan’s so-called “confession,” and her play gave an inaccurate portrayal of Chicago’s criminal justice system. Despite Watkins’s insistence that her drama revealed the truth about its subjects without any exaggeration, her play depicted police, prosecutors, and judges as the only “good guys” in the story, ignoring those who lied, misled, and used brutal methods to obtain forced confessions.

At the height of the cocaine-fueled 1980s, Carolyn Wilkins left a disastrous marriage in Seattle and, hoping to make it in the music business, moved with her four-year-old daughter to a gritty working-class town on the edge of Boston. They Raised Me Up is the story of her battle to succeed in the world of jam sessions and jazz clubs—a man’s world where women were seen as either sex objects or doormats. To survive, she had to find a way to pay the bills, overcome a crippling case of stage fright, fend off a series of unsuitable men, and most important, find a reliable babysitter.

Alternating with Carolyn’s story are the stories of her ancestors and mentors—five musically gifted women who struggled to realize their dreams at the turn of the twentieth century:

Philippa Schuyler, whose efforts to “pass” for white inspired Carolyn to embrace her own black identity despite her “damn near white” appearance and biracial child;

Marjory Jackson, the musician and single mother whose dark complexion and flamboyant lifestyle raised eyebrows among her contemporaries in the snobby, color-conscious world of the African American elite;

Lilly Pruett, the daughter of an illiterate sharecropper whose stunning beauty might have been her only ticket out of the “Jim Crow” South;

Ruth Lipscomb, the country girl who dreamed, against all odds, of becoming a concert pianist and realized her improbable ambition in 1941;

Alberta Sweeney, who survived a devastating personal tragedy by relying on the musical talent and spiritual stamina she had acquired growing up in a rough-and-tumble Kansas mining town.

They Raised Me Up interweaves memoir with family history to create an entertaining, informative, and engrossing read that will appeal to anyone with an interest in African American or women’s history or to readers simply looking for an intriguing story about music and family.

Before attaining that status of senior church apostle at the death of John Taylor in 1886, Woodruff had been one of the fiercest opponents of United States hegemony. He spent years evading territorial marshals on the Mormon “underground,” escaping prosecution for polygamy, unable even to attend his first wife’s funeral. As church president, faced with disfranchisement and federal confiscation of Mormon property, including temples, Woodruff reached his monumental decision in 1890 to accept U.S. law and to petition for Utah statehood.

As church doctrines and practices evolved, Woodruff himself changed. The author examines the secular and religious development of Woodruff’s world view from apocalyptic mystic to pragmatic conciliator. He also reveals the gentle, solitary farmer; the fisherman and horticulturalist; the family man with seven wives; the charismatic preacher of the Mormon Reformation; the astute businessman; the urbane, savvy politician who courted the favor of prominent Republicans in California and Oregon (Leland Stanford and Isaac Trumbo); and the vulnerable romantic who pursued the affections of Lydia Mountford, an international lecturer and Jewish rights advocate. He traces a faithful polygamist who ultimately embraced the Christian Home movement and settled comfortably into a monogamous relationship in an otherwise typically Victorian setting.

Originally from New Hampshire, Amasa Mason Lyman converted to Mormonism over the objection of his family at age nineteen. Compelled to leave home with a total of eleven dollars in his pocket, he ventured some 700 miles east to Ohio, where Joseph Smith told him to return east and serve a mission despite his unfamiliarity with the church’s doctrines and procedures.

Ten years later Lyman temporarily replaced Orson Pratt in the Quorum of Twelve Apostles. This made him a kind of fifth wheel (thirteenth apostle) when Pratt was reinstated. Lyman would nevertheless regain his position in the quorum two years later and serve faithfully until his expulsion in 1867 for denying the divinity of Jesus. He then gravitated toward the anti-Brighamite spiritualist movement in Utah. Tracing the arc of this transformation from firm believer to prominent heretic, Lyman’s diaries are a window into the thinking of pioneer Mormons and the idealogical issues that sometimes divided them. This is the first in an anticipated multi-volume collection of historic diaries that will comprise the Signature Legacy Series.