front cover of Unbound Spirit
Unbound Spirit
Letters of Flora Belle Jan
Flora Belle Jan. Edited by Fleur Yano and Saralyn Daly. Introduction by Judy Wu.
University of Illinois Press, 2008
This volume collects the letters written over a thirty-year period by a second generation Chinese American woman, Flora Belle Jan (1906–50). Born in California to immigrant parents and educated at Berkeley and the University of Chicago, Jan raised three children with her husband Charles Wang and worked as a journalist in both the United States and China. Written during the years 1918–48, these letters offer unique insight into the social and political situation of educated, middle-class, professional Chinese American women in the early twentieth century. Literate, candid, and charming, they convey the intellectual curiosity and perspicacity of a vivacious and ambitious woman while tracing her engagement with two different worlds.
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front cover of An Uncompromising Secessionist
An Uncompromising Secessionist
The Civil War of George Knox Miller, Eighth (Wade's) Confederate Cavalry
George Knox Miller, edited by Richard M. McMurry
University of Alabama Press, 2006

Offers significant insight into the life, heart, mind, and attitudes of an intelligent, educated, young mid-19th-century white Southerner

This book contains the letters of George Knox Miller who served as a line officer in the Confederate cavalry and participated in almost all of the major campaigns of the Army of Tennessee. He was, clearly, a very well-educated young man. Born in 1836 in Talladega, Alabama, he developed a great love for reading and the theater and set his sights upon getting an education that would lead to a career in law or medicine; meanwhile he worked as an apprentice in a painting firm to earn tuition. Miller then enrolled in the University of Virginia, where he excelled in his studies.

Eloquent, bordering on the lyrical, the letters provide riveting first-hand accounts of cavalry raids, the monotony of camp life, and the horror of battlefield carnage. Miller gives detailed descriptions of military uniforms, cavalry tactics, and prison conditions. He conveys a deep commitment to the Confederacy, but he was also critical of Confederate policies that he felt hindered the army's efforts. Dispersed among these war-related topics is the story of Miller's budding relationship with Celestine “Cellie” McCann, the love of his life, whom he would eventually marry.

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front cover of UNDER THE FLAG OF THE NATION
UNDER THE FLAG OF THE NATION
DIARIES AND LETTERS OF OWEN JOHNSTON HOPKINS, A YANKEE VOLUNTEER IN THE CIVIL WAR
OWEN JOHNSTON HOPKINS
The Ohio State University Press, 1998
From these diaries and letters of a soldier in the Union Army emerges a revealing portrait of their author, a man caught up in a life-and-death struggle of national import. Compiled from the diaries kept by Owen Johnston Hopkins while he was on duty with the 42nd and 182nd regiments, Ohio Volunteer Infantry, and from letters to his family and friends, this book gives a clear picture of the motives, attitudes, and sentiments of a Yankee soldier during the Civil War.

Owen Hopkins was a young man brought to maturity by the agony of war, but in spite of the horror of battle and the tedium of life in camp, he maintained a lively sense of humor and a constant devotion to the ideals for which he fought. The Civil War in these pages is a savage, vindictive conflict fought with canister, "minnie balls," grapeshot, the Enfield rifle, and the bayonet. Only seventeen when he enlisted in 1861, Hopkins was a foot soldier and a witness to the action that took place on the field of battle.

A vital part of Hopkins's life in the army was his correspondence with Julia Allison, who lived in his hometown of Bellefontaine. They began writing each other in 1863, and their friendship deepened into love. Each was a fervent patriot, and their shared devotion to their country was a significant fact of their relationship. They were married in 1865.

An epilogue tells what happened to Hopkins after June of 1865: his career, his family, and his death in 1902. Originally published in1961, this work is now available for the first time in paperback.
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front cover of Unheard Witness
Unheard Witness
The Life and Death of Kathy Leissner Whitman
Jo Scott-Coe
University of Texas Press, 2023

Unheard Witness foregrounds a young woman’s experience of domestic abuse, resistance, and survival before the mass shooting at the University of Texas at Austin in 1966.

In 1966, Kathy Leissner Whitman was a twenty-three-year-old teacher dreaming of a better future. She was an avid writer of letters, composing hundreds in the years before she was stabbed to death by her husband, Charles Whitman, who went on to commit a mass shooting from the tower at the University of Texas at Austin. Kathy’s writing provides a rare glimpse of how one woman described, and sought to change, her short life with a coercive, controlling, and violent partner.

Unheard Witness provides a portrait of Kathy’s life, doing so at a time when Americans are slowly grasping the link between domestic abuse and mass shootings. Public violence often follows violence in the home, yet such private crimes continue to be treated separately and even erased in the public imagination. Jo Scott-Coe shows how Kathy's letters go against the grain of the official history, which ignored Kathy’s perspective. With its nuanced understanding of abuse and survival, Unheard Witness is an intimate, real-time account of trust and vulnerability—in its own way, a prologue to our age of atrocities.

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front cover of Until Death Do Us Part
Until Death Do Us Part
The Letters and Travels of Anna and Vitus Bering
Edited by Peter Ulf Møller and Natasha Okhotina Lind
University of Alaska Press, 2008
Eighteenth-century Danish explorer Vitus Bering led historic expeditions to the Russian Far East and Alaska under the patronage of Peter the Great, and his wife Anna Christina accompanied him on his expedition to Okhotsk in 1739. The sixteen letters that they wrote over the following year make up the core of this volume, which features facing-page translations from the original German. The documents offer an intimate look into eighteenth-century customs, as well as the explorer’s family life and daily routine. Also featured is an inventory of goods that Anna Christina brought back to Moscow after Bering’s death in 1742, revealing key insights into the types of goods available in Russia at the time. Until Death Do Us Part is a richly informative volume that will be essential for all those interested in European history and travel writing.
 
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front cover of Unveiled Voices, Unvarnished Memories
Unveiled Voices, Unvarnished Memories
The Cromwell Family in Slavery and Segregation, 1692-1972
Adelaide M. Cromwell
University of Missouri Press, 2006
When an industrious slave named Willis Hodges Cromwell earned the money to obtain liberty for his wife—who then bought freedom for him and for their children—he set in motion a family saga that resounds today. His youngest son, John Wesley Cromwell, became an educator, lawyer, and newspaper publisher—and one of the most influential men of letters in the generation that bridged Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois. Now, in Unveiled Voices, Unvarnished Memories, his granddaughter, Adelaide M. Cromwell, documents the journey of her family from the slave marts of Annapolis to achievements in a variety of learned professions.
John W. Cromwell began the family archives from which this book is drawn—letters and documents that provide an unprecedented view of how one black family thought, strived, and survived in American society from the seventeenth century to the twentieth. These papers reflect intimate thoughts about such topics as national and local leaders, moral behavior, color consciousness, and the challenges of everyday life in a racist society. They also convey a wealth of rich insights on the burdens that black parents’ demands for achievement placed on their children, the frequently bitter rivalries within the intellectual class of the African American community, and the negative impact on African American women of sexism in a world dominated by black men whose own hold on respect was tentative at best.
The voices gathered here give readers an inside look at the formation and networks of the African American elite, as John Cromwell forged friendships with such figures as journalist John E. Bruce and the Reverend Theophilus Gould Steward. Letters with those two faithfully depict the forces that shaped the worldview of the small but steadily expanding community of African American intellectuals who helped transform the nation’s attitudes and policies on race, and whose unguarded comments on a wide range of matters will be of particular interest to social historians. Additional correspondence between John and his son, John Jr., brings the family story into modern times.
Unveiled Voices, Unvarnished Memories is a rare look at the public and private world of individuals who refused to be circumscribed by racism and the ghetto while pursuing their own well-being. Its narrative depth breaks new ground in African American history and offers a unique primary source for that community.
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front cover of Up in the Rocky Mountains
Up in the Rocky Mountains
Writing the Swedish Immigrant Experience
Jennifer Eastman Attebery
University of Minnesota Press, 2007

Before the turn of the twentieth century, many Swedish men emigrated to the American Rockies as itinerant laborers, drawn by the region’s developing industries. Single Swedish women ventured west, too, and whole families migrated, settling into farm communities. By 1920, one-fifth of all Swedish immigrants were living in the West.

In Up in the Rocky Mountains, Jennifer Eastman Attebery offers a new perspective on Swedish immigrants’ experiences in Idaho, Montana, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico from 1880 to 1917 by interpreting their letters home. Considering more than three hundred letters, Attebery analyzes their storytelling, repetitive language, traditional phrasing, and metaphoric images. Recognizing the letters’ power as a folk form, Attebery sees in them the writers’ relationships back in Sweden as well as their encounters with religious and labor movements, regionalism, and nationalism in their new country.

By defining personal letters as a vernacular genre, Attebery provides a model for discerning immigrants’ shared culture in correspondence collections. By studying their words, she brings to life small Swedish communities throughout the Rocky Mountain region.

Jennifer Eastman Attebery is professor of English and director of American studies at Idaho State University.

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