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C. Francis Jenkins, Pioneer of Film and Television
Donald G. Godfrey
University of Illinois Press, 2014

This is the first biography of the important but long-forgotten American inventor Charles Francis Jenkins (1867-1934). Historian Donald G. Godfrey documents the life of Jenkins from his childhood in Indiana and early life in the West to his work as a prolific inventor whose productivity was cut short by an early death. Jenkins was an inventor who made a difference.

As one of America's greatest independent inventors, Jenkins's passion was to meet the needs of his day and the future. In 1895 he produced the first film projector able to show a motion picture on a large screen, coincidentally igniting the first film boycott among his Quaker viewers when the film he screened showed a woman's ankle. Jenkins produced the first American television pictures in 1923, and developed the only fully operating broadcast television station in Washington, D.C. transmitting to ham operators from coast to coast as well as programming for his local audience.

Godfrey's biography raises the profile of C. Francis Jenkins from his former place in the footnotes to his rightful position as a true pioneer of today's film and television. Along the way, it provides a window into the earliest days of both motion pictures and television as well as the now-vanished world of the independent inventor.

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C. L. R. James's Caribbean
Paget Henry and Paul Buhle, eds.
Duke University Press, 1992
For more than half a century, C. L. R. James (1901–1989)—"the Black Plato," as coined by the London Times—has been an internationally renowned revolutionary thinker, writer, and activist. Born in Trinidad, his lifelong work was devoted to understanding and transforming race and class exploitation in his native West Indies, as well as in Britain and the United States. In C. L. R. James's Caribbean, noted scholars examine the roots of both James's life and oeuvre in connection with the economic, social, and political environment of the West Indies.

Drawing upon James's observations of his own life as revealed to interviewers and close friends, this volume provides an examination of James's childhood and early years as colonial literatteur and his massive contribution to West Indian political-cultural understanding. Moving beyond previous biographical interpretations, the contributors here take up the problem of reading James's texts in light of poststructuralist criticism, the implications of his texts for Marxist discourse, and for problems of Caribbean development.

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C. P. Snow and the Struggle of Modernity
By John de la Mothe
University of Texas Press, 1992

The condition of modernity springs from that tension between science and the humanities that had its roots in the Enlightenment but reached its full flowering with the rise of twentieth-century technology. It manifests itself most notably in the crisis of individuality that is generated by the nexus of science, literature, and politics, one that challenges each of us to find a way of balancing our personal identities between our public and private selves in an otherwise estranging world. This challenge, which can only be expressed as "the struggle of modernity," perhaps finds no better expression than in C. P. Snow. In his career as novelist, scientist, and civil servant, C. P. Snow (1905-1980) attempted to bridge the disparate worlds of modern science and the humanities.

While Snow is often regarded as a late-Victorian liberal who has little to say about the modernist period in which he lived and wrote, de la Mothe challenges this judgment, reassessing Snow's place in twentieth-century thought. He argues that Snow's life and writings—most notably his Strangers and Brothers sequence of novels and his provocative thesis in The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution—reflect a persistent struggle with the nature of modernity. They manifest Snow's belief that science and technology were at the center of modern life.

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Cabin 135
A Memoir of Alaska
Katie Eberhart
University of Alaska Press, 2020
As a young adult, Katie Eberhart moved to Cabin 135, a house on a knoll in remote Alaska. Over the next decade, growing up and growing into her home, she found herself thinking through her ever-changing ideas about aging and place, a lot of which were wrapped up closely in her experience of living in the house itself. Cabin 135 provided shelter and security, and it also offered lessons on economic disruptions and how ideas of normalcy change. In these pages, we share Eberhart’s experience of digging into the past—figuratively and, in her garden, at an archaeology site, and in a national park, literally. Every layer peeled back, we find, reveals another story, another way of thinking about nature and the past—our own and that of others. In greenhouse and garden, yard, forest, and more distant places—a beach in southeast Alaska, the Arctic coast, Swiss Alps, Iceland, and even Biosphere-2 in Arizona—Eberhart engages with the world around her, and, through it, reflects on her own experiences and journey through life. Offering a journey of wonder and curiosity, through the author’s mind, a house’s structure, and other places, Cabin 135 is a deft combination of memoir and nature writing, rich with thought and full of appreciation for—and profound concerns about—the world and our place in it.
 
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Cabin Stories
The Best of Dark Winter Nights: True Stories from Alaska
Rob Prince
University of Alaska Press, 2022
Cabin Stories: The Best of Dark Winter Nights: True Stories from Alaska is a collection of favorite stories selected by the executive producers of the hit live event, radio show, and podcast Dark Winter Nights. These hilarious, heartwarming, and riveting stories depict true adventures, impossible situations, and the stranger side of life in Alaska—falling through ice, surviving a plane crash, living through a shipwreck in a hurricane, discovering a bear trapped in a woman’s front entryway, finding a pet goose frozen to a porch in a pile of its own poop, and more—as told by the everyday Alaskans who experienced them.
 
From the humorous to the heart-wrenching, these are the stories told up north on dark winter nights. Anyone curious about what living in Alaska is really like will appreciate this wild and fun anthology.
 
 
Contributors: Glenner Anderson, Kat Betters, Randy Brown, Melissa Buchta, JB Carnahan, Philip Charette, Roy Churchwell, Richard Coleman, Michael Daku, Wendy Demers, Alexandra Dunlap, Alyssa Enriquez, Jan Hanscom, Mike Hopper, James Mennaker, Ken Moore, Steve Neumeth, Kaiti Ott, Lori Schoening, Bill Schnabel, Guy Schroder, Ed Shirk, Eric Stevens, Chris Zwolinski
 
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Caesar
A Life in Western Culture
Maria Wyke
University of Chicago Press, 2008
More than two millennia have passed since Brutus and his companions murdered Julius Caesar—and inaugurated his legend. Though the assassins succeeded in ending Caesar’s dictatorship, they could never have imagined that his power and influence would only grow after his death, reaching mythic proportions and establishing him as one of the central icons of Western culture, fascinating armchair historians and specialists alike.
 
With Caesar, Maria Wyke takes up the question of just why Julius Caesar has become such an exalted figure when most of his fellow Romans have long been forgotten. Focusing on key events in Caesar’s life, she begins with accounts from ancient sources, then traces the ways in which his legend has been adapted and employed by everyone from Machiavelli to Madison Avenue, Shakespeare to George Bernard Shaw. Napoleon and Mussolini, for example, cited Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon in defense of their own dictatorial aims, while John Wilkes Booth fancied himself a new Brutus, ridding America of an imperial scourge. Caesar’s personal life, too, has long been fair game—but the lessons we draw from it have changed: Suetonius derided Caesar for his lustfulness and his love of luxury, but these days he and his lover Cleopatra serve as the very embodiment of glamour, enticingly invoked everywhere from Caesars Palace in Las Vegas to the hit HBO series Rome.
 
Caesar is the witty and perceptive work of a writer who is as comfortable with the implications of Xena: Warrior Princess as with the long shadow cast by the Annals of Tacitus. Wyke gives us a Caesar for our own time: complicated, hotly contested, and perpetually, fascinatingly renewed.
 
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Cafe Society
The wrong place for the Right people
Barney Josephson with Terry Trilling-Josephson. Foreword by Dan Morgenstern.
University of Illinois Press, 2009

Set against the drama of the Great Depression, the conflict of American race relations, and the inquisitions of the House Un-American Activities Committee, Cafe Society tells the personal history of Barney Josephson, proprietor of the legendary interracial New York City night clubs Cafe Society Downtown and Cafe Society Uptown and their successor, The Cookery. Famously known as "the wrong place for the Right people," Cafe Society featured the cream of jazz and blues performers--among whom were Billie Holiday, boogie-woogie pianists, Big Joe Turner, Lester Young, Buck Clayton, Big Sid Catlett, and Mary Lou Williams--as well as comedy stars Imogene Coca, Zero Mostel, and Jack Gilford, and also gospel and folk singers. A trailblazer in many ways, Josephson welcomed black and white artists alike to perform for mixed audiences in a venue whose walls were festooned with artistic and satiric murals lampooning what was then called "high society."

Featuring scores of photographs that illustrate the vibrant cast of characters in Josephson's life, this exceptional book speaks richly about Cafe Society's revolutionary innovations and creativity, inspired by the vision of one remarkable man.

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Calamities of Exile
Three Nonfiction Novellas
Lawrence Weschler
University of Chicago Press, 1998
From the author of Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, Calamities of Exile combines three gripping narratives that afford a sort of double CAT scan into the natures of both modern totalitarianism and timeless exile.

"Beautiful but harrowing chronicles of three exiles that probe the moral and personal risks of their encounters with totalitarianism. . . . Piercing and timely."—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"Weschler . . . combines a novelist's gift for drama with the objectivity and research skills of a journalist. . . . The result is three gripping profiles of very human but also extraordinary men."—Publishers Weekly

"[Weschler's] thorough accounting of the men's covert operations, assumed identities and strained relationships with fathers, wives, and colleagues creates a disturbing triptych of the perils of totalitarianism."—Lance Gould, New York Times Book Review

"Weschler tells these three tragic tales with an admirable combination of psychological penetration, intellectual thrust, concision and compassion."—Francis King, Spectator

"Endlessly absorbing. . . . Breathtaking."—Jeri Laber, Los Angeles Times Book Review
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Caliban's Freedom
The Early Political Thought of C.L.R. James
Anthony Bogues
Pluto Press, 1997
C.L.R. James (1901-1989) is one the few political thinkers whose ideas have made a genuinely significant contribution to the development of emancipatory ideas in the twentieth century. In this volume, Anthony Bogues examines the origins of the relationship between the black radical tradition and James's own view of Marxism. Integrating these two political currents provided the basis for a profound critique that became the hallmark of James’s life’s work. Anthony Bogues traces the main features of James’s early political thought, up to his deportation from the United States in the early 1950s, arguing that his work represents a major attempt in the immediate postwar period to establish new frontiers in Marxism and radical political thought in general. This illuminating and scholarly study reinforces James’s position as a political theorist of major standing.
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The California Days of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Brian C. Wilson
University of Massachusetts Press, 2022

In the spring of 1871, Ralph Waldo Emerson boarded a train in Concord, Massachusetts, bound for a month-and-a-half-long tour of California—an interlude that became one of the highlights of his life. On their journey across the American West, he and his companions would take in breathtaking vistas in the Rockies and along the Pacific Coast, speak with a young John Muir in the Yosemite Valley, stop off in Salt Lake City for a meeting with Brigham Young, and encounter a diversity of communities and cultures that would challenge their Yankee prejudices.

Based on original research employing newly discovered documents, The California Days of Ralph Waldo Emerson maps the public story of this group’s travels onto the private story of Emerson’s final years, as aphasia set in and increasingly robbed him of his words. Engaging and compelling, this travelogue makes it clear that Emerson was still capable of wonder, surprise, and friendship, debunking the presumed darkness of his last decade.

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Californio Voices
The Oral Memoirs of Jose Maria Amador and Lorenzo Asisara
Gregorio Mora-Torres
University of North Texas Press, 2005

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Call Him Mac
Ernest W. McFarland, the Arizona Years
Gary L. Stuart; Foreword by Michael Daly Hawkins
University of Arizona Press, 2018
The political life of Ernest W. McFarland—lawyer, judge, senator, governor, Arizona Supreme Court justice, and businessman—is well documented. Less known is his life as a family man, country lawyer, rural judge, and visionary.

In Call Him Mac, Gary L. Stuart renders a nuanced portrait of a young, ambitious, restless, and smiling man on the verge of becoming a political force headed for the highest levels of governance in Arizona and America. Stuart reveals how Mac became an expert on water law and a visionary in Arizona’s agricultural future. Using interviews with friends and family and extensive primary source research, Stuart spotlights Mac’s unerring focus as a loving husband, father, and grandfather, even in times of great personal tragedy. Mac’s commitments to his family mirrored his sense of fiduciary duty in public life. His enormous political successes were answers to how he dealt with threats to his own life in 1919, the loss of his first wife and three children in the 1930s, and a political loss in 1952 that no one saw coming.

Stuart writes the little-known story of how Arizona’s culture and citizens shaped this energetic, determined, likable lawyer. The fame Mac created was not for himself but for those he served in Arizona and beyond. Mac’s unparalleled political success was fermented during his early Arizona years, the bridge that brought him to his future as an approachable and likable elder statesman of Arizona politics.
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Call Me Tom
The Life of Thomas F. Eagleton
James N. Giglio
University of Missouri Press, 2011
Call Me Tom is the first book-length biography of one of Missouri’s most successful senators. A moderate liberal in a conservative state, Thomas F. Eagleton was known for his political independence, integrity, and intelligence, likely the reasons Eagleton never once lost an election in his thirty years of public service.

Born in St. Louis, Eagleton began his public career in 1956 as St. Louis Circuit Attorney. At 27, he was the youngest person in the history of the state to hold that position, and he duplicated the feat in his next two elected positions, attorney general in 1960 and lieutenant governor in 1964. In 1968, he was elected to the U.S. Senate, where he served until 1987. He was thrown into the national spotlight in 1972 when revelations regarding his mental health, particularly the shock treatments he received for depression, forced his resignation as a vice presidential nominee of the Democratic Party. All of that would overshadow his significant contributions as senator, especially on environmental and social legislation, as well as his defense of Congressional authority on war making and his role in the U. S. military disengagement from Southeast Asia in 1973.

Respected biographer James N. Giglio provides readers with an encompassing and nuanced portrait of Eagleton by placing the man and his career in the context of his times. Giglio allows readers to see his rumpled suits, smell the smoke of his Pall Mall cigarettes, hear his gravelly voice, and relish his sense of humor. At the same time, Giglio does not shy away from the personal torments that Eagleton had to overcome. A definitive examination of the senator’s career also reveals his unique ability to work with Republican counterparts, especially prior to the 1980s when bipartisanship was more possible.

Measuring the effect his mental illness had on his career, Giglio determines that the removal of aspirations for higher office in 1972 made Eagleton a better senator. He consistently took principled stands, with the ultimate goal of preserving and modernizing the agenda of Franklin D. Roosevelt, his favorite president.

Thoroughly researched using the Eagleton Papers and interviews with more than eighty-five people close to Eagleton, including family, friends, colleagues, subordinates, and former classmates, Call Me Tom offers an engaging and in-depth portrayal of a man who remained a devoted public servant throughout his life.
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Callaghan
Harry Conroy
Haus Publishing, 2006
Part of the Prime Ministers Series, Callaghan was the Labour Prime Minister who was defeated by Thatcher
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Called to Courage
Four Women in Missouri History
Margot Ford McMillen & Heather Roberson
University of Missouri Press, 2002
While there are many accessible biographies of important Missouri men, there are few such biographies of Missouri women, which might suggest that they did not count in history. This book, written by a mother-and-daughter team, helps to correct that misconception by tracing the lives of four women who played important roles in their eras. These women were exceptional because they had the courage to make the best of their abilities, forging trails and breaking the barriers that separated women’s spheres from those of men:
·        A Native American woman the French newspapers called “Ignon Ouaconisen,” and the people of Paris called the “Missouri princess,” lived from about 1700 to after 1751. She traveled with adventurer Etienne de Bourgmont and bore his child. Although much of her life remains a mystery, her story gives us insights into the lives of Missouri Indian women in the days of the fur trade.
·        Pioneer Olive Boone (1783–1858) came to the Louisiana Territory as the teenage bride of Nathan Boone, guiding a skiff and their horses across the Missouri River to join the Daniel Boone family near St. Charles. For much of her married life, she stayed alone with her fourteen children while her husband traveled on lengthy hunting expeditions, supervised the Boone saltworks in present-day Howard County, and spent years in the military.
·        Martha Jane Chisley, born a slave in 1833, was brought to northeast Missouri as a young woman. During the Civil War, Martha Jane escaped with her children to Illinois. She overcame many obstacles so that her son Augustine was able to enter school and get an education. Augustine studied in Rome and became the first nationally known African American priest.
·        Nell Donnelly of Kansas City was a pioneering businesswoman who founded a dress company that became the world’s largest, brightening the wardrobe of the “housewife” while also creating fair working conditions for her employees. Born into an ordinary middle-class family in 1889, she achieved a success and high profile that brought its own problems.
            Using Missouri and Illinois archives, Margot Ford McMillen and Heather Roberson have compiled well-known and obscure materials to describe the lives of both women and men, showing how roles changed as Missouri and America matured. Bringing together family insights and the rare writings of observers who almost never mention women in their journals, Called to Courage will be welcomed by anyone interested in women’s history or Missouri history.
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The Callendar Effect
The Life and Work of Guy Stewart Callendar (1898-1964)
James Rodger Fleming
American Meteorological Society, 2007
This is the untold story of the remarkable scientist who established the carbon dioxide theory of climate change. Guy Stewart Callendar discovered that global warming could be brought about by increases in the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide due to human activities, primarily through burning fossil fuels. He did this in 1938! Using never-before-published original scientific correspondence, notebooks, family letters, and photographs, science historian James Rodger Fleming introduces us to one of Britain’s leading engineers and explains his life and work through two World Wars to his continuing legacy as the scientist who established The Callendar Effect.
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The Calling of History
Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire of Truth
Dipesh Chakrabarty
University of Chicago Press, 2015
A leading scholar in early twentieth-century India, Sir Jadunath Sarkar (1870–1958) was knighted in 1929 and became the first Indian historian to gain honorary membership in the American Historical Association. By the end of his lifetime, however, he had been marginalized by the Indian history establishment, as postcolonial historians embraced alternative approaches in the name of democracy and anti-colonialism. The Calling of History examines Sarkar’s career—and poignant obsolescence—as a way into larger questions about the discipline of history and its public life.

Through close readings of more than twelve hundred letters to and from Sarkar along with other archival documents, Dipesh Chakrabarty demonstrates that historians in colonial India formulated the basic concepts and practices of the field via vigorous—and at times bitter and hurtful—debates in the public sphere. He furthermore shows that because of its non-technical nature, the discipline as a whole remains susceptible to pressure from both the public and the academy even today. Methodological debates and the changing reputations of scholars like Sarkar, he argues, must therefore be understood within the specific contexts in which particular histories are written.

Insightful and with far-reaching implications for all historians, The Calling of History offers a valuable look at the double life of history and how tensions between its public and private sides played out in a major scholar’s career.
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The Camel's Nose
Memoirs Of A Curious Scientist
Knut Schmidt-Nielsen
Island Press, 1998
"It has been said that the primary function of schools is to impart enough facts to make children stop asking questions. Those with whom the schools do not succeed become scientists." So begins Knut Schmidt-Nielsen in his autobiography The Camel's Nose, a fascinating reflection on his life and more than forty years of studies and adventures in locations ranging from the Sahara Desert to the Arctic Circle.One of the world's most prominent animal physiologists, Schmidt-Nielsen has throughout his career sought answers to seemingly simple questions: How can camels go for days without drinking? Do marine birds drink seawater? Why don't penguins' feet freeze? How do animals find food and water in the desert? By asking questions about the animals around us, we learn more about who we are, and the answers Schmidt-Nielsen discovered have not only helped us understand animals, but have provided us with insight into fundamental principles of life and survival.In The Camel's Nose, Schmidt-Nielsen relates the story of his life and work, interweaving tales of his childhood in Scandinavia and his personal and professional struggles in the United States with first-hand accounts of field work in Africa, Australia, and around the globe. He recounts how he sought out peculiar problems of animal form and function and details his remarkable discoveries. He also provides a glimpse into the personal life of a world-renowned scientist, from the rewards and difficulties of growing up in a family of scientists to the challenges of his early career to the redeeming power of love later in life.The Camel's Nose reveals a passionate curiosity for seeking out and finding answers. The reader is fortunate to share in Schmidt-Nielsen's lifelong quest and to be given an inside look into the life of a scientist who has witnessed the better part of a century of breathtaking discovery and change.
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Camp Life Is Paradise for Freddy
A Childhood in the Dutch East Indies, 1933–1946
Fred Lanzing
Ohio University Press, 2017

“Children see and hear what is there; adults see and hear what they are expected to and mainly remember what they think they ought to remember,” David Lowenthal wrote in The Past Is a Foreign Country. It is on this fraught foundation that Fred Lanzing builds this memoir of his childhood in a Japanese internment camp for Dutch colonialists in the East Indies during the World War II.

When published in the Netherlands in 2007, the book triggered controversy, if not vitriol, for Lanzing’s assertion that his time in the camp was not the compendium of horrors commonly associated with the Dutch internment experience. Despite the angry reception, Lanzing’s account corresponds more closely with the scant historical record than do most camp memoirs. In this way, Lanzing’s work is a substantial addition to ongoing discussions of the politics of memory and the powerful—if contentious—contributions that subjective accounts make to historiography and to the legacies of the past.

Lanzing relates an aspect of the war in the Pacific seldom discussed outside the Netherlands and, by focusing on the experiences of ordinary people, expands our understanding of World War II in general. His compact, beautifully detailed account will be accessible to undergraduate students and a general readership and, together with the introduction by William H. Frederick, is a significant contribution to literature on World War II, the Dutch colonial experience, the history of childhood, and Southeast Asian history.

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Campbell-Bannerman
Roy Hattersley
Haus Publishing, 2006
A biography of the intriguing life of the unknown Liberal British Prime Minister.
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Can This Marriage Be Saved?
A Memoir
Nancy McCabe
University of Missouri Press, 2020
In this warm, deeply-personal, and often humorous book, Nancy McCabe re-examines and gains new understanding of her early life and her ill-advised marriage. Borrowing from Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights and Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” how-to essays and before-and-after weight loss ads, a curriculum guide, Bible study notes, an obsession with Tom Swiftie jokes, and women’s magazine columns and quizzes that oversimplified women’s lives and choices, McCabe examines the many influences that led to her youthful marriage—and out of it, into finally taking control of her life.
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The Canals of Mars
A Memoir
Gary Fincke
Michigan State University Press, 2010

The Canals of Mars is a memoir that explores and ponders "weakness," which in Gary Fincke's family was the catch-all term for every possible human flaw-physical, psychological, or spiritual. Fincke grew up near Pittsburgh during the 1950s and 1960s, raised by blue-collar parents for whom the problems that beset people-from alcoholism to nearsightedness to asthma to fear of heights-were nothing but weaknesses.
     In a highly engaging style, Fincke meditates on the disappointments he suffered-in his body, his mind, his work-because he was convinced that he had to be "perfect." Anything less than perfection was weakness and no one, he understood from an early age, wants to be weak.
     Six of the chapters in the book have been cited in Best American Essays. The chapter that provides the book's title, The Canals of Mars, won a Pushcart Prize and was included in The Pushcart Book of Essays: The Best Essays from a Quarter Century of the Pushcart Prize.

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Canine Pioneer
The Extraordinary Life of Rudolphina Menzel
Edited by Susan Martha Kahn
Brandeis University Press, 2022
An insightful look at the life and legacy of a pioneer cynologist between Europe and Israel.
 
Rudolphina Menzel (née Waltuch, 1891–1973), was a Viennese-born, Jewish scientist whose pioneering research on canine psychology, development, and behavior fundamentally shaped the ways dogs came to be trained, cared for, and understood. Between the two world wars, Menzel was known throughout Europe as one of the foremost breeders and trainers of police dogs and served as a sought-after consultant at Kummersdorf, the German military dog training institute in Berlin. She was also a fervent Zionist who was responsible for inventing the canine infrastructure in what came to be the State of Israel and for training hundreds of dogs to protect Jewish lives and property in pre-state Palestine. Teaching Jews to like dogs and training dogs to serve Jews became Menzel’s unique kind of Zionist mission. Detailed and insightful, Canine Pioneer: The Extraordinary Life of Rudolphina Menzel brings to light an important piece of history.
 
 
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The Caning
The Assault That Drove America to Civil War
Stephen Puleo
Westholme Publishing, 2012
A Turning Point in American History, the Beating of U.S. Senator Charles Sumner and the Beginning of the War Over Slavery
Early in the afternoon of May 22, 1856, ardent pro-slavery Congressman Preston S. Brooks of South Carolina strode into the United States Senate Chamber in Washington, D.C., and began beating renowned anti-slavery Senator Charles Sumner with a gold-topped walking cane. Brooks struck again and again—more than thirty times across Sumner’s head, face, and shoulders—until his cane splintered into pieces and the helpless Massachusetts senator, having nearly wrenched his desk from its fixed base, lay unconscious and covered in blood. It was a retaliatory attack. Forty-eight hours earlier, Sumner had concluded a speech on the Senate floor that had spanned two days, during which he vilified Southern slaveowners for violence occurring in Kansas, called Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois a “noise-some, squat, and nameless animal,” and famously charged Brooks’s second cousin, South Carolina Senator Andrew Butler, as having “a mistress. . . who ugly to others, is always lovely to him. . . . I mean, the harlot, Slavery.” Brooks not only shattered his cane during the beating, but also destroyed any pretense of civility between North and South.
One of the most shocking and provocative events in American history, the caning convinced each side that the gulf between them was unbridgeable and that they could no longer discuss their vast differences of opinion regarding slavery on any reasonable level.The Caning: The Assault That Drove America to Civil War tells the incredible story of this transformative event. While Sumner eventually recovered after a lengthy convalescence, compromise had suffered a mortal blow. Moderate voices were drowned out completely; extremist views accelerated, became intractable, and locked both sides on a tragic collision course.
The caning had an enormous impact on the events that followed over the next four years: the meteoric rise of the Republican Party and Abraham Lincoln; the Dred Scott decision; the increasing militancy of abolitionists, notably John Brown’s actions; and the secession of the Southern states and the founding of the Confederacy. As a result of the caning, the country was pushed, inexorably and unstoppably, to war. Many factors conspired to cause the Civil War, but it was the caning that made conflict and disunion unavoidable five years later.
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Capital Consequences
Families of the Condemned Tell Their Stories
King, Rachel
Rutgers University Press, 2004

Those who support capital punishment often claim that they do so because it provides justice and closure for the victims’ families. In Capital Consequences, attorney Rachel King reminds us that there are other families and other victims who must be considered in the debate over the death penalty.

Combining a narrative voice with vivid, passionate, and painful accounts of the families of death row inmates, the book demonstrates that crimes that lead to death sentences also devastate the families of those convicted. These families, King argues, are the unseen victims of capital punishment.

King challenges readers to question the morality of a punishment that victimizes families of the condemned and ripples out through future generations. Chapters tell the stories of families that have lost life savings supporting an accused loved one, endured intense public scrutiny, been subjected to harassment by the media, and are struggling to live with the inhumane treatment that their loved ones receive on death row.  The author also explores the unique nature of the grief that these families suffer. Because their pain tends to elicit less attention and empathy than that of the crime victims’ families, King shows how it becomes much more desperate and isolating.

On a human level, this book is a powerful reminder that tragic events have tragic consequences that far outreach their immediate victims. At the same time, the accounts illustrate many of the flaws inherent in the judicial system—racial and economic bias, incompetent counsel, prosecutorial misconduct, the execution of juveniles, and wrongful convictions, some of which are only now being overturned because of recent advances in DNA technology.

Regardless of which side of the death penalty issue you are on, this book will lead you to pause and consider that all acts—criminal and retributive—have broader human implications than we are sometimes willing to realize.

 

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Capitol Women
Texas Female Legislators, 1923-1999
By Nancy Baker Jones and Ruthe Winegarten
University of Texas Press, 2000

Along with bar rooms and bordellos, there has hardly been a more male-focused institution in Texas history than the Texas Legislature. Yet the eighty-six women who have served there have made a mark on the institution through the legislation they have passed, much of which addresses their concerns as citizens who have been inadequately represented by male lawmakers.

This first complete record of the women of the Texas Legislature places such well-known figures as Kay Bailey Hutchison, Sissy Farenthold, Barbara Jordan, Irma Rangel, Eddie Bernice Johnson, Susan Combs, and Judith Zaffirini in the context of their times and among the women and men with whom they served. Drawing on years of primary research and interviews, Nancy Baker Jones and Ruthe Winegarten offer concise biographies and profiles of all eighty-six women who have served or currently hold office in the Texas Legislature.

The biographies describe the women lawmakers' lives, campaign strategies, and legislative successes and defeats. Four introductory essays provide historical and cultural context for the biographies, which are arranged chronologically to give a sense of the passage of time, of relationships among and between women, and of the issues of their eras.

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Captain Billy's Troopers
A Writer's Life
William Cobb
University of Alabama Press, 2015
Opens a candid window into the life of a writer and teacher who overcame years of addiction and serious health problems as his voice, artistic vision, and sense of self evolved and matured

In this audacious memoir, William Cobb reveals the tumultuous creative life of a distinguished practitioner of southern and Alabama storytelling. As poignant and inspiring as his own fiction, Captain Billy’s Troopers traces Cobb’s early life, education, and struggles with alcohol and the debilitating condition normal pressure hydrocephalus (NPH).
 
Like a curving river, the broad sweep of Cobb’s turbulent life includes both startling cataracts and desultory eddies, leading sometimes into shadows or opening into unexpected sunlight. With unsentimental clarity, Cobb recounts coming of age in his native Demopolis in the churning middle years of the twentieth century. It’s there he has his first tantalizing tastes of alcohol and begins to drink habitually. Readers then travel with Cobb to Livingston University (now the University of West Alabama) and then on to Vanderbilt University. Along the way, readers relish his first experiences of love and success as a writer, leading to a career as a professor of writing at Alabama College (now the University of Montevallo) in 1963.
 
From there Cobb’s struggles with alcohol and depression lead to elongated years of tumbling creative output and the collapse of his marriage. The summer of 1984 found Cobb in rehab, the first step in his path to recovery. His unflinching memoir narrates both the milestones and telling details of his intense therapy and years in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). In the sober thirty years since, Cobb has published a string of critically praised novels and a prize-winning collection of short stories. The capstone of his comeback was winning the Harper Lee Award in 2007 for distinguished fiction writing.
 
In 2000, shortly after retiring, Cobb developed NPH, which upset his sense of balance and triggered dementia symptoms and other maladies. Nine years later in 2009, brain surgery brought Cobb a dramatic recovery, which began the third act in his writing career. Vital, honest, and entertaining, Captain Billy’s Troopers captures the life of an Alabama original.
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Captain J. A. Brooks, Texas Ranger
Paul N. Spellman
University of North Texas Press, 2007

front cover of Captain Jack Helm
Captain Jack Helm
A Victim of Texas Reconstruction Violence
Chuck Parsons
University of North Texas Press, 2018

front cover of Captain John H. Rogers, Texas Ranger
Captain John H. Rogers, Texas Ranger
Paul N. Spellman
University of North Texas Press, 2003

front cover of Captain John R. Hughes
Captain John R. Hughes
Lone Star Ranger
Chuck Parsons
University of North Texas Press, 2011

front cover of Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates
Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates
Robert Ritchie
Harvard University Press, 1989

The legends that die hardest are those of the romantic outlaw, and those of swashbuckling pirates are surely among the most durable. Swift ships, snug inns, treasures buried by torchlight, palm-fringed beaches, fabulous riches, and, most of all, freedom from the mean life of the laboring man are the stuff of this tradition reinforced by many a novel and film.

It is disconcerting to think of such dashing scoundrels as slaves to economic forces, but so they were—as Robert Ritchie demonstrates in this lively history of piracy. He focuses on the shadowy figure of William Kidd, whose career in the late seventeenth century swept him from the Caribbean to New York, to London, to the Indian Ocean before he ended in Newgate prison and on the gallows. Piracy in those days was encouraged by governments that could not afford to maintain a navy in peacetime. Kidd’s most famous voyage was sponsored by some of the most powerful men in England, and even though such patronage granted him extraordinary privileges, it tied him to the political fortunes of the mighty Whig leaders. When their influence waned, the opposition seized upon Kidd as a weapon. Previously sympathetic merchants and shipowners did an about-face too and joined the navy in hunting down Kidd and other pirates.

By the early eighteenth century, pirates were on their way to becoming anachronisms. Ritchie’s wide-ranging research has probed this shift in the context of actual voyages, sea fights, and adventures ashore. What sort of men became pirates in the first place, and why did they choose such an occupation? What was life like aboard a pirate ship? How many pirates actually became wealthy? How were they governed? What large forces really caused their downfall?

As the saga of the buccaneers unfolds, we see the impact of early modern life: social changes and Anglo-American politics, the English judicial system, colonial empires, rising capitalism, and the maturing bureaucratic state are all interwoven in the story. Best of all, Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates is an epic of adventure on the high seas and a tale of back-room politics on land that captures the mind and the imagination.

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Captain Paul Cuffe, Yeoman
A Biography
Jeffrey A. Fortin
University of Massachusetts Press, 2024

Paul Cuffe is best understood as a member of the Black founding fathers—a group of pre-eminent African Americans who built institutions and movements during the first decades of the United States. While he is known amongst scholars, his astounding life story deserves a much wider audience. Jeffrey A. Fortin has crafted a beautiful, moving portrait of this important maritime figure that will appeal to anyone interested in early American history and who loves great story telling.

Born on Cuttyhunk Island, Massachusetts in 1759 to a formerly enslaved African father and a Wampanoag Indian mother, Cuffe emerged from anonymity to become the most celebrated African-American sea captain during the Age of Sail. An abolitionist, veteran, and community activist, celebrity followed Cuffe as he built a shipping empire that traded both in American coastal waters and across the wider Atlantic Ocean. Cuffe and his Black crews shook the foundations of systemic racism, challenging norms by sailing into Charleston and other ports where slavery was legal, and thus demonstrating that business and profits were more powerful than social limitations. He founded America’s first racially integrated school in Westport, Massachusetts, and is considered the leader of the nation’s first back-to-Africa movement. Newspapers in England, the United States, and the Caribbean reported his whereabouts and adventures, and abolitionists hailed him for his Quaker beliefs, sobriety, and commitment to advancing opportunities for persons of African descent.

Drawing on pamphlets, letters, and other documents, and painstakingly reconstructing his genealogy, Fortin vividly describes Cuffe’s experiences and places them within the broader history of the Early Republic to help reveal the central role of African Americans in the founding of the United States. Unlike previous biographies, Fortin situates Cuffe within an Atlantic world where race and identity were fluid, and Africans and African Americans sought to build and govern a free Black nation in West Africa. 

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The Captain’s Best Mate
The Journal of Mary Chipman Lawrence on the Whaler Addison, 1856–1860
Mary Chipman. Lawrence
University Press of New England, 1986
The diary of a wife who, with their five-year old daughter, accompanied her husband on a three-and-a-half year whaling voyage.
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A Captive Audience
Voices of Japanese American Youth in World War II Arkansas
Ali Welky
Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, 2015
Using archival primary material such as photographs, yearbooks, artwork, and first-person written accounts, A Captive Audience gives an inside look at the experiences of young people at the Rohwer and Jerome Relocation Centers in Arkansas during the forced incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. Many young internees at the camps saw their families lose their homes, businesses, and possessions on the West Coast when the U.S. government rounded up people of Japanese descent after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Yet through all the chaos and heartbreak of the internment experience, young people often brought a unique perspective of hope and resiliency.
Intended for young-adult readers, this book explores important dimensions of Arkansas and U.S. history, including human rights and what it means to be an American.
[more]

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Captive of the Labyrinth
Sarah L. Winchester, Heiress to the Rifle Fortune, Revised and Updated Edition
Mary Jo Ignoffo
University of Missouri Press, 2022
Captive of the Labyrinth is reissued here to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the death of rifle heiress Sarah L. Winchester in 1922. After inheriting a vast fortune upon the death of her husband in 1881, Winchester purchased a simple farmhouse in San José, California. She built additions to the house and continued construction for the next twenty years. When neighbors and the local press could not imagine her motivations, they invented fanciful ones of their own. She was accused of being a ghost-obsessed spiritualist, and to this day it is largely believed that the extensive construction she executed on her San José house was done to thwart death and appease the spirits of those killed by the Winchester rifle.

Author and historian Mary Jo Ignoffo’s definitive biography unearths the truth about this reclusive eccentric, revealing that she was not a maddened spiritualist driven by remorse but an intelligent, articulate woman who sought to protect her private life amidst the chaos of her public existence and the social mores of the time. The author takes readers through Winchester’s several homes, explores her private life, and, by excerpting from personal correspondence, one learns the widow’s true priority was not dissipating her fortune on the mansion in San José but endowing a hospital to eradicate a dread disease.

Sarah Winchester has been exploited for profit for over a century, but Captive of the Labyrinth finally puts to rest the myths about this American heiress, and, in the process, uncovers her true legacies.
 
[more]

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Capturing the News
Three Decades of Reporting Crisis and Conflict
Anthony Collings
University of Missouri Press, 2010

Anthony Collings found himself in his share of difficult situations in his thirty-four years as a newsman. Like being captured by AK-47–toting Syrians in Lebanon in 1981 while looking for missiles that threatened a new outbreak of hostilities with Israel, or being “detained” by the KGB in Moscow in 1967 during his first foreign posting for the Associated Press filing stories about Soviet dissidents.

Name a hot spot, and Collings has likely been there. From AP correspondent to Newsweek bureau chief to CNN reporter, he covered the Middle East, Rome, Moscow, London, Paris, and Washington. Now he has gathered stories about his work in a book that is both a journalist’s memoir and a commentary on the current ethical crises in the news media and how to address them.

Brimming with entertaining stories about journalism, especially the chaotic early years at CNN when he and his colleagues established the first major cable news network, Collings’s book reveals the dangers and pressures of covering the news and the difficulties of overcoming obstacles to the truth. He recalls smuggling tapes out of Poland after the Communists had imposed martial law; flying dangerously near Libya’s “Line of Death”; interviewing world figures from Brezhnev to Kaddafi and Arafat; and winning awards for covering Iran-Contra and the Oklahoma City bombing. Collings brings fresh insights to the Oliver North affair and examines how the press was suckered in its coverage of the Jessica Lynch prisoner-of-war story in 2003. He voices his concerns regarding oversimplified reporting of complex issues and poses provocative questions about covering terrorism.

In this book, Collings presents an insider’s appraisal of the American news media’s failings and accomplishments. Easy to read, informative, and thoughtful, Capturing the News will enlighten general readers interested in how journalists cover current affairs, while offering newsmen food for thought about the craft and ethics of journalism.
[more]

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Cardozo
A Study in Reputation
Richard A. Posner
University of Chicago Press, 1993
What makes a great judge? How are reputations forged? Why do some reputations endure, while others crumble? And how can we know whether a reputation is fairly deserved? In this ambitious book, Richard Posner confronts these questions in the case of Benjamin Cardozo. The result is both a revealing portrait of one of the most influential legal minds of our century and a model for a new kind of study—a balanced, objective, critical assessment of a judicial career.

"The present compact and unflaggingly interesting volume . . . is a full-bodied scholarly biography. . . .It is illuminating in itself, and will serve as a significant contribution."—Paul A. Freund, New York Times Book Review

[more]

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Career Patterns in the Ch’ing Dynasty
The Office of the Governor General
Raymond W. Chu and William G. Saywell
University of Michigan Press, 1981
The office of governor general (tsung-tu) was the highest provincial post throughout the Ch’ing dynasty. As such, it was a vital link in the control of a vast empire by a very small and alien ruling elite. This is primarily a biographical and statistical analysis of the incumbents of that office. By analyzing the biographical data of those who held the position of governor-general, much may be learned about the nature of the office itself. However, the main objective of the study is to provide information on career patterns, that is, the variety of different posts held from the first official appointment to that of governor-general, of an important cross section of successful Ch’ing bureaucrats. By plotting and analyzing the different patterns their official careers took, we should be able to determine what kind of men reached the top of China’s provincial and national administration during the final centuries of China’s imperial history; the qualifications that were required; the factors which prompted rapid promotion or sudden disgrace. We should also be able to determine the extent to which these and other factors varied markedly among Manchu, Mongol, Chinese Bannerman, and Han incumbents and whether changes throughout the dynasty can be detected in policies concerning the office or in the career patterns of its personnel. If such detection is possible, this study may lend support to the view that late imperial China was not static, but a society undergoing significant changes. [xi]
[more]

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Caribbean Autobiography
Cultural Identity and Self-Representation
Sandra Pouchet Paquet
University of Wisconsin Press, 2002

Despite the range and abundance of autobiographical writing from the Anglophone Caribbean, this book is the first to explore this literature fully. It covers works from the colonial era up to present-day AIDS memoirs and assesses the links between more familiar works by George Lamming, C. L. R. James, Derek Walcott, V. S. Naipaul, and Jamaica Kincaid and less frequently cited works by the Hart sisters, Mary Prince, Mary Seacole, Claude McKay, Yseult Bridges, Jean Rhys, Anna Mahase, and Kamau Brathwaite.
    Sandra Pouchet Paquet charts the intersection of multiple, contradictory viewpoints of the colonial and postcolonial Caribbean, differing concepts of community and levels of social integration, and a persistent pattern of both resistance and accommodation within island states that were largely shaped by British colonial practice from the mid-seventeenth through the mid-twentieth century. The texts examined here reflect the entire range of autobiographical practice, including the slave narrative and testimonial, written and oral narratives, spiritual autobiographies, fiction, serial autobiography, verse, diaries and journals, elegy, and parody.

[more]

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Carl B. Stokes and the Rise of Black Political Power
Leonard N. Moore
University of Illinois Press, 2002
As the first elected black mayor of a major U.S. city, Cleveland's Carl B. Stokes embodied the transformation of the civil rights movement from a vehicle of protest to one of black political power.
In this wide-ranging political biography, Leonard N. Moore examines the convictions and alliances that brought Stokes to power. Impelled by the problems plaguing Cleveland's ghettos in the decades following World War II, Stokes and other Clevelanders questioned how the sit-ins and marches of the civil rights movement could correct the exclusionary zoning practices, police brutality, substandard housing, and de facto school segregation that African Americans in the country's northern urban centers viewed as evidence of their oppression.
 
As civil unrest in the country's ghettos turned to violence in the 1960s, Cleveland was one of the first cities to heed the call of Malcolm X's infamous "The Ballot or the Bullet" speech. Understanding the importance of controlling the city's political system, Cleveland's blacks utilized their substantial voting base to put Stokes in office in 1967.
 
Stokes was committed to showing the country that an African American could be an effective political leader. He employed an ambitious and radically progressive agenda to clean up Cleveland's ghettos, reform law enforcement, move public housing to middle-class neighborhoods, and jump-start black economic power. Hindered by resistance from the black middle class and the Cleveland City Council, spurned by the media and fellow politicians who deemed him a black nationalist, and unable to prove that black leadership could thwart black unrest, Stokes finished his four years in office with many of his legislative goals unfulfilled.
Focusing on Stokes and Cleveland, but attending to themes that affected many urban centers after the second great migration of African Americans to the North, Moore balances Stokes's failures and successes to provide a thorough and engaging portrait of his life and his pioneering contributions to a distinct African American political culture that continues to shape American life.
 
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CARL SANDBURG
Harry Golden
University of Illinois Press, 1988
 Harry Golden greatly admired and loved Carl Sandburg, and the feeling was indeed
      mutual. Toward the end of his life, Sandburg shared his papers, letters,
      photographs, and memories with Golden. Combining these materials with his
      own recollections, Golden reconstructs the life of his closest friend. His
      anecdotal account is both an engaging portrait of Sandburg and a tribute
      to their friendship. Generations of Sandburg's devoted readers will want
      to own this very personal biography.
     
 
[more]

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Carl Sandburg - American Writers 97
University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers
Gay Wilson Allen
University of Minnesota Press, 1972

Carl Sandburg - American Writers 97 was first published in 1972. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

[more]

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Carla Bley
Amy C. Beal
University of Illinois Press, 2011

This is the first comprehensive treatment of the remarkable music and influence of Carla Bley, a highly innovative American jazz composer, pianist, organist, band leader, and activist. With fastidious attention to Bley's diverse compositions over the last fifty years spanning critical moments in jazz and experimental music history, Amy C. Beal tenders a long-overdue representation of a major figure in American music.

Best known for her jazz opera "Escalator over the Hill," her role in the Free Jazz movement of the 1960s, and her collaborations with artists such as Jack Bruce, Don Cherry, Robert Wyatt, and Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason, Bley has successfully maneuvered the field of jazz from highly accessible, tradition-based contexts to commercially unviable, avant-garde works. Beal details the staggering variety in Bley's work as well as her use of parody, quotations, and contradictions, examining the vocabulary Bley has developed throughout her career and highlighting the compositional and cultural significance of her experimentalism.

Beal also points to Bley's professional and managerial work as a pioneer in the development of artist-owned record labels, the cofounder and manager of WATT Records, and the cofounder of New Music Distribution Service. Showing her to be not just an artist but an activist who has maintained musical independence and professional control amid the profit-driven, corporation-dominated world of commercial jazz, Beal's straightforward discussion of Bley's life and career will stimulate deeper examinations of her work.

[more]

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The Carleton Bigamy Trial
Mary Carleton
Iter Press, 2023
Multiple conflicting perspectives come together in this collection to provide a Rashomon-style account of marriage, fraud, and trickery in seventeenth-century England.
 
Mary Carleton was an ordinary woman from Canterbury who entered historical records when she was accused of bigamy. The seven pamphlets in this edition focus on the bigamy trial of Mary Carleton, in which the accused eloquently defends herself and is ultimately acquitted. Written in the early years of the English Restoration, they demonstrate that narratives presenting what “she said” and what “he said” can reveal, forcefully and painfully, how truth can be fragmented in the different arenas of law, love, and politics. Through their disparate accounts of a marriage gone wrong, these pamphlets reinforce the social status quo even while they radically shatter the very foundations that give it heft. In asking readers to question absolutes, they unmask the precarious relationship between words and the world.
 
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Carlos Lacerda, Brazilian Crusader
Volume I: The Years 1914-1960
By John W. F. Dulles
University of Texas Press, 1991

Playwright, journalist, and spectacularly successful governor, Carlos Lacerda was Brazil's foremost orator in the 20th century and its most controversial politician. He might have become president in the 1960s had not the military taken over. In the words of eminent historian José Honório Rodrigues, "No one person influenced the Brazilian historical process as much as Carlos Lacerda from 1945 to 1968."

In this volume, the first of a two-volume biography, Professor Dulles paints a portrait of a rebellious youth, who had the willfulness of his prominent father and who crusaded for Communism before becoming its most outspoken foe. Recalling Lacerda's rallying cry, "Brazil must be shaken up," Dulles traces the career of the journalist whose unsparing attacks on the men in power led authorities to imprison him and employ thugs who pummeled him physically. The story covers events in which Lacerda helped alter Brazil, such as the redemocratization in 1945 and his revelation of scandals in high places in the early 1950s. An unsuccessful attempt by government men to murder him in 1954 led to the suicide of President Getulio Vargas in 1954.

Lacerda's spirited oratory helped him become Brazil's most popular congressman, but it scared the rulers of Brazil and they prohibited the broadcast of his speeches after he returned from exile in 1956. Their effort to deprive him of his mandate stirred the entire nation and culminated in one of the most dramatic sessions ever held in the Chamber of Deputies.

Dulles, who knew Lacerda well and had access to his papers, sheds light on Lacerda the man, ardent in courtship and in all his undertakings, intellectually restless, and scornful of routine and mediocrity. Lacerda had a vitriolic pen that made bitter enemies, but, as disclosed in these pages, his courage and incorruptibility attracted an enthusiastic following, evident in the landslide election victories that brought him seats on Rio de Janeiro's city council and in the federal Congress.

[more]

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Carlos Lacerda, Brazilian Crusader
Volume II: The Years 1960-1977
By John W. F. Dulles
University of Texas Press, 1991

From reviews of Volume I:

"Brazilian Crusader is no doubt the best biography yet produced on Lacerda and the second volume . . . is certainly worth waiting for."

Luso-Brazilian Review

Journalist and spectacularly successful governor, Carlos Lacerda was Brazil's foremost orator in the 20th century and its most controversial politician. He might have become president in the 1960s had not the military taken over.

In the first volume, John F. W. Dulles paints a portrait of a rebellious youth, who had the willfulness of his prominent father and who crusaded for Communism before becoming its most outspoken foe. Recalling Lacerda's rallying cry, "Brazil must be shaken up," Dulles traces the career of the journalist whose unsparing attacks on the men in power led authorities to imprison him and employ thugs who pummeled him physically. Lacerda's spirited oratory helped him become Brazil's most popular congressman, but it scared the rulers of Brazil, who prohibited the broadcast of his speeches after he returned from exile in 1956. Their effort to deprive him of his mandate stirred the entire nation and culminated in one of the most dramatic sessions ever held in the Chamber of Deputies.

In the second and final volume, Dulles explores the political and private life of Lacerda from 1960, when he became governor of Brazil's Guanabara state, until his death in 1977. Dulles focuses particularly on the years 1960 to 1968, in which Lacerda played a central role in some of the most drastic political changes that Brazil has experienced in this century.

Lacerda's story ranges from the headlines constantly generated by his political attacks and journalistic sensationalism to private moments of personal tragedy. In telling his story, Dulles draws on hundreds of interviews, as well as extensive research in press archives, Lacerda's public papers, and the private collections of Lacerda's family and associates. This material paints a compelling portrait of an honest administrator who alienated top figures in politics, the press, and the military.

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Carol and John Steinbeck
Portrait of a Marriage
Susan Shillinglaw
University of Nevada Press, 2013
Carol Henning Steinbeck, writer John Steinbeck’s first wife, was his creative anchor, the inspiration for his great work of the 1930s, culminating in The Grapes of Wrath. Meeting at Lake Tahoe in 1928, their attachment was immediate, their personalities meshing in creative synergy. Carol was unconventional, artistic, and compelling. In the formative years of Steinbeck’s career, living in San Francisco, Pacific Grove, Los Gatos, and Monterey, their Modernist circle included Ed Ricketts, Joseph Campbell, and Lincoln Steffens. In many ways Carol’s story is all too familiar: a creative and intelligent woman subsumes her own life and work into that of her husband. Together, they brought forth one of the enduring novels of the 20th century. 
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Caroline Quarlls and the Underground Railroad
Julia Pferdehirt
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2008
On July 4th, 1842, Caroline Quarlls left family, friends, and the only life she'd known behind in St. Louis, Missouri. As the child of a slave mother and a slave-owner father, her young life was one of drudgery and obedience until that fateful Independence Day when she illegally took a steamboat across the Mississippi River from St. Louis to Alton, Illinois, in the hope of reaching freedom.
 
With the help of abolitionists, the 16-year-old traveled through Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Michigan on the Underground Railroad, enduring long, bumpy rides in the bottom of a wagon and taking cover in everything from barrels to potato chutes. Each step of the way, Quarlls was pursued by lawyers paid to retrieve her and bounty hunters greedy for the reward money. Finally, she crossed from Detroit into Sandwich, Canada, where created a new life as a free woman, an exciting but also frightening, experience. Quarlls' story gives young readers a personal snapshot of the tension-filled journey of a runaway slave while illuminating a segment of the complicated history of race in our nation.
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Cas Walker
Stories on His Life and Legend
Joshua S. Hodge
University of Tennessee Press, 2019

Businessman, politician, broadcasting personality, and newspaper publisher, Cas Walker (1902–1998) was, by his own estimation, a “living legend” in Knoxville for much of the twentieth century. Renowned for his gravelly voice and country-boy persona, he rose from blue-collar beginnings to make a fortune as a grocer whose chain of supermarkets extended from East Tennessee into Virginia and Kentucky. To promote his stores, he hosted a local variety show, first on radio and then TV, that advanced the careers of many famed country music artists from a young Dolly Parton to Roy Acuff, Chet Atkins, and Bill Monroe. As a member of the Knoxville city council, he championed the “little man” while ceaselessly irritating the people he called the “silk-stocking crowd.” 

This wonderfully entertaining book brings together selections from interviews with a score of Knoxvillians, various newspaper accounts, Walker’s own autobiography, and other sources to present a colorful mosaic of Walker’s life. The stories range from his flamboyant advertising schemes—as when he buried a man alive outside one of his stores—to memories of his inimitable managerial style—as when he infamously canned the Everly Brothers because he didn’t like it when they began performing rock ’n’ roll. Further recollections call to mind Walker’s peculiar brand of bare-knuckle politics, his generosity to people in need, his stance on civil rights, and his lifelong love of coon hunting (and coon dogs). The book also traces his decline, hastened in part by a successful libel suit brought against his muckraking weekly newspaper, the Watchdog. 

It’s said that any Knoxvillian born before 1980 has a Cas Walker story. In relating many of those stories in the voices of those who still remember him, this book not only offers an engaging portrait of the man himself and his checkered legacy, but also opens a new window into the history and culture of the city in which he lived and thrived. 

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Casanova the Irresistible
Translated and with an Introduction by Armine Kotin Mortimer
University of Illinois Press, 2016
His is a name synonymous with seduction. His was a life lived without limits. Giacomo Casanova left behind thousands of pages detailing his years among Europe's notable and noble. In Casanova the Irresistible, Philippe Sollers--prolific intellectual and revered visionary of the French avant-garde--proffers a lively reading of and guide to the famed libertine's sprawling memoir.
 
Armine Kotin Mortimer's translation of Sollers's reading tracks the alluring Venetian through the whole of his astounding and disreputable life. Eschewing myth, Sollers dares to present the plain realities of a man "simple, direct, courageous, cultivated, seductive, funny. A philosopher in action." The lovers are here, and the ruses and adventures. But Sollers also rescues Casanova the writer, a gifted composer of words who reigns as a titan of eighteenth-century literature. As always, Sollers seeks to shame society for its failure to recognize its failings. By admiring those of Casanova's admirable qualities present in himself, Sollers spurns bourgeois hypocrisy and cliché to affirm a jocund philosophy of life devoted to the twinned pursuits of pleasure and joy.
 
A masterful translation that captures Sollers's idiosyncratic style, Casanova the Irresistible escorts readers on a journey into the heads and hearts of two singular personalities.
 
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The Case of the Slave-Child, Med
Free Soil in Antislavery Boston
Karen Woods Weierman
University of Massachusetts Press, 2019
In 1836, an enslaved six-year-old girl named Med was brought to Boston by a woman from New Orleans who claimed her as property. Learning of the girl's arrival in the city, the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS) waged a legal fight to secure her freedom and affirm the free soil of Massachusetts. While Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw ruled quite narrowly in the case that enslaved people brought to Massachusetts could not be held against their will, BFASS claimed a broad victory for the abolitionist cause, and Med was released to the care of a local institution. When she died two years later, celebration quickly turned to silence, and her story was soon forgotten. As a result, Commonwealth v. Aves is little known outside of legal scholarship. In this book, Karen Woods Weierman complicates Boston's identity as the birthplace of abolition and the cradle of liberty, and restores Med to her rightful place in antislavery history by situating her story in the context of other writings on slavery, childhood, and the law.
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Casper Jaggi
Master Swiss Cheese Maker
Jerry Apps
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2008
Have you ever wondered why Swiss cheese has holes? You'll find out in this story about a Swiss cheese maker named Casper Jaggi. Casper Jaggi was only six years old when his father taught him how to make cheese in the Swiss Alps. In 1913, Jaggi left Switzerland in search of new opportunities in the United States. Like many other Swiss, he settled in Green County, Wisconsin, where the rolling hills dotted with grazing cows reminded him of home. And soon, he'd be turning cow's milk into cheese, just as he did in Switzerland.

The book opens the doors to Jaggi's Brodhead Swiss Cheese Factory - largest factory of its kind in Wisconsin in the 1950s. Archival photos help illustrate, step-by-step, the process Jaggi and his workers followed to transform 2,000 pounds of milk in a copper kettle into a 200-pound wheel of Swiss cheese.
 
Jaggi was one of the many European immigrants who helped establish Wisconsin's reputation for delicious cheese. The artisan cheese makers crafting award-winning cheeses today are continuing this rich tradition in America's Dairyland.
 
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Cass Hite
The Life of an Old Prospector
James H. Knipmeyer
University of Utah Press, 2016
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Cass Hite was a well-known prospector in the Glen Canyon area of southern Utah. He lived as a recluse yet knew most of the river runners, trekkers, cowboys, and Native Americans that passed through the region. He often wrote to newspapers and was in turn sought out by reporters for his vibrant comments. Hite followed the trail of gold and silver to destinations throughout the West—a time recounted in a memoir he penned in rhyming verse. After his death, his name remained prominent in the region. The tiny hamlet of Hite was an important ferry crossing of the Colorado River (since replaced by a bridge), and the nearby Hite Marina kept the name in the public eye for thousands of boaters.

Despite this notoriety, no one has written a full-length, scholarly account of Hite’s life. This biography fills that void, detailing Hite’s story from his birth in central Illinois in 1845 to his death in Glen Canyon in 1914. It corrects some of the long-accepted stories about Hite and puts others in their proper perspective, while revealing new information. Scores of photographs and excerpts from Hite’s own writing further illuminate this colorful prospector’s life. 
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Cast in Deathless Bronze
Andrew Rowan, the Spanish-American War, and the Origins of American Empire
Donald Tunnicliff Rice
West Virginia University Press, 2016
In 1898, when war with Spain seemed inevitable, Andrew Summers Rowan, an American army lieutenant from West Virginia, was sent on a secret mission to Cuba. He was to meet with General Calixto García, a leader of the Cuban rebels, in order to gather information for a U.S. invasion. Months later, after the war was fought and won, a flamboyant entrepreneur named Elbert Hubbard wrote an account of Rowan’s mission titled “A Message to García.” It sold millions of copies, and Rowan became the equivalent of a modern-day rock star. His fame resulted in hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles, radio shows, and two movies. Even today he is held up as an exemplar of bravery and loyalty. The problem is that nothing Hubbard wrote about Rowan was true.
 
Donald Tunnicliff Rice reveals the facts behind the story of “A Message to García” while using Rowan’s biography as a window into the history of the Spanish-American War, the Philippine War, and the Moro Rebellion. The result is a compellingly written narrative containing many details never before published in any form, and also an accessible perspective on American diplomatic and military history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
 
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Castle Valley America
Hard Land, Hard-won Home
Nancy Taniguchi
Utah State University Press, 2004

This is American history told through the stories of an atypical, for Utah, region. Castle Valley is roughly conterminous with two counties, Carbon and Emery, which together formed a rural, industrial enclave in a mostly desert environment behind the mountain range that borders Utah's principal corridor of settlement. In Castle Valley, coal mining and the railroad attracted diverse, multiethnic communities and a fair share of historic characters, from Butch Cassidy, who stole its largest payroll, to Mother Jones, who helped organize its workers against its mining companies. Among the last major segments of the state to be settled, it was also a generally poor region that stretched the capabilities of people to scratch a living from a harsh landscape.

The people of Castle Valley experienced complex, unusual combinations of both social cohesion and conflict, but they struggled through poverty, labor disputes, major mining disasters, and other challenges to build communities whose stories reflected the historical course of the nation as a whole. In order to convey her subject's both unique and representative qualities, Nancy Taniguchi has written an epic history that is not just local history, but American history written locally.

Nancy J. Taniguchi, who lived for thirteen years in Castle Valley and was previously on the faculty of the College of Eastern Utah in Price, is professor of history at California State University, Stanislaus. She is the author of numerous published articles in mining, legal, women's, western, and Utah history and of one book, Necessary Fraud: Progressive Reform
and Utah Coal
.

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Catalyst for Controversy
Paul Carus of Open Court
Harold Henderson
Southern Illinois University Press, 2009

"I am not a common atheist; I am an atheist who loves God."—Paul Carus, "The God of Science," 1904

In the summer of 1880, while teaching at the military academy of the Royal Corps of Cadets of Saxony in Dresden, Paul Carus published a brief pamphlet denying the literal truth of scripture and describing the Bible as a great literary work comparable to the Odyssey.

This unremarkable document was Carus’s first step in a wide-ranging intellectual voyage in which he traversed philosophy, science, religion, mathematics, history, music, literature, and social and political issues. The Royal Corps, Carus later reported, found his published views "not in harmony with the Christian spirit, in accordance with which the training and education of the Corps of Cadets should be conducted." And so the corps offered the young teacher the choice of asking "most humbly for forgiveness for daring to have an opinion of my own and to express it, perhaps even promise to publish nothing more on religious matters, or to give up my post. I chose the latter. . . . There was thus no other choice for me but to emigrate and, trusting in my own powers, to establish for myself a new home." His resignation was effective on Easter Sunday, 1881.

Carus toured the Rhine, lived briefly in Belgium, and taught in a military college in England to learn English well enough to "thrive in the United States." By late 1884 or early 1885 he was on his way to the New World. Thriving in the United States proved more difficult than it had in England, but before 1885 ended he had published his first philosophical work in English, Monism and Meliorism. The book was not widely read, but it did reach Edward C. Hegeler, a La Salle, Illinois, zinc processor who became his father-in-law as well as his ideological and financial backer.

Established in La Salle, Carus began the work that would place him among the prominent American philosophers of his day and make the Open Court Publishing Company a leading publisher of philosophical, scientific, and religious books. He edited The Open Court and The Monist, offering the finest view of Oriental thought and religion then available in the West, and sought unsuccessfully to bring about a second World Parliament of Religions. He befriended physicist-philosopher Ernst Mach. For eleven years he employed D. T. Suzuki, who later became a great Zen Buddhist teacher. He published more articles by Charles S. Peirce, now viewed as one of the great world philosophers, in The Monist than appeared in any other publication.

Biographer Harold Henderson concludes his study of this remarkable man: "Whenever anyone is so fired with an idea that he or she can’t wait to write it down, there the spirit of Paul Carus remains, as he would have wished, active in the world."

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Catarino Garza's Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border
Elliott Young
Duke University Press, 2004
Catarino Garza’s Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border rescues an understudied episode from the footnotes of history. On September 15, 1891, Garza, a Mexican journalist and political activist, led a band of Mexican rebels out of South Texas and across the Rio Grande, declaring a revolution against Mexico’s dictator, Porfirio Díaz. Made up of a broad cross-border alliance of ranchers, merchants, peasants, and disgruntled military men, Garza’s revolution was the largest and longest lasting threat to the Díaz regime up to that point. After two years of sporadic fighting, the combined efforts of the U.S. and Mexican armies, Texas Rangers, and local police finally succeeded in crushing the rebellion. Garza went into exile and was killed in Panama in 1895.

Elliott Young provides the first full-length analysis of the revolt and its significance, arguing that Garza’s rebellion is an important and telling chapter in the formation of the border between Mexico and the United States and in the histories of both countries. Throughout the nineteenth century, the borderlands were a relatively coherent region. Young analyzes archival materials, newspapers, travel accounts, and autobiographies from both countries to show that Garza’s revolution was more than just an effort to overthrow Díaz. It was part of the long struggle of borderlands people to maintain their autonomy in the face of two powerful and encroaching nation-states and of Mexicans in particular to protect themselves from being economically and socially displaced by Anglo Americans. By critically examining the different perspectives of military officers, journalists, diplomats, and the Garzistas themselves, Young exposes how nationalism and its preeminent symbol, the border, were manufactured and resisted along the Rio Grande.
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Catch and Release
An Oregon Life in Politics
Les AuCoin
Oregon State University Press, 2019
In 1974, at the age of thirty-two, Les AuCoin became the first Democrat to win a US House seat in Oregon’s First District. He was one of the post-Watergate reformers who shook up an insular, autocratic Congress and led fights for affordable housing, “trickle-up” economics, wilderness protection, abortion rights, and nuclear arms control. In the 1980s, the Oregonian called him “the most powerful congressman in Oregon.”
 
In this compelling collection of life stories, AuCoin traces his unlikely rise from a fatherless childhood in Central Oregon to the top ranks of national power. Then came a painful defeat in one of the most controversial races in US Senate history, against incumbent Bob Packwood.
 
A fly fisher, AuCoin uses “catch and release” as a metaphor for succeeding and letting go of loss with dignity and equanimity. His memories are in turn funny, suspenseful, and revealing. AuCoin takes us to the Kremlin, pre-industrial China, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and into the tortuous politics of the Northwest spotted owl crisis. He interacted with world figures like Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan, House Speakers Tip O’Neill and Jim Wright, and Oregon legends Tom McCall and Mark Hatfield. Closer to home, AuCoin allied himself with activists like Sidney Lasseigne of the Newport Fishermen’s Wives.
 
Catch and Release offers readers a revealing glimpse behind the scenes of congressional life, as lived by the 535 souls who inhabit the US House and Senate—including the author, who assesses his own strengths and foibles with humility and candor.
 
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Cattle In The Cold Desert, Expanded Edition
James A. Young
University of Nevada Press, 2002

A sophisticated ecological analysis of ranching in northern Nevada featuring a new chapter and new epilogue by the authors.First published in 1985, Cattle in the Cold Desert has become a classic in the environmental history of the Great Basin, brilliantly combining a lively account of the development of the Great Basin grazing industry with a detailed scientific discussion of the ecology of its sagebrush/grassland plant communities. The volume traces the history of white settlement in the Great Basin from about 1860, along with the arrival of herds of cattle and sheep to exploit the forage resources of a pristine environment and, through the history of John Sparks, a pioneer cattleman, illustrates how the herdsmen interacted with the sagebrush/grasslands of the cold desert West. As the story unfolds on two levels—that of the herdsmen adapting their livelihood to the challenging conditions of the Great Basin's scanty forage, aridity, and fierce winters, and that of the fragile ecology of the desert plant communities responding to the presence of huge herds of livestock—we see the results of a grand experiment initiated by men willing to venture beyond the limits of accepted environmental potential to settle the Great Basin, as well as the often ruinous consequences of the introduction of domestic livestock into the plant communities of the region. The result is a remarkably balanced and insightful discussion of the grazing industry in the Intermountain West. This new paperback edition includes an additional chapter that addresses the impact of wild mustangs on the Great Basin rangelands, and an epilogue that discusses changes in rangeland management and in rangeland conditions, especially the impact of recent wildfires. As concern over the future of the Great Basin's unique rangeland environment and its principal agricultural industry grows, Cattle in the Cold Desert remains essential reading for everyone who cares about this underappreciated region of the American West.

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Cedar
The Life and Music of Cedar Walton
Ben Markley
University of North Texas Press, 2023

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Celebrity Chefs of New Jersey
Their Stories, Recipes, and Secrets
Teresa Politano
Rutgers University Press, 2010
One demanding New Jersey chef once tied his cooks to the stove by their apron strings. Another was such a finicky eater as a child, he refused to allow his cereal to touch his milk. One was kissed by Fidel Castro, another played onstage with Todd Rundgren. Celebrity Chefs of New Jersey peeks into the kitchens and the lives of some of the most famous chefs in the Garden State, where foodies and other gourmands will discover passions, kitchen secrets, life lessons, and signature recipes.

Not so long ago, perhaps even just at the turn of this century, it was easy to lament the lack of sophisticated food in New Jersey. Oh sure, a few restaurants always sparkled, but, for the most part, New Jerseyans looked across at the bright lights of the big city, wistfully yearning for a table in glamorous Manhattan. Now, however, the most sought- after tables are right here and we have the best seats in the house, made even sweeter perhaps because they're our own little secret. We can dine frequently and dine well, with a smug sense that if only New Yorkers knew, they'd be looking across the river wishing they were us.

In Celebrity Chefs of New Jersey, Teresa Politano profiles Craig Shelton, the chef who crystallized New Jersey's place in culinary history with his legendary Ryland Inn, along with other chefs, telling their personal stories of both creativity and survival. Some of these men and women rose from humble or difficult childhoods to fame in the food world. Others were not only talented but lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. Their stories are arranged into three categories: legends, stars, and chefs to watch, and then topped off with a sweet surprise finish. Politano includes photographs, cooking secrets, and some of their sought-after signature recipes that are sophisticated but manageable for the skilled home chef.
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Celluloid Activist
The Life and Times of Vito Russo
Michael Schiavi
University of Wisconsin Press, 2011
Celluloid Activist is the biography of gay-rights giant Vito Russo, the man who wrote The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, commonly regarded as the foundational text of gay and lesbian film studies and one of the first to be widely read.
            But Russo was much more than a pioneering journalist and author. A founding member of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) and cofounder of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), Russo lived at the center of the most important gay cultural turning points in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. His life as a cultural Zelig intersects a crucial period of social change, and in some ways his story becomes the story of a developing gay revolution in America. A frequent participant at “zaps” and an organizer of Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) cabarets and dances—which gave the New York gay and lesbian community its first social alternative to Mafia-owned bars—Russo made his most enduring contribution to the GAA with his marshaling of “Movie Nights,” the forerunners to his worldwide Celluloid Closet lecture tours that gave gay audiences their first community forum for the dissection of gay imagery in mainstream film.            Biographer Michael Schiavi unravels Vito Russo’s fascinating life story, from his childhood in East Harlem to his own heartbreaking experiences with HIV/AIDS. Drawing on archival materials, unpublished letters and journals, and more than two hundred interviews, including conversations with a range of Russo’s friends and family from brother Charlie Russo to comedian Lily Tomlin to pioneering activist and playwright Larry Kramer, Celluloid Activistprovides an unprecedented portrait of a man who defined gay-rights and AIDS activism.

“Schiavi tells a compelling story in this biography—from his re-creation of life on the streets of East Harlem and in Greenwich Village of the 1960s and 1970s to the way he conveys Russo’s excitement about his film research and popular education to his account of the AIDS years in New York City.”—John D’Emilio, Italian American Review 

“In [Schiavi’s] hands Russo’s life is both fascinating in its own right and a window into a larger milieu of activism during two critical decades.”—Italian American Review
 
Best Special Interest Books, selected by the American Association of School Librarians

Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Reviewers

Finalist, Gay Memoir/Biography, Lambda Literary Awards

Finalist, Over the Rainbow Selection, American Library Association
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CENTENARY ED WORKS NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
VOL. VI, TRUE STORIES FROM HISTORY AND B
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
The Ohio State University Press, 1972
"Because it represents the first scholarly effort to establish texts as close as possible to the intentions of the author, this Centenary Edition makes obsolete all previous editions, notorious for their textual corruption. An eminent staff . . . has analyzed and synthesized the evidence of all MSS and worthwhile printed editions. Each volume includes a well documented introduction concerning such matters as circumstances leading to composition and history of publication as well as textual notes on alterations in the MSS, editorial emendations, etc." --Choice "The Centenary Edition, which has been producing weighty volumes of definitively edited texts of Hawthorne for a full generation, is now the sine qua non of Hawthorne scholarship. As an example of editorial care and research thoroughness it has been a model for the profession and as a physical object a model for publishers. In addition to the immensely important achievement of producing fully accurate texts of the romances, tales, and sketches, the Centenary editors have made available, for the very first time, all of the various Notebooks and letters. For the letters, especially, the wait has been long but the result is gratifying. Reading straight through the Centenary's six volumes of letters is a self-indulgent pleasure that brings us markedly closer to the man than we can get in any other way." --American Literature Representing decades of work, this is the definitive edition of Hawthorne's works. Each volume includes comprehensive notes and explanatory material. I: The Scarlet Letter $62.95 cloth 0-8142-0059-1 II: The House of the Seven Gables $69.95 cloth 0-8142-0060-5 III: The Blithedale Romance and Fanshawe $72.95 cloth 0-8142-0061-3 IV: The Marble Faun $83.95 cloth 0-8142-0062-1 V: Our Old Home $72.95 cloth 0-8142-0002-8 VI: True Stories from History and Biography $72.95 cloth 0-8142-0157-1 VII: A Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales $72.95 cloth 0-8142-0158-X VIII: The American Notebooks $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0159-8 IX: Twice-told Tales $83.95 cloth 0-8142-0202-0 X: Mosses from an Old Manse $83.95 cloth 0-8142-0203-9 XI: The Snow Image and Uncollected Tales $72.95 cloth 0-8142-0204-7 XII: The American Claimant Manuscripts $83.95 cloth 0-8142-0251-9 XIII: The Elixir of Life Manuscripts $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0252-7 XIV: The French and Italian Notebooks $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0256-X XV: The Letters, 1813-1843 $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0363-9 XVI: The Letters, 1843-1853 $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0364-7 XVII: The Letters, 1853-1856 $83.95 cloth 0-8142-0365-5 XVIII: The Letters, 1857-1864 $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0383-3 XIX: The Consular Letters, 1853-1855 $83.95 cloth 0-8142-0384-1 XX: The Consular Letters, 1856-1857 $83.95 cloth 0-8142-0462-7 XXI: The English Notebooks, 1853-1856 $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0670-0 XXII: The English Notebooks, 1856-1860 $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0671-9 XXIII: Miscellaneous Prose and Verse $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0644-1
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Central Standard
A Time, a Place, a Family
Patrick Irelan
University of Iowa Press, 2002

 Not so long ago, the Rock Island Railroad was a household name, the Great Depression was a recent memory, and family farms dotted the landscape. Today, the great railroads have nearly disappeared, the Depression is a chapter in history books, and family farms are hard to come by. Yet this time is not forgotten.

In Central Standard: A Time, a Place, a Family, Patrick Irelan vividly recaptures a remarkable era in midwestern history in twenty-four beautifully crafted and often witty essays. Beginning with his parents’ marriage in 1932 and continuing into the present, Irelan relates the many wonderful stories and experiences of his Davis County, Iowa, family. In “Country Living,” he describes his parents’ disheartening life as farmers during the worst years of the Depression. “The CB&Q” then relates the happiest years of his family’s life when his parents lived and worked in the Burlington Railroad depots of rural Nebraska.

Irelan’s tales of hard times and harder work, family meals and talkative relatives, depots and farmsteads paint a brilliant yet deceptively simple portrait of one rural, working-class family. At its heart, Central Standard carries a greater message: it reminds us of the enduring strength of the American family.

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The Ceramic Career of M. Louise McLaughlin
Anita J. Ellis
Ohio University Press, 2003

In 1877 the thirty-year-old artist Mary Louise McLaughlin wrote China Painting, the first manual on the subject in the United States written by a woman for women. Extremely successful, it is now accepted as the book that launched the china painting movement in America.

When in 1898 McLaughlin decided to produce porcelain, the most difficult of ceramics, she showed the determination and exactitude that were her trademarks. Already renowned as a ceramicist, she became the first to produce studio porcelain in America and the first to discover the technique for decorating under the glaze. Her work was welcomed with enthusiasm in New York and Paris.

Despite the enormous influence of Mary Louise McLaughlin on the history of American ceramics, Anita Ellis’s The Ceramic Career of M. Louise McLaughlin is the first definitive study dedicated to her accomplishments.

Anita Ellis depicts the many challenges McLaughlin encountered in pursuit of her ultimately successful career. Not the least of these was her rivalry with the formidable Maria Longworth Nichols, fellow Cincinnatian and founder of the Rookwood Pottery Company. Another was that of being a woman in the arts: her primary goal had been to paint portraits on canvas, but Victorian society did not afford opportunities in what was considered a male sphere.

Replete with historic photos and color illustrations of many of McLaughlin’s works, The Ceramic Career of M. Louise McLaughlin is a tribute to a woman artist who rose to one of the most esteemed positions in her field.

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A Cezanne in the Hedge and Other Memories of Charleston and Bloomsbury
Edited by Hugh Lee
University of Chicago Press, 1992
The Bloomsbury circle has long preoccupied writers, critics, and the general public alike. For many years its focal point was Charleston Farmhouse in Sussex, home to Vanessa and Clive Bell and Duncan Grant. A Cézanne in the Hedge brings together thirty firsthand reminiscences of the Charleston, vividly and amusingly evoking its creativity—and eccentricity. Childhood memories from Quentin Bell, Angelica Garnett, and Nigel Nicholson are interspersed with appraisals of the work of Bloomsbury members such as Roger Fry, Maynard Keynes, and Virginia Woolf and of their contribution to twentieth-century British art and thought. The finale is a childhood spoof written by Virginia Woolf entitled "A Terrible Tragedy in a Duckpond."
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Chaim Weizmann
A Biography
Jehuda Reinharz and Motti Golani
Brandeis University Press, 2024
A magisterial biography of Israel’s first president.
 
In Chaim Weizmann: A Biography, Jehuda Reinharz and Motti Golani show how Weizmann, a leader of the World Zionist Organization who became the first president of Israel, advocated for a Jewish state by gaining the support of influential politicians and statesmen as well as Jews around the world. Beginning with his childhood in Belorussia and concluding with his tenure as president, Reinharz and Golani describe how a Russian Jew, who immigrated to the United Kingdom in the early twentieth century, was able to advance the goals of Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist Organization. Weizmann is also shown as a man of human foibles—his infatuations, political machinations, and elitism—as well as a man of admirable qualities—intelligence, wit, charisma, and dedication.
 
Weizmann, who came to the UK to work as a biochemist, was in regular communication with British political figures, including prime ministers Arthur James Balfour, David Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, and Ramsay MacDonald. He also met presidents of the United States from Woodrow Wilson to Harry Truman. His success in earning the support of British political figures helped lead to the Balfour Declaration, which advocated for a “national home” for the Jewish people in Palestine.

As the authors show in this authoritative account of Weizmann’s life, Weizmann was guided by the belief that “Zion shall be redeemed in justice,” a phrase that recurs often in his writings.
 
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Chains of Love
Slave Couples in Antebellum South Carolina
Emily West
University of Illinois Press, 2004
Historians have traditionally neglected relationships between slave men and women during the antebellum period. In Chains of Love, historian Emily West remedies this situation by investigating the social and cultural history of slave relationships in the very heart of the South. 
 
Focusing on South Carolina, West deals directly with the most intimate areas of the slave experience including courtship, love and affection between spouses, the abuse of slave women by white men, and the devastating consequences of forced separations. Slaves fought these separations through cross-gender bonding and cross-plantation marriages, illustrating West's thesis about slave marriage as a fierce source of resistance to the oppression of slavery in general.
 
Making expert use of sources such as the Works Progress Administration narratives, slave autobiographies, slave owner records, and church records, this book-length study is the first to focus on the primacy of spousal support as a means for facing oppression. Chains of Love provides telling insights into the nature of the slave family that emerged from these tensions, celebrates its strength, and reveals new dimensions to the slaves' struggle for freedom.  
 
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Chairman of the Board
A Biography of Carl A. Gerstacker
E. N. Brandt
Michigan State University Press, 2003

Carl A. Gerstacker was born in 1916 in Cleveland, Ohio. At an early age his father, Rollin, instilled in him an interest in finance and the stock market. In 1930, when Carl turned fourteen, Rollin advised his son to withdraw his paper-route and odd-job money from a local bank and invest it all in The Dow Chemical Company. It was the beginning of a relationship that would last a lifetime. After high school, Carl landed an hourly position with Dow Chemical as a lab assistant and, at the same time, pursued an engineering degree at the University of Michigan as part of the company’s student training course. After graduating in 1938, Gerstacker continued to work for Dow Chemical until the outbreak of World War II when he joined the U.S. Army. Returning to civilian life in 1946, he was rehired by Dow and quickly moved up the corporate ladder, becoming Treasurer in 1949, Vice-President in 1955, and Chairman of the Board in 1960, a position he retained until 1976. He retired five years later in 1981. 
     Carl Gerstacker was a business leader who believed that every company had a special personality and that the Dow personality was largely shaped by its employees. “For Dow Chemical, people are the most important asset, not the patents, the plants, nor the products.” Gerstacker’s personal financial acumen was rivaled only by his own contributions to the sound corporate growth of Dow Chemical, a business he loved and to which he devoted his life. Gerstacker died in 1995, leaving a legacy that lives on in the form of numerous philanthropic endeavors he began during his lifetime and on whose boards he once served. Carl A. Gerstacker was one of the towering figures of twentieth-century American industry.

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Challenging the Daley Machine
A Chicago Alderman's Memoir
Leon M. Despres
Northwestern University Press, 2005
Winner, 2006 Illinois State Historical Society Book Award
Winner, 2007 The Hyde Park Historical Society Paul Cornell Award

Political war stories from a thorn in the side of Chicago's famous Boss

In 1955, south-sider Leon Despres was elected to the Chicago City Council-the same year that Paddy Bauler famously uttered that "Chicago ain't ready for reform." Ready or not, Chicago got twenty years of reform efforts from Despres, one of the few independents in the council and the most liberal alderman in the city. His demand to cut out the corrupt sale of city driveway permits made him enemies from the very beginning. Over the years his crusades to ban discrimination, preserve Chicago landmark buildings, and gain equality for African-Americans-when Daley-beholden African-American council members refused to help-threw wrench after wrench into the Machine. And, not incidentally, changed the city.

But Challenging the Daley Machine is more than a memoir. It's a historical portrait of the way things were done under the Boss, when changing times and a changing city forced the Machine to confront the problems Despres championed. His battles against the seemingly monolithic Machine are also an inspiration to anyone who is facing long odds, but is convinced he/she is on the side of right.
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Chamberlain
Graham Macklin
Haus Publishing, 2006
Former British Prime Minister who will always be remembered for his appeasement policy towards Hitler.
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Chamfort
A Biography
Claude Arnaud
University of Chicago Press, 1992
Sébastien Roch Nicolas Chamfort (1740-1794), whom Nietzsche called the "wittiest of all moralists," is now known for little more than brillian aphorisms that captivated a long line of thinkers, from Stendhal to Cioran, Schopenhauer to Camus. Yet the fascination of Chamfort's life is barely suggested by the fragments of writing that have survived him. In Claude Arnaud's captivating biography, Chamfort the libertine, playwright, journalist, and revolutionary stands revealed as the most telling emblem of his times.
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A Chance for Love
The World War II Letters of Marian Elizabeth Smith and Lt. Eugene T. Petersen, USMCR
Eugene Peterson
Michigan State University Press, 1998

In mid-February 1944 Marian Elizabeth Smith, a young Wisconsin woman, met Marine Corps Lieutenant Eugene T. Petersen on the passenger train, El Capitan, as it made its 42-hour run from Los Angeles to Chicago. After a brief acquaintance, he left the United States to join the Third Marine Division on Guam and eventually to take part in the battle for Iwo Jima in February and March of 1945. The collected letters of their subsequent 18-month correspondence reveal much about wartime life at home and abroad. This correspondence represents a time capsule of current events as Smith and Petersen discuss Franklin Roosevelt, the United Nations, internationalism, popular movies, the French aviator and poet Antoine de St. Exupery, the comic strip Barnaby, and the frustrations of dealing with sometimes less-than- enlightened parents. The loss of Marian's brother during the bombing of Ploesti, Rumania, in June 1944, brought Petersen and Smith closer together, and after hundreds of letters the "chance for love" Marian had suggested early in their correspondence evolved into a marriage that has endured for more than half a century.  

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A Chancellor's Tale
Transforming Academic Medicine
Ralph Snyderman, MD
Duke University Press, 2016
During his fifteen years as chancellor, Dr. Ralph Snyderman helped create new paradigms for academic medicine while guiding the Duke University Medical Center through periods of great challenge and transformation. Under his leadership, the medical center became internationally known for its innovations in medicine, including the creation of the Duke University Health System—which became a model for integrated health care delivery—and the development of personalized health care based on a rational and compassionate model of care. In A Chancellor's Tale Snyderman reflects on his role in developing and instituting these changes.
 
Beginning his faculty career at Duke in 1972, Snyderman made major contributions to inflammation research while leading the Division of Rheumatology and Immunology. When he became chancellor in 1989, he learned that Duke’s medical center required bold new capabilities to survive the advent of managed care and HMOs. The need to change spurred creativity, but it also generated strong resistance. 
 
Among his many achievements, Snyderman led ambitious institutional growth in research and clinical care, broadened clinical research and collaborations between academics and industry, and spurred the fields of integrative and personalized medicine. Snyderman describes how he immersed himself in all aspects of Duke’s medical enterprise as evidenced by his exercise in "following the sheet" from the patient's room to the laundry facilities and back, which allowed him to meet staff throughout the hospital. Upon discovering that temperatures in the laundry facilities were over 110 degrees he had air conditioning installed. He also implemented programs to help employees gain needed skills to advance. Snyderman discusses the necessity for strategic planning, fund-raising, and media relations and the relationship between the medical center and Duke University. He concludes with advice for current and future academic medical center administrators.
 
The fascinating story of Snyderman's career shines a bright light on the importance of leadership, organization, planning, and innovation in a medical and academic environment while highlighting the systemic changes in academic medicine and American health care over the last half century. A Chancellor's Tale will be required reading for those interested in academic medicine, health care, administrative and leadership positions, and the history of Duke University.
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Chandra
A Biography of S. Chandrasekhar
Kameshwar C. Wali
University of Chicago Press, 1990
Chandra is an intimate portrait of a highly private and brilliant man, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, a Nobel laureate in physics who has been a major contributor to the theories of white dwarfs and black holes.

"Wali has given us a magnificent portrait of Chandra, full of life and color, with a deep understanding of the three cultures—Indian, British, and American—in which Chandra was successively immersed. . . . I wish I had the job of reviewing this book for the New York Times rather than for Physics Today. If the book is only read by physicists, then Wali's devoted labors were in vain."—Freeman Dyson, Physics Today

"An enthralling human document."—William McCrea, Times Higher Education Supplement

"A dramatic, exuberant biography of one of the century's great scientists."—Publishers Weekly
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The Changing Face of Economics
Conversations with Cutting Edge Economists
David Colander, Richard P. F. Holt, and J. Barkley Rosser, Jr.
University of Michigan Press, 2004
The Changing Face of Economics gives the reader a sense of the modern economics profession and how it is changing. The volume does so with a set of nine interviews with cutting edge economists, followed by interviews with two Nobel Prize winners, Paul Samuelson and Kenneth Arrow, reflecting on the changes that are occurring. What results is a clear picture of today's economics--and it is no longer standard neoclassical economics.

The interviews and commentary together demonstrate that economics is currently undergoing a fundamental shift in method and is moving away from traditional neoclassical economics into a dynamic set of new methods and approaches. These new approaches include work in behavioral economics, experimental economics, evolutionary game theory and ecological approaches, complexity and nonlinear dynamics, methodological analysis, and agent-based modeling.

David E. Colander is Professor of Economics, Middlebury College.

J. Barkley Rosser, Jr., is Professor of Economics and Kirby L. Kramer Jr. Professor of Business Administration, James Madison University.

Richard P. F. Holt is Professor of Churchill Honors and Economics, Southern Oregon University.




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"Chaotic Freedom" in Civil War Louisiana
The Origins of an Iconic Image
Bruce Laurie
University of Massachusetts Press, 2021
The image is terrible and familiar. A man sits, his face in profile, his torso exposed. His back is a breathtaking mass of scars, crisscrossing his body and baring the brutality of American slavery. Reproduced as a carte de visite, the image circulated widely throughout abolitionist networks and was featured in Harper's Weekly. Its undeniable power testified to the evils of slavery. But who was this man and how did this image come to be?

Bruce Laurie uncovers the people and events that created this seminal image, telling the tale of three men, two Yankee soldiers from western Massachusetts who were serving the Union Army in Louisiana and a man named Peter whose scarred back horrified all who saw it. The two soldiers were so shocked by what had been done to Peter, they sought to capture the image and document slavery's cruelty, the likes of which was all too common among those fleeing bondage in Louisiana. Meticulously researched and briskly told, this short volume unearths the story behind an iconic image.
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Character Is Destiny
The Autobiography of Alice Salomon
Andrew Lees, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2004

In her autobiography, the remarkable feminist and social worker Alice Salomon recounts her transition in the 1890s from privileged idleness to energetic engagement in solving social problems. Salomon took the lead in establishing the profession of social work, and built a career as a social reformer, activist, and educator. A prolific author, Salomon also played a key role in the transatlantic dialogue between German and American feminists in the early twentieth century. Her narrative concludes with the account of her expulsion from Germany by the Nazis in 1937.
Salomon's formative influence on the field of social work makes her story crucial for the history of the discipline. This work will also appeal to anyone with an interest in the history of the feminist and socialist movements or the political and social history of twentieth-century Germany. The volume also includes several of Salomon's essays on social work and women's issues, along with photographs of Salomon, her students, and her colleagues.
Andrew Lees is Professor and Chair of the History Department at Rutgers University, Camden.
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Charlemagne
Johannes Fried
Harvard University Press, 2016

When Charlemagne died in 814 CE, he left behind a dominion and a legacy unlike anything seen in Western Europe since the fall of Rome. Distinguished historian and author of The Middle Ages Johannes Fried presents a new biographical study of the legendary Frankish king and emperor, illuminating the life and reign of a ruler who shaped Europe’s destiny in ways few figures, before or since, have equaled.

Living in an age of faith, Charlemagne was above all a Christian king, Fried says. He made his court in Aix-la-Chapelle the center of a religious and intellectual renaissance, enlisting the Anglo-Saxon scholar Alcuin of York to be his personal tutor, and insisting that monks be literate and versed in rhetoric and logic. He erected a magnificent cathedral in his capital, decorating it lavishly while also dutifully attending Mass every morning and evening. And to an extent greater than any ruler before him, Charlemagne enhanced the papacy’s influence, becoming the first king to enact the legal principle that the pope was beyond the reach of temporal justice—a decision with fateful consequences for European politics for centuries afterward.

Though devout, Charlemagne was not saintly. He was a warrior-king, intimately familiar with violence and bloodshed. And he enjoyed worldly pleasures, including physical love. Though there are aspects of his personality we can never know with certainty, Fried paints a compelling portrait of a ruler, a time, and a kingdom that deepens our understanding of the man often called “the father of Europe.”

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Charles A. Janeway
Pediatrician to the World’s Children
Robert J. Haggerty and Frederick H. Lovejoy, Jr.
Harvard University Press, 2007

This biography of one of the most prominent pediatricians of the twentieth century describes his illustrious medical family and his remarkable tenure of nearly three decades as Thomas Morgan Rotch Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and head of the department of medicine at Children's Hospital, Boston. During this period Janeway built the first department of pediatrics in the nation with subspecialties based upon the new developments in basic sciences. Janeway and his colleagues defined the gamma globulin disorders that resulted in children's increased susceptibility to infections and associated arthritic disorders.

Janeway was the most visible U.S. pediatrician on the world scene in the last half of the 20th century. He traveled widely, taught modern pediatrics to thousands of physicians throughout the developing world, and brought many of them to the U.S. for further training. He was instrumental in starting teaching hospitals in Shiraz, Iran, and Cameroon.

Janeway believed that through teaching by example he might further the cause of peace in the world. His life is an inspiration to everyone in medicine, and serves as a model that all can seek to improve the health of the world's millions and promote a more peaceful future.

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Charles A. Lindbergh and the American Dilemma
The Conflict of Technology and Human Values
Susan M. Gray
University of Wisconsin Press, 1988
Throughout his life, Lindbergh’s value structure, interests, and activities shifted and moved, yielding a conflict between instinct and intellect. Both its presence in his life and his readjustment of values in accordance with it are representative of his time and culture. He moved, with the twentieth century itself, from a faith in technology to a disenchantment with it and finally to a balanced resolution that synthesized the seeming oppositions of technology and the human spirit. This emphasis on a balance between technology and humanity, and Lindbergh’s belief that maintained the complementarity rather than the opposition of the two forces, finally culminated in a post-technological mysticism, a teleological worldview of science and nature as aspects of the same physical and spiritual environment.
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Charles Bell and the Anatomy of Reform
Carin Berkowitz
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Sir Charles Bell (1774–1842) was a medical reformer in a great age of reform—an occasional and reluctant vivisectionist, a theistic popularizer of natural science, a Fellow of the Royal Society, a surgeon, an artist, and a teacher. He was among the last of a generation of medical men who strove to fashion a particularly British science of medicine; who formed their careers, their research, and their publications through the private classrooms of nineteenth-century London; and whose politics were shaped by the exigencies of developing a living through patronage in a time when careers in medical science simply did not exist. A decade after Bell’s death, that world was gone, replaced by professionalism, standardized education, and regular career paths.
           
In Charles Bell and the Anatomy of Reform, Carin Berkowitz takes readers into Bell’s world, helping us understand the life of medicine before the modern separation of classroom, laboratory, and clinic. Through Bell’s story, we witness the age when modern medical science, with its practical universities, set curricula, and medical professionals, was born.
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Charles E. Hires and the Drink that Wowed a Nation
The Life and Times of a Philadelphia Entrepreneur
Bill Double
Temple University Press, 2018

Introduced at the 1876 Centennial Exposition and powered by an historic advertising campaign, Hires Root Beer—launched 10 years before Coca-Cola—blazed the trail for development of the American soft drink industry. Its inventor, Charles Elmer Hires, has been described as “a tycoon with the soul of a chemist.” In addition to creating root beer, Hires, a devoted family man and a pillar of the Quaker community, became a leading importer of botanical commodities, an authority on the vanilla bean. Starting from scratch, he also built one of the world’s largest condensed milk companies.

Charles E. Hires and the Drink that Wowed a Nation chronicles the humble origin and meteoric business success of this extraordinary entrepreneur. Author Bill Double uses published interviews, correspondence, newspaper reports, magazine articles, financial data, and a small family archive to tell this story of native ingenuity. Here, the rough-hewn capitalism of the gilded age, the evolution of the neighborhood drugstore, the rise of advertising in creating mass markets, and the emerging temperance movement all come together in a biography that, well, fizzes with entrepreneurial spirit.

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Charles Follen's Search for Nationality and Freedom
Germany and America, 1796-1840
Edmund Spevack
Harvard University Press, 1997

This unique account of the life of German nationalist and revolutionary Charles Follen opens a window on several worlds during the first half of the nineteenth century. Seldom does one biography embrace so many important historical issues and events.

Trained as a lawyer in his native Germany, Follen was involved in student nationalism, eventually turning to revolutionary Jacobinism. He fled to Switzerland in 1819 after conspiring in the first political murder of modern German history--the assassination of the playwright August von Kotzebue. In Switzerland, Follen secretly continued activities for revolutionizing Germany. When his plans were discovered in 1824, he fled to America. For ten years, Follen taught at Harvard; he was the first professor of German literature at an American institution of higher learning. He played a central role in the early importation of German ideas to New England, contributing to the fields of literature, philosophy, and theology. His marriage to Eliza Lee Cabot allowed him to move in elite Boston social circles. After his ordination as a Unitarian minister in 1836, Follen combined his interest in social reform (including an ardent devotion to the antislavery movement) with clerical service. Unitarian leader William Ellery Channingand abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison became Follen's close friends.

During the last two years of his life, Follen began to doubt his own power to bring about political change and suffered a crisis in self-confidence before his accidental death at the age of forty-three.

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Charles Gates Dawes
A Life
Annette B. Dunlap
Northwestern University Press, 2016

Charles Gates Dawes: A Life is the first comprehensive biography of an American in whose fascinating story contemporary readers can follow the struggles and triumphs of early twentieth-century America and Europe.

Dawes is most known today as vice president of the United States under Calvin Coolidge, but he also distinguished himself and his hometown of Evanston, Illinois, on the world stage with the 1925 Nobel Peace Prize. This engrossing biography traces how, when the punitive armistice that ended the First World War resulted in a disabled, restive Germany, Dawes’s diplomatic legerdemain averted war through a renegotiation of Germany’s debt repayments.

Dawes’s diplomatic and political achievements, however, were only the illustrious capstones to a multifaceted career that included military service, law, finance, and business on the local, state, national, and global stages. In every arena of his life, he combined the social graces of the Gilded Age with the spirit of service of the Progressive Era.

Despite his life of disciplined service, Dawes was an ebullient and irrepressible figure. Dawes’s salty language was often colorful fodder for tabloid and magazine writers of his era. In this captivating biography, Annette B. Dunlap recounts the story of an original American who enlightened and enlivened his world.

This book was published in cooperation with the Evanston History Center and with generous support from the Tawani Foundation.
 

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Charles Hillman Brough
A Biography
Foy Lisenby
University of Arkansas Press, 1996
Ten years in the making, taken largely fron primary materials, some lent by descendents, this biography is a balanced portrait of an extraordinary Arkansas leader, progressive governor of the state from 1917 to 1921.
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Charles K. McClatchy and the Golden Era of American Journalism
Steven M. Avella
University of Missouri Press, 2016

Charles K. McClatchy was twenty-five when he inherited The Sacramento Bee from his father, and his ensuing career as the paper’s editor extended well beyond the newsroom. Until his death in 1936, McClatchy was a consistent advocate for Progressive politics, a crusader for urban reform, a staunch isolationist, and a voice for Northern California. This biography explores his career as the long-time editor of the Bee in a work that weaves the history of Northern California with that of American newspapers.

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Charles Lee
Self Before Country
Mazzagetti, Dominick
Rutgers University Press, 2013

Received an Honorable Mention for the American Revolution Round Table of Richmond's 2014 Book Award

Dominick Mazzagetti presents an engaging account of the life of Charles Lee, the forgotten man of the American Revolution. History has not been kind to Lee—for good reason. In this compelling biography, Mazzagetti compares Lee’s life and attributes to those of George Washington and offers significant observations omitted from previous Lee biographies, including extensive correspondence with British officers in 1777 that reflects Lee’s abandonment of the Patriots’ cause.

Lee, a British officer, a veteran of the French and Indian War, and a critic of King George III, arrived in New York City in 1773 with an ego that knew no bounds and tolerated no rivals.  A highly visible and newsworthy personality, he quickly took up the American cause and encouraged rebellion. As a result of this advocacy and his military skills, Lee was granted a commission as a major general in the Continental Army and soon became second-in-command to George Washington. He helped organize the defense of Boston, designed defenses for New York City, and commanded the force that repelled the British attack on Charleston.

Upon his return to New York in 1776, Lee was considered by some leaders of the Revolution to be an alternative to George Washington, who was in full retreat from British forces. Lee’s capture by the British in December 1776 put an end to that possibility. Lee’s subsequent release in a prisoner exchange in 1778 and return to an American command led to a dramatic confrontation with Washington on the battlefield at Monmouth, New Jersey, in June 1778. Washington chastised Lee publicly for ordering an unnecessary retreat. Lee suffered the ignominy of a court-martial conviction for this blunder and spent the remaining years to his death in 1782 attacking Washington. Although few doubted Lee’s loyalty at the time, his actions at Monmouth fueled speculation that he switched sides during his imprisonment.

A discovery years after his death completed Lee’s tale. In 1862, a researcher discovered “Mr. Lee’s Plan,” a detailed strategy for the defeat of the American rebels delivered to British General William Howe while Lee was held in captivity. This discovery sealed Lee’s historical record and ended all further discussion of his contributions to the American Revolution. Today, few people even realize that Fort Lee, on the New Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge, was named in his honor.

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Charles Olson's Reading
A Biography
Ralph Maud
Southern Illinois University Press, 1996

In this narrative account of the life and work of Charles Olson, Ralph Maud focuses on what the poet read as a basis for understanding the work he produced.

To an extraordinary degree, Olson’s reading and life were coextensive, according to Maud, who notes that Olson saw his written output over his lifetime as a total cosmology. An individual who rarely traveled, this major American poet explored the world and its history as well as the furthest reaches of the thought of his day through books.

Maud builds upon George Butterick’s annotated listing of Olson’s library, bought by the University of Connecticut after the poet’s death in 1970. The present volume, however, adds categories of books Butterick deliberately omitted: Olson’s childhood books and poetry by his own contemporaries.

Linking Olson’s books to his intellectual and poetic development at each stage of his career, Maud reveals such little-known but important connections as the contracted book project "Operation Red, White and Black" and Olson’s plan for the long poem "West"—two unrealized projects much later shaped into The Maximus Poems.

Maud also outlines the surprisingly multiple role of the painter Corrado Cagli, who brought home to Olson the significance of the Holocaust and introduced him both to the Tarot and to the theories of non-Euclidean geometry that Olson variously incorporated into his poems and essays. In discussing Olson’s relationship to Ezra Pound, Maud defines in some detail what Olson gained from Pound and what he repudiated.

Maud refutes the notion that Olson’s intellectual and creative powers declined during the last years of his life, demonstrating that during these years Olson developed his Jungian interest, his attention to early Greek thought, and a new concern for Northern mythology.

This chronicle of Olson’s reading from childhood to deathbed constitutes a critical biography of the larger-than-life author of Call Me Ishmael and The Maximus Poems. No modern poet is more revealed in his sources than Olson. Maud’s comprehensive and complete study provides a basis for new and fresh modes of thinking about Olson’s great achievement.

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Charles Seeger
A Life in American Music
Ann M. Pescatello
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992
Ann M. Pescatello presents the first biography of Charles Seeger, who was a force in American music for most of the twentieth century. Part composer, teacher, performer, musicologist, bureaucrat, and inventor-Seeger's ninety-two year life touched many people and many areas of American music. As both a traditionalist and champion of the new, he established the University of California's music department and the nation's first curriculum in musicology, and taught at the Institute of Musical Arts (later Julliard), and at the New School in New York. He was also a music activist-defending the artistic value of American folk music, and seeking global cooperation for musical enterprise at the Resettlement administraion, the WPA, and the Pan American Union.
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Charles Valentine Riley
Founder of Modern Entomology
W. Conner Sorensen, Edward H. Smith, and Janet R. Smith, with Donald C. Weber
University of Alabama Press, 2019
Riley propelled entomology from a collector’s parlor hobby of the nineteenth century to the serious study of insects in the Modern Age
 
This definitive biography is the first full account of a fascinating American scientist whose leadership created the modern science of entomology that recognizes both the essential role of insects in natural systems and their challenge to the agricultural food supply that sustains humankind. Charles Valentine Riley: Founder of Modern Entomology tells the story of how Riley (1843–1895), a young British immigrant to America—with classical schooling, only a smattering of natural history knowledge, and with talent in art and writing but no formal training in science—came to play a key role in the reorientation of entomology from the collection and arrangement of specimens to a scientific approach to insect evolution, diversity, ecology, and applied management of insect pests.
 
Drawing on Riley’s personal diaries, family records, correspondence, and publications, the authors trace Riley’s career as farm laborer, Chicago journalist, Missouri State Entomologist, chief federal entomologist, founder of the National Insect Collection, and initiator of the professional organization that became the Entomological Society of America. Also examined in detail are his spectacular campaigns against the Rocky Mountain Locust that stalled western migration in the 1870s, the Grape Phylloxera that threatened French vineyards in the 1870s and 80s, the Cotton Worm that devastated southern cotton fields after the Civil War, and the Cottony Cushion Scale that threatened the California citrus industry in the 1880s. The latter was defeated through importation of the Vedalia Beetle from Australia, the spectacular first example of biological control of an invasive insect pest by its introduced natural enemy.

A striking figure in appearance and deed, Riley combined scientific, literary, artistic, and managerial skills that enabled him to influence every aspect of entomology. A correspondent of Darwin and one of his most vocal American advocates, he discovered the famous example of mimicry of the Monarch butterfly by the Viceroy, and described the intricate coevolution of yucca moths and yuccas, a complex system that fascinates evolutionary scientists to this day. Whether applying evolutionary theory to pest control, promoting an American silk industry, developing improved spray technologies, or promoting applied entomology in state and federal government and to the public, Riley was the central figure in the formative years of the entomology profession. In addition to showcasing his own renderings of the insects he investigated, this comprehensive account provides fresh insight into the personal and public life of an ingenious, colorful, and controversial scientist, who aimed to discover, understand, and outsmart the insects.
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Charlotte Delbo
A Life Reclaimed
Ghislaine Dunant, Translated by Kathryn M. Lachman
University of Massachusetts Press, 2021
In 1943, Charlotte Delbo and 229 other women were deported to a station with no name, which they later learned was Auschwitz. Arrested for resisting the Nazi occupation of Paris, Delbo was sent to the camps, enduring both Auschwitz and Ravensbrück for twenty-seven months. There, she, her fellow deportees, and millions of others were subjected to slave labor and nearly succumbed to typhus, dysentery, and hunger. She sustained herself by reciting Molière and resolved to someday write a book about herself and her fellow deportees, a stunning work called None of Us Will Return. After the camps, Delbo devoted her life to the art of writing and the duty of witnessing, fiercely advocating for the power of the arts to testify against despotism and tyranny.

Ghislaine Dunant's unforgettable biography of Delbo, La vie retrouvée (2016), captivated French readers and was awarded the Prix Femina. Now translated into English for the first time, Charlotte Delbo: A Life Reclaimed depicts Delbo's lifelong battles as a working-class woman, as a survivor, as a leftist who broke from the Communist Party, and most of all, as a writer whose words compelled others to see.
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Chasing Good Sense
A Boy's Life on the Frontier
Homer McCarty and Coralie McCarty Beyers
University of Utah Press, 2018
In this creative memoir, Homer McCarty adopts the voice of seven-year-old Buck to recollect his own life growing up in rugged southern Utah Territory in the late 1800s. Although Buck’s reflections are necessarily imprecise—gathered from fragments of memory and then embellished freely—the stories he tells are an honest look at life on the frontier.  

In the spirit of Huck Finn, Buck embarks on adventures and mischief with his loyal friend, Earl. Naïve, eager, and inquisitive, he seeks to make sense of his world. McCarty’s portrayal of the period is often humorous, capturing the intimacy of place and family through a young boy’s eyes.

McCarty completed this work in 1948. Had it not been for a series of fortuitous events and the dedication of his granddaughters, including Coralie Beyers, these pages would have been lost. Thanks to her efforts, her grandfather’s lively, entertaining book is now available for readers to relish and enjoy.
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Che on My Mind
Margaret Randall
Duke University Press, 2013
Che on My Mind is an impressionistic look at the life, death, and legacy of Che Guevara by the renowned feminist poet and activist Margaret Randall. Recalling an era and this figure, she writes, "I am old enough to remember the world in which [Che] lived. I was part of that world, and it remains a part of me." Randall participated in the Mexican student movement of 1968 and eventually was forced to leave the country. She arrived in Cuba in 1969, less than two years after Che's death, and lived there until 1980. She became friends with several of Che's family members, friends, and compatriots. In Che on My Mind she reflects on his relationships with his family and fellow insurgents, including Fidel Castro. She is deeply admiring of Che's integrity and charisma and frank about what she sees as his strategic errors. Randall concludes by reflecting on the inspiration and lessons that Che's struggles might offer early twenty-first-century social justice activists and freedom fighters.
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Chen Yi
Leta E. Miller and J. Michele Edwards
University of Illinois Press, 2020

Winner of the Leila Webster Memorial Music Award for the International Alliance for Women in Music of the 2022 Pauline Alderman Awards for Outstanding Scholarship on Women in Music

Chen Yi is the most prominent woman among the renowned group of new wave composers who came to the US from mainland China in the early 1980s. Known for her creative output and a distinctive merging of Chinese and Western influences, Chen built a musical language that references a breathtaking range of sources and crisscrosses geographical and musical borders without eradicating them.

Leta E. Miller and J. Michele Edwards provide an accessible guide to the composer's background and her more than 150 works. Extensive interviews with Chen complement in-depth analyses of selected pieces from Chen's solos for Western or Chinese instruments, chamber works, choral and vocal pieces, and compositions scored for wind ensemble, chamber orchestra, or full orchestra. The authors highlight Chen's compositional strategies, her artistic elaborations, and the voice that links her earliest and most recent music. A concluding discussion addresses questions related to Chen's music and issues such as gender, ethnicity and nationality, transnationalism, border crossing, diaspora, exoticism, and identity.

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Chester Bowles
New Dealer in Cold War
Howard B. Schaffer
Harvard University Press, 1993

When Harry Truman named him ambassador to India in 1951, Chester Bowles was already a prominent figure in American public life a onetime advertising mogul, wartime administrator, governor of Connecticut and yet his past hardly presaged the turn his path would take in Asia. Over the next two decades, at home and abroad, Bowles would become one of the leading liberal lights in American foreign policy, a New Dealer destined to be at odds with the stiffening cold war conservatism of his time. His biography is also the story of America finding its place in a changing world, a story of remarkable relevance to our own post-cold war era.

Howard Schaffer, a former ambassador and seasoned Foreign Service officer, worked closely with Bowles in India and Washington and is able to offer a colorful firsthand portrayal of the man, as well as an insider's view of American foreign policy in the making. Bowles's indefatigable energy, inspired idealism, and humanitarian instincts leave their mark on these pages—as do his stubbornness, his cultural blinders, and his failure to master the game of bureaucratic politics. We see him in his sometimes exhilarating and ultimately frustrating struggle to influence the leaders and policymakers of his day—as twice ambassador to India, Democratic party foreign policy spokesman, congressman from Connecticut, foreign policy adviser to John F. Kennedy, undersecretary to Dean Rusk at the State Department, and President Kennedy's special adviser on Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Drawing on a wealth of documents and interviews with some of the nation's top foreign policy makers in the post-World War II years, Schaffer shows us Bowles in his tireless attempt to advance an alternative approach to international relations during those decades, an approach defined less in military than in economic terms, focused less on the struggle for power with the Soviet Union in Europe than on the contest with China over the fate of Third World countries.

“Only the historians can determine who was right and who was wrong,” Dean Rusk once said of Bowles's ideas and convictions—and today history itself is writing the last word.

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Chi Town
Norbert Blei
Northwestern University Press, 2003
The final work of the acclaimed Chicago Trilogy, this collection of nonfiction tales reveals Sandburg's "city of the big shoulders," concrete and neon; uptown and downtown; State Street, Michigan Avenue; the river, the lake; the matter-of-factness and poetry of Chicago people-from Mike Royko describing his neighborhood to the observations of newspaper vendors, from Studs Terkel interviewing jazz great Dave Brubeck to dinner with Petros in Greek Town. Written with a keen eye, Blei's stories evoke a vanished Chicago, a city of gritty and colorful neighborhoods and their gritty and colorful characters. It is, as he writes, a "love letter to a city that has meant so much to me."

Chi Townis the story of Norbert Blei's love affair with a city that shaped both his life and work. Along the route of this walking tour of the Windy City, you'll dine with Petros in Greek Town, see Studs Terkel in action at WFMT interviewing Dave Brubeck, listen to Mike Royko describe his own neighborhood, share the thoughts of Chicago sportswriter Jerome Holtzman, and meet newspaper vendors, trash collectors, bankers and more.
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Chiang Kai-shek’s Politics of Shame
Leadership, Legacy, and National Identity in China
Grace C. Huang
Harvard University Press, 2021

Once a powerful figure who reversed the disintegration of China and steered the country to Allied victory in World War II, Chiang Kai-shek fled into exile following his 1949 defeat in the Chinese civil war. As attention pivoted to Mao Zedong’s communist experiment, Chiang was relegated to the dustbin of history.

In Chiang Kai-shek’s Politics of Shame, Grace C. Huang reconsiders Chiang’s leadership and legacy by drawing on an extraordinary and uncensored collection of his diaries, telegrams, and speeches stitched together by his secretaries. She paints a new, intriguing portrait of this twentieth-century leader who advanced a Confucian politics of shame to confront Japanese incursion into China and urge unity among his people. In also comparing Chiang’s response to imperialism to those of Mao, Yuan Shikai, and Mahatma Gandhi, Huang widens the implications of her findings to explore alternatives to Western expressions of nationalism and modernity and reveal how leaders of vulnerable states can use potent cultural tools to inspire their country and contribute to an enduring national identity.

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Chiang Kai-shek’s Politics of Shame
Leadership, Legacy, and National Identity in China
Grace C. Huang
Harvard University Press, 2021

Once a powerful figure who reversed the disintegration of China and steered the country to Allied victory in World War II, Chiang Kai-shek fled into exile following his 1949 defeat in the Chinese civil war. As attention pivoted to Mao Zedong’s communist experiment, Chiang was relegated to the dustbin of history.

In Chiang Kai-shek’s Politics of Shame, Grace C. Huang reconsiders Chiang’s leadership and legacy by drawing on an extraordinary and uncensored collection of his diaries, telegrams, and speeches stitched together by his secretaries. She paints a new, intriguing portrait of this twentieth-century leader who advanced a Confucian politics of shame to confront Japanese incursion into China and urge unity among his people. In also comparing Chiang’s response to imperialism to those of Mao, Yuan Shikai, and Mahatma Gandhi, Huang widens the implications of her findings to explore alternatives to Western expressions of nationalism and modernity and reveal how leaders of vulnerable states can use potent cultural tools to inspire their country and contribute to an enduring national identity.

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