Results by title

5550 books match the query 'Biography & Autobiography' and 577 start with a

cover of Attlee

Attlee

David Howell

Haus Publishing, 2006

Former British Prime Minister best known for the creation of the National Health Service.
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cover of Aubade: A Teacher's Notebook

Aubade

A Teacher's Notebook

Wallace Fowlie

Duke University Press, 1983

Wallace Fowlie describes his book as "not as much a memoir-autobiography as Journal of Rehearsals, but a reconstruction of events and thoughts that have formed me. The life of each man: a myth. The effort of each writer: to give meaning to his myth."

In Aubade: A Teacher's Notebook Fowlie writes at length of his life as a teacher at Duke University, his friendships with students and colleagues, his appreciation of movies, plays, travels, friends and books he has enjoyed and that have enhanced his life. This is an account of the life of a dedicated teacher who is also a writer-critic. Fowlie assesses his own sense of identity and the manner in which he transmits the values his studies have for him to his students through major literary texts. Aubade delineates Fowlies discovery, via his students, of the forms of a new culture arising alongside the old, which he integrates into his own intellectual life, broadening its horizons.

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cover of Audre Lorde’s Transnational Legacies

Audre Lorde’s Transnational Legacies

Stella Bolaki

University of Massachusetts Press, 2015

Among the most influential and insightful thinkers of her generation, Audre Lorde (1934–1992) inspired readers and activists through her poetry, autobiography, essays, and her political action. Most scholars have situated her work within the context of the women's, gay and lesbian, and black civil rights movements within the United States. However, Lorde forged coalitions with women in Europe, the Caribbean, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Africa, and twenty years after her passing, these alliances remain largely undocumented and unexplored.

Audre Lorde's Transnational Legacies is the first book to systematically document and thoroughly investigate Lorde's influence beyond the United States. Arranged in three thematically interrelated sections—Archives, Connections, and Work—the volume brings together scholarly essays, interviews, Lorde's unpublished speech about Europe, and personal reflections and testimonials from key figures throughout the world. Using a range of interdisciplinary approaches, contributors assess the reception, translation, and circulation of Lorde's writing and activism within different communities, audiences, and circles. They also shed new light on the work Lorde inspired across disciplinary borders.

In addition the volume editors, contributors include Sarah Cefai, Cassandra Ellerbe-Dueck, Paul M. Farber, Tiffany N. Florvil, Katharina Gerund, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Gloria Joseph, Jackie Kay, Marion Kraft, Christiana Lambrinidis, Zeedah Meierhofer-Mangeli, Rina Nissim, Chantal Oakes, Lester C. Olson, Pratibha Parmar, Peggy Piesche, Dagmar Schultz, Tamara Lea Spira, and Gloria Wekker.
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cover of Audubon at Sea: The Coastal and Transatlantic Adventures of John James Audubon

Audubon at Sea

The Coastal and Transatlantic Adventures of John James Audubon

Edited by Christoph Irmscher and Richard J. King

University of Chicago Press, 2022

This one-of-a-kind, lavishly illustrated anthology celebrates Audubon’s connection to the sea through both his words and art.
 
The American naturalist John James Audubon (1785–1851) is widely remembered for his iconic paintings of American birdlife. But as this anthology makes clear, Audubon was also a brilliant writer—and his keen gaze took in far more than creatures of the sky. Culled from his published and unpublished writings, Audubon at Sea explores Audubon’s diverse observations of the ocean, the coast, and their human and animal inhabitants. With Audubon expert Christoph Irmscher and scholar of the sea Richard J. King as our guides, we set sail from the humid expanses of the American South to the shores of England and the chilly landscapes of the Canadian North. We learn not only about the diversity of sea life Audubon documented—birds, sharks, fish, and whales—but also about life aboard ship, travel in early America, Audubon’s work habits, and the origins of beloved paintings. As we face an unfathomable loss of seabirds today, Audubon’s warnings about the fragility of birdlife in his time are prescient and newly relevant.

Charting the course of Audubon’s life and work, from his birth in Haiti to his death in New York City, Irmscher and King’s sweeping introduction and carefully drawn commentary confront the challenges Audubon’s legacy poses for us today, including his participation in American slavery and the thousands of birds he killed for his art. Rounded out by hundreds of historical and ornithological notes and beautiful illustrations, and with a foreword by distinguished photographer and conservationist Subhankar Banerjee, Audubon at Sea is the most comprehensively annotated collection of Audubon’s work ever published.
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cover of Augusta Evans Wilson, 1835-1909

Augusta Evans Wilson, 1835-1909

William Perry Fidler

University of Alabama Press, 1951

A comprehensive biography of Augusta Jane Evans Wilson, one of the nineteenth-century America’s best-selling authors

A fascinating biography about Augusta Jane Evans, a nearly forgotten writer who was nevertheless one of the most popular writers of her era. She wrote nine novels about southern women, including St. Elmo, which sold a staggering one million copies within four months of its release in 1866. William Fidler traces the life of Augusta Jane Evans from her birth in 1835 in Columbus, Georgia till her death in Alabama in 1909.
 

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cover of Auguste Bébian: Paving the Way for Deaf Emancipation

Auguste Bébian

Paving the Way for Deaf Emancipation

Fabrice Bertin

Gallaudet University Press, 2024

Published in French and English by INSEI Editions, Suresnes, France. English edition distributed throughout the world by Gallaudet University Press.

To some, he is a mythical figure; to others, he is unknown. Auguste Bébian (1789-1839) reflects society’s ambivalence toward Deaf history: sometimes recognized, often ignored. In the wake of Abbé de l’Épée, whose name is remembered in posterity and who demonstrated that the large-scale education of Deaf people was possible, Auguste Bébian was nonetheless a key player in an unprecedented upheaval, which in many ways went beyond the educational sphere. The goal of this research on Auguste Bébian, combining biographical elements and analysis of his thinking in unprecedented ways, is not to deconstruct the myth, but rather to decipher the messages it conveys, and to understand what it tells us, indirectly, about the Deaf experience.

Born in 1789 in Guadeloupe, part of the French West Indies, it was on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, in France, that Auguste Bébian fulfilled most of his destiny. While living at the National Institution for the Deaf in Paris at the beginning of the 19th century, his daily contact with the young students made him the first known hearing person in France to achieve true mastery of sign language, the natural language of Deaf people, and a deep understanding of its inherent culture. On becoming a teacher, he constantly defended the use of sign language as a linguistic system in its own right in order to awaken the intelligence of Deaf children, to whom “we pay no more attention than to the sunlight that shines on us every day.” His numerous publications display a level of modernity rarely seen before or since. This biographical and historical study shows how the passion evinced by Auguste Bébian was a crucial link in the chain of events that led to the emancipation of Deaf people.
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cover of Austin Harrison and the English Review

Austin Harrison and the English Review

Martha S. Vogeler

University of Missouri Press, 2008

Political and literary journalist Austin Harrison became editor of the English Review in 1910. While holding that chair, he expanded the publication’s literary scope by publishing articles on such issues as women’s suffrage, parliamentary reform, the German threat, and Irish home rule. But although he edited the Review far longer than did its celebrated founder, Ford Madox Ford, history has long confined him to the shadows of not only his predecessor but also his father, the English Positivist Frederic Harrison.
 
 
            This first scholarly assessment of Harrison’s tenure at the English Review from 1910 to 1923 shows him courting controversy, establishing reputations, winning and losing authors, and pushing the limits of the publishable as he made his “Great Adult Review” the most consistently intelligent and challenging monthly of its day. Martha Vogeler offers a compelling personal and family narrative and a new perspective on British literary culture and political journalism in the years just before, during, and after the First World War.
 
 
            Vogeler provides a revealing account of Harrison the editor—his writings and opinions, his public life and relations—as she also traces the complex relationship between a son and his famous father. Balancing a scholar’s attention to detail and a fine writer’s eye for style, she relates Harrison’s improbable friendships with the notorious Frank Harris and the outrageous Aleister Crowley. And she has mined Harrison’s correspondence to lend insight into the careers of such writers as Ford Madox Ford, D. H. Lawrence, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, John Masefield, Bernard Shaw, Arnold Bennett, and Marie Stopes. Other figures such as George Gissing, Bertrand Russell, Lord Northcliffe, and important Irish revolutionaries appear in new contexts.
 
 
            Ranging widely across literature, foreign relations, national politics, the women’s movement, censorship, and sexuality, Vogeler captures the themes of Harrison’s era. She describes his transformation from Germanophobe before and during World War I to an outspoken critic of the punitive measures against Germany in the Treaty of Versailles. She explores the ambiguities in his engagement with modernist aesthetics and in his attempt to escape the shadow of his father while benefiting from his family’s wealth and connections. Vogeler’s assessment of Harrison’s books further sharpens our understanding of his ideas about Germany, women, education, and Victorian family life—notably his underappreciated tribute/rebuke to his father, Frederic Harrison: Thoughts and Memories.
 
 
            This account of Austin Harrison’s career allows us to observe a journalist making his way in a highly competitive world and opens up a new window on Britain in the era of the Great War.
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cover of Austin and Mabel: The Amherst Affair and Love Letters of Austin Dickinson and Mabel Loomis Todd

Austin and Mabel

The Amherst Affair and Love Letters of Austin Dickinson and Mabel Loomis Todd

Polly Longsworth

University of Massachusetts Press, 1999

A true tale of illicit love in the era of Emily Dickinson. The author adds her own annotations to correspondence, journals, diaries and the observations of the protagonists' peers, to paint a detailed picture of social and sexual mores in 19th-century America.
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cover of Australian Adventure: Letters from an Ambassador's Wife

Australian Adventure

Letters from an Ambassador's Wife

By Anne Clark

University of Texas Press, 1969

From August 1965 to February 1968, during his period of service in Australia, Ambassador Edward Clark traveled in that country as no other American and probably few Australians ever have. His wife, Anne Clark, traveled with him, then wrote her observations and impressions to friends and family in the United States.

Her letters, published for the first time in this volume, reveal the isolations and involvements as well as the opportunities and the pleasures of embassy life. The etiquette of official functions at times posed problems, as in the Clarks' first black-tie dinner with the Acting Governor General, where Mrs. Clark was supposed to curtsy. "Some Ambassadors feel strongly that the representative of the President of the United States should never bend his knee (or rather his wife's) to any man. Mrs. Battle, wife of our predecessor ... put the question directly to President Kennedy. His answer to her was, 'Curtsy you must, but keep a stiff upper knee.'"

Soon, Anne Clark realized that the routine of appearances and entertainments was constant: "I do not know when I will make peace with the schedule. I am a slave to the little black book that is my calendar."

In addition to the intricacies of embassy life, the Clarks encountered much that was unfamiliar—new people, almost a new language, new flowers, new animals—even a sky with its new moon upside down. But their warm hospitality and genuine interest in things Australian attracted friends throughout the continent. Figures from the government, the church, the diplomatic circle, and everyday life, plus well-known guests from home, all become known to the reader in this perceptive account of official life from the inside.

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cover of Authentic Texas: People of the Big Bend

Authentic Texas

People of the Big Bend

By Marcia Hatfield Daudistel and Bill Wright

University of Texas Press, 2013

Winner, Southwest Book Award, Border Regional Library Association, 2015

The Texas of vast open spaces inhabited by independent, self-reliant men and women may be more of a dream than a reality for the state’s largely urban population, but it still exists in the Big Bend. One of the most sparsely settled areas of the United States, the Big Bend attracts people who are willing to forego many modern conveniences for a lifestyle that proclaims “don’t fence me in.” Marcia Hatfield Daudistel and Bill Wright believe that the character traits exemplified by folks in the Big Bend—including self-sufficiency, friendliness, and neighborliness—go back to the founding of the state. In this book, they introduce us to several dozen Big Bend residents—old and young, long-settled and recently arrived, racially diverse—who show us what it means to be an authentic Texan.

Interviewing people in Marathon, Big Bend National Park, Terlingua, Redford, Presidio, Alpine, Marfa, Valentine, Balmorhea, Limpia Crossing, and Fort Davis, Daudistel and Wright discover the reasons why residents of the Big Bend make this remote area of Texas their permanent home. In talking to ranchers and writers, entrepreneurs and artists, people living off the grid and urban refugees, they find a common willingness to overcome difficulties through individual skill and initiative. As one interviewee remarks, you have to have a lot of “try” in you to make a life in the Big Bend. Bill Wright’s photographs of the people and landscapes are a perfect complement to the stories of these authentic Texans. Together, these voices and images offer the most complete, contemporary portrait of the Texas Big Bend.

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cover of Autobiographical Reflections, Revised Edition with Glossary

Autobiographical Reflections, Revised Edition with Glossary

Eric Voegelin, edited with an introduction by Ellis Sandoz

University of Missouri Press, 2011

Autobiographical Reflections is a window into the mind of a man whose reassessment of the nature of history and thought has overturned traditional approaches to, and appraisals of, the Western intellectual tradition. Here we encounter the motivations for Voegelin's work, the stages in the development of his unique philosophy of consciousness, his key intellectual breakthroughs, his theory of history, and his diagnosis of the political ills of the modern age.
 
Included in this revised volume is a glossary of terms used in Voegelin’s writings. The glossary lists, defines, and illustrates from the author’s writings many of the key terms employed, paying particular attention to the Greek terms. Together, the glossary and enlarged index systematically include names, subjects, ideas, writings, and terms, making this volume an indispensable help for any serious study of Eric Voegelin’s oeuvre.
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cover of Autobiography and Decolonization: Modernity, Masculinity, and the Nation-State

Autobiography and Decolonization

Modernity, Masculinity, and the Nation-State

Philip Holden

University of Wisconsin Press, 2008

Philip Holden reveals deeply gendered connections between the writing of individual lives and of the narratives of nations emerging from colonialism. Autobiography and Decolonization is the first book to give serious academic attention to autobiographies of nationalist leaders in the process of decolonization, attending to them not simply as partial historical documents, but as texts involved in remaking the world views of their readers.
            Holden examines Mohandas K. Gandhi’s An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Marcus Garvey’s fragmentary Autobiography,Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayford’s Ethiopia Unbound, Lee Kuan Yew’s The Singapore Story, Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, Jawaharlal Nehru’s An Autobiography, and Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana:The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah.
            Holden argues that these examples of life writing have had significant influence on the formation of new, and often profoundly gendered, national identities. These narratives constitute the nation less as an imagined community than as an imagined individual. Moving from the past to the promise of the future, they mediate relationships between public and private, and between individual and collective stories. Ultimately, they show how the construction of modern selfhood is inextricably linked to the construction of a postcolonial polity.
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cover of Autobiography and Letters of a Spanish Nun

Autobiography and Letters of a Spanish Nun

María Vela y Cueto

Iter Press, 2016

When María Vela y Cueto (1561–1617) declared that God had personally ordered her to take only the Eucharist as food and to restore primitive dress and public penance in her aristocratic convent, the entire religious community, according to her confessor, “rose up in wrath.” Yet, when Vela died, her peers joined with the populace to declare her a saint. In her autobiography and personal letters, Vela speaks candidly of the obstacles, perils, and rewards of re-negotiating piety in a convent where devotion to God was no longer expressed through rigorous asceticism. Vela’s experience, told in her own words, reveals her shrewd understanding of the persuasive power of a woman’s body.

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cover of Autobiography and Postmodernism

Autobiography and Postmodernism

Kathleen Ashley

University of Massachusetts Press, 1994

Exploring the connections between autobiography and postmodernism, this book addresses self-representation in a variety of literature—Native American, British, Chicana, immigrant, and lesbian, among others—in genres as diverse as poetry, naming, and confession, photography, and the manifesto. The essays examine how different writers respond to the culturally specific pressures of genre, how these constraints are negotiated, and what self-representation reveals about the politics of identity.

In contrast to those critics of postmodernism who fear the dissolution of the active subject, the contributors here demonstrate that autobiography gives postmodernism a discourse through which to theorize human agency. The autobiographical subject that emerges is not the decentered human agent of so many versions of postmodernism but the producer of texts that call attention to the contradictions in dominant modes of self-representation and demonstrate the possibilities of writing from from other locations.

Contributors are Betty Bergland, Andrei Codrescu, Michael M. J. Fischer, Leigh Gilmore, David P. Haney, Paul Jay, Shirley Neuman, Christopher Ortiz, Sidonie Smith, Kirsten Wasson, and Hertha D. Wong.
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cover of Autobiography of Emperor Charles IV and his Legend of St Wenceslas

Autobiography of Emperor Charles IV and his Legend of St Wenceslas

Balázs Nagy

Central European University Press, 2001

One of the few autobiographies to have survived from the Middle Ages, this life history of one of the most influential rulers of the fourteenth century, Charles IV of Bohemia, covers his life from birth until his election as King of Germany in 1346.

Charles IV describes his childhood, spent mainly in the court of French kings, his juvenile years, his marriage and his first steps into the international political scene during the early part of the fourteenth century.

A unique addition to this volume is the first ever English translation of the Legend of Saint Wenceslas, written by Charles IV of Luxemburg.

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cover of Autobiography of My Hungers

Autobiography of My Hungers

Rigoberto González

University of Wisconsin Press, 2019

Rigoberto González, author of the critically acclaimed memoir Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa, takes a second piercing look at his past through a startling new lens: hunger.
            The need for sustenance originating in childhood poverty, the adolescent emotional need for solace and comfort, the adult desire for a larger world, another lover, a different body—all are explored by González in a series of heartbreaking and poetic vignettes.
            Each vignette is a defining moment of self-awareness, every moment an important step in a lifelong journey toward clarity, knowledge, and the nourishment that comes in various forms—even "the smallest biggest joys" help piece together a complex portrait of a gay man of color who at last defines himself by what he learns, not by what he yearns for.

Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement, Publishing Triangle

“Told in a series of revealing vignettes and poems, González’s Autobiography of my Hungers turns moments of need and want into revelations of truth and self-awareness, creating the portrait of an artist that is complex if not entirely complete.”—El Paso Times

“Through his provocative vignettes, González communicates a lifetime of struggle for affirmation and self-acceptance.”—Make/Shift 
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cover of Autobiography of Samuel S. Hildebrand: The Renowned Missouri Bushwhacker

Autobiography of Samuel S. Hildebrand

The Renowned Missouri Bushwhacker

Kirby Ross

University of Arkansas Press, 2016

Most Civil War historians now agree that the guerrilla conflict shaped the entire war in significant ways. Some of these “bushwhackers”—Nathan Bedford Forrest, William Clarke Quantrill, John Singleton Mosby—have become quite infamous. Illiterate Sam Hildebrand, one of Missouri’s most notorious guerrillas—often compared to “Rob Roy,” and the subject of dime novels—was one of the few to survive the war and have his story taken down and published. Shortly after this he was killed in a barroom brawl. “I make no apology to mankind for my acts of retaliation; I make no whining appeal to the world for sympathy. I sought revenge and I found it; the key of hell was not suffered to rust in the lock while I was on the war path.” —Sam Hildebrand Hildebrand’s reign of terror gave the Union army fits and kept much of the Trans-Mississippi, especially Missouri, roiling in the 1860s. Over seven years of fighting he and his men killed dozens of soldiers and civilians, whites and blacks; he claimed to have killed nearly one hundred himself. He was accused of many heinous acts. The historical significance of Hildebrand’s story is substantial, but his bloody tale is eminently readable and stands quite well on its own as a cold-blooded portrait of a violent time in American history. Like the nightmarish and depraved world of the Kid in Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian, Hildebrand’s world is truly ruthless and his story is brutally descriptive in its coolly detached rendering of one man’s personal war. Published in 1870, Hildebrand’s autobiography has long been out of print and has been a rare and highly prized acquisition among Civil War
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cover of Autobiography of Silas Thompson Trowbridge M.D.

Autobiography of Silas Thompson Trowbridge M.D.

Silas Thompson Trowbridge. Introduction by John S. Haller Jr. and Barbara Mason

Southern Illinois University Press, 2004

Autobiography of Silas Thompson Trowbridge M.D. is a remarkable account of nineteenth-century medicine, politics, and personal life that recovers the captivating experiences of a Civil War–era regimental surgeon who was also a president of the Illinois State Medical Society and a United States consul in Mexico. First published in 1872 by Trowbridge’s family and even printed on a family-owned press, only a handful of copies of the initial publication survive. In this first paperback edition, Trowbridge’s memoirs are reprinted as they originally appeared.

Indiana-born Trowbridge moved to Illinois in his early twenties. A teacher by trade, he continued that career while he began the study of medicine, eventually starting a medical practice near New Castle, which he later moved to Decatur. Though respected by the community, Trowbridge lacked an authentic medical degree, so he enrolled in a four-month course of medical lectures at Rush Medical College in Chicago. Autobiography describes the atmosphere of the medical school and delineates Trowbridge’s opinions on the lack of quality control in medical colleges of the day.

Although three years of study and two annual terms of sixteen weeks were the actual requirements for the degree, Trowbridge was allowed to graduate after a single course of lectures  and completion of a twenty-page thesis due to his previous experience. He then married a young widow and returned to Decatur, where he began a partnership with two local physicians and inaugurated a county medical society.  In addition to practicing medicine, he was known and respected for regulating it, too, having supported legislation that would legalize dissection and prohibit incompetent persons from practicing medicine.

In 1861, Trowbridge began service as a surgeon of the 8th Illinois Volunteer Infantry commanded by Colonel Richard J. Oglesby. Autobiography describes his experiences beginning in Cairo, Illinois, where the infantry was involved in several expeditions and where Trowbridge made his “debut at the operating table.” Revealing a litany of surgical duties, replete with gruesome details, these war-time recollections provide a unique perspective on medical practices of the day. Likewise, his commentaries on political issues and his descriptions of combat serve to correct some of the early written histories of the war’s great battles.

After receiving an honorable discharge in 1864, Trowbridge returned to Decatur to resume his partnership with Dr. W. J. Chenoweth and devote himself to surgery. His reminiscences recount several difficult surgeries, his efforts to reorganize the county medical society (which had collapsed during the war), and his communications to the Illinois legislature to set higher qualifications for practicing physicians. He was later elected president of the Illinois State Medical Society and appointed by President Grant United States Consul to Vera Cruz on the eastern coast of Mexico, where he studied and challenged the treatment of yellow fever. The autobiography ends in 1874 with a six-day family vacation and the marriage of his daughter to a merchant of Vera Cruz.

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cover of Autobiography of a Yaqui Poet

Autobiography of a Yaqui Poet

Refugio Savala; Edited by Kathleen M. Sands

University of Arizona Press, 1980

This is the major literary achievement of a sensitive, gifted man. The author is a Yaqui Indian, a railroad gandy dancer who sees beauty in iron spikes and rail clamps as well as in twilight-purple mountains and glossy-leafed cottonwood trees. In the seventy years following his flight from the Yaqui-Mexican wars in Sonora, Savala became a talented poet and loving recorder of his people's cultural heritage. A large sampling of his original works appears in the interpretations section of this book. Together with the beautifully written autobiography, they offer a unique view of Arizona Yaqui culture and history, railroading in the American West, and the personal and artistic growth of a Native American man of letters.
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cover of Autobiography of an Androgyne

Autobiography of an Androgyne

Ralph Werther and Edited by Scott Herring

Rutgers University Press, 2008

First printed in 1918, Ralph Werther's Autobiography of an Androgyne charts his emerging self-understanding as a member of the "third sex" and documents his explorations of queer underworlds in turn-of-the-century New York City. Werther presents a sensational life narrative that begins with a privileged upper-class birth and a youthful realization of his difference from other boys. He concludes with a decision to undergo castration. Along the way, he recounts intimate stories of adolescent sexual encounters with adult men and women, escapades as a reckless "fairie" who trolled Brooklyn and the Bowery in search of working-class Irish and Italian immigrants, and an immersion into the subculture of male "inverts." This new edition also includes a critical introduction by Scott Herring that situates the text within the scientific, historical, literary, and social contexts of urban American life in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Tracing how this pioneering autobiography engages with conversations on immigration, gender, economics, metropolitan working-class culture, and the invention of homosexuality across class lines, this edition is ideal for courses on topics ranging from Victorian literature to modern American sexuality.
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cover of Autobiography of an Aspiring Saint

Autobiography of an Aspiring Saint

Cecilia Ferrazzi

University of Chicago Press, 1996

Charged by the Venetian Inquisition with the conscious and cynical feigning of holiness, Cecelia Ferrazzi (1609-1684) requested and obtained the unprecedented opportunity to defend herself through a presentation of her life story. Ferrazzi's unique inquisitorial autobiography and the transcripts of her preceding testimony, expertly transcribed and eloquently translated into English, allow us to enter an unfamiliar sector of the past and hear 'another voice'—that of a humble Venetian woman who had extraordinary experiences and exhibited exceptional courage.

Born in 1609 into an artisan family, Cecilia Ferrazzi wanted to become a nun. When her parents' death in the plague of 1630 made it financially impossible for her to enter the convent, she refused to marry and as a single laywoman set out in pursuit of holiness. Eventually she improvised a vocation: running houses of refuge for "girls in danger," young women at risk of being lured into prostitution.

Ferrazzi's frequent visions persuaded her, as well as some clerics and acquaintances among the Venetian elite, that she was on the right track. The socially valuable service she was providing enhanced this impresssion. Not everyone, however, was convinced that she was a genuine favorite of God. In 1664 she was denounced to the Inquisition.

The Inquisition convicted Ferrazzi of the pretense of sanctity. Yet her autobiographical act permits us to see in vivid detail both the opportunities and the obstacles presented to seventeenth-century women.
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cover of Autobiography, Volume 1: 1907-1937, Journey East, Journey West

Autobiography, Volume 1

1907-1937, Journey East, Journey West

Mircea Eliade

University of Chicago Press, 1990

"Here finally are Eliade's memoirs of the first thirty years of his life in Mac Linscott Rickett's crisp and lucid English translation. They present a fascinating account of the early development of a Renaissance talent, expressed in everything from daily and periodical journalism, realistic and fantastic fiction, and general nonfiction works to distinguished contributions to the history of religions. Autobiography follows an apparently amazingly candid report of this remarkable man's progression from a mischievous street urchin and literary prodigy, through his various love affairs, a decisive and traumatic Indian sojourn, and active, brilliant participation in pre-World War II Romanian cultural life."—Seymour Cain, Religious Studies Review
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cover of Autobiography, Volume 2: 1937-1960, Exile's Odyssey

Autobiography, Volume 2

1937-1960, Exile's Odyssey

Mircea Eliade

University of Chicago Press, 1988

"Here finally are Eliade's memoirs of the first thirty years of his life in Mac Linscott Rickett's crisp and lucid English translation. They present a fascinating account of the early development of a Renaissance talent, expressed in everything from daily and periodical journalism, realistic and fantastic fiction, and general nonfiction works to distinguished contributions to the history of religions. Autobiography follows an apparently amazingly candid report of this remarkable man's progression from a mischievous street urchin and literary prodigy, through his various love affairs, a decisive and traumatic Indian sojourn, and active, brilliant participation in pre-World War II Romanian cultural life."—Seymour Cain, Religious Studies Review
[more]
cover of Autumn Equinox

Autumn Equinox

Jabbour Douaihy

University of Arkansas Press, 2001

Jabbour Douaihy’s Autumn Equinox is a diary of a young man recently resettled in his Lebanese village after going to college in the United States. It continues from the end of May through the September equinox of 1986, narrating his efforts to remake himself through adjustments to his reading, writing, and eating habits, his dress, his posture, his family relationships, his love life. . . .
 
The diary begins with a view of an Israeli bombing in South Lebanon and ends with a description of refugee families fleeing to the mountain villages. Otherwise, except for allusions to what is going on in the capital, the Lebanese Civil War is far from the story, although its violence has never been far from this village. America, personified by a Lara who does not answer his letters, is a faraway land of nostalgia. The village is here, at the center of the young man’s narration, peopled by comic characters who seem to insist on their own unchanging selfhoods and to resist his attempts to be different.
 
The Civil War and the Occupation, the author seems to be saying, are not the only sources of turmoil. Violence and revenge have been part of the people’s consciousness, and people might indeed need to redefine themselves while at the same time adjusting to the environment.
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cover of Ava Helen Pauling: Partner, Activist, Visionary

Ava Helen Pauling

Partner, Activist, Visionary

Mina Carson

Oregon State University Press, 2013

The story of Ava Helen Pauling—her rich career as an activist first for civil rights and liberties, then against nuclear testing, and finally for peace, feminism, and environmental stewardship—is best told in the context of her enduring partnership with her famous husband, Linus Pauling. In this long-awaited first biography of Ava Helen Pauling, Mina Carson reveals the complex and fascinating history behind one of the great love stories of the twentieth century.

Though she began her public career in the shadow of her spouse, Ava Helen soon found herself tugged between her ardor to support Linus in his career and her desire that he embrace the social and political causes she felt passionate about. She believed it was her destiny to accept duties as a mother and homemaker, but neither of those roles was fully satisfying. Her more complete identity emerged over decades, as she evolved as an influential activist.

Ava Helen Pauling’s story is significant because so many aspects of it were shared with countless American women of her generation and the generations surrounding her. They had new educational opportunities but were expected to conform to the same limited social roles dictated by the gender ideology of the nineteenth century. When second wave feminism erupted in the 1960s, its force did not come solely from the young women rebelling against their elders’ rules and limitations, but also from the frustrated dreams of those elders themselves.

Ava Helen did not experience overt oppression by her husband or community; she even asserted some very non-feminist positions as a young woman. This, combined with a structural lack of opportunity, contributed to the strength and persistence of role expectations in her life. At the same time, she was feisty and willful. Her personality both created her marital loyalty and eventually took her down an openly feminist path.

Ava Helen Pauling: Partner, Activist, Visionary is an important complement to writings about Linus Pauling and a welcome addition to the literature on women’s and family history. It will also appeal to students and scholars of peace and reform movements and the social history of science.
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cover of Avenues of Transformation: Illinois's Path from Territory to State

Avenues of Transformation

Illinois's Path from Territory to State

James A. Edstrom

Southern Illinois University Press, 2022

WINNER, 2023 Illinois State Historical Society Russell P. Strange Book of the Year Award!

A territory split by slavery, a state forged for union


Avenues of Transformation traces the surprising path, marked by shame, ambition, and will that led to Illinois’s admission to the Union in 1818. Historian James A. Edstrom guides the reader through this story by associating each stage of the narrative—the original statehood campaign, the passage of Illinois’s statehood-enabling act by Congress, and Illinois’s first constitutional convention—with the primary leaders in each of those episodes. The lives of these men—Daniel Pope Cook, Nathaniel Pope, and Elias Kent Kane—reflect the momentous tangle of politics, slavery, and geography. This history maps the drive for statehood in the conflict between nation and state, in the perpetuation of slavery, and in the sweep of water and commerce. It underscores the ways in which the Prairie State is uniquely intertwined—economically, socially, and politically—with every region of the Union: North, South, East, and West—and captures the compelling moment when Illinois statehood stood ready to more perfectly unify the nation.

This volume is the first full-length book in over a century to describe and analyze Illinois’s admission to the Union. It marks the first time that a historian has analyzed in detail the roll-call votes of the first state constitutional convention, seated evenly by pro- and antislavery delegates. Edstrom’s wit and prose weave a lively narrative of political ambition and human failure. Patiently crafted, Avenues of Transformation will be the first source for readers to turn to for gaining a better understanding of Illinois statehood.
 
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cover of Awakening to Equality: A Young White Pastor at the Dawn of Civil Rights

Awakening to Equality

A Young White Pastor at the Dawn of Civil Rights

Karl E. Lutze

University of Missouri Press, 2006

When Karl Lutze arrived in Oklahoma in 1945, he stepped into another world. A newly ordained clergyman born in Wisconsin, he was a young white man assigned to minister among Muskogee’s African American community. He soon found that in the South, crosses were as likely to be burned as revered. His recollections of postwar Oklahoma provide a compelling testament to the era’s racial conflict and some steps taken toward its resolution.
Awakening to Equality offers a unique perspective on an often-violent era that witnessed the gradual dismantling of segregation. Serving congregations in Muskogee and Tulsa, Lutze encountered a cross section of both communities—from the white and black power brokers to the most disempowered black and biracial families—and a stratified society buttressed by intimidation, cross burnings, and bombs. His activism in the Urban League and other local civil rights organizations gave him firsthand experience with forces moving toward change, as well as with the more entrenched forces resisting it.
Blending personal anecdotes and recollections of key players in this unfolding drama, Lutze puts a human face on historical and journalistic accounts of social change during the crucial early years of the civil rights movement. He takes readers back to small-town and urban Oklahoma in a time when African Americans were beginning to challenge segregation in Muskogee’s public transportation and a handful of liberal whites were trying to move their communities toward desegregation. Throughout this rich memoir, we meet actual people creating a future—one that involved the very redefinition of America.
More than a view of an earnest young clergyman trying to grow beyond the racial and social limitations of the church of his day, Awakening to Equality also depicts the struggles of Lutze’s own denomination to overcome its earlier accommodation of racism. Lutze’s success in his ministries made his achievements a model for mission work among African Americans and led to his appointment in 1959 first as field secretary and then shortly thereafter as executive director of the Lutheran Human Relations Association, a pioneering civil rights organization. Simultaneously, he taught classes as Associate Professor of Theology at Valparaiso University.
Lutze not only witnessed important events but also participated in them and found that his entire career was shaped by the experience. Awakening to Equality is a moving story that captures the real-life education of a prominent clergyman during a critical period in American life.
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