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H. H. Bennett, Photographer
His American Landscape
Sara Rath
University of Wisconsin Press, 2010

"My energies for near a lifetime have been used almost entirely to win such prominence as I could in outdoor photography."—H. H. Bennett

Henry Hamilton Bennett (1843–1908) became a celebrated photographer in the half-century following the American Civil War. Bennett is admired for his superb depictions of dramatic landscapes of the Dells of the Wisconsin River and also for his many technical innovations in photography, including a stop-action shutter and a revolving solar printing house that is now housed at the Smithsonian Institution. With his instantaneous shutter, he gained recognition for his striking images of moving subjects, such as lumber raftsmen shooting the river rapids and his son Ashley leaping in midair from a bluff to the craggy pillar of Stand Rock. Less well-known are Bennett’s splendid urban photographs of nineteenth-century Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul.
    This engaging biography of H. H. Bennett tells his life story, illustrated throughout with his remarkable photographs, some of them rarely viewed before. It draws on the photographer’s own letters and journals, along with other family documents, to portray the sweep of his career and personal life. An important figure in the history of photography, he also contributed to the growth of American tourism: his nationally distributed stereoscopic views of Dells rock formations and his portraits of local Ho-Chunk Indians played a significant role in creating the Wisconsin Dells as the popular tourist destination it is today. Despite personal challenges—a crippling Civil War injury, the death of his first wife, and continual financial worries—Bennett produced an extensive portfolio that captures the midwestern culture of his time. He accepted commissions in the 1890s to document Chicago’s modern skyscrapers, grand residences of Milwaukee’s entrepreneurs and sailing ships in its harbor, enormous scenic panoramas along the routes of Wisconsin railroads, and sparkling ice palaces lit by fireworks at the St. Paul Winter Carnival.

Finalist, Midwest Regional Interest, Midwest Book Awards

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Hadassah
An American Story
Hadassah Lieberman
Brandeis University Press, 2021

Born in Prague to Holocaust survivors, Hadassah Lieberman and her family immigrated in 1949 to the United States. She went on to earn a BA from Boston University in government and dramatics and an MA in international relations and American government from Northeastern University. She built a career devoted largely to public health that has included positions at Lehman Brothers, Pfizer, and the National Research Council. After her first marriage ended in divorce, she married Joe Lieberman, a US senator from Connecticut who was the Democratic nominee for vice president with Al Gore and would go on to run for president.

In Hadassah, Lieberman pens the compelling story of her extraordinary life: from her family's experience in Eastern Europe to their move to Gardner, Massachusetts; forging her career; experiencing divorce; and, following her remarriage, her life on the national political stage. By offering insight into her identity as an immigrant, an American Jew, a working woman, and a wife, mother, and grandmother, Lieberman’s moving memoir speaks to many of the major issues of our time, from immigration to gender politics. Featuring an introduction by Joe Lieberman and an afterword by Megan McCain, it is a true American story.

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Hadrian
Empire and Conflict
Thorsten Opper
Harvard University Press, 2008

Even in the panoply of Roman history, Hadrian stands out. Emperor from 117 to 138 ad, he was at once a benevolent ruler and a ruthless military leader, known for his restless and ambitious nature, his interest in architecture, and his passion for Greek culture. This book moves beyond the familiar image of Hadrian to offer a new appraisal of this Emperor’s contradictory personality, his exploits and accomplishments, his rule, and his military role, against the backdrop of his twenty-one-year reign.

Lavishly illustrated with key works of art and objects, celebrated and little-known sculptures, bronzes, coins and medals, drawings, and watercolors from museums around the globe, the book conveys a vivid sense of the world Hadrian inhabited. Thorsten Opper shows the emperor from many angles—as a complex individual, as a military leader and strategist, as the amateur architect who created magnificent buildings such as his villa at Tivoli (an empire in miniature), as the lover who deified his male lover Antinous after his mysterious death in the Nile, and, finally, as the traveler who tirelessly roamed his empire and its boundaries.

From his place in Roman history to his legacy, which even makes its way into the popular culture of our day, the Hadrian who emerges from these pages is no longer larger than life; rather, he has all the depth and complexity, the color and shadings and detail of life itself.

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Haiti Fights Back
The Life and Legacy of Charlemagne Péralte
Yveline Alexis
Rutgers University Press, 2021
Winner of the 2021 Haitian Studies Association Book Prize​

Haiti Fights Back: The Life and Legacy of Charlemagne Péralte is the first US scholarly examination of the politician and caco leader (guerrilla fighter) who fought against the US military occupation of Haiti. The occupation lasted close to two decades, from 1915-1934. Alexis argues for the importance of documenting resistance while exploring the occupation’s mechanics and its imperialism. She takes us to Haiti, exploring the sites of what she labels as resistance zones, including Péralte’s hometown of Hinche and the nation’s large port areas--Port-au-Prince and Cap-Haïtien. Alexis offers a new reading of U.S. military archival sources that record Haitian protests as banditry. Haiti Fights Back illuminates how Péralte launched a political movement, and meticulously captures how Haitian women and men resisted occupation through silence, military battles, and writings. She locates and assembles rare, multilingual primary sources from traditional repositories, living archives (oral stories), and artistic representations in Haiti and the United States. The interdisciplinary work draws on legislation, cacos’ letters, newspapers, and murals, offering a unique examination of Péralte’s life (1885-1919) and the significance of his legacy through the twenty-first century. Haiti Fights Back offers a new approach to the study of the U.S. invasion of the Americas by chronicling how Caribbean people fought back.
 
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Halcyon Journey
In Search of the Belted Kingfisher
Marina Richie
Oregon State University Press, 2022
Winner of the John Burroughs Medal Award for Natural History Writing

More than one hundred species of kingfishers brighten every continent but Antarctica. Not all are fishing birds. They range in size from the African dwarf kingfisher to the laughing kookaburra of Australia. This first book to feature North America’s belted kingfisher is a lyrical story of observation, revelation, and curiosity in the presence of flowing waters.

The kingfisher—also known as the halcyon bird—is linked to the mythic origin of halcyon days, a state of happiness that Marina Richie hopes to find outside her back door in Missoula, Montana. Epiphanies and a citizen science discovery punctuate days tracking a bird that outwits at every turn. The female is more colorful than the male (unusual and puzzling) and the birds’ earthen nest holes are difficult to locate.

While the heart of the drama takes place on Rattlesnake Creek in Missoula, the author’s adventures in search of kingfisher kin on the lower Rio Grande, in South Africa, and in London illuminate her relationships with the birds of Montana. In the quiet of winter, she explores tribal stories of the kingfisher as messenger and helper, pivotal qualities for her quest. For all who love birds or simply seek solace in nature, Halcyon Journey is an inviting introduction to the mythic and mysterious belted kingfisher.
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Half Wild
People, Dogs, and Environmental Policy
Dave Dempsey
Michigan State University Press, 2023
Humans and canines have been cohabitating for centuries, straddling a boundary that allows us to live together within and across our species. In this empathetic volume, author Dave Dempsey explores this life on the border, the overlapping planes between humans and the nonhuman world that lead to both magnificent creation and appalling destruction. Dempsey’s forty-year career as an environmentalist gives this book a nuanced context that could only be afforded by someone who has lived a half-wild existence himself, both defending and expanding the range of protections afforded to other species. As the former environmental advisor to Michigan Governor James J. Blanchard, Dempsey’s recollections also provide a unique perspective on the history of environmental policy, ruminating on how such policy reflects the way we understand ourselves in relation to the environment. Through vignettes that recall personal stories and those that outline historical events that influenced policymaking, Dempsey calls attention to the philosophical question of how we as humans relate to animals and our environment.
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Half-Life of a Zealot
Swanee Hunt
Duke University Press, 2006
Swanee Hunt’s life has lived up to her Texas-size childhood. Daughter of legendary oil magnate H. L. Hunt, she grew up in a household dominated by an arch-conservative patriarch who spawned a brood of colorful offspring. Her family was nothing if not zealous, and that zeal—albeit for more compassionate causes—propelled her into a mission that reaches around the world.

Half-Life of a Zealot tells how the girl who spoke against “Reds” alongside her father became a fierce advocate for progressive change in America and abroad, an innovative philanthropist, and Bill Clinton’s Ambassador to Austria. In captivating prose, Hunt describes the warmth and wear of Southern Baptist culture, which instilled in her a calling to help those who are vulnerable. The reader is drawn into her full-throttle professional life as it competes with critical family needs.

Hunt gives a remarkably frank account of her triumphs and shortcomings; her sorrows, including a miscarriage and the failure of a marriage; the joys and struggles of her second marriage; and her angst over the life-threatening illness of one of her three children. She is candid about the opportunities her fortune has created, as well as the challenge of life as an heiress.

Much of Swanee Hunt’s professional life is devoted to expanding women’s roles in making and shaping public policy. She is the founding director of Harvard’s Women and Public Policy Program at the Kennedy School of Government, chair of the Initiative for Inclusive Security, and president of the Hunt Alternatives Fund.

Swanee Hunt’s autobiography brims over with strong women: her mother, whose religious faith and optimism were an inspiration; her daughter, who fights the social stigma of mental disorders; the women of war-torn Bosnia, who transformed their grief into action; and friends like Hillary Clinton, who used her position as First Lady to strengthen the voices of others.

Hunt is one more strong woman. Half-Life of a Zealot is her story—so far.

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Hamka’s Great Story
A Master Writer’s Vision of Islam for Modern Indonesia
James R. Rush
University of Wisconsin Press, 2016
Hamka’s Great Story presents Indonesia through the eyes of an impassioned, popular thinker who believed that Indonesians and Muslims everywhere should embrace the thrilling promises of modern life, and navigate its dangers, with Islam as their compass.
            Hamka (Haji Abdul Malik Karim Amrullah) was born when Indonesia was still a Dutch colony and came of age as the nation itself was emerging through tumultuous periods of Japanese occupation, revolution, and early independence. He became a prominent author and controversial public figure. In his lifetime of prodigious writing, Hamka advanced Islam as a liberating, enlightened, and hopeful body of beliefs around which the new nation could form and prosper. He embraced science, human agency, social justice, and democracy, arguing that these modern concepts comported with Islam’s true teachings. Hamka unfolded this big idea—his Great Story—decade by decade in a vast outpouring of writing that included novels and poems and chatty newspaper columns, biographies, memoirs, and histories, and lengthy studies of theology including a thirty-volume commentary on the Holy Qur’an. In introducing this influential figure and his ideas to a wider audience, this sweeping biography also illustrates a profound global process: how public debates about religion are shaping national societies in the postcolonial world.
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The Hamlet Vocation of Coleridge and Wordsworth
Martin Greenberg
University of Iowa Press, 1986

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Hamlin Garland
A Biography
By Jean Holloway
University of Texas Press, 1960

Hamlin Garland’s Main-Travelled Roads is recognized as one of the early landmarks of American literary realism. But Garland’s shift in mid-career from the harsh verisimilitude of Prairie Folks and Prairie Songs to a romanticizing of the Far West, and from ardent espousal of the principles of “veritism” to violent denunciations of naturalism, is a paradox which has long puzzled literary historians.

In tracing the evolution of Garland’s work, the various reactions of his stories under the influence of editorial comment and of contemporary critical reaction, Jean Holloway suggests that the Garland apostasy was an illusion produced by his very intellectual immobility amidst the swirling currents of American thought. His extensive correspondence with Gilder of the Century, Alden of Harper’s Monthly, McClure of McClure’s, and Bok of the Ladies’ Home Journal is adduced in support of the thesis that the writer’s choices of subject and of treatment were psychologically forced rather than conditioned primarily by literary theory.

As a subject for biography, however, Garland has an appeal far beyond the scope of his literary influence. The friendships of this gregarious peripatetic with the famous began with Howells, Twain, Whitman, and Stephen Crane, stretched down the years to include such younger men as Bret Harte and Carl Van Doren, and crossed the seas to embrace such British literary lions as Barrie, Shaw, and Kipling. Garland’s fervent espousal of “causes”—the Single Tax Movement, psychic experimentation, Indian rights-brought him into close contact with other prominent men—Henry George, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Jennings Bryan.

These public figures form the incidental characters in Garland’s spate of autobiographical works. Yet it is the central figure of his own story which has become permanently identified with the “Middle Border,” that region “between the land of the hunter and the harvester” which Augustus Thomas defined as “wherever Hamlin Garland is.” In A Son of the Middle Border Garland nostalgically recreated his boyhood on the frontier and, regardless of the detractions of literary critics, preserved for posterity an important segment of American social history.

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Hammarskjöld
A Life
Roger Lipsey
University of Michigan Press, 2015

After his mysterious death, Dag Hammarskjöld was described by John F. Kennedy as the "greatest statesman of our century." Second secretary-general of the United Nations (1953 - 61), he is the only person to have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize posthumously. Through extensive research in little explored archives and personal correspondence, Roger Lipsey has produced the definitive biography of Dag Hammarskjöld. Hammarskjöld: A Life provides vivid new insights into the life and mind of a truly great individual. Hammarskjöld the statesman and Hammarskjöld the author of the classic spiritual journal Markings meet in this new biography - and the reader will meet them both in these pages. A towering mid-twentieth-century figure, Hammarskjöld speaks directly to our time.

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Hands on the Freedom Plow
Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC
Faith S. Holsaert
University of Illinois Press, 2012
In Hands on the Freedom Plow, fifty-two women--northern and southern, young and old, urban and rural, black, white, and Latina--share their courageous personal stories of working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement.
 
The testimonies gathered here present a sweeping personal history of SNCC: early sit-ins, voter registration campaigns, and freedom rides; the 1963 March on Washington, the Mississippi Freedom Summer, and the movements in Alabama and Maryland; and Black Power and antiwar activism. Since the women spent time in the Deep South, many also describe risking their lives through beatings and arrests and witnessing unspeakable violence. These intense stories depict women, many very young, dealing with extreme fear and finding the remarkable strength to survive.
 
The women in SNCC acquired new skills, experienced personal growth, sustained one another, and even had fun in the midst of serious struggle. Readers are privy to their analyses of the Movement, its tactics, strategies, and underlying philosophies. The contributors revisit central debates of the struggle including the role of nonviolence and self-defense, the role of white people in a black-led movement, and the role of women within the Movement and the society at large.  
 
Each story reveals how the struggle for social change was formed, supported, and maintained by the women who kept their "hands on the freedom plow." As the editors write in the introduction, "Though the voices are different, they all tell the same story--of women bursting out of constraints, leaving school, leaving their hometowns, meeting new people, talking into the night, laughing, going to jail, being afraid, teaching in Freedom Schools, working in the field, dancing at the Elks Hall, working the WATS line to relay horror story after horror story, telling the press, telling the story, telling the word. And making a difference in this world."
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Hannah Ryggen
Threads of Defiance
Marit Paasche
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Hannah Ryggen (1894–1970) was a Swedish-Norwegian modern artist who began her career as a painter before switching to creating political art in the form of monumental tapestries. Combining the decorative and the political, Ryggen was ahead of her time with her turn to “political weaving.” She was also a feminist with strong communist sympathies involved in the international workers’ movement. Her dramatic, beautiful tapestries were shown at both the Paris and Brussels World’s Fairs, but she was largely forgotten by the international art world in the decades after her death. In recent years, however, as interest in both fiber arts and pioneering women artists has grown, Ryggen’s work has returned to the public eye, with major international exhibitions and fresh attention from curators, collectors, and critics.

A widely recognized authority on Ryggen, Marit Paasche brings this important Scandinavian artist to the foreground in this biography, the first published on Ryggen in English. Paasche looks at Ryggen within the social, political, and cultural contexts of her time and explores how these issues informed her work, from her anti-fascist tapestry that depicted a spear piercing Mussolini’s head to one protesting the war in Vietnam. Published to correspond with a major retrospective in Frankfurt, of which Paasche is one of the curators, Hannah Ryggen is a foundational book that will provide a crucial introduction of this artist to a broader audience.
 
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Hanna's Town
A Little World We Have Lost
W. William Wimberly II
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2010
In late autumn 1902 a macabre scene unfolded at the original burial ground of Wabash, which had been called both the Old Cemetery and Hanna's Cemetery. The task at hand was the disinterment of four bodies. The newest of the four graves held whatever might be left of the corpse of Colonel Hugh Hanna who, more than any other single citizen, was the founding father and civic icon of the prosperous and picturesque community. This book tells the story of a town that rose from the wilderness, one with a bustling economy, a sense of community, civic pride, broad economic connections, architectural achievements, and various other cultural pretensions.
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Hannis Taylor
The New Southerner as an American
Tennant McWilliams
University of Alabama Press, 1978
How a proponent of the New South creed could move easily to advocate the nationalistic foreign and domestic policies often associated with Theodore Roosevelt
 
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American life took on contradictions that were later to surface with considerable poignancy. While many publicists and politicians foresaw an America of harmony and great opportunity, they also clung tenaciously to such doctrines as Anglo-Saxon racial superiority and the righteousness of liberal capitalism-notions that worked to defeat the progress they espoused. Here is a study of one of those persons, Hannis Taylor.
 
For a number of reasons Taylor’s life is uniquely useful for the historian interested in the paradoxes of American life at the turn of the century. Unlike many others of the era who have been examined through biography, Taylor pursued the multifaceted career of prac­ticing attorney, constitutional historian, journalist, diplomat, and ever-aspiring politician. Hence he had occasion to write and speak on almost every intellectual and popular issue of the period. His record serves as a microcosm of many of the contradictions spanning American thought during that time. Further, Taylor was a Southerner. Before moving to Washington, D.C. in 1902, Taylor had grown up in a North Carolina torn by the Civil War and had taken an active role in Alabama affairs during the three decades following Reconstruction. His life shows how a proponent of the New South creed could move easily to advocate the nationalistic foreign and domestic policies often associated with Theodore Roosevelt. Finally, from a humanistic standpoint Taylor's life permits a study in human strivings for achievement. American historiography gravitates to the successful; here is an account of a more common stereotype, the man who worked relentlessly at becoming a noted American by supporting popular causes and who failed tragically.
 
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Hapa Girl
A Memoir
May-lee Chai
Temple University Press, 2008

In the mid-1960s, Winberg Chai, a young academic and the son of Chinese immigrants, married an Irish-American artist. In Hapa Girl ("hapa" is Hawaiian for "mixed") their daughter tells the story of this loving family as they moved from Southern California to New York to a South Dakota farm by the 1980s. In their new Midwestern home, the family finds itself the object of unwelcome attention, which swiftly escalates to violence. The Chais are suddenly socially isolated and barely able to cope with the tension that arises from daily incidents of racial animosity, including random acts of cruelty.

May-lee Chai's memoir ends in China, where she arrives just in time to witness a riot and demonstrations. Here she realizes that the rural Americans' "fears of change, of economic uncertainty, of racial anxiety, of the unknowable future compared to the known past were the same as China's. And I realized finally that it had not been my fault."

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Happenstance
Robert Root
University of Iowa Press, 2013
Reflecting on how a student’s parents met because of a fly ball to center field in a summer softball game, author Robert Root wondered how the lives of that student’s parents and of the student himself would have changed had the batter bunted or struck out. Haunted by this pure example of happenstance, he began to ponder his own existence, dependent in part on geology (the Niagara Escarpment) and history (the Erie Canal). He wondered how happenstance had influenced the course of his parents’ lives, in particular their marriages (they married and divorced each other twice), and consequently the shaping of his identity. Happenstance investigates the effects of that phenomenon and choice on one man’s life.
Root explores this theme in interwoven strands of narrative, interpretation, and reflection. One strand, “The Hundred Days,” follows his attempt to write one hundred journal entries, each about a different day in his life, to recover memories of specific moments or collections of moments. In the strand headed “Album,” he examines and interprets old family photographs in light of the way he reads them in the present, as someone now privy to a family secret that directed his and his siblings’ lives without their knowledge. Interspersed among these brief interpretations and narratives are reflections on happenstance and choice, a sequence contemplating their effect on his life and perhaps on all our lives. Through juxtaposition and accumulation, the book’s incremental unraveling of meaning imitates the process of unexpected epiphanies and gradual self-discovery in anyone’s life.
By revisiting individual days, giving voice to photographs that mutely preserve family moments, and reflecting on the way happenstance and choice determine the directions lives take, Robert Root generates a meditation on identity anchored in an album in words and images of a mid-twentieth-century life.
 
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Happily Sometimes After
Discovering Stories from Twelve Generations of an American Family
Andie Tucher
University of Massachusetts Press, 2014
For more than four hundred years, members of the author's family have been telling stories about their American lives. They have told of impassioned elopements and heart-breaking kidnaps, of hairbreadth escapes and shocking murders, of bigamists, changelings, patriots, Indians, fires, floods, and how the great-grandmother of Chief Justice John Marshall married the pirate Blackbeard by mistake.

In this beautifully written work, Andie Tucher considers family stories as another way to look at history, neither from the top down nor the bottom up but from the inside out. She explores not just what happened—everywhere from Jamestown to Boonesborough, from the bloody field at Chickamauga to the metropolis of the Gilded Age—but also what the storytellers thought or wished or hoped or feared happened. She offers insights into what they valued, what they lost, how they judged their own lives and found meaning in them. The narrative touches on sorrow, recompense, love, pain, and the persistent tension between hope and disappointment in a nation that by making the pursuit of happiness thinkable also made unhappiness regrettable.

Based on extensive research in archives, local history societies, and family-history sources as well as conversations and correspondence, Happily Sometimes After offers an intimate and unusual perspective on how ordinary people used stories to imagine the world they wished for, and what those stories reveal about their relationships with the world they actually had.
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Hard Road West
History and Geology along the Gold Rush Trail
Keith Heyer Meldahl
University of Chicago Press, 2007
In 1848 news of the discovery of gold in California triggered an enormous wave of emigration toward the Pacific. Lured by the promise of riches, thousands of settlers left behind the forests, rain, and fertile soil of the eastern United States in favor of the rough-hewn lands of the American West. The dramatic terrain they struggled to cross is so familiar to us now that it is hard to imagine how frightening—even godforsaken—its sheer rock faces and barren deserts seemed to our forebears.
       
Hard Road West brings their perspective vividly to life, weaving together the epic overland journey of the covered wagon trains and the compelling story of the landscape they encountered. Taking readers along the 2,000-mile California Trail, Keith Meldahl uses the diaries and letters of the settlers themselves—as well as the countless hours he has spent following the trail—to reveal how the geology and geography of the West directly affected our nation’s westward expansion. He guides us through a corrugated landscape of sawtooth mountains, following the meager streams that served as lifelines through an arid land, all the way to California itself, where colliding tectonic plates created breathtaking scenery and planted the gold that lured travelers west in the first place.
 
“Alternates seamlessly between vivid accounts of the 19th-century journey and lucid explanations of the geological events that shaped the landscape traveled. . . . The reader comes away with both an appreciation for the arduous cross-continental wagon journey and an understanding of the events that created such a vast and difficult landscape.”—Library Journal
 
“[Meldahl] draws on his professional knowledge to explain the geology of the West, showing how centuries of geological activity had a direct effect on the routes taken by the travelers. . . . Meldahl provides a novel account of the largest overland migration since the Crusades.”—Science News
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Hard Scrabble
Observations on a Patch of Land
By John Graves
Introduction by Rick Bass
University of Texas Press, 2016

“A kind of homemade book—imperfect like a handmade thing, a prize. It’s a galloping, spontaneous book, on occasion within whooping distance of that greatest and sweetest of country books, Ivan Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Notebook.” —Edward Hoagland, New York Times Book Review

“His subjects are trees and brush, hired help, fences, soil, armadillos and other wildlife, flood and drought, local history, sheep and goats . . . and they come to us reshaped and reenlivened by his agreeably individual (and sometimes cranky) notions.” —New Yorker

“If Goodbye to a River was in some sense Graves’s Odyssey, this book is his [version of Hesiod’s] Works and Days. It is partly a book about work, partly a book about nature, but mostly a book about belonging. In the end John Graves has learned to belong to his patch of land so thoroughly that at moments he can sense in himself a unity with medieval peasants and Sumerian farmers, working with their fields by the Tigris.” —Larry McMurtry, Washington Post Book World

Hard Scrabble is hard pastoral of the kind we have learned to recognize in Wordsworth, Frost, Hemingway, and Faulkner. It celebrates life in accommodation with a piece of the ‘given’ creation, a recalcitrant four hundred or so acres of Texas cedar brake, old field, and creek bottom, which will require of any genuine resident all the character he can muster.” —Southwest Review

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Hardboiled in Hollywood
Five Black Mask Writers and the Movies
Smith
University of Wisconsin Press, 1991

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Harder than Hardscrabble
Oral Recollections of the Farming Life from the Edge of the Texas Hill Country
Edited by Thad Sitton
University of Texas Press, 2004

Winner, San Antonio Conservation Society Citation, 2005
Runner-up, Carr P. Collins Award, Best Book of Nonfiction, Texas Institute of Letters, 2005

Until the U.S. Army claimed 300-plus square miles of hardscrabble land to build Fort Hood in 1942, small communities like Antelope, Pidcoke, Stampede, and Okay scratched out a living by growing cotton and ranching goats on the less fertile edges of the Texas Hill Country. While a few farmers took jobs with construction crews at Fort Hood to remain in the area, almost the entire population—and with it, an entire segment of rural culture—disappeared into the rest of the state.

In Harder than Hardscrabble, oral historian Thad Sitton collects the colorful and frequently touching stories of the pre-Fort Hood residents to give a firsthand view of Texas farming life before World War II. Accessible to the general reader and historian alike, the stories recount in vivid detail the hardships and satisfactions of daily life in the Texas countryside. They describe agricultural practices and livestock handling as well as life beyond work: traveling peddlers, visits to towns, country schools, medical practices, and fox hunting. The anecdotes capture a fast-disappearing rural society—a world very different from today's urban Texas.

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Hardship and Hope
Missouri Women Writing about Their Lives, 1820-1920
Carla Waal and Barbara Oliver Korner, eds.
University of Missouri Press, 1997

Over the years Missouri women have endured many hardships: Civil War troops in their homes, the harshness of westward travel, the loneliness of the Gold Rush, and slavery. They have also greatly influenced the state's history. Marie Watkins Oliver made the state flag; Margaret Nelson Stephens was a gifted politician; Carry A. Nation fought for prohibition; and Mary Ezit Bulkley was active in the woman suffrage movement.

Hardship and Hope brings to life these and other known and unknown Missouri women through their own writings in journals, letters, diaries, and memoirs. Most of these pieces have never been published or have long been out of print. Carla Waal and Barbara Oliver Korner have skillfully crafted this anthology to represent myriad Missouri women. There are pieces representing the experiences of Jewish, Irish, and German immigrants, African Americans, well-educated women, and deeply religious women. Preceding each entry is a useful introduction that provides history and background on the woman and her work.

Readers will meet women like Phoebe Wilson Couzins, who was the first woman law graduate in Missouri. She went on to work with Susan B. Anthony for the suffrage movement but died in poverty, physically handicapped and emotionally unstable. Emma J. Ray was born a slave just before the Civil War. She and her husband did missionary work in jails and on the streets of Kansas City. Other women represented are Laura Ingalls Wilder, Kate Chopin, Fannie Hurst, and Henriette Geisberg Bruns.

Hardship and Hope began as a series of performances around the state of Missouri through which the book's editors demonstrated the roles women played in that state's past. Because of the enthusiastic response to their performances, Waal and Korner continued searching for documents by Missouri women and now share their discoveries in book form. Covering a little more than a century, from just before Missouri's admission to the Union in 1821 to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment that gave women the right to vote in 1920, the excerpts here both captivate and inform.

This anthology will appeal to those interested in women's studies, Missouri and midwestern history, and oral interpretation.

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Hardwood Glory
A Life of John Wooden
Barbara Olenyik Morrow
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2014
The tenth volume in the Indiana Historical Society Press’s celebrated Youth Biography Series examines the life of a man who helped define college basketball in the twentieth century and became an icon of American sports—John Wooden. He was born in the small Indiana town of Martinsville near the start of the last century. His claim to fame came first as an accomplished athlete, helping his high school basketball team compete in three state championship games, then earning All-American honors three times in his home state as a starting guard at Purdue University. After briefly teaching high school English and coaching several sports in Dayton, Kentucky, Wooden returned to Indiana, where he launched a successful career coaching basketball at South Bend Central High School and later at Indiana State Teachers College (now Indiana State University) in Terre Haute. In 1948, at age thirty-seven, Wooden moved west, as did many Americans in the post-World War II era. He took over the head basketball job at the University of California at Los Angeles, a school with virtually no basketball tradition. He took his family and his coaching skills with him. He also took his midwestern values. For the next six decades he remained in Southern California, creating a basketball dynasty at UCLA and solidifying his place as one of the sporting world’s greats. When he died on June 4, 2010, at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, he was four months shy of his hundredth birthday. Wooden’s success as a college coach was unprecedented and, in pure numbers, staggering. From 1964 to 1975, he led the UCLA Bruins men’s basketball team to ten National Collegiate Athletic Association national basketball championships, including seven in a row—a feat that may never be matched. During that string of championships, he coached the Bruins to four perfect 30–0 seasons, an NCAA men’s record that still stands. He also coached UCLA to an eighty-eight-game winning streak, yet another unrivaled men’s record. Over the course of his twenty-seven seasons at UCLA, he mentored All-Americans such as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Bill Walton, earned the respect of legions of players, and inspired countless would-be roundballers and coaches alike. These achievements put Wooden in the company of legendary coaches throughout the field of sports. Even in that elite company, he fared especially well. In 2009 Sporting News magazine asked more than one hundred coaches and sports experts to name the greatest coach of all time in any sport. Not surprisingly, coaching giants such as the Green Bay Packers’s Vince Lombardi, Notre Dame’s Knute Rockne, the Boston Celtics’s Red Auerbach, and New York Yankees’s Casey Stengel ranked in the top ten; Wooden stood at number one the list. Long before that ranking, however, awards and honors flowed Wooden’s way. In 1973 he was inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame as coach, making him the first to be honored as both a player and a coach. (He received the honor as a player in 1960.) In 1977 college basketball’s annual player-of-the-year award was named for him. The NCAA bestowed its highest honor, the Theodore Roosevelt award, on Wooden in 1995. And in 2006 the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame in Kansas City, Missouri, honored him as a member of the founding class, along with basketball inventor Doctor James Naismith. Accolades also poured in from outside the sports world. In 2003 President George W. Bush awarded Wooden the Presidential Medal of Freedom, American’s highest civilian honor. Two years later, Indiana bestowed on him its highest honor, the Sachem, an award recognizing a lifetime of excellence and virtue. In earlier decades, entities ranging from service clubs to faith-based organizations to universities rushed to salute not only his accomplishments but also his character.
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Hardy Cross
American Engineer
Leonard K. Eaton
University of Illinois Press, 2006

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The Harlan Renaissance
Stories of Black Life in Appalachian Coal Towns
William H. Turner
West Virginia University Press, 2021
Weatherford Award Winner, Nonfiction

A personal remembrance from the preeminent chronicler of Black life in Appalachia.

The Harlan Renaissance is an intimate remembrance of kinship and community in eastern Kentucky’s coal towns written by one of the luminaries of Appalachian studies, William Turner. Turner reconstructs Black life in the company towns in and around Harlan County during coal’s final postwar boom years, which built toward an enduring bust as the children of Black miners, like the author, left the region in search of better opportunities.

The Harlan Renaissance invites readers into what might be an unfamiliar Appalachia: one studded by large and vibrant Black communities, where families took the pulse of the nation through magazines like Jet and Ebony and through the news that traveled within Black churches, schools, and restaurants. Difficult choices for the future were made as parents considered the unpredictable nature of Appalachia’s economic realities alongside the unpredictable nature of a national movement toward civil rights.

Unfolding through layers of sociological insight and oral history, The Harlan Renaissance centers the sympathetic perspectives and critical eye of a master narrator of Black life.
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Harnessed to the Pole
Sledge Dogs in Service to American Explorers of the Arctic 1853-1909
Sheila Nickerson
University of Alaska Press, 2014
In the second half of the nineteenth century, an epic race was underway in some of the most brutal stretches on the planet. Explorers from around the world hoped to stake their claim on the Arctic, with the North Pole being the ultimate prize. Those with the greatest success found that the fastest way to travel was on four legs—using a team of hardworking sledge dogs.

Harnessed to the Pole follows the adventures of eight American explorers and their dog teams, starting with Elisha Kent Kane and ending with Robert Peary, controversial claimant of the title of first to reach the North Pole. While history has long forgotten these “little camels of the north,” Sheila Nickerson reveals how critical dogs were to the Arctic conquest. Besides providing transportation in extreme conditions, sledge dogs protected against wolves and polar bears, helped in hunting, found their way through storms, and provided warmth in extreme cold. They also faced rough handling, starvation, and the possibility of being left behind as expeditions plunged ahead. Harnessed to the Pole is an extraordinary—and unflinching—look at the dogs that raced to the top of the world.
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Harold B. Lee
Life and Thought
Newell G. Bringhurst
Signature Books, 2021
While Harold B. Lee served as president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for a mere one and half-years—among the shortest tenure of any church leader—his impact on the modern LDS Church remains among the most profound. Lee implemented the Church Welfare Program, which provided relief to suffering church members during the 1930s Great Depression and continues to impact the lives of church members today. As a high-ranking general authority from 1941 to 1973, he championed other innovations, the most important being Correlation. Lee acted in response to the church’s record growth and increased diversity to consolidate and streamline churchwide instruction and administration. As a teacher/mentor, he promoted conservative church doctrine and practice, which influenced a generation of church leaders, including future presidents Spencer W. Kimball, Ezra Taft Benson, Howard W. Hunter, Gordon B. Hinckley, and Thomas S. Monson. Noted historian Newell G. Bringhurst succinctly narrates the major, defining events in Lee’s remarkable life, while highlighting Lee’s important, lasting contributions. This is the first volume in Signature’s new Brief Mormon Lives series.
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Harold Ickes of the New Deal
His Private Life and Public Career
Graham White and John Maze
Harvard University Press, 1985

Very little has been written about Harold Ickes, one of the most important, complex, and colorful figures of the New Deal. By any standards his public career was remarkable. For thirteen turbulent years as Interior Secretary and as head of the Public Works Administration he was an uncommonly effective official and a widely acknowledged leader of liberal reform. As the foremost conservationist of his time, he saved millions of acres of land from decimation. He was matchless, too, as a fighter for just causes, and used his formidable talent for invective and his inexhaustible supply of moral fervor to flay representatives of prejudice and self-interest, whether in the cause of Negro rights or that of the common man against economic royalists.

Despite a long and distinguished public life, Ickes is an enigma because of his inability to control his rage, to temper his public criticism, to respond objectively to situations. At the heart of his public and private life was constant moral outrage. This astute study by a historian and a psychologist probes the sources and consequences of Ickes' abnormal combativeness.

White and Maze uncover the psychological imperatives and conscious ideals of Ickes' unknown private life that illuminate his public career. Some of the episodes include sadistic attacks by an elder brother; young Harold contemplating shooting his father; bitter and physical brawls with his imperious, wealthy, and previously married socialite wife, Anna Wilmarth Thompson of Chicago; and thoughts of suicide.

Richard Polenberg calls this book "Superb [and] one of the most informative and interesting I have read on the New Deal. The story shows Ickes' weaknesses and flaws, but it puts them in context. The authors have not tried to explain everything Ickes ever did wholly in psychological terms, but the particular insights they bring to bear help present a rounded view of the man. The book is beautifully written."

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Harold Rosenberg
A Critic‘s Life
Debra Bricker Balken
University of Chicago Press, 2021
Despite being one of the foremost American intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century, Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978) was utterly incapable of fitting in—and he liked it that way. Signature cane in one hand and a cigarette in the other, he cut a distinctive figure on the New York City culture scene, with his radiant dark eyes and black bushy brows. A gangly giant at six foot four, he would tower over others as he forcefully expounded on his latest obsession in an oddly high-pitched, nasal voice. And people would listen, captivated by his ideas.
 
With Harold Rosenberg: A Critic’s Life, Debra Bricker Balken offers the first-ever complete biography of this great and eccentric man. Although he is now known mainly for his role as an art critic at the New Yorker from 1962 to 1978, Balken weaves together a complete tapestry of Rosenberg’s life and literary production, cast against the dynamic intellectual and social ferment of his time. She explores his role in some of the most contentious cultural debates of the Cold War period, including those over the commodification of art and the erosion of individuality in favor of celebrity, demonstrated in his famous essay “The Herd of Independent Minds.” An outspoken socialist and advocate for the political agency of art, he formed deep alliances with figures such as Hannah Arendt, Saul Bellow, Paul Goodman, Mary McCarthy, Jean-Paul Sartre, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock, all of whom Balken portrays with vivid accounts from Rosenberg’s life.

Thoroughly researched and captivatingly written, this book tells in full Rosenberg’s brilliant, fiercely independent life and the five decades in which he played a leading role in US cultural, intellectual, and political history.
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Harriet Bosse
Strindberg's Muse and Interpreter
Carla Waal
Southern Illinois University Press, 1990
Harriet Bosse, a delicate beauty with rich theatrical talent, wasan inspiration for the prominent and controversial playwright August Strindberg. After their three-year marriage collapsed, she became his interpreter to the world, guardian of the Strindberg legend. This first biography of Harriet Bosse in English explores her own important career as an actress on the Swedish stage, as well as her influence on Strindberg’s work. Waal has separated Harriet Bosse from her romanticized image in the shadow of August Strindberg and has shown her as a person, fascinating and self-sufficient. Her daughter-in-law Randi Wingård said: "Harriet was a great personality, and even if she was tiny, one could nothelp noticing her in any gathering. She attracted everyone’s attention." While tracing the development of Bosse’s career, her triumphs and disappointments, Waal chronicles the beginnings of Swedish filmmaking in early silent films as well as four decades of major developments in Swedish theatre. But Bosse’s marriage to Strindberg and her relationship to his writing are an integral part of her story, and Waal also details the couple’s stormy marriage, from 1901 to 1903, the reasons for its failure, and the personal and career influences they continued to exert on each other. As Strindberg’s inspiration for many literary works, Bosse was alternately vilified and idealized. Much of what Strindberg wrote after meeting Bosse reflects his adoration of her and his despair over the problems of their relationship. She inspired two of his major works of poetry, "The Golden Eagle" and "The Dutchman," in addition to the character of the virgin princess in Swan White. On stage she played eight minor and six major Strindberg roles, including Indra’s Daughter in A Dream Play and Christina in Queen Christina.
Much information for this book is drawn from previously inaccessible sources, including unpublished materials in libraries, archives, and private collections, mostly in Scandinavia. Waal interviewed Strindberg and Bosse’s daughter Anne Marie Wyller Hagelin (to whom the book is dedicated) as well as other members of Bosse’s family and a wide range of actors, critics, directors, and scholars. Forty-one photographs are included in the text.
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Harriet Hosmer
A Cultural Biography
Kate Culkin
University of Massachusetts Press, 2010
Harriet Hosmer (1830–1908) was celebrated as one of the country's most respected artists, credited with opening the field of sculpture to women and cited as a model of female ability and American refinement. In this biographical study, Kate Culkin explores Hosmer's life and work and places her in the context of a notable group of expatriate writers and artists who gathered in Rome in the mid-nineteenth century.

In 1852 Hosmer moved from Boston to Rome, where she shared a house with actress Charlotte Cushman and soon formed close friendships with such prominent expatriates as Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and fellow sculptors John Gibson, Emma Stebbins, and William Wetmore Story. References to Hosmer or characters inspired by her appear in the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, and Kate Field among others. Culkin argues that Hosmer's success was made possible by her extensive network of supporters, including her famous friends, boosters of American gentility, and women's rights advocates. This unlikely coalition, along with her talent, ambition, and careful maintenance of her public profile, ultimately brought her great acclaim. Culkin also addresses Hosmer's critique of women's position in nineteenth-century culture through her sculpture, women's rights advocates' use of high art to promote their cause, the role Hosmer's relationships with women played in her life and success, and the complex position a female artist occupied within a country increasingly interested in proving its gentility.
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Harriet Tubman
Myth, Memory, and History
Milton C. Sernett
Duke University Press, 2007
Harriet Tubman is one of America’s most beloved historical figures, revered alongside luminaries including Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History tells the fascinating story of Tubman’s life as an American icon. The distinguished historian Milton C. Sernett compares the larger-than-life symbolic Tubman with the actual “historical” Tubman. He does so not to diminish Tubman’s achievements but rather to explore the interplay of history and myth in our national consciousness. Analyzing how the Tubman icon has changed over time, Sernett shows that the various constructions of the “Black Moses” reveal as much about their creators as they do about Tubman herself.

Three biographies of Harriet Tubman were published within months of each other in 2003–04; they were the first book-length studies of the “Queen of the Underground Railroad” to appear in almost sixty years. Sernett examines the accuracy and reception of these three books as well as two earlier biographies first published in 1869 and 1943. He finds that the three recent studies come closer to capturing the “real” Tubman than did the earlier two. Arguing that the mythical Tubman is most clearly enshrined in stories told to and written for children, Sernett scrutinizes visual and textual representations of “Aunt Harriet” in children’s literature. He looks at how Tubman has been portrayed in film, painting, music, and theater; in her Maryland birthplace; in Auburn, New York, where she lived out her final years; and in the naming of schools, streets, and other public venues. He also investigates how the legendary Tubman was embraced and represented by different groups during her lifetime and at her death in 1913. Ultimately, Sernett contends that Harriet Tubman may be America’s most malleable and resilient icon.

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Harriet Tubman
The Life and the Life Stories
Jean M. Humez
University of Wisconsin Press, 2005

    Harriet Tubman’s name is known world-wide and her exploits as a self-liberated Underground Railroad heroine are celebrated in children’s literature, film, and history books, yet no major biography of Tubman has appeared since 1943. Jean M. Humez’s comprehensive Harriet Tubman is both an important biographical overview based on extensive new research and a complete collection of the stories Tubman told about her life—a virtual autobiography culled by Humez from rare early publications and manuscript sources. This book will become a landmark resource for scholars, historians, and general readers interested in slavery, the Underground Railroad, the Civil War, and African American women.
    Born in slavery in Maryland in or around 1820, Tubman drew upon deep spiritual resources and covert antislavery networks when she escaped to the north in 1849. Vowing to liberate her entire family, she made repeated trips south during the 1850s and successfully guided dozens of fugitives to freedom. During the Civil War she was recruited to act as spy and scout with the Union Army. After the war she settled in Auburn, New York, where she worked to support an extended family and in her later years founded a home for the indigent aged. Celebrated by her primarily white antislavery associates in a variety of private and public documents from the 1850s through the 1870s, she was rediscovered as a race heroine by woman suffragists and the African American women’s club movement in the early twentieth century. Her story was used as a key symbolic resource in education, institutional fundraising, and debates about the meaning of "race" throughout the twentieth century.
    Humez includes an extended discussion of Tubman’s work as a public performer of her own life history during the nearly sixty years she lived in the north. Drawing upon historiographical and literary discussion of the complex hybrid authorship of slave narrative literature, Humez analyzes the interactive dynamic between Tubman and her interviewers. Humez illustrates how Tubman, though unable to write, made major unrecognized contributions to the shaping of her own heroic myth by early biographers like Sarah Bradford. Selections of key documents illustrate how Tubman appeared to her contemporaries, and a comprehensive list of primary sources represents an important resource for scholars.

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Harry Hopkins
Ally of the Poor and Defender of Democracy
George McJimsey
Harvard University Press, 1987

During America's longest crisis—the Great Depression and the Second World War—one man stood nearest to the president, almost as a partner: Harry Hopkins, trusted and loyal lieutenant and best friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt. From his work on the New Deal through his assignments during the war, Hopkins was the grand planner, expediter, adviser, and negotiator. Here is the first complete modern biography of this remarkable man, based on prodigious primary sources and written with the benefit of historical perspective.

George McJimsey fully records Hopkins's meteoric public career and probes the sources of his creativity and talent. Reared in Iowa with missionary values, he became a professional social worker in New York, pioneering strategies for several health and social service agencies. His special talent for persuasion and conciliation brought him into the New Deal, where as head of the Federal Emergency Relief Agency and the Public Works Administration he led Roosevelt's recovery programs—helping to pump billions of dollars into large projects and into tens of thousands of jobs without any political scandal or great conflict with conservative adversaries or competitors such as Harold Ickes. Later, as Secretary of Commerce, he continued to lead the country out of depression.

The coming of war tested Hopkins in new and unexpected ways. From being democracy's great bureaucrat he became the grand vizier of the arsenal of democracy. Living in the White House (in the Lincoln Room), Hopkins organized Lend-Lease, built the Anglo-American alliance, coordinated military supplies with strategic objectives, negotiated with Stalin, and helped to plan FDR's meetings with Churchill, Stalin, De Gaulle, and Chiang Kai-shek. Intelligent, humane, imaginative yet practical, always loyal to Roosevelt yet operating with his own creative independence, Hopkins played a role in winning the war and shaping the peace that provides an inspiring example of devoted public service. General readers and historians, journalists, and everyone interested in how government works will value and enjoy this book.

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Harry Huntt Ransom
Intellect in Motion
By Alan Gribben
University of Texas Press, 2008

Both a life story and a portrait of public higher education during the twentieth century, Harry Huntt Ransom captures the spirit of a dynamic individual who dedicated his talents to nurturing intellectual life in Texas and beyond. Tracing the details of Ransom's youth in Galveston and Tennessee and his education at Yale, where he earned a doctorate, Alan Gribben provides new insight into the factors that shaped Ransom's future as a renowned administrator and defender of the humanities.

Ransom's career at the University of Texas began in 1935, when he was hired as an instructor of English. He rose through the ranks to become chancellor, stepping down in 1971 during a volatile period when debates about the University's central mission raged—particularly over the question of commercializing higher education. The development of Ransom's lasting legacy, the Humanities Research Center bearing his name, is explored in depth as well. Bringing to life a legendary figure, Harry Huntt Ransom is a colorful testament to a singular man of letters who had the audacity to propose "that there be established somewhere in Texas—let's say in the capital city—a center of our cultural compass, a research center to be the Bibliothèque Nationale of the only state that started out as an independent nation."

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Harry Reasoner
A Life in the News
By Douglass K. Daniel
University of Texas Press, 2007

Harry Reasoner was one of the most trusted and well-liked journalists of the golden age of network television news. Whether anchoring the evening newscast on CBS in the 1960s or on ABC in the 1970s, providing in-depth reporting on 60 Minutes, or hosting numerous special programs covering civil rights struggles, the Vietnam War, and Watergate, Reasoner had "that almost mystical quality it seems to take for good television reporting, exuding this atmosphere of truth and believability," in the words of Walter Cronkite. Yet his reassuring manner and urbane, often witty, on-air persona masked a man who was far more complex and contradictory. Though gifted with the intelligence and drive to rise to the top of his profession, Reasoner was regarded by many colleagues as lazy and self-indulgent, a man who never achieved his full potential despite his many accomplishments.

Harry Reasoner: A Life in the News covers the entire sweep of this enigmatic journalist's life and career. Douglass K. Daniel opens with Reasoner's Depression-era Midwestern upbringing and follows him through his early work in newspapers and radio before he joined CBS in 1956. Focusing on Reasoner's thirty-five-year tenure in television news, Daniel presents fascinating, behind-the-scenes accounts of Reasoner's key role in founding the top-rated newsmagazine 60 Minutes. He also explores Reasoner's highly publicized move to ABC in 1970, where he anchored the nightly newscast, first with Howard K. Smith and later with Barbara Walters—a disastrous pairing from which Reasoner's career never fully recovered.

Based on scores of interviews and unpublished letters, memos, and other primary sources, this first biography of the man once rated second in credibility only to Walter Cronkite illuminates an entire era in broadcast journalism, as well as many of the unique personalities, from Andy Rooney to Mike Wallace, who made that era distinctive.

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Harry S. Truman
A Life
Robert H. Ferrell
University of Missouri Press, 1995

Few U.S. presidents have captured the imagination of the American people as has Harry S. Truman, “the man from Missouri.”

In this major new biography, Robert H. Ferrell, widely regarded as an authority on the thirty-third president, challenges the popular characterization of Truman as a man who rarely sought the offices he received, revealing instead a man who—with modesty, commitment to service, and basic honesty—moved with method and system toward the presidency.

Truman was ambitious in the best sense of the word. His powerful commitment to service was accompanied by a remarkable shrewdness and an exceptional ability to judge people. He regarded himself as a consummate politician, a designation of which he was proud. While in Washington, he never succumbed to the “Potomac fever” that swelled the heads of so many officials in that city. A scrupulously honest man, Truman exhibited only one lapse when, at the beginning of 1941, he padded his Senate payroll by adding his wife and later his sister.

From his early years on the family farm through his pivotal decision to use the atomic bomb in World War II, Truman’s life was filled with fascinating events. Ferrell’s exhaustive research offers new perspectives on many key episodes in Truman’s career, including his first Senate term and the circumstances surrounding the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. In addition, Ferrell taps many little-known sources to relate the intriguing story of the machinations by which Truman gained the vice presidential nomination in 1944, a position which put him a heartbeat away from the presidency.

No other historian has ever demonstrated such command over the vast amounts of material that Robert Ferrell brings to bear on the unforgettable story of Truman’s life. Based upon years of research in the Truman Library and the study of many never-before-used primary sources, Harry S. Truman is destined to become the authoritative account of the nation’s favorite president.

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Harry T. Burleigh
From the Spiritual to the Harlem Renaissance
Jean E. Snyder
University of Illinois Press, 2021
Harry T. Burleigh (1866-1949) played a leading role in American music and culture in the twentieth century. Celebrated for his arrangements of spirituals, Burleigh was also the first African American composer to create a significant body of art song. An international roster of opera and recital singers performed his works and praised them as among the best of their time. Jean E. Snyder traces Burleigh's life from his Pennsylvania childhood through his fifty-year tenure as soloist at St. George's Episcopal Church in Manhattan. As a composer, Burleigh's pioneering work preserved and transformed the African American spiritual; as a music editor, he facilitated the work of other black composers; as a role model, vocal coach, and mentor, he profoundly influenced American song; and in private life he was friends with Antonín Dvořák, Marian Anderson, Will Marion Cook, and other America luminaries. Snyder provides rich historical, social, and political contexts that explore Burleigh's professional and personal life within an era complicated by changes in race relations, class expectations, and musical tastes.
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Harry, Tom, and Father Rice
Accusation and Betrayal in America’s Cold War
John Hoerr
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007

John Hoerr tells the story of three men—his uncle, Congressman Harry Davenport, union leader Tom Quinn, and Father Charles Owen Rice—whose lives became intertwined during the anti-Communist witch hunts of the McCarthy Era. The story helps illuminate one of the more repressive periods in American history, when thousands of Americans guilty only of enlisting in leftist causes were caught up in dragnets cast by overzealous Communist hunters on behalf of the House Un-American Activities Committee and other bodies. Much has been written about well-known cultural figures (the Hollywood Ten), and prominent writers (Arthur Miller and Lillian Hellman) who contended with HUAC. Hoerr tells of mostly ordinary Americans who were largely unknown at the time, but whose stories are nonetheless remarkable.

Writing from personal experience with the title characters, as well as archival research, Hoerr recreates the events of the 1949 HUAC hearings, where rigged testimony by a few workers cast suspicion on their union brothers.  The results would echo through the years, causing people to lose jobs, marriages, and self-respect. Hoerr traces the paths followed by Harry, Tom, and Father Rice and relates their individual experiences to the great conflict between anti-Communist and Communist forces in the American labor movement, leading to the eventual demise of the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations).

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Hatching Ruin
Or Mark Twain's Road to Bankruptcy
Charles H. Gold
University of Missouri Press, 2003

In “Hatching Ruin,” Charles H. Gold provides a complete description of Samuel L. Clemens’s business relationships with Charles L. Webster and James W. Paige during the 1880s. Gold analyzes how these relationships affected Clemens as a person and an artist, most notably in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

The 1880s were a time when Samuel Clemens was more businessman than author. Clemens wanted to be rich. From an early age, he had dreamed of wealth. Suspicious of his previous publisher, Clemens started a publishing company and placed Charles L. Webster, who was married to his niece, at the head of it. He also invested large sums of money with James Paige, who was developing a typesetting machine. These were to be Clemens’s instruments of success—his way to bring technology to the world and become so rich that he would never need to earn money again.
 
Unfortunately for him, Paige was a perfectionist and a compulsive tinkerer who never stopped working on the typesetting machine. When, after early success, the publishing company began to fail, Clemens was unable to continue his investments in the typesetter. He blamed both Webster and Paige for his failure to “get rich quick” and for his eventual bankruptcy in 1894. Gold argues that these financial changes in his life helped to shape Connecticut Yankee, an important novel and cultural statement.
 
At the beginning of the 1880s, while life was still good, Clemens wrote Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in part a nostalgic look at youth and innocence in preindustrial America. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, written after the author’s financial failures, is a savage condemnation of the Gilded Age, especially technology’s role in it. Gold’s “Hatching Ruin” tells for the first time the full story of Clemens’s experiences as an investor, employer, and entrepreneur during the Gilded Age.
 
Gold uses previously unpublished material from family correspondence and Clemens’s autobiographical dictations to present a far more complex picture of the man most people know only as Mark Twain. He also offers a fuller depiction of Charles Webster and his relationship with Clemens than was previously available, while answering many questions that have hung over that relationship. This book will have a wide appeal to both Twain students and scholars, as well as anyone interested in social history.
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Haunted Heart
A Biography of Susannah McCorkle
Linda Dahl
University of Michigan Press, 2006

"In this comprehensive biography, compiled from meticulous research and interviews with many of McCorkle's confidants . . . Dahl reconstructs a career distinguished by great promise and great sadness . . . doing her best to address a large, looming 'Why?' that can never be completely answered."
New York Times

"A compelling, sympathetic but often chilling view not only of McCorkle's complexities but also of the difficult business of music itself and of the widespread always potentially fatal illness now better known as bipolar disorder, which the singer hid from so many, even from herself for many years."
Newsweek

“Susannah's life was dark and daunting. Her music was suave and sunny. Both are honored in this remarkably well-researched and constantly revealing keyhole peek into a haunted life that is both chilling and exhilarating. I could not put it down.”
—Rex Reed

“Susannah McCorkle was a mesmerizing singer with a dark side she hid even from her closest friends. Now, thanks to this probing and courageous biography, we can understand the gut ambition that took her to the top of her field and the turmoil that brought her down.”
—James Gavin, author of Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker

Haunted Heart strikingly resembles the woman it describes: it is vivacious, tender, saturnine, industrious, and deeply intelligent. Like Susannah's way with certain ballads, it opens a wound and begins the work of healing it. I am grateful for Linda Dahl's diligence and sympathy.”
—Leon Wieseltier

Linda Dahl is the author of Stormy Weather: The Music and Lives of a Century of Jazzwomen and Morning Glory: A Biography of Mary Lou Williams. Visit the author’s website at www.dahljazz.com.

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Haunted Man's Report
Reading Charles Portis
Robert Cochran
University of Arkansas Press, 2024
Robert Cochran’s Haunted Man’s Report is a pioneering study of the novels and other writings of Arkansan Charles Portis (1933–2020), best known for the novel True Grit and its film adaptations. Hailed by one critic as “the author of classics on the order of a twentieth-century Mark Twain” and as America’s “least-known great novelist,” Portis has garnered a devoted fan base with his ear for language, picaresque characters, literary Easter eggs, and talent for injecting comedy into even the smallest turn of phrase. As a former Marine who served on the front lines of the Korean War and as a journalist who observed firsthand the violent resistance to the civil rights movement, Portis reported on atrocities that came to inform his fiction profoundly. His novels take aim at colonialism and notions of American exceptionalism, focusing on ordinary people, often vets, searching for safe havens in a fallen world.

Haunted Man’s Report, a deeply insightful literary exploration of Portis’s singular and underexamined oeuvre, celebrates this novelist’s great achievement and is certain to prove a valuable guide for readers new to Portis as well as aficionados.
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The Haunting of Sylvia Plath
Jacqueline Rose
Harvard University Press, 1992
Since her death in 1963 at the age of thirty, Sylvia Plath has become a strange icon---an object of intense speculation, fantasy, repulsion, and desire. Jacqueline Rose stands back from the debates and looks instead at the swirl of controversy, recognizing it as a phenomenon in itself--one with much to tell us about how a culture selects and judges writers; how we hear women's voices; and how we receive messages from, to, and about our unconscious selves.
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Havana and Other Missing Fathers
Mia Leonin
University of Arizona Press, 2009
Mia Leonin spent the first sixteen years of her life believing her father was dead. All she knew of the man came through stories told by her mother. At times he had been a surgeon, at others a psychiatrist. In truth, he had been a fantasy.

Shortly after her sixteenth birthday, Leonin learned from her mother that her father, a Cuban exile, was very much alive and living in Florida. Her attempts to contact him, however, were thwarted until four years later, when she left home in search of her roots.

She meets her father, but trying to discover the truth behind him proves to be a more daunting task. Her journey takes her to Miami, Colombia, and Cuba, and her search for cultural identity leads her to create memories, friendships, and romances. She finds moments of connection and redemption, ending up in Havana not as a cultural tourist but as an illegitimate daughter of Cuba looking for validation. What she discovers is an island bereft of fathers and brimming with paternalism. As she becomes entangled with two different men, she descends further into the Havana of poverty, humiliation, and despair, as well as the ever-inventive city that is as passionate as it is contradictory.

Insightful, imaginative, and often poetic, Havana and Other Missing Fathers is Mia Leonin’s recollection of this journey and her longing to learn more about her origins. In the end, she must learn to accept the answers she discovers as well as the questions that remain.
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Havel
Unfinished Revolution
David Gilbreath Barton
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021

This is the story of a man who tried to resurrect the spirit of democratic life. He was born into a time of chaos and absurdity, and he took it as his fate to carry a candle into the night. This is his story and the story of many others, the writers, artists, actors, and philosophers who took it upon themselves to remember a tradition that had failed so miserably it had almost been forgotten.

Václav Havel (1936–2011), the famous Czech dissident, intellectual, and playwright, was there when a half million people came to Wenceslas Square to demand an end to Communism in 1989. Many came to hear him call for a free Czechoslovakia, for democratic elections, and a return to Europe. The demonstrators roared when he spoke. “Havel to the castle,” they chanted— meaning Havel for president. And a few weeks later, Havel became a most unusual president. He was sometimes misunderstood and not always popular, but by the time of his death in 2011, the world recognized Havel as one of the most prominent figures of the twentieth century.

Born into one of the most prominent and wealthy families in Prague, Havel was the constant subject of attention and an artistic eccentric in a family of businessmen. A young Havel and his family were cast by the Communist takeover as class enemies. Havel traveled a dark road that, ironically, provided the experiences he needed to reconnect not only to his own “ground of being” but to the traditions of civic society. This biography is the story of Havel’s inward journey in his underground years and thus the story of how Havel, the outsider, became the ultimate insider as president of the nation.

In this intimate and sweeping portrayal of Havel, David Barton reveals the eccentricities of the last president of Czechoslovakia, and the first president of the Czech Republic.

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Hawthorne in His Own Time
A Biographical Chronicle of His Life,Drawn from Recollections,Interviews, and Memoirs by Family,Frie
Ronald A Bosco
University of Iowa Press, 2007

At his death, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) was universally acknowledged in America and England as "the Great Romancer." Novels such as The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables and stories published in such collections as Twice-Told Tales continue to capture the minds and imaginations of readers and critics to this day. Harder to capture, however, were the character and personality of the man himself. So few of the essays that appeared in the two years after his death offered new insights into his life, art, and reputation that Hawthorne seemed fated to premature obscurity or, at least, permanent misrepresentation. This first collection of personal reminiscences by those who knew Hawthorne intimately or knew about him through reliable secondary sources rescues him from these confusions and provides the real human history behind the successful writer.

Remembrances from Elizabeth Peabody, Sophia Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, and twenty others printed in Hawthorne in His Own Time follow him from his childhood in Salem, through his years of initial literary obscurity, his days in the Boston and Salem Custom Houses, his service as U.S. Consul to Liverpool and Manchester and his life in the Anglo-American communities at Rome and Florence, to his late years as the "Great Romancer."

In their enlightening introduction, editors Ronald Bosco and Jillmarie Murphy assess the postmortem building of Hawthorne's reputation as well as his relationship to the prominent Transcendentalists, spiritualists, Swedenborgians, and other personalities of his time. By clarifying the sentimental associations between Hawthorne's writings and his actual personality and moving away from the critical review to the personal narrative, these artful and perceptive reminiscences tell the private and public story of a remarkable life.

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The Haydn Economy
Music, Aesthetics, and Commerce in the Late Eighteenth Century
Nicholas Mathew
University of Chicago Press, 2022
Analyzing the final three decades of Haydn’s career, this book uses the composer as a prism through which to examine urgent questions across the humanities.
 
In this far-reaching work of music history and criticism, Nicholas Mathew reimagines the world of Joseph Haydn and his contemporaries, with its catastrophic upheavals and thrilling sense of potential. In the process, Mathew tackles critical questions of particular moment: how we tell the history of the European Enlightenment and Romanticism; the relation of late eighteenth-century culture to incipient capitalism and European colonialism; and how the modern market and modern aesthetic values were—and remain—inextricably entwined.

The Haydn Economy weaves a vibrant material history of Haydn’s career, extending from the sphere of the ancient Esterházy court to his frenetic years as an entrepreneur plying between London and Vienna to his final decade as a venerable musical celebrity, during which he witnessed the transformation of his legacy by a new generation of students and acolytes, Beethoven foremost among them. Ultimately, Mathew asserts, Haydn’s historical trajectory compels us to ask what we might retain from the cultural and political practices of European modernity—whether we can extract and preserve its moral promise from its moral failures. And it demands that we confront the deep histories of capitalism that continue to shape our beliefs about music, sound, and material culture.
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Haydée Santamaría, Cuban Revolutionary
She Led by Transgression
Margaret Randall
Duke University Press, 2015
Taking part in the Cuban Revolution's first armed action in 1953, enduring the torture and killings of her brother and fiancé, assuming a leadership role in the underground movement, and smuggling weapons into Cuba, Haydée Santamaría was the only woman to participate in every phase of the Revolution. Virtually unknown outside of Cuba, Santamaría was a trusted member of Fidel Castro's inner circle and friend of Che Guevara. Following the Revolution's victory Santamaría founded and ran the cultural and arts institution Casa de las Americas, which attracted cutting-edge artists, exposed Cubans to some of the world's greatest creative minds, and protected queer, black, and feminist artists from state repression. Santamaría's suicide in 1980 caused confusion and discomfort throughout Cuba; despite her commitment to the Revolution, communist orthodoxy's disapproval of suicide prevented the Cuban leadership from mourning and celebrating her in the Plaza of the Revolution. In this impressionistic portrait of her friend Haydée Santamaría, Margaret Randall shows how one woman can help change the course of history.
[more]

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Hayek
A Life, 1899–1950
Bruce Caldwell and Hansjoerg Klausinger
University of Chicago Press, 2022
A 2022 Economist Best Book of the Year.
The definitive account of the distinguished economist’s formative years.


Few twentieth-century figures have been lionized and vilified in such equal measure as Friedrich Hayek—economist, social theorist, leader of the Austrian school of economics, and champion of classical liberalism. Hayek’s erudite arguments in support of individualism and the market economy have attracted a devout following, including many at the levers of power in business and government. Critics, meanwhile, cast Hayek as the intellectual forefather of “neoliberalism” and of all the evils they associate with that pernicious doctrine. 

In Hayek: A Life, historians of economics Bruce Caldwell and Hansjörg Klausinger draw on never-before-seen archival and family material to produce an authoritative account of the influential economist’s first five decades. This includes portrayals of his early career in Vienna; his relationships in London and Cambridge; his family disputes; and definitive accounts of the creation of The Road to Serfdom and of the founding meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society. 

A landmark work of history and biography, Hayek: A Life is a major contribution both to our cultural accounting of a towering figure and to intellectual history itself. 
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Hayek on Hayek
An Autobiographical Dialogue
F. A. Hayek
University of Chicago Press, 1994
The crumbling of the Berlin Wall, the fall of the iron curtain, and the Reagan and Thatcher "revolutions" all owe a tremendous debt to F. A. Hayek. Economist, social and political theorist, and intellectual historian, Hayek passionately championed individual liberty and condemned the dangers of state control. Now Hayek at last tells the story of his long and controversial career, during which his fortunes rose, fell, and finally rose again.

Through a complete collection of previously unpublished autobiographical sketches and a wide selection of interviews, Hayek on Hayek provides the first detailed chronology of Hayek's early life and education, his intellectual progress, and the academic and public reception of his ideas. His discussions range from economic methodology and the question of religious faith to the atmosphere of post-World War I Vienna and the British character.

Born in 1899 into a Viennese family of academics and civil servants, Hayek was educated at the University of Vienna, fought in the Great War, and later moved to London, where, as he watched liberty vanish under fascism and communism across Europe, he wrote The Road to Serfdom. Although this book attracted great public attention, Hayek was ignored by other economists for thirty years after World War II, when European social democracies boomed and Keynesianism became the dominant intellectual force. However, the award of the Nobel Prize in economics for 1974 signaled a reversal in Hayek's fortunes, and before his death in 1992 he saw his life's work vindicated in the collapse of the planned economies of Eastern Europe.

Hayek on Hayek is as close to an autobiography of Hayek as we will ever have. In his own eloquent words, Hayek reveals the remarkable life of a revolutionary thinker in revolutionary times.

"One of the great thinkers of our age who explored the promise and contours of liberty....[Hayek] revolutionized the world's intellectual and political life"—President George Bush, on awarding F. A. Hayek the Medal of Freedom

F. A. Hayek, recipient of the Medal of Freedom 1991 and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1974, was a pioneer in monetary theory and the principal proponent of the libertarian philosophy. Hayek is the author of numerous books in economics, as well as books in political philosophy and psychology.
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Hayek's Challenge
An Intellectual Biography of F.A. Hayek
Bruce Caldwell
University of Chicago Press, 2003
Friedrich A. Hayek is regarded as one of the preeminent economic theorists of the twentieth century, as much for his work outside of economics as for his work within it. During a career spanning several decades, he made contributions in fields as diverse as psychology, political philosophy, the history of ideas, and the methodology of the social sciences. Bruce Caldwell—editor of The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek—understands Hayek's thought like few others, and with this book he offers us the first full intellectual biography of this pivotal social theorist.

Caldwell begins by providing the necessary background for understanding Hayek's thought, tracing the emergence, in fin-de-siècle Vienna, of the Austrian school of economics—a distinctive analysis forged in the midst of contending schools of thought. In the second part of the book, Caldwell follows the path by which Hayek, beginning from the standard Austrian assumptions, gradually developed his unique perspective on not only economics but a broad range of social phenomena. In the third part, Caldwell offers both an assessment of Hayek's arguments and, in an epilogue, an insightful estimation of how Hayek's insights can help us to clarify and reexamine changes in the field of economics during the twentieth century.

As Hayek's ideas matured, he became increasingly critical of developments within mainstream economics: his works grew increasingly contrarian and evolved in striking—and sometimes seemingly contradictory—ways. Caldwell is ideally suited to explain the complex evolution of Hayek's thought, and his analysis here is nothing short of brilliant, impressively situating Hayek in a broader intellectual context, unpacking the often difficult turns in his thinking, and showing how his economic ideas came to inform his ideas on the other social sciences.

Hayek's Challenge will be received as one of the most important works published on this thinker in recent decades.
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The Haygoods of Columbus
A Love Story
Wil Haygood
The Ohio State University Press, 2016
Wil Haygood’s memoir of his hometown of Columbus, Ohio, is an uplifting and unsparing celebration of the ties that bind all loving American families. The lives of the Haygood clan—grandmother a hotel cook, mother a nightlife-loving waitress, father mostly absent, one brother a legendary pimp, the other a star-crossed dreamer, sisters whose fates included very little disposable income—were intertwined with that of Mount Vernon Avenue, a seductive street of shops, juke joints, and speakeasies at the epicenter of Columbus’s black community. Wil loved that avenue. Gifted and ambitious, he eventually found his first reporting terrain there, writing for the local paper, The Call & Post, while the first waves of urban renewal began to shake and shift the city of his childhood. Haygood tells here of his early passions: his fierce love for his restless mother, his enthusiasm for fishing in the Olentangy River, and his adolescent love of basketball, which drove him to ride buses surreptitiously.
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Hazel Scott
The Pioneering Journey of a Jazz Pianist, from Café Society to Hollywood to HUAC
Karen Chilton
University of Michigan Press, 2010

"Hazel Scott was an important figure in the later part of the Black renaissance onward. Even in an era where there was limited mainstream recognition of Black Stars, Hazel Scott's talent stood out and she is still fondly remembered by a large segment of the community. I am pleased to see her legend honored."
---Melvin Van Peebles, filmmaker and director

"This book is really, really important. It comprises a lot of history---of culture, race, gender, and America. In many ways, Hazel's story is the story of the twentieth century."
---Murray Horwitz, NPR commentator and coauthor of Ain't Misbehavin'

"Karen Chilton has deftly woven three narrative threads---Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Harlem, and Hazel Scott---into a marvelous tapestry of black life, particularly from the Depression to the Civil Rights era. Of course, Hazel Scott's magnificent career is the brightest thread, and Chilton handles it with the same finesse and brilliance as her subject brought to the piano."
---Herb Boyd, author of Baldwin's Harlem: A Biography of James Baldwin

"A wonderful book about an extraordinary woman: Hazel Scott was a glamorous, gifted musician and fierce freedom fighter. Thank you Karen Chilton for reintroducing her. May she never be forgotten."
---Farah Griffin, Institute for Research in African-American Studies, Columbia University

In this fascinating biography, Karen Chilton traces the brilliant arc of the gifted and audacious pianist Hazel Scott, from international stardom to ultimate obscurity.

A child prodigy, born in Trinidad and raised in Harlem in the 1920s, Scott's musical talent was cultivated by her musician mother, Alma Long Scott as well as several great jazz luminaries of the period, namely, Art Tatum, Fats Waller, Billie Holiday and Lester Young. Career success was swift for the young pianist---she auditioned at the prestigious Juilliard School when she was only eight years old, hosted her own radio show, and shared the bill at Roseland Ballroom with the Count Basie Orchestra at fifteen. After several stand-out performances on Broadway, it was the opening of New York's first integrated nightclub, Café Society, that made Hazel Scott a star. Still a teenager, the "Darling of Café Society" wowed audiences with her swing renditions of classical masterpieces by Chopin, Bach, and Rachmaninoff. By the time Hollywood came calling, Scott had achieved such stature that she could successfully challenge the studios' deplorable treatment of black actors. She would later become one of the first black women to host her own television show. During the 1940s and 50s, her sexy and vivacious presence captivated fans worldwide, while her marriage to the controversial black Congressman from Harlem, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., kept her constantly in the headlines.

In a career spanning over four decades, Hazel Scott became known not only for her accomplishments on stage and screen, but for her outspoken advocacy of civil rights and her refusal to play before segregated audiences. Her relentless crusade on behalf of African Americans, women, and artists made her the target of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) during the McCarthy Era, eventually forcing her to join the black expatriate community in Paris. By age twenty-five, Hazel Scott was an international star. Before reaching thirty-five, however, she considered herself a failure. Plagued by insecurity and depression, she twice tried to take her own life. Though she was once one of the most sought-after talents in show business, Scott would return to America, after years of living abroad, to a music world that no longer valued what she had to offer. In this first biography of an important but overlooked African American pianist, singer, actor and activist, Hazel Scott's contributions are finally recognized.

Karen Chilton is a New York-based writer and actor, and the coauthor of I Wish You Love, the memoir of legendary jazz vocalist Gloria Lynne.

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He, Leo
The Life and Poetry of Lew Welch
Ewan Clark
Oregon State University Press, 2023
Largely remembered for his mysterious disappearance in May 1971, Lew Welch was an important voice of the Beat Generation and San Francisco Renaissance. He spoke of key issues that America was facing in the aftermath of World War II—from the rise of consumerism and complacent suburban sensibilities to the threat of environmental disaster. He championed American speech, idioms, and identities. He found inspiration in the words of Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams, in the philosophies of Senzaki and the Buddha, and in his myriad friendships with some of the most renowned and revered poets, musicians, and artists of the 1950s and 1960s. His search for authenticity in language and poetry was a small part of a far greater search to establish a clear sense of himself.

He, Leo investigates Welch’s life and work in a chronological fashion, structured around Welch’s own notion of how three main aspects of his life—The Man, The Mountain, and The City—were interdependent. From his birth until his disappearance and presumed death, Welch’s life was often defined by problems, including a complex relationship with his mother, a long struggle with alcohol, and a fluctuating mental state. He was open and candid about everything, a fact that is evident in all aspects of his work.

Each of the three main sections of He, Leo includes key poems, essays, and events—both personal and cultural—to help establish Welch’s importance as a prominent poet and figure during the San Francisco Renaissance. Despite his crushing self-criticism and his reputation as a “friend of,” he was a bona fide poet with a strong voice and message of his own. With this first full-length biography, Ewan Clark restores Lew Welch to his rightful place as an important member of a significant American literary and cultural movement.
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He Rode with Butch and Sundance
The Story of Harvey "Kid Curry" Logan
Mark T. Smokov
University of North Texas Press, 2012

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Head, Heart, and Hand
John Brown University and Modern Evangelical Higher Education
Rick Ostrander
University of Arkansas Press, 2018
Traveling evangelist John Brown believed that conventional colleges had become elitist and morally suspect, so he founded a small utopian college in 1919 to better combine evangelical Christianity and higher education. Historian Rick Ostrander places John Brown University in the long tradition of Christian education, but he also shows that evangelicalism had largely separated from mainstream higher education by the twentieth century. This engaging and objective history explores how John Brown University has adapted to modern American culture while maintaining its evangelical character. Brown set out to educate the poor, rural children of the Ozarks who had no other opportunity for schooling. He wanted to instill in them not only religious zeal but also his conception of what constituted significant work, namely manual labor. His concern with practical work is evident today in programs for broadcasting, engineering, teacher education, and business. His sons made academic excellence an institutional priority and gradually transformed the school into an accredited, respected liberal arts college. Head, Heart, and Hand deftly connects the story of John Brown University to the larger currents of American education and religion.
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Headline Hollywood
A Century of Film Scandal
McLean, Adrienne L
Rutgers University Press, 2001
Hollywood has long been associated with scandal--with covering it up, with managing its effects, and, in some cases, with creating and directing it. In putting together Headline Hollywood, Adrienne McLean and David Cook approach the relationship between Hollywood and scandal from a fresh perspective. The contributors consider some of the famous transgressions that shocked Hollywood and its audiences during the last century, and explore the changing meaning of scandal over time by zeroing in on issues of power: Who decides what crimes and misdemeanors should be circulated for public consumption and titillation? What makes a Hollywood scandal scandalous? What are the uses of scandal? The essays are arranged chronologically to show how Hollywood scandals have evolved relative to changing moral and social orders. This collection will prove essential to the field of film studies as well as to anyone interested in the character and future direction of American culture. Contributors are Mark Lynn Anderson, Cynthia Baron, James Castonguay, Nancy Cook, Mary Desjardins, Lucy Fischer, Lee Grieveson, Erik Hedling, Peter Lehman, William Luhr, Adrienne L. McLean, Susan McLeland, and Sam Stoloff. Adrienne L. McLean is an assistant professor of film studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. David A. Cook is a professor of film and media studies at Emory University. He is the author of A History of Film Narrative.
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The Heart of a Woman
The Life and Music of Florence B. Price
Rae Linda Brown. Edited and with a Foreword by Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr.
University of Illinois Press, 2020

Book Prize Winner of the International Alliance for Women in Music of the 2022 Pauline Alderman Awards for Outstanding Scholarship on Women in Music

The Heart of a Woman offers the first-ever biography of Florence B. Price, a composer whose career spanned both the Harlem and Chicago Renaissances, and the first African American woman to gain national recognition for her works.

Price's twenty-five years in Chicago formed the core of a working life that saw her create three hundred works in diverse genres, including symphonies and orchestral suites, art songs, vocal and choral music, and arrangements of spirituals. Through interviews and a wealth of material from public and private archives, Rae Linda Brown illuminates Price's major works while exploring the considerable depth of her achievement. Brown also traces the life of the extremely private individual from her childhood in Little Rock through her time at the New England Conservatory, her extensive teaching, and her struggles with racism, poverty, and professional jealousies. In addition, Brown provides musicians and scholars with dozens of musical examples.

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Heart of Palms
My Peace Corps Years in Tranquilla
Meredith W. Cornett
University of Alabama Press, 2014
Heart of Palms is a clear-eyed memoir of Peace Corps service in the rural Panamanian village of Tranquilla through the eyes of a young American woman trained as a community forester.

In the storied fifty-year history of the US Peace Corps, Heart of Palms is the first Peace Corps memoir set in Panama, the slender isthmus that connects two continents and two oceans. In her memoir, Meredith Cornett transports readers to the remote village of Tranquilla, where dugout canoes are the mainstay of daily transportation, life and nature are permeated by witchcraft, and a restful night’s sleep may be disturbed by a raiding phalanx of army ants.

Cornett is sent to help counter the rapid deforestation that is destroying the ecosystem and livelihoods of the Panama Canal watershed region. Her first chapters chronicle her arrival and struggles not only with the social issues of language, loneliness, and insecurity, but also with the tragicomic basics of mastering open-fire cookery and intrusions by insects and poisonous snakes. As she grows to understand the region and its people, her keen eye discerns the overwhelming scope of her task. Unable to plant trees faster than they are lost, she writes with moving clarity about her sense of powerlessness.

Combating deforestation leads Cornett into an equally fierce battle against her own feelings of fear and isolation. Her journey to Panama becomes a parallel journey into herself. In this way, Heart of Palms is much more than a record of her Peace Corps service; it is also a moving environmental coming-of-age story and nuanced meditation on one village’s relationship to nature. When she returns home two years later, Cornett brings with her both skills and experience and a remarkable, newfound sense of confidence and mission.

Writing with rueful, self-deprecating humor, Cornett lets us ride along with her on a wave of naïve optimism, a wave that breaks not only on fear and intimidation, but also on tedium and isolation. Heart of Palms offers a bracing alternative to the romantic idealism common to Peace Corps memoirs and will be valued as a welcome addition to writing about the Peace Corps and environmental service.
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Heart Of The Sound
Marybeth Holleman
University of Utah Press, 2004

"You can’t step in the same river twice—although I once believed I could. I believed that the pieces of my life I had chosen, those I held close to my heart, would, once chosen and held, remain the same."—from the book

How does one recover from disaster? That question is at the heart of Marybeth Holleman’s lyrical, elegiac response to the repercussions of the Exxon Valdez oil spill that devastated Alaska’s Prince William Sound in 1989. Twining together the destruction of an ecosystem and the disintegration of her marriage, Holleman explores the resiliency of nature—both wild and human—and the ways in which that resiliency is tested. Like the oil that remains pooled beneath rocks years after the tanker spill, the emotional wounds of the past lie just below the surface. Recovery and restoration from the pain wrought by human hands does not come easily.

If much of nature writing is about the heart’s search for an unspoiled, perfect landscape, The Heart of the Sound is about what happens when the return-to-paradise fantasy is over and paradise is lost. In language rich with passion and hard-won insight, Holleman creates a captivating picture of a woman who found her Eden in the sweeping fjords of Alaska only to lose it to ecological tragedy. But somewhere within that loss, she finds herself.

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Heartbeat of Struggle
The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama
Diane C. Fujino
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
On February 12, 1965, in the Audubon Ballroom, Yuri Kochiyama cradled Malcolm X in her arms as he died, but her role as a public servant and activist began much earlier than this pivotal public moment. Heartbeat of Struggle is the first biography of this courageous woman, the most prominent Asian American activist to emerge during the 1960s. Based on extensive archival research and interviews with Kochiyama's family, friends, and the subject herself, Diane C. Fujino traces Kochiyama's life from an "all-American" childhood to her achievements as a tireless defender of - and fighter for - human rights. Raised by a Japanese immigrant family in California during the 1920s and 1930s, Kochiyama was active in sports, school, and church. She was both unquestioningly patriotic and largely unconscious of race and racism in the United States. After Pearl Harbor, however, Kochiyama's family was among the thousands of Japanese Americans forcibly removed to internment camps for the duration of the war, a traumatic experience that opened her eyes to the existence of social injustice. After the war, Kochiyama moved to New York. It was in the context of the vibrant Black movement in Harlem in the 1960s that she began her activist career. There, she met Malcolm X, who inspired her radical political development and the ensuing four decades of incessant work for Black liberation, Asian American equality, Puerto Rican independence, and political prisoner defense. Kochiyama is widely respected for her work in forging unity among diverse communities, especially between Asian and African Americans. Fujino, a scholar and activist, offers an in-depth examination of Kochiyama's political awakening, rich life, and impressive achievements with particular attention to how her public role so often defied gender, racial, and cultural norms. Heartbeat of Struggle is a source of inspiration and guidance for anyone committed to social change.
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Heartthrob
Del Balboa Cafe al Apartheid and Back
Susana Chávez-Silverman
University of Wisconsin Press, 2019
On a wintry Thursday night in San Francisco, Susana Chávez-Silverman catches her first glimpse of a handsome stranger through the window as he passes the infamous Balboa Cafe. She knows immediately he is the man of her dreams. His eyes meet hers, he turns and enters the bar . . .
Their attraction was intense, but the social and political climate of South Africa, still in the grip of apartheid, threatened to tear them apart. Describing the vicissitudes of the Latina migratory experience, Chávez-Silverman struggles to overcome the hostility of a place that is so unwelcoming to nonwhite persons and outsiders.
Heartthrob, a love story for the ages, implores us to consider how things could have been. In these romantic crónicas based on detailed diary entries and confessional letters to family and friends, Chávez-Silverman weaves together English and Spanish to lay bare the raw intensity and true fragility of love. Anyone who has wondered about the-one-that-got-away or sought out the true meaning of happily-ever-after will be enraptured by this intimate exploration of love, loss, and regret.
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Heath
Denis MacShane
Haus Publishing, 2006
Former British Prime Minister Edward Heath is best known for taking Britain into the European Union.
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Heavenly Supper
The Story of Maria Janis
Fulvio Tomizza
University of Chicago Press, 1991
It is a winter morning in Venice, in 1622. Muted voices drift through a thin wall next door. Her curiosity aroused, a young woman peers through a crack in the door, only to witness a strange and disturbing sight: a woman and a priest secretly celebrating communion. Troubled by what she sees, she reports the incident at confession. Her revelation leads to the arrest, jailing, and arraignment of the two for heresy before the Venetian Holy Office of the Inquisition.

So begins Fulvio Tomizza's absorbing account of the true story of Maria Janis, a devout peasant woman from the mountains north of Bergamo. Too poor to enter a convent, Maria had set out to serve God by relinquishing the little she had, through renunciation of all food but the bread and wine of communion. Encouraged by the restless village priest Pietro Morali, Maria claimed to have existed in this sanctified state for five years. During this time, she, Morali, and the weaver Pietro Palazzi travel from a little village in the Alps to Rome and then to Venice, where their alleged sacrilege is discovered and they are brought to trial. Both revered as a saint and reviled as a fraud, Maria with her "privilege" inspires and threatens believers within the Church. Combining the historian's precision with the novelist's imagination, Tomizza painstakingly reconstructs her story, crafting a fascinating portrait of sublimated love, ambition, and jealousy.

Heavenly Supper alternates a chronological account of the trial with analyses of each protagonist's life history. Along the way, Tomizza gives voice to the minds and hearts of his characters, allowing them to speak for themselves in their own words. The world he recreates resonates with the fervor of the Counter Reformation when faith and its consequences were rigidly controlled by the Church. As suspenseful as a detective novel, Tomizza's story goes beyond the trial to evoke a panoramic view of seventeenth-century Italian culture.
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Heavy Ground
William Mulholland and the St. Francis Dam Disaster
Norris Hundley
University of Nevada Press, 2020
Minutes before midnight on March 12, 1928, the St. Francis Dam collapsed, sending more than twelve billion gallons of water surging through Southern California’s Santa Clara Valley, killing some four hundred people and causing the greatest civil engineering disaster in twentieth-century American history. In this carefully researched work, Norris Hundley jr. and Donald C. Jackson provide a riveting narrative exploring the history of the ill-fated dam and the person directly responsible for its flawed design—William Mulholland, a self-taught engineer of the Los Angeles municipal water system. 

Employing copious illustrations and intensive research, Heavy Ground traces the interwoven roles of politics and engineering in explaining how the St. Francis Dam came to be built and the reasons for its collapse. Hundley and Jackson also detail the terror and heartbreak brought by the flood, legal claims against the City of Los Angeles, efforts to restore the Santa Clara Valley, political factors influencing investigations of the failure, and the effect of the disaster on congressional approval of the future Hoover Dam. Underlying it all is a consideration of how the dam—and the disaster—were inextricably intertwined with the life and career of William Mulholland. Ultimately, this thoughtful and nuanced account of the dam’s failure reveals how individual and bureaucratic conceit fed Los Angeles’s desire to control vital water supplies in the booming metropolis of Southern California.
 
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Hector P Garcia
Everyday Rhetoric and Mexican American Civil Rights
Michelle Hall Kells. Foreword by Rolando Hinojosa-Smith
Southern Illinois University Press, 2006

Examining the Mexican American civil rights movement through the public rhetoric of a veteran activist

Héctor P. García: Everyday Rhetoric and Mexican American Civil Rights examines the transition of Mexican Americans from political and social marginalization to civic inclusion after World War II. Focusing on the public rhetoric of veteran rights activist and physician Dr. Héctor P. García, a Mexican immigrant who achieved unprecedented influence within the U.S. political system, author Michelle Hall Kells provides an important case study in the exercise of influence, the formation of civic identity, and the acquisition of social power among this underrepresented group.

As a major influence in national twentieth-century civil rights reform, García effectively operated between Anglo and Mexican American sociopolitical structures. The volume illustrates how García, a decorated World War II veteran and founder of the American GI Forum in Texas in 1948, successfully engendered a discourse that crossed geographical, political, and cultural borders, forming associations with the working poor as well as with prominent national figures such as John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Through his rhetoric and action, García publicly revealed the plight of Mexican Americans, crossing class, regional, and racial lines to improve socioeconomic conditions for his people.

Héctor P. García, which is enhanced by sixteen illustrations, contributes to rhetorical, cultural, and historical studies and offers new scholarship establishing García’s role on the national front, effectively tracing Garcia’s legacy of resistance, the process of achieving enfranchisement, and the role of racism in the evolution from social marginalization to national influence.

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Heir to the Crescent Moon
Abdur-Rahman, Sufiya
University of Iowa Press, 2021
From age five, Sufiya Abdur-Rahman, the daughter of two Black Power–era converts to Islam, feels drawn to the faith even as her father, a devoted Muslim, introduces her to and, at the same time, distances her from it. Abdur-Rahman’s father and mother abandoned their Harlem mosque before she was born and divorced when she was twelve. Forced apart from her father—her portal into Islam—she yearns to reconnect with the religion and, through it, reconnect with him.

In Heir to the Crescent Moon, Abdur-Rahman’s longing to comprehend her father’s complicated relationship with Islam leads her first to recount her own history, and then delves into her father’s past. She journeys from the Christian righteousness of Adam Clayton Powell Jr.’s 1950s Harlem, through the Malcolm X–inspired college activism of the late 1960s, to the unfulfilled potential of the early 1970s Black American Muslim movement. Told at times with lighthearted humor or heartbreaking candor, Abdur-Rahman’s story of adolescent Arabic lessons, fasting, and Muslim mosque, funeral, and Eid services speaks to the challenges of bridging generational and cultural divides and what it takes to maintain family amidst personal and societal upheaval. She weaves a vital tale about a family: Black, Muslim, and distinctly American.
 
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Helen Foster Snow
An American Woman in Revolutionary China
Kelly Ann Long
University Press of Colorado, 2006
Helen Foster Snow: An American Woman in Revolutionary China tells the story of a remarkable woman born in rural Utah in 1907, who lived in China during the 1930's and became an important author, a lifelong humanitarian, and a bridge-builder between the United States and China.

As Kelly Ann Long recounts in this engaging biography, Helen Foster Snow immersed herself in the social and political currents of a nation in turmoil. After marrying renowned journalist Edgar Snow, she developed her own writing talents and offered an important perspective on emerging events in China as that nation was wracked by Japanese invasion, the outbreak of World War II, and a continuing civil war. She supported the December Ninth Movement of 1935, broke boundaries to enter communist Yenan in 1937, and helped initiate the "gung ho" Chinese Industrial Cooperative movement.

Helen Foster Snow wrote about the people and events in China's remote communist territories during an important era. She relayed detailed portraits of female communist leaders and famous figures such as Mao Zedong and Zhu De, as well as common people struggling to survive in a period of increasing turmoil. Her informed, compassionate depictions built a bridge linking American interest to the welfare of the Chinese.

Long's account recovers the story of a controversial and important commentator on a critical period in U.S.-China relations and in Chinese history
[more]

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Helen Ring Robinson
Colorado Senator and Suffragist
Pat Pascoe
University Press of Colorado, 2011
Calling herself "the housewife of the senate," Helen Ring Robinson was Colorado's first female state senator and only the second in the United States. Serving from 1913 to 1917, she worked for social and economic justice as a champion of women, children, and workers' rights and education during a tumultuous time in the country's history. Her commitment to these causes did not end in the senate; she continued to labor first for world peace and then for the American war effort after her term ended. Helen Ring Robinson is the first book to focus on this important figure in the women's suffrage movement and the 1913, 1914, and 1915 sessions of the Colorado General Assembly.

Author Pat Pascoe, herself a former Colorado senator, uses newspapers, legislative materials, Robinson's published writings, and her own expertise as a legislator to craft the only biography of this contradictory and little-known woman. Robinson had complex politics as a suffragist, peace activist, international activist, and strong supporter of the war effort in World War I and a curious personal life with an often long-distance marriage to lawyer Ewing Robinson, yet close relationship with her stepdaughter, Alycon. Pascoe explores both of these worlds, although much of that personal life remains a mystery. This fascinating story will be a worthwhile read to anyone interested in Colorado history, women's history, labor history, or politics.

[more]

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Hell Or High Water
James White's Disputed Passage through Grand Canyon, 1867
Eilean Adams
Utah State University Press, 2001

Although John Wesley Powell and party are usually given credit for the first river descent through the Grand Canyon, the ghost of James White has haunted those claims. White was a Colorado prospector, who, almost two years before Powell's journey, washed up on a makeshift raft at Callville, Nevada. His claim to have entered the Colorado above the San Juan River with another man (soon drowned) as they fled from Indians was widely disseminated and believed for a time, but Powell and his successors on the river publically discounted it. Colorado River runners and historians have since debated whether White's passage through Grand Canyon even could have happened.

Hell or High Water is the first full account of White's story and how it became distorted and he disparaged over time. It is also a fascinating detective story, recounting how White's granddaughter, Eilean Adams, over decades and with the assistance of a couple of notable Colorado River historians who believed he could have done what he claimed, gradually uncovered the record of James White's adventure and put together a plausible narrative of how and why he ended up floating helplessly down a turbulent river, entrenched in massive cliffs, with nothing but a driftwood raft to carry him through.

[more]

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Hell's Belles, Revised Edition
Prostitution, Vice, and Crime in Early Denver, With a Biography of Sam Howe, Frontier Lawman
Clark Secrest
University Press of Colorado, 2001
This updated and revised edition of Hell's Belles takes the reader on a soundly researched, well-documented, and amusing journey back to the early days of Denver. Clark Secrest details the evolution of Denver's prostitution, the gambling, the drug addicts, and the corrupt politicians and police who, palms outstretched, allowed it all to happen. Also included in Hell's Belles is a biography of one of Denver's original police officers, Sam Howe, upon whose crime studies the book is based.

 

The popular veneer of Denver's present-day Market Street - its fancy bars, posh restaurants, and Coors Field - is stripped away to reveal the street's former incarnation: a mecca of loose morals entrenched in prostitution, liquor, and money. Hell's Belles examines the neglected topics of vice and crime in Denver and utilizes a unique and invaluable historic source - the scrapbooks of Detective Sam Howe.

 

 


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Hell's Not Far Off
Bruce Crawford and the Appalachian Left
Josh Howard
West Virginia University Press, 2024

A biography of Bruce Crawford, a southwest Virginia journalist-writer of the radical tradition and one of the first to interpret Appalachian labor history.

Hell’s Not Far Off is a grounded, politically engaged study of the Appalachian journalist and political critic Bruce Crawford, a scourge of coal and railway interests. Crawford fought injustices wherever he saw them at major risk to his own life and became an early interpreter of Appalachian labor history.

His writings and actions from the 1920s to the 1960s helped shape southwest Virginia and West Virginia. Through Crawford’s Weekly, a newspaper active from 1920 to 1935, Crawford challenged the Ku Klux Klan, lynch mobs, and the private police forces of coal barons. The wounds received for these efforts were the closing of his paper and a bullet to his leg during a Harlan County strike in the 1930s. In his work after journalism, he led the West Virginia branch of the Federal Writers’ Project during the political standoff over the contents of the state’s official guidebook.

In Hell’s Not Far Off, Josh Howard resurrects strands of a radical tradition centered especially on matters of labor, environment, and race, drawing attention to that tradition’s ongoing salience: “Present-day Appalachia’s fights were [Crawford’s], and his fights are still ours.”

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Helmholtz
A Life in Science
David Cahan
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Hermann von Helmholtz was a towering figure of nineteenth-century scientific and intellectual life. Best known for his achievements in physiology and physics, he also contributed to other disciplines such as ophthalmology, psychology, mathematics, chemical thermodynamics, and meteorology. With Helmholtz: A Life in Science, David Cahan has written a definitive biography, one that brings to light the dynamic relationship between Helmholtz’s private life, his professional pursuits, and the larger world in which he lived.

Utilizing all of Helmholtz’s scientific and philosophical writings, as well as previously unknown letters, this book reveals the forces that drove his life—a passion to unite the sciences, vigilant attention to the sources and methods of knowledge, and a deep appreciation of the ways in which the arts and sciences could benefit each other. By placing the overall structure and development of his scientific work and philosophy within the greater context of nineteenth-century Germany, Helmholtz also serves as cultural biography of the construction of the scientific community: its laboratories, institutes, journals, disciplinary organizations, and national and international meetings. Helmholtz’s life is a shining example of what can happen when the sciences and the humanities become interwoven in the life of one highly motivated, energetic, and gifted person.
[more]

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Helmi's Shadow
A Journey of Survival From Russia to East Asia to the American West
David Horgan
University of Nevada Press, 2021
Helmi’s Shadow tells the sweeping true story of two Russian Jewish refugees, a mother (Rachel Koskin) and her daughter (Helmi). With determination and courage, they survived decades of hardship in the hidden corners of war-torn Asia and then journeyed across the Pacific at the end of the Second World War to become United States citizens after seeking safe harbor in the unlikely western desert town of Reno, Nevada. This compelling narrative is also a memoir, told lovingly by Helmi’s son, David, of growing up under the wings of these strong women in an unusual American family.

Rachel Koskin was a middle-class Russian Jew born in Odessa, Ukraine, in 1896. Ten years later, her family fled from the murderous pogroms against Jews in the Russian Empire eastward to Harbin, a Russian-controlled city within China’s borders on the harsh plain of Manchuria. Full of lively detail and the struggles of being stateless in a time of war, the narrative follows Rachel through her life in Harbin, which became a center of Russian culture in the Far East; the birth of her daughter, Helmi, in Kobe, Japan; their life together in the slums of Shanghai and back in Japan during World War II, where they endured many more hardships; and their subsequent immigration to the United States.

This remarkable account uncovers a history of refugees living in war-torn China and Japan, a history that to this day remains largely unknown. It is also a story of survival during a long period of upheaval and war—from the Russian Revolution to the Holocaust—and an intimate portrait of an American immigrant family. David reveals both the joys and tragedies he experienced growing up in a multicultural household in post\-Second World War America with a Jewish mother, a live-in Russian grandmother, and a devout Irish Catholic American father. 

As David develops a clearer awareness of the mysterious past lives of his mother and grandmother—and the impact of these events on his own understanding of the long-term effects of fear, trauma, and loss—he shows us that, even in times of peace and security, we are all shadows of our past, marked by our experiences, whether we choose to reveal them to others or not.
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Hemingway
Kenneth Lynn
Harvard University Press, 1995
Ernest Hemingway was a mythic figure of overt masculinity and vibrant literary genius. He lived life on an epic scale, presenting to the world a character as compelling as the fiction he created. But behind it all lurked an insecure, troubled man. In this immensely powerful and revealing study, Kenneth S. Lynn explores the many tragic facets that both nurtured Hemingway’s work and eroded his life. Masterfully written, Hemingway brings to life the writer whose desperate struggle to exorcise his demons produced some of the greatest American fiction of this century.
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Hemingway’s Second War
Bearing Witness to the Spanish Civil War
Alex Vernon
University of Iowa Press, 2011

In 1937 and 1938, Ernest Hemingway made four trips to Spain to cover its civil war for the North American News Alliance wire service and to help create the pro-Republican documentary film The Spanish Earth. Hemingway’s Second War is the first book-length scholarly work devoted to this subject.

     Drawing on primary sources, Alex Vernon provides a thorough account of Hemingway’s involvement in the Spanish Civil War, a messy, complicated, brutal precursor to World War II that inspired Hemingway’s great novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. Vernon also offers the most sustained history and consideration to date of The Spanish Earth. Directed by Joris Ivens, this film was a landmark work in the development of war documentaries, for which Hemingway served as screenwriter and narrator.
      Contributing factual, textual, and contextual information to Hemingway studies in general and his participation in the war specifically, Vernon has written a critical biography for Hemingway’s experiences during the Spanish Civil War that includes discussion of the left-wing politics of the era and the execution of José Robles Pazos. Finally, the book provides readings ofFor Whom the Bell Tollsboth in historical context and on its own terms.
      Marked by both impressive breadth and accessibility, Hemingway’s Second War will be an indispensible resource for students of literature, film, journalism, and European history and a landmark work for readers of Ernest Hemingway.
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Hemingway's Wars
Public and Private Battles
Linda Wagner-Martin
University of Missouri Press, 2017
This is a study of the ways various kinds of injury and trauma affected Ernest Hemingway’s life and writing, from the First World War through his suicide in 1961.

Linda Wagner-Martin has written or edited more than sixty books including Ernest Hemingway, A Literary Life. She is Frank Borden Hanes Professor Emerita at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and a winner of the Jay B. Hubbell Medal for Lifetime Achievement.
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Henry Adams - American Writers 93
University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers
Louis Auchincloss
University of Minnesota Press, 1971

Henry Adams - American Writers 93 was first published in 1971. 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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Henry Bradley Plant
Gilded Age Dreams for Florida and a New South
Canter Brown Jr.
University of Alabama Press, 2020
The first biography of Henry Bradley Plant, the entrepreneur and business magnate considered the father of modern Florida

In this landmark biography, Canter Brown Jr. makes evident the extent of Henry Bradley Plant’s influences throughout North, Central, and South America as well as his role in the emergence of integrated transportation and a national tourism system. One of the preeminent historians of Florida, Brown brings this important but understudied figure in American history to the foreground.

Henry Bradley Plant: Gilded Age Dreams for Florida and a New South carefully examines the complicated years of adventure and activity that marked Plant’s existence, from his birth in Connecticut in 1819 to his somewhat mysterious death in New York City in 1899. Brown illuminates Plant’s vision and perspectives for the state of Florida and the country as a whole and traces many of his influences back to events from his childhood and early adulthood. The book also elaborates on Plant’s controversial Civil War relationships and his utilization of wartime earnings in the postwar era to invest in the bankrupt Southern rail lines. With the success of his businesses such as the Southern Express Company and the Tampa Bay Hotel, Plant transformed Florida into a hub for trade and tourism—traits we still recognize in the Florida of today.

This thoroughly researched biography fills important gaps in Florida’s social and economic history and sheds light on a historical figure to an extent never previously undertaken or sufficiently appreciated. Both informative and innovative, Brown’s volume will be a valuable resource for scholars and general readers interested in Southern history, business history, Civil War–era history, and transportation history.
 
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Henry Darwin Rogers, 1808–1866
American Geologist
Patsy Gerstner
University of Alabama Press, 1994

Henry Darwin Rogers was one of the first professional geologists in the United States. He directed two of the earliest state geological surveys--New Jersey and Pennsylvania--in the mid-1830s.  His major interest was Pennsylvania, with its Appalachian Mountains, which Rogers saw as great folds of sedimentary rock. He belived that an interpretation of these folds would lead to an understanding of the dynamic processes that had shaped the earth. From Rogers' efforts to explain these Pennsylvania folds came the first uniquely American theory of mountain elevation, a theory that Rogers personally considered his most significant achievement.

 

 

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Henry David Thoreau
A Life
Laura Dassow Walls
University of Chicago Press, 2017
“Walden. Yesterday I came here to live.” That entry from the journal of Henry David Thoreau, and the intellectual journey it began, would by themselves be enough to place Thoreau in the American pantheon. His attempt to “live deliberately” in a small woods at the edge of his hometown of Concord has been a touchstone for individualists and seekers since the publication of Walden in 1854.
 
But there was much more to Thoreau than his brief experiment in living at Walden Pond. A member of the vibrant intellectual circle centered on his neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson, he was also an ardent naturalist, a manual laborer and inventor, a radical political activist, and more. Many books have taken up various aspects of Thoreau’s character and achievements, but, as Laura Dassow Walls writes, “Thoreau has never been captured between covers; he was too quixotic, mischievous, many-sided.” Two hundred years after his birth, and two generations after the last full-scale biography, Walls restores Henry David Thoreau to us in all his profound, inspiring complexity.
 
Walls traces the full arc of Thoreau’s life, from his early days in the intellectual hothouse of Concord, when the American experiment still felt fresh and precarious, and “America was a family affair, earned by one generation and about to pass to the next.” By the time he died in 1862, at only forty-four years of age, Thoreau had witnessed the transformation of his world from a community of farmers and artisans into a bustling, interconnected commercial nation. What did that portend for the contemplative individual and abundant, wild nature that Thoreau celebrated?
 
Drawing on Thoreau’s copious writings, published and unpublished, Walls presents a Thoreau vigorously alive in all his quirks and contradictions: the young man shattered by the sudden death of his brother; the ambitious Harvard College student; the ecstatic visionary who closed Walden with an account of the regenerative power of the Cosmos. We meet the man whose belief in human freedom and the value of labor made him an uncompromising abolitionist; the solitary walker who found society in nature, but also found his own nature in the society of which he was a deeply interwoven part. And, running through it all, Thoreau the passionate naturalist, who, long before the age of environmentalism, saw tragedy for future generations in the human heedlessness around him.
 
“The Thoreau I sought was not in any book, so I wrote this one,” says Walls. The result is a Thoreau unlike any seen since he walked the streets of Concord, a Thoreau for our time and all time.
 
[more]

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Henry Friendly, Greatest Judge of His Era
David M. Dorsen
Harvard University Press, 2012

Henry Friendly is frequently grouped with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo, and Learned Hand as the best American jurists of the twentieth century. In this first, comprehensive biography of Friendly, David M. Dorsen opens a unique window onto how a judge of this caliber thinks and decides cases, and how Friendly lived his life.

During his time on the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (1959–1986), Judge Friendly was revered as a conservative who exemplified the tradition of judicial restraint. But he demonstrated remarkable creativity in circumventing precedent and formulating new rules in multiple areas of the law. Henry Friendly, Greatest Judge of His Era describes the inner workings of Friendly’s chambers and his craftsmanship in writing opinions. His articles on habeas corpus, the Fourth Amendment, self-incrimination, and the reach of the state are still cited by the Supreme Court.

Dorsen draws on extensive research, employing private memoranda between the judges and interviews with all fifty-one of Friendly’s law clerks—a veritable Who’s Who that includes Chief Justice John R. Roberts, Jr., six other federal judges, and seventeen professors at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and elsewhere. In his Foreword, Judge Richard Posner writes: “David Dorsen has produced the most illuminating, the most useful, judicial biography that I have ever read . . . We learn more about the American judiciary at its best than we can learn from any other . . . Some of what I’ve learned has already induced me to make certain changes in my judicial practice.”

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Henry Grady's New South
Atlanta, a Brave and Beautiful City
Harold E. Davis
University of Alabama Press, 1990
    The popular image of Henry W. Grady is that of a champion of the postbellum South, a region that would forgive the North for defeating it and would mobilize its own many resources for hones business and agricultural competition. Biographies and collections of Grady’s essays and speeches that appeared shortly after his death enhanced this image, and for a half-century, Grady was considered the personification of the New South Movement, a movement which promised industrialization for the South, an improved Southern agriculture, and justice and opportunity for black Southerners. As managing editor of the Atlanta Constitution, he espoused the New South throughout the nation and was in demand as a speaker for audiences in New York and Boston.
    Through extensive research, focusing on the decade of the 1880s in Georgia, Davis demonstrates that although Grady said all the right things to show that he wished to industrialize the South and that he was committed to the improvement of agriculture and fairness in racial matters, in fact he spent most of his efforts on behalf of Atlanta. His major interest was in making a difference for that city, leaving the rest of the South to enjoy whatever Atlanta could not garner for itself.
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Henry Hotze, Confederate Propagandist
Selected Writings on Revolution, Recognition, and Race
Lonnie A. Burnett
University of Alabama Press, 2008
The life of Henry Hotze encompasses the history of antebellum Mobile, Confederate military recruitment, Civil War diplomacy and international intrigue, and the development of a Darwinian-based effort to find scientific evidence for differences among human “races.” When civil war broke out in his adopted country, Hotze enthusiastically assumed the mindset of the young Southern secessionist, serving first as newspaper correspondent and Confederate soldier until the Confederate government selected him as an agent, with instructions to promote the Southern cause in London. There he founded, edited, and wrote most of the content for The Index, a pro-Southern paper, as a part of the effort to convince the British Government to extend recognition to the Confederacy.

Among the arguments Hotze employed were adaptations of the scientific racism of the period, which attempted to establish a rational basis for assumptions of racial difference. After the collapse of the Confederacy in 1865, Hötze remained in Europe, where he became an active partisan and promoter of the ideas of Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882) whose work Essai sur L’inégalité des Races Humaines was a founding document in racism’s struggle for intellectual respectability.

This work consists of a biographical essay on Hotze; his contributions to Mobile newspapers during his military service in 1861; his correspondence with Confederate officials during his service in London; articles he published in London to influence British and European opinion; and his correspondence with, and published work in support of, Gobineau.
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Henry J. Kaiser
Builder in the Modern American West
By Mark S. Foster
University of Texas Press, 1989

In the 1940s Henry J. Kaiser was a household name, as familiar then as Warren Buffett and Donald Trump are now. Like a Horatio Alger hero, Kaiser rose from lower-middle-class origins to become an enormously wealthy entrepreneur, building roads, bridges, dams, and housing. He established giant businesses in cement, aluminum, chemicals, steel, health care, and tourism. During World War II, his companies built cargo planes and Liberty ships. After the war, he manufactured the Kaiser-Frazer automobile. Along the way, he also became a major force in the development of the western United States, including Hawaii.

Henry J. Kaiser: Builder in the Modern American West is the first biography of this remarkable man. Drawing on a wealth of archival material never before utilized, Mark Foster paints an evenhanded portrait of a man of driving ambition and integrity, perhaps the ultimate "can-do" capitalist. He covers Kaiser's entire life (1882–1967), emphasizing many business ventures. He demonstrates that Kaiser was the prototypical "frontier" entrepreneur who often used government and union support to tame the "wilderness."

Though today the Kaiser industries are no longer under family management, the Kaiser legacy remains great. Kaiser played a major role in building the Hoover, Bonneville, Grand Coulee, and Shasta dams. The Kaiser-Permanente Medical Care Program still provides comprehensive health care for millions of subscribers. Kaiser-planned communities remain in Los Angeles; San Francisco; Portland, Oregon; and Boulder City, Nevada. Kaiser Engineers was actively engaged in hundreds of huge construction jobs across the nation and around the world.

U.S. and business historians, scholars of the modern West, and general readers will all find much to absorb them in this well-written biography.

[more]

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Henry L. Brunk and Brunk's Comedians
Tent Repertoire Empire of the Southwest
Jerry L. Martin
University of Wisconsin Press, 1984
Tent repertoire theatre as a form of popular entertainment caught on in the late 19th century, had its heyday in the 1920s, and was finished by the Depression and World War II gasoline rationing. The author examines this rise and fall in context of an increasingly urbanized society.
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Henry M. Teller
Colorado's Grand Old Man
Duane A. Smith
University Press of Colorado, 2002
Serving longer in the U.S. Senate than any other Coloradan, Henry M. Teller was one of the Centennial State's greatest statesmen and political leaders. Now Duane A. Smith, author of Horace Tabor: His Life and the Legend, rescues this larger-than-life figure from obscurity in this new and definitive biography of the Central City lawyer turned Colorado senator. Teller was a prime example of what a politician should be in an era when elected officials left a great deal to be desired. As Colorado's representative, Teller stated his beliefs and stuck by them. Not all agreed with him, but all admired him for his honesty and integrity. His legal career in Colorado encompassed much of the early legislation in the territory, such as developing mining law and the organization of the Colorado Central Railroad, while his Washington career touched on nearly every important western economic development issue that occurred in Colorado between 1876 and 1909. Teller declared to the U.S. Congress that Colorado was a part of the nation, and that the West deserved a say in its decisions. Incorporating extensive primary and secondary sources, federal documents, the Teller papers, a wealth of newspaper articles, and a superb array of photographs, Smith's biography will be a wonderful source for anyone interested in Colorado history and the political past of the state and nation.
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Henry Miller, Happy Rock
Brassaï
University of Chicago Press, 2002
"In a world like this one, it's difficult to devote oneself to art body and soul. To get published, to get exhibited, to get produced often requires ten or twenty years of patient, intense labor. I spent half my life at it! And how do you survive during all that time? Beg? Live off other people until you're successful? What a dog's life! I know something about that! You're always recognized too late. And today, it's no longer enough to have talent, originality, to write a good or beautiful book. One must be inspired! Not only touch the public but create one's own public. Otherwise, you're headed straight for suicide."

That's Henry Miller's advice for young aspiring artists, as remembered by his very good friend Brassaï in this lively book. One of two that Brassaï wrote about the man who called himself a "happy rock," this volume covers their lives and friendship from the 1950s to 1973. Over the course of a number of warm, intimate conversations, Brassaï and Miller revisit their careers; discuss art, literature, Paris, Greece, Japan, World War II, and more; and consider the lives and works of many others in their circle, including Lawrence Durrell, Henri Matisse, Salvador Dalí, Georges Simenon, André Malraux, Hans Reichel, Paul Klee, and Amedeo Modigliani. Throughout Miller's zest for life shines through, as do his love of art and his passionate intensity for just about everything he does, from discussing a movie or play he'd just seen to reminiscing about a decades-long love.

Brassaï's Henry Miller, Happy Rock presents a vivid portrait of two close friends who thoroughly enjoy each other's company—and just happen to be world—famous artists too.
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Henry Ware Lawton
Union Infantryman, Frontier Soldier, Charismatic Warrior
Michael E. Shay
University of Missouri Press, 2016

Henry Ware Lawton’s nearly four decades as a professional soldier in the U.S. Army tie his story closely to that of America in the nineteenth century, from the Civil War to the settlement of the West, to the experiment with empire. Lawton served the country nearly uninterrupted from the day he enlisted at age 18—soon after Lincoln’s first call for volunteers to fight in the Civil War, where he earned a Medal of Honor—to his death at age 56, a major general in the Philippine War. In between, he fought in the Spanish-American War and the Indian Wars; during that time he rose to national prominence as the man who captured Geronimo.

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Henry William Ravenel, 1814-1887
South Carolina Scientist in the Civil War Era
Tamara Miner Haygood
University of Alabama Press, 1987
"Provides an engaging and illuminating view of the culture of the South and the study of natural history. . . . Ravenel's achievements, Haygood argues, refute Clement Eaton's contention that slavery stifled creative thought; they also modify the more extravagant claim for southern equality with northern science made in Thomas Cary Johnson's Scientific Interests in the Old South (1936)."

American Historical Review

"Convincingly argues for the importance of these middle years to understanding American science and vividly illustrates the effect of the Civil War on science. . . . Ravenel, a geographically isolated planter with a college degree but no scientific training, managed to serve as one of America's leading mycologists, despite continual financial and medical problems and the disruption of the Civil War. This lively account of his life and work is at once inspiring and tragic."

Journal of the History of Biology

"A thoroughly enjoyable biography of one of the important American naturalists, botanists, and mycologists of the 1800s. . . . Truly an outstanding contribution to the history of American science."

Brittonia

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Henryk Grossman and the Recovery of Marxism
Rick Kuhn
University of Illinois Press, 2006

Rick Kuhn’s Henryk Grossman and the Recovery of Marxism is the definitive study of the life and work of this renowned economist, activist, and intellectual. As a young man, Grossman joined the socialist movement and participated in Jewish workers' strikes and demonstrations, as well as in boycotts against employers and the Austro-Hungarian state. He moved to Vienna, but was driven back to Poland by the Austrian state's racist citizenship policies. A member of the illegal Polish Communist Party, Grossman was frequently arrested and jailed, finally leaving Poland for a post at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main, which gave rise to the famous 'Frankfurt School'. 

Grossman published his best known work in Frankfurt, including studies of Marx's method in Capital and theories of economic crisis that remain influential today. In tracing Grossman's experiences, from Kraków to New York, and offering a detailed account of his ideas, the biography provides an intimate account of key events in twentieth century history, including the politicization of east European Jewry, the World Wars, the rise of Stalinism and Nazism, and the cold war.

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Her Brilliant Career
The Life of Stella Miles Franklin
Jill Roe
Harvard University Press, 2009

Born in the Australian bush, Stella Miles Franklin became an international publishing sensation in 1901, at the age of 21, with My Brilliant Career, whose portrayal of an ambitious and independent woman defying social expectations still captivates readers. In a magisterial biography, Jill Roe details Miles’ extraordinary life.

Early success launched Miles into influential literary and socialist circles in Sydney and Melbourne, where she met Banjo Paterson (composer of “Waltzing Matilda” and author of The Man from Snowy River) and suffragist Vida Goldstein (who introduced her to Christian Science). Researching the lives of working women, Miles disguised herself as a domestic for a year. She then lit out for adventure abroad, landing in San Francisco just after the Great Earthquake. At Jane Addams’ Hull House in Chicago, she joined the women’s labor movement, working for the National Women’s Trade Union League and writing for its magazine.

Moving to Britain in 1915, Miles joined the war cause and served in Macedonia as a hospital orderly and then worked in London for various feminist and progressive causes, including the National Housing Council. Always she wrote, becoming a prolific author of plays as well as novels and archetypal bush stories. Returning to Australia in the 1930s, she supported women’s causes and promoted Australian writers, leaving her estate to endow the nation’s premier literary award.

The culmination of decades of research in thousands of papers left by Miles, Her Brilliant Career stands as the definitive life of this remarkable writer and feminist.

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Here and There in Mexico
The Travel Writings of Mary Ashley Townsend
Mary Ashley Townsend, edited by Ralph Lee Woodward Jr.
University of Alabama Press, 2001

 Mary Ashley Townsend was a novelist, newspaper columnist, and poet laureate of New Orleans who made several trips to Mexico with her daughter Cora during the last two decades of the 19th century. She collected her impressions of many aspects of life in that country—flora, fauna, architecture, people at work and play, fashion, society, food—and wrote about them during a time when few women engaged in solo travel, much less the pursuit of travel writing. Her collected work was still in progress when she died in a train accident in 1901, and was never published.

Renowned Latin Americanist Ralph Lee Woodward Jr. discovered Townsend’s manuscript, along with many of the author’s personal papers, in the Special Collections division of Tulane University’s Howard-Tilton Library. In addition to annotating the text, he has written a critical introduction to the work that provides excellent background information about the author and places the work in its historical and cultural context.
Townsend’s writing provides an unusual feminine perspective on Mexico as she describes the country during the middle years of the Porfirio Diaz dictatorship, a pivotal time in Mexican history. Though Townsend does not delve heavily into politics her observations of people’s lives provide a valuable source for social historians of the period.
Here and There in Mexico will make new contribution to the field of Latin American studies and to the travel literature genre, both as a primary source for historians and as a well-written account of a southern woman’s impressions of Mexico during a crucial period in that country’s development.
 
 
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Here I Stand
The Life and Legacy of John Beecher
Angela J. Smith
University of Alabama Press, 2017
Biography of a forgotten poet who used his name and influence to speak up for those on the margins of society.

Few surnames resonate in American history more than Beecher. The family’s abolitionist ministers, educators, and writers are central figures in the historical narrative of the United States. The Beechers’ influence was greatest in the nineteenth century, but the family story continued—albeit with less public attention—with a descendant who grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, during the early twentieth century.
 
John Beecher (1904–1980) never had the public prominence of his famous ancestors, but as a poet, professor, sociologist, New Deal administrator, journalist, and civil rights activist, he spent his life fighting for the voiceless and oppressed with a distinct moral sensibility that reflected his self-identification as the twentieth-century torchbearer for his famous family. While John Beecher had many vocations in his lifetime, he always considered himself a poet and a teacher. Some critics have compared the populist elements of Beecher’s poetry to the work of Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg, but his writing never gained a broad audience or critical acclaim during his lifetime.
 
In Here I Stand: The Life and Legacy of John Beecher, Angela J. Smith examines Beecher’s writing and activism and places them in the broader context of American culture at pivotal points in the twentieth century. Employing his extensive letters, articles, unpublished poetry and prose, and audio interviews in addition to his numerous published books, Smith uncovers a record of public concerns in American history ranging from the plight of workers in 1920s steel mills to sharecroppers’ struggles during the Depression to the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
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Here on Lake Hallie
In Praise of Barflies, Fix-It Guys, and Other Folks in Our Hometown
Patti See
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2022
In these humorous and heartfelt essays, Patti See celebrates small-town life in Wisconsin’s Chippewa Valley. Featuring childhood memories of supper clubs, thrift sales, and cribbage games, as well as the midlife concerns that accompany having a son in the military, a parent with Alzheimer’s, and a private onsite septic system, See’s writing praises the quirky charm of her hometown and its people.

Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s as the youngest of eight children, Patti never imagined she’d stay in Chippewa Falls as an adult. Now, living on rural Lake Hallie just five miles from her childhood home, she has a new appreciation for all that comes with country living, from ice fishing and eagle sightings to pontoon rides and tavern dice. These brief essays—many of which were originally published in the Sawdust Stories column of the Eau Claire Leader-Telegram—establish that, above all else, it’s friends, family, and other folks in our hometown who provide us with a sense of belonging.
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Herero Heroes
A Socio-Political History of the Herero of Namibia, 1890–1923
Jan-Bart Gewald
Ohio University Press, 1998

The Herero-German war led to the destruction of Herero society. Yet Herero society reemerged, reorganizing itself around the structures and beliefs of the German colonial army and Rhenish missionary activity.

This book describes the manner in which the Herero of Namibia struggled to maintain control over their own freedom in the face of advancing German colonialism. Taking advantage of the South AFrican invasion in of Namibia in World War One the Herero established themselves in areas of their own choosing. The effective reoccupation of land by the Herero forced the new colonial state, anxious to maintain peace and cut costs, to come to terms with the existence of Herero society.

The study ends in 1923 when the death and funeral of Samuel Maherero — first paramount of the Herero and then resistance leader — was the catalyst that brought the disparate groups of Herero together to establish a single unitary Herero identity.

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Heretics and Hellraisers
Women Contributors to The Masses, 1911-1917
By Margaret C. Jones
University of Texas Press, 1993

The Masses was the most dynamic and influential left-wing magazine of the early twentieth century, a touchstone for understanding radical thought and social movements in the United States during that era. As a magazine that supported feminist issues, it played a crucial role in shaping public discourse about women's concerns. Women editors, fiction writers, poets, and activists like Mary Heaton Vorse, Louise Bryant, Adriana Spadoni, Elsie Clews Parsons, Inez Haynes Gillmore, and Helen Hull contributed as significantly to the magazine as better-known male figures.

In this major revisionist work, Margaret C. Jones calls for reexamination of the relevance of Masses feminism to that of the 1990s. She explores women contributors' perspectives on crucial issues: patriarchy, birth control, the labor movement, woman suffrage, pacifism, and ethnicity. The book includes numerous examples of the writings and visual art of Masses women and a series of biographical/bibliographical sketches designed to aid other researchers.

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The Heritage
A Daughter's Memoir Of Louis Bromfield
Ellen Bromfield Geld
Ohio University Press, 1999
Louis Bromfield, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, established one of the most significant homesteads in Ohio on his Malabar Farm. Today it receives thousands of visitors a year from all over the world; once the site of the wedding of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, it was a successful prototype of experimental and conservation farming.

This lively, outspoken, and affectionate memoir preserves all things Louis Bromfield fought for or against in a life marked by surging vitality and gusto. He came from an Ohio family whose roots were in the land before the land was lost. He had his father's love of the land, and from his willful mother a hunger to know the world. From the New York City of theaters, concerts, parties, and novels, and a life in France that his success allowed, he finally returned to Ohio and established a new order for his family and friends, and for his followers, a new orbit into which they were drawn.

Ellen Bromfield Geld wrote a memoir of the man who was Louis Bromfield, father and friend, tyrant and “Boss,” alive always to whatever was worth responding to in people and in places, yet complex and lonely as a writer must essentially be to work at his craft. Now revived in paperback thirty-five years after its first publication, The Heritage remains a moving tribute and the recreation of a remarkable human being.
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