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Weaving together lyrical history and personal memoir, Virdi powerfully examines society’s—and her own—perception of life as a deaf person in America.

At the age of four, Jaipreet Virdi’s world went silent. A severe case of meningitis left her alive but deaf, suddenly treated differently by everyone. Her deafness downplayed by society and doctors, she struggled to “pass” as hearing for most of her life. Countless cures, treatments, and technologies led to dead ends. Never quite deaf enough for the Deaf community or quite hearing enough for the “normal” majority, Virdi was stuck in aural limbo for years. It wasn’t until her thirties, exasperated by problems with new digital hearing aids, that she began to actively assert her deafness and reexamine society’s—and her own—perception of life as a deaf person in America.
 
Through lyrical history and personal memoir, Hearing Happiness raises pivotal questions about deafness in American society and the endless quest for a cure. Taking us from the 1860s up to the present, Virdi combs archives and museums in order to understand the long history of curious cures: ear trumpets, violet ray apparatuses, vibrating massagers, electrotherapy machines, airplane diving, bloodletting, skull hammering, and many more. Hundreds of procedures and products have promised grand miracles but always failed to deliver a universal cure—a harmful legacy that is still present in contemporary biomedicine.

Weaving Virdi’s own experiences together with her exploration into the fascinating history of deafness cures, Hearing Happiness is a powerful story that America needs to hear.

A memoir of service, culture and transformation in a rural Panamanian village by a young American woman trained as a community forester for the Peace Corp.

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.

Lo Dagerman reconstructs the love, trauma, and creative journeys of her parents—Swedish writer Stig Dagerman and actress Anita Björk

In 1953, Swedish writer Stig Dagerman, one of Europe’s greatest postwar writers, married Anita Björk, an acclaimed actress famous for the Cannes Grand Prix award-winning film Miss Julie. Inscribed into her wedding ring were his words “Heaven Is Near.” A year later, Stig was found dead by suicide. His death shocked Sweden and left a devastated Anita to raise their small daughter, Lo.

Heaven Is Near is Lo Dagerman’s endeavor to understand what happened. In an unconventional hybrid of biography and memoir, Lo dives deep into diaries, notebooks, letters, and other source material to bring her parents’ stories to life. Her account offers an unsparing look at her father’s creative crisis, depression, and suicide, as well as her mother’s life-long striving and sustained success in reaching the height of artistic excellence while navigating motherhood and family. Moving between Stockholm, Paris, Berlin, and Hollywood, Lo lays bare her parents’ legacy not as a tragic abstraction but as their lived experience, inserting her own memories and reflections along the way.

Through Lo’s unsentimental, psychologically rich narration, Heaven Is Near offers a quietly luminous, multigenerational account of genius, trauma, and creative regeneration.

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Henpecked: Winston Churchill and Women’s Suffrage explores the recurrent interactions between Winston Churchill and the women’s suffrage movement in Britain. Churchill purposely concealed, under a discursive veil, his complex and shifting perceptions of women’s competency to use the franchise. In balancing a public stance that vaguely favored the “principle” of women’s suffrage with his, often private, opposition to the movement’s legislative efforts, he employed every available rhetorical tool. This book presents a new understanding of his early Parliamentary career, his ability to manipulate public and private discourse, and his complicated stance on women’s right to vote. This rhetorical history challenges the view that Winston Churchill was only dissuaded in his support of women’s suffrage by the militancy of suffrage activists.

The life and legacy of a pioneer who helped shape American geology.

Henry Darwin Rogers, 1808–1866: American Geologist is the first comprehensive biography of Henry Darwin Rogers, one of the pioneering figures who helped establish geology as a professional scientific discipline in the United States. Written by historian Patsy Gerstner, this meticulously researched study traces Rogers's life from his early education and scientific interests to his leadership of the groundbreaking geological surveys of New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

At a time when American science was still in its formative stages, Rogers distinguished himself through extensive fieldwork, influential publications, and innovative theories about the formation of mountain systems. His investigations of Pennsylvania's Appalachian region led to one of the first distinctly American theories of mountain elevation and helped advance understanding of the earth's geological structure. Gerstner places these achievements within the broader context of nineteenth-century scientific institutions, professional rivalries, and the growing importance of state-sponsored research

More than a scientific biography, the book offers a compelling account of the emergence of American geology and the individuals who transformed natural history into a rigorous scientific enterprise. It is an indispensable resource for understanding the history of science, the development of geological thought, and the evolution of scientific professionalism in the United States.

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.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. To meet a need which had been felt for some time both in the United States and abroad, the pamphlet series, the University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers, was established in 1959. By providing readable critical introductions to American Writers, the pamphlets were designed to meet the needs and tastes of mature students and readers of imaginative literature throughout the world. Each pamphlet presents a brief biography of a writer, a longer critical analysis and evaluation of his or her work, and a selected bibliography of his or her books and articles about him or her. Editors of the series were William Van O’Connor, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren. There was an advisory board consisting of William Thorp, Karl Shapiro, and Philip Rahv.

The life of a pioneering Southern scientist in an era of war, change, and discovery.

Henry William Ravenel, 1814–1887: South Carolina Scientist in the Civil War Era is a compelling biography of one of nineteenth-century America's most accomplished yet largely overlooked natural scientists. Through meticulous archival research, Tamara Miner Haygood brings to life the story of Henry William Ravenel, a South Carolina planter, botanist, and pioneering mycologist whose work earned international recognition while he lived far from the major scientific centers of the United States.

Born into the Lowcountry planter class, Ravenel developed a lifelong fascination with the natural world and became a leading authority on the study of fungi and plants. Despite limited formal scientific training, he built an extensive network of correspondents that included some of the most prominent botanists in America and Europe. His collections, publications, and exchanges of specimens contributed significantly to the advancement of botanical science and established his reputation as one of the foremost naturalists of his generation.

Haygood places Ravenel's scientific achievements within the broader context of Southern society, demonstrating how intellectual pursuits flourished in unexpected ways within a region often overlooked in histories of American science. At the same time, the biography confronts the realities of slavery, plantation life, religion, and regional identity that shaped Ravenel's world. His experience challenges long-held assumptions about the relationship between Southern culture and scientific inquiry.

The Civil War and its aftermath transformed Ravenel's life, disrupting his finances, professional networks, and daily routines. Yet he remained committed to scientific work, continuing to collect, study, and publish despite enormous challenges. More than a biography, this volume offers a fascinating exploration of science, society, and survival during one of the most turbulent periods in American history. Essential reading for historians of science, Civil War scholars, environmental historians, botanists, and students of Southern culture.

The biography of one of Minnesota’s most beloved nature writers, from her career in the city to her rustic cabin on Gunflint Lake
 

During the late 1950s through the early 1970s, Helen Hoover’s stories and essays of life in the wilderness on northern Minnesota’s Gunflint Lake, published in popular magazines and several bestselling books (including The Gift of the Deer in 1966 and A Place in the Woods in 1969), found millions of fans and earned her accolades alongside nature writers like Sigurd Olson, Rachel Carson, Sally Carrighar, and Calvin Rutstrum. Hoover’s own unlikely history of leaving a corporate career in Chicago for a small cabin without electricity or running water—with no interest in hunting or fishing—is just one chapter of the remarkable life that David Hakensen describes in Her Place in the Woods. This first complete biography illuminates how Helen Hoover (1910–1984) made a place for herself and for countless readers in, as she put it, the world of her time.

Hoover defied convention. Self-trained and without an academic degree, she worked in the male-dominated metallurgical field as a researcher at International Harvester, where she solved a long-standing problem with the manufacture of discs for farm implements and earned a patent. She and her husband, Adrian, a commercial artist, had long dreamed of moving to a remote cabin in the woods. As they started the long return drive to Chicago after a summer spent on Gunflint Lake, they finally made the leap, quitting their jobs with a long-distance phone call from Grand Marais and figuring out the rest as they went.

The Hoovers were woefully unprepared for life off the grid and slowly learned how to convert sheds into chicken coops and fend off bears. Social encounters presented their own challenges, with Helen’s fiery personality leading to clashes with hunters and other Gunflint neighbors. Gradually, the Hoovers settled into the rhythms of their remote homestead, and Helen would craft a prolific literary livelihood from her keen observations of nature and encounters with animals in the surrounding woods.

Her Place in the Woods captures both an awakening to the power and fragility of the natural world and the efforts and talents of an extraordinary woman defining herself as a writer. Though Helen Hoover would move on from the secluded North Woods, as she wrote in her final book, The Years of the Forest, “From this time on it would be both here and with me wherever I might be, as long as I should live.”

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.