Results by title

28164 books match the query 'History' and 932 start with l

cover of Letters From The Promised Land: Swedes in America, 1840-1914

Letters From The Promised Land

Swedes in America, 1840-1914

H. Arnold Barton

University of Minnesota Press, 2000

Swedish immigrants tell their own stories in this collection of letters, diaries, and memoirs—a perfect book for those interested in history, immigration, or just the daily lives of early Swedish-American settlers.

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cover of Letters Home to Sarah: The Civil War Letters of Guy C. Taylor, Thirty-Sixth Wisconsin Volunteers

Letters Home to Sarah

The Civil War Letters of Guy C. Taylor, Thirty-Sixth Wisconsin Volunteers

Guy C. Taylor; Edited by Kevin L. Alderson and Patsy Alderson; Introduction by Kathryn Shively Meier

University of Wisconsin Press, 2012

Forgotten for more than a century in an old cardboard box, these are the letters of Guy Carlton Taylor, a farmer who served in the Thirty-Sixth Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiment in the American Civil War. From March 23, 1864, to July 14, 1865, Taylor wrote 165 letters home to his wife Sarah and their son Charley.

From the initial mustering and training of his regiment at Camp Randall in Wisconsin, through the siege of Petersburg in Virginia, General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, and the postwar Grand Review of the Armies parade in Washington, D.C., Taylor conveys in vivid detail his own experiences and emotions and shows himself a keen observer of all that is passing around him. While at war, he contracts measles, pneumonia, and malaria, and he writes about the hospitals, treatments, and sanitary conditions that he and his comrades endured during the war. Amidst the descriptions of soldiering, Taylor’s letters to Sarah are threaded with the concerns of a young married couple separated by war but still coping together with childrearing and financial matters. The letters show, too, Taylor’s transformation from a lonely and somewhat disgruntled infantryman to a thoughtful commentator on the greater ideals of the war.

This remarkable trove of letters, which had been left in the attic of Taylor’s former home in Cashton, Wisconsin, was discovered by local historian Kevin Alderson at a household auction. Recognizing them for the treasure they are, Alderson bought the letters and, aided by his wife Patsy, painstakingly transcribed the letters and researched Taylor’s story in Wisconsin and at historical sites of the Civil War. The Aldersons’ preface and notes are augmented by an introduction by Civil War historian Kathryn Shively Meier, and the book includes photographs, maps, and illustrations related to Guy Taylor’s life and letters.
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cover of Letters and Orations

Letters and Orations

Cassandra Fedele

University of Chicago Press, 2000

By the end of the fifteenth century, Cassandra Fedele (1465-1558), a learned middle-class woman of Venice, was arguably the most famous woman writer and scholar in Europe. A cultural icon in her own time, she regularly corresponded with the king of France, lords of Milan and Naples, the Borgia pope Alexander VI, and even maintained a ten-year epistolary exchange with Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain that resulted in an invitation for her to join their court. Fedele's letters reveal the central, mediating role she occupied in a community of scholars otherwise inaccessible to women. Her unique admittance into this community is also highlighted by her presence as the first independent woman writer in Italy to speak publicly and, more importantly, the first to address philosophical, political, and moral issues in her own voice. Her three public orations and almost all of her letters, translated into English, are presented here for the first time.
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cover of Letters from Alabama, 1817–1822

Letters from Alabama, 1817–1822

Anne Newport Royall

University of Alabama Press, 1969

Letters of an outspoken “first” woman journalist in Alabama

Anne Royall was a prominent woman journalist for more than a quarter of a century before her death in 1854, publishing some ten books of travel accounts, one novel, and two successive weekly newspapers in Washington, and sponsoring causes, often unpopular, in the manner of latter-day "muck­rakers." She was a well-known habitue of the halls of Congress, looking for news and subscribers, sniffing out irregularities in governmental departments, and pressing claims for a pension which she believed should have been hers from her Revolu­tionary War husband. For those who helped her she had high, often inordinate, praise; for those who refused her or crossed her path she was a "holy terror," lashing out against them often in intemperate language. Through the columns of her paper she debated such public issues as the Bank, anti­Masonry, Nullification, and the franking privilege; she was forever attacking what she considered a very diabolical plot to unite church and state. There was never a doubt where she stood on any of the issues on which she spoke out; she was no compromiser or "fence-straddler." She has the distinction of being the only woman in our national history who was tried (and convicted) for being a "common scold." She was, in short, an aggressive, intolerant, outspoken, suspicious, meddlesome, nonconforming but patriotic, and fascinating woman.
 
Anne Royall, we might say, began her journalistic career in Alabama. Although the letters were not published until 1830, some four years after Sketches of History, Life and Manners in the United States, they were her :first literary effort. Ostensibly written to a young lawyer friend “Matt” in Virginia, the letters are dated from November 28, 1817 to June 8, 1822.. The letters include, in addition to personal matters and comments on the inconveniences of travel, a considerable amount of description of the country through which she traveled and discussions -often lengthy-of religion, literature, education, social in­justices, crops, and important personages she met in her travels. While she is often outspoken, her comments in these letters are more temperate than those in her later works.
 
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cover of Letters from Alabama: Chiefly Relating to Natural HIstory

Letters from Alabama

Chiefly Relating to Natural HIstory

Philip Henry Gosse, introduction by Harvey H. Jackson III, edited by Virginia Hamilton

University of Alabama Press, 1993

A naturalist's captivating portrait of Alabama's wildlife, landscapes, and people.

Philip Henry Gosse (1810-1888), a British naturalist, left home at age 17 and made his way to Alabama in 1838, where he had heard educated people were in demand. He was employed by Judge Reuben Saffold at Pleasant Hill in Dallas County as a teacher for about a dozen children of local landowners, but his principal interest was natural history. During the eight months he lived in th Black Belt he watched, listened, thought, took notes, and made sketches--activities that eventually led to Letters from Alabama. He lived among Alabamians, talked and listened to them, saw them at their best and their worst, and came to understand their hopes and fears. They were a part of the natural world, and he paid attention to them as any good scientist would. With the skills of a scientist and the temperament of an artist, Gosse set down an account of natural life in frontier Alabama that has no equal. Written to no one in particular, a common literary device of the period, the letters were first published in a magazine, and in 1859 appeared as a book. By that time Gosse was an established scholar and one of England’s most noted scientific illustrators.

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cover of Letters from Alabama: Chiefly Relating to Natural History

Letters from Alabama

Chiefly Relating to Natural History

Philip Henry Gosse, Edited by Gary R. Mullen and Taylor D. Littleton

University of Alabama Press, 2013

New and improved edition of a naturalist's captivating portrait of Alabama's wildlife, landscapes, and people. 

Philip Henry Gosse (1810–1888), a British naturalist, left home at age seventeen and made his way to Alabama in 1838. He was employed by Judge Reuben Saffold and other planters near Pleasant Hill in Dallas County as a teacher for about a dozen of their children, but his principal interest was natural history. Letters from Alabama is a personalized record of Gosse’s perceptive observations during his eight-month residence in this small antebellum community. The work addresses a Victorian readership, including entomologists, who Gosse believed were relatively uninformed about the novelty and beauty of this “hilly region of the State of Alabama.” Written in an engaging literary style and organized as a series of epistolary discussions, the book is unparalleled in its detailed evocations of the natural history and cultural conditions of frontier Alabama. By the time Letters from Alabama appeared in 1859, Gosse’s scientific publications and fine illustrations had led to his being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London.

Edited by Gary R. Mullen and Taylor D. Littleton, this authoritative edition features thirty grayscale lithographs shot directly from the 1859 edition, reset type for easier reading, a new introduction and index by the two foremost scholars of Gosse in Alabama, a new appendix that provides modern scientific and common names for the plant and animal species described by Gosse, and a four-color cover featuring one of the plates from Gosse’s Entomologia Alabamensis.

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cover of Letters from Clara: One Intrepid Woman's Travels on the Eve of War, 1936-1939

Letters from Clara

One Intrepid Woman's Travels on the Eve of War, 1936-1939

Janet Newman

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2022

A unique collection of letters from a member of the YWCA on her first world tour in the 1930s, Letters from Clara tells one woman’s story of adventure and danger on the eve of World War II. Despite limited financial means, Clara Pagel was richly resourceful and used the YWCA network to find work and places to live in the Far East, along the way meeting other women also working their way around the world. As Clara described in letters to her YWCA friends back home, her sojourn was filled with museums and world-famous landmarks, as well as typhoons, bombings, and earthquakes. These experiences are described in over one hundred pages of letters, annotated throughout by Janet Newman. Upon Clara’s return to the United States in 1939, she enrolled at the University of Chicago and earned an MBA at the age of forty-six. This is the story of a remarkable woman on an unexpected but fulfilling journey to learn about the world and herself.
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cover of Letters from Red Farm: The Untold Story of the Friendship between Helen Keller and Journalist Joseph Edgar Chamberlin

Letters from Red Farm

The Untold Story of the Friendship between Helen Keller and Journalist Joseph Edgar Chamberlin

Elizabeth Emerson

University of Massachusetts Press, 2021

In 1888, young Helen Keller traveled to Boston with her teacher, Annie Sullivan, where they met a man who would change her life: Boston Transcript columnist and editor Joseph Edgar Chamberlin. Throughout her childhood and young adult years, Keller spent weekends and holidays at Red Farm, the Chamberlins' home in Wrentham, Massachusetts, a bustling environment where avant-garde writers, intellectuals, and social reformers of the day congregated. Keller eventually called Red Farm home for a year when she was sixteen.

Informed by previously unpublished letters and extensive research, Letters from Red Farm explores for the first time Keller's deep and enduring friendship with the man who became her literary mentor and friend for over forty years. Written by Chamberlin's great-great granddaughter, this engaging story imparts new insights into Keller's life and personality, introduces the irresistible Chamberlin to a modern public, and follows Keller's burgeoning interest in social activism, as she took up the causes of disability rights, women's issues, and pacifism.
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cover of Letters from Robben Island: A Selection of Ahmed Kathrada's Prison Correspondence, 1964-1989

Letters from Robben Island

A Selection of Ahmed Kathrada's Prison Correspondence, 1964-1989

Robert D. Vassen

Michigan State University Press, 1999

Late one night in July, 1963, a South African police unit surrounded the African National Congress headquarters in Rivonia and arrested a group of Movement leaders gathered inside. Eventually eight of them, including Nelson Mandela, who was already serving a sentence, Walter Sisulu, Dennis Goldberg, Govan Mbeki, Raymond Mhlaba, Elias Motsoledi, Andrew Mangeni, and Ahmed Kathrada, were convicted of sabotage and, on June 12, 1964, sentenced to life in prison. Soon, these men became widely known as the "Rivonia Trialists." Despite their imprisonment, the Trialists played active roles in the struggle against South Africa's racist regime. Instead of being forgotten, as apartheid officials had hoped, they became enduring symbols in a struggle against injustice and racism. 
     Kathrada and his colleagues were classified as high security prisoners, segregated from others and closely watched. Every activity was regulated and monitored. Among the many indignities visited upon them, the prisoners were prohibited from keeping copies of incoming and outgoing correspondence. Kathrada, or "Kathy" as he is known, successfully hid both. 
     Letters From Robben Island contains a selection of 86 of the more than 900 pieces of correspondence Ahmed Kathrada wrote during his 26 years on Robben Island and at Pollsmoor Prison. Some were smuggled out by friends; others were written in code to hide meaning and content from prison censors. These are among his most poignant, touching, and eloquent communications. They are testimonies to Kathrada, his colleagues, and to their commitment to obtaining human dignity and freedom for all South Africans.

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cover of Letters from Spain: A Seventeenth-Century French Noblewoman at the Spanish Royal Court

Letters from Spain

A Seventeenth-Century French Noblewoman at the Spanish Royal Court

Marie Gigault de Bellefonds

Iter Press, 2021

Marie Gigault de Bellefonds, Marquise de Villars was a well-regarded figure in Parisian salons and esteemed by King Louis XIV, and she traveled internationally to accompany her ambassador husband, playing significant diplomatic roles at the court of Savoy in Turin and at the court of Spain in Madrid. She became the confidante of the queen of Spain, Marie-Louise d’Orléans, the niece of Louis XIV, and, as instructed by the king of France, endeavored to pursue French political interests in Madrid with female members of royalty.

This volume includes her surviving letters from Madrid to her friend Madame de Coulanges and an appendix of her letters sent from Paris and Turin. The letters from Spain, written between 1679 and 1681, paint a vivid and engaging picture of the royal court and its new queen.
 
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cover of Letters from Wupatki

Letters from Wupatki

Courtney Reeder Jones; Edited by Lisa Rappoport

University of Arizona Press, 1995

When David and Courtney Reeder Jones moved into two rooms reached by ladder in a northern Arizona Indian ruin, they had been married only two weeks. Except for the ruin's cement floors, which were originally hardened mud, and skylights instead of smokeholes, the rooms were exactly as they had been 800 years before.

The year was 1938, and the newlyweds had come to Wupatki National Monument as full-time National Park Service caretakers for the ruin. Remote in time and place, their story as described in Courtney's letters will take readers into a dramatic landscape of red rocks, purple volcanoes, and endless blue sky. Here, some 60 years ago, two young people came to terms with their new life together and with their nearly total reliance upon each other and their Navajo neighbors.

"They helped us in any way that a neighbor would, and we helped them as we could," wrote Courtney in her memoirs years later. Vivid and engaging, her letters home spill over with descriptions of their friendship with local Navajo families, their sings and celebrations, and her good luck in being able to be a part of it all.

Letters from Wupatki captures a more innocent era in southwestern archaeology and the history of the National Park Service before the post-war years brought paved roads, expanded park facilities, and ever-increasing crowds of visitors. Courtney's letters to her family and friends reflect all the charm of the earlier time as they convey the sense of rapid transition that came after the war.

Tracking those changes in the development of Wupatki National Monument and the National Park Service, the letters also—and perhaps more important—reveal changes in the Joneses themselves. Of particular interest to anthropologists and historians, their story also gives the general reader captivating glimpses of a partnership between two people who only grew stronger for the struggles they shared together.
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cover of Letters from the Boys: Wisconsin World War I Soldiers Write Home

Letters from the Boys

Wisconsin World War I Soldiers Write Home

Carrie A Meyer

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2018

Words from the Wisconsin boys manning the trenches.

On the 100th anniversary of the arrival of the flood of American troops in Europe that would shift the tide of World War I in favor of the Allies, Letters from the Boys brings to life this terrible war as experienced by Wisconsinites writing home.

Technology had transformed the battlefield in alarming ways. Automatic rifles mowed down the young men who went “over the top” to attack enemy trenches; airplanes and improved artillery brought death unseen from miles away; terrifying clouds of poison gas choked and burned the European countryside; the internal combustion engine brought tanks to the battlefield for the first time and revolutionized the way troops deployed. 

In the thick of it were young men from Wisconsin who found themselves caught up in geopolitical events half a world away. Professor Carrie A. Meyer combed through three newspapers in Green County, Wisconsin, to collect and synthesize the letters from the boys into a narrative that is both unique and representative, telling the stories of several Green County boys and what they saw, from preparing for war, to life among French families near the front, to the terror of the battlefield. Meyer gracefully removes the veil of obscurity and anonymity hanging over soldiers who participated in a war fought so long ago by great numbers of men, reminding us that armies are made of individuals who strove to do their part and then return to their families. 
 
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cover of Letters from the Front, 1898-1945

Letters from the Front, 1898-1945

Michael E. Stevens

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 1992

This volume tells the stories of 62 men and women from Wisconsin who served in the Spanish-American War, World War I, and World War II. Letters from the Front is a vivid social history of wartime as told by those who took part in these foreign conflicts. Most of them are "ordinary" people, uprooted from farms, factories, and offices, who took part in extraordinary events. This work explores how war changed their lives and reveals the emotions they felt in uniform, in remote outposts, in combat, and in prison camps. These letters, diaries, oral histories, newspapers, and contemporary accounts provide a history of adaptation to military life; they also reflect the changes that occurred over the half-century encompassing these confilcts, an era of great technological innovation — and one in which America's vision of itself also changed.

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cover of Letters from the Queen of Navarre with an Ample Declaration

Letters from the Queen of Navarre with an Ample Declaration

Jeanne d’Albret

Iter Press, 2016

This edition presents in English, for the first time, Jeanne d’Albret’s Letters to the king, his mother, his brother, her own brother-in-law, and the queen of England, together with her Ample Declaration (1568) defending her decampment to the Protestant stronghold of La Rochelle. A historical-biographical introduction situates these writings in the larger context of Reformation politics and examines in detail the specific literary characteristics of her memoir. In her works, Jeanne d’Albret asserts her own position as legal sovereign of Béarn and Navarre and situates herself at the nexus of overlapping political, religious, and familial tensions.

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cover of Letters from the Southwest

Letters from the Southwest

Charles Lummis; Edited by James W. Byrkit

University of Arizona Press, 0

In the fall of 1884, journalist Charles Lummis set out on foot from Ohio to California on assignment for the Los Angeles Times. The reports he mailed ahead to that newspaper were later refashioned for the book A Tramp Across the Continent, a work that helped to establish Lummis as the most active promoter of Southwestern culture who ever lived.

Lummis wrote another set of letters during his journey, however, which he sent back to Ohio for publication by the Chillicothe Leader. Although these letters contain basically the same narrative as those sent to Los Angeles and later found in A Tramp, the Ohio letters more closely reflect the author’s thoughts and observations while on the journey. In fact, a comparison of the two drafts indicates that Lummis spent considerable effort removing spontaneous details from the Ohio letters in favor or a more commercial, self-promoting, and politic reporting for the California paper.

The twenty-four Ohio letters, assembled here by James W. Byrkit, offer a far more candid look at the Southwest than Lummis was later to bring to print, as well as greater insight into the author’s own personality. Byrkit’s introductory essay provides the background for Lummis’s career, compares the three bodies of work relating to the trek, and offers an account of Lummis’s transformation from chronicler to promoter.

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cover of Letters on Ethics: To Lucilius

Letters on Ethics

To Lucilius

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

University of Chicago Press, 2015

The Roman statesman and philosopher Seneca (4 BCE–65 CE) recorded his moral philosophy and reflections on life as a highly original kind of correspondence. Letters on Ethics includes vivid descriptions of town and country life in Nero’s Italy, discussions of poetry and oratory, and philosophical training for Seneca’s friend Lucilius. This volume, the first complete English translation in nearly a century, makes the Letters more accessible than ever before.

Written as much for a general audience as for Lucilius, these engaging letters offer advice on how to deal with everything from nosy neighbors to sickness, pain, and death. Seneca uses the informal format of the letter to present the central ideas of Stoicism, for centuries the most influential philosophical system in the Mediterranean world. His lively and at times humorous expositions have made the Letters his most popular work and an enduring classic. Including an introduction and explanatory notes by Margaret Graver and A. A. Long, this authoritative edition will captivate a new generation of readers.
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cover of Letters on Natural Philosophy: The Scientific Correspondence of a Sixteenth-Century Pharmacist, with Related Texts

Letters on Natural Philosophy

The Scientific Correspondence of a Sixteenth-Century Pharmacist, with Related Texts

Camilla Erculiani

Iter Press, 2020

In her Letters on Natural Philosophy, published originally in Krakow in 1584, Camilla Erculiani proposed her new theory of the natural causes of the universal flood in the biblical book of Genesis. Erculiani weaves together her understanding of Aristotelian, Platonic, Galenic, and astrological traditions and combines them with her own observations of the world as seen from her apothecary shop in sixteenth-century Padua. This publication brought Erculiani to the attention of the Inquisition, which accused her of heresy, silencing her for centuries.

 This edition presents the first full English translation of Erculiani’s book and other relevant texts, bringing to light the cultural context and scientific thought of this unique natural philosopher.
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cover of Letters to Francesco Datini

Letters to Francesco Datini

Margherita Datini

Iter Press, 2012

The letters of Margherita Datini to her husband, “the merchant of Prato,” are virtually impossible to put down. Margherita is never obsequious, and never holds her tongue as she chastises Francesco for staying up too late, asks about a case before the Eight of Florence, beseeches him to help friends in prison, worries over financial transactions, and updates him on his business, the harvests, and his illegitimate child (whom she cares for) when he is away. Rich in emotional life and historical particulars, the letters are a unique window into late medieval Tuscany and women’s “work.” Thanks to Carolyn James and Antonio Pagliaro for their illuminating introduction and equally luminous translation.
—Jane Tylus
Professor of Italian Studies and vice provost for academic affairs, New York University
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cover of Letters to Her Sons, 1447–1470

Letters to Her Sons, 1447–1470

Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi

Iter Press, 2016

The seventy-three surviving letters written by Florentine widow, Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi (c.1406–1471), to her distant sons first appeared in print well over a century ago, but are here translated into English in their entirety for the first time. Whether for the professional historian or for the general reader interested in Renaissance Florence, they constitute a most precious testimony regarding both private and public life in the mid-fifteenth century, with themes ranging from familial relations, motherhood, marriage, and aspects of material culture to the harsh realities of political exile meted out by the Medici to their perceived opponents, these latter including her husband and, subsequently, her sons.

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cover of Letters, 1-91

Letters, 1-91

Saint Ambrose

Catholic University of America Press, 1954

The Letters 1-91 of Saint Ambrose.
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cover of Letters, 121-150

Letters, 121-150

Owen J. Peter Damian

Catholic University of America Press, 2004

No description available
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cover of Letters, 151-180

Letters, 151-180

Owen J. Peter Damian

Catholic University of America Press, 2005

No description available
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cover of Letters, Kinship, and Social Mobility in Nigeria

Letters, Kinship, and Social Mobility in Nigeria

Olufemi Vaughan

University of Wisconsin Press, 2023

In 2003, Olufemi Vaughan received from his ninety-five-year-old father, Abiodun, a trove of more than three thousand letters written by four generations of his family in Ibadan, Nigeria, between 1926 and 1994. The people who wrote these letters had emerged from the religious, social, and educational institutions established by the Church Missionary Society, the preeminent Anglican mission in the Atlantic Nigerian region following the imposition of British colonial rule. Abiodun, recruited to be a civil servant in the colonial Department of Agriculture, became a leader of a prominent family in Ibadan, the dominant Yoruba city in southern Nigeria. Reading deeply in these letters, Vaughan realized he had a unique set of sources to illuminate everyday life in modern Nigeria.

Letter writing was a dominant form of communication for Western-educated elites in colonial Africa, especially in Nigeria. Exposure to the modern world and a growing sense of nationalism were among the factors that led people to begin exchanging letters, particularly in their interactions with British colonial authorities. Through careful textual analysis and broad contextualization, Vaughan reconstructs dominant storylines, including themes such as kinship, social mobility, Western education, modernity, and elite consolidation in colonial and post-colonial Nigeria. Vaughan brings his prodigious skills as an interdisciplinary scholar to bear on this wealth of information, bringing to life a portrait, at once intimate and expansive, of a community during a transformative period in African history. 
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cover of Letters, Volume 1

Letters, Volume 1

John Barsanuphius and John

Catholic University of America Press, 2006

No description available
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cover of Letters, Volume 1 (1–185)

Letters, Volume 1 (1–185)

Saint Basil

Catholic University of America Press, 1951

No description available
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cover of Letters, Volume 1 (1–82)

Letters, Volume 1 (1–82)

Saint Augustine

Catholic University of America Press, 1951

No description available
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cover of Letters, Volume 2

Letters, Volume 2

John Barsanuphius and John

Catholic University of America Press, 2006

No description available
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cover of Letters, Volume 2 (186–368)

Letters, Volume 2 (186–368)

Saint Basil

Catholic University of America Press, 1955

No description available
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cover of Letters, Volume 2 (83–130)

Letters, Volume 2 (83–130)

Saint Augustine

Catholic University of America Press, 1953

No description available
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cover of Letters, Volume 3 (131-164)

Letters, Volume 3 (131-164)

Saint Augustine

Catholic University of America Press, 1953

No description available
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cover of Letters, Volume 4 (165–203)

Letters, Volume 4 (165–203)

Saint Augustine

Catholic University of America Press, 1955

No description available
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cover of Letters, Volume 5 (204–270)

Letters, Volume 5 (204–270)

Saint Augustine

Catholic University of America Press, 1956

No description available
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cover of Letters, Volume 6 (1*–29*)

Letters, Volume 6 (1*–29*)

Saint Augustine

Catholic University of America Press, 1989

No description available
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cover of Letters: A Bilingual Edition

Letters

A Bilingual Edition

Hortense Mancini

Iter Press, 2025

The first translated collection of Hortense Mancini’s correspondence.

During the seventeenth century, Hortense Mancini, Duchess of Mazarin (1646–99), became an icon of women’s emancipation. In 1668, she shocked Europe when she fled her coercive husband and began a nomadic exile. Her notoriety increased in 1675 with the publication of her memoir—one of the first to appear in French by a woman—and was later magnified by her stint as the royal mistress of Charles II of England and by her establishment of a freethinking salon in London. As a salonnière, an exile, and a litigant fighting for legal separation from her husband, Mancini’s letters were a means of connection, collusion, and survival as well as cultural collaboration. Collected and translated here for the first time, this correspondence charts her struggle for autonomy in her own words.
 
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cover of Levi Strauss: The Man Who Gave Blue Jeans to the World

Levi Strauss

The Man Who Gave Blue Jeans to the World

Lynn Downey

University of Massachusetts Press, 2016

Winner of the 2016 Foreword Indies' Silver Award in Biography
Blue jeans are globally beloved and quintessentially American. They symbolize everything from the Old West to the hippie counter-culture; everyone from car mechanics to high-fashion models wears jeans. And no name is more associated with blue jeans than Levi Strauss & Co., the creator of this classic American garment.

As a young man Levi Strauss left his home in Germany and immigrated to America. He made his way to San Francisco and by 1853 had started his company. Soon he was a leading businessman in a growing commercial city that was beginning to influence the rest of the nation. Family-centered and deeply rooted in his Jewish faith, Strauss was the hub of a wheel whose spokes reached into nearly every aspect of American culture: business, philanthropy, politics, immigration, transportation, education, and fashion.

But despite creating an American icon, Levi Strauss is a mystery. Little is known about the man, and the widely circulated "facts" about his life are steeped in mythology. In this first full-length biography, Lynn Downey sets the record straight about this brilliant businessman. Strauss's life was the classic American success story, filled with lessons about craft and integrity, leadership and innovation.
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cover of Leviathans at the Gold Mine: Creating Indigenous and Corporate Actors in Papua New Guinea

Leviathans at the Gold Mine

Creating Indigenous and Corporate Actors in Papua New Guinea

Alex Golub

Duke University Press, 2014

Leviathans at the Gold Mine is an ethnographic account of the relationship between the Ipili, an indigenous group in Papua New Guinea, and the large international gold mine operating on their land. It was not until 1939 that Australian territorial patrols reached the Ipili. By 1990, the third largest gold mine on the planet was operating in their valley. Alex Golub examines how "the mine" and "the Ipili" were brought into being in relation to one another, and how certain individuals were authorized to speak for the mine and others to speak for the Ipili. Considering the relative success of the Ipili in their negotiations with a multinational corporation, Golub argues that a unique conjuncture of personal relationships and political circumstances created a propitious moment during which the dynamic and fluid nature of Ipili culture could be used to full advantage. As that moment faded away, social problems in the valley increased. The Ipili now struggle with the extreme social dislocation brought about by the massive influx of migrants and money into their valley.
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cover of Levirate Marriage and the Family in Ancient Judaism

Levirate Marriage and the Family in Ancient Judaism

Dvora E. Weisberg

Brandeis University Press, 2009

In this study, Weisberg uses levirate marriage (an institution that involves the union of a man and the widow of his childless brother) as described in biblical law and explicated in rabbinic Judaism as a lens to examine the status of women and attitudes toward marriage, sexuality, and reproduction in early Jewish society. While marriage generally marks the beginning of a new family unit, levirate comes into play when a family’s life is cut short. As such, it offers an opportunity to study the family at a moment of breakdown and restructuring. With her discussion rooted in rabbinic sources and commentary, Weisberg explores kinship structure and descent, the relationship between a family unit created through levirate marriage and the extended family, and the roles of individuals within the family. She also considers the position of women, asking whether it is through marriage or the bearing of children that a woman becomes part of her husband’s family, and to what degree a married woman remains part of her natal family. She argues that rabbinic responses to levirate suggest that a family is an evolving entity, one that can preserve itself through realignment and redefinition.
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cover of Lewd and Notorious: Female Transgression in the Eighteenth Century

Lewd and Notorious

Female Transgression in the Eighteenth Century

Katharine Kittredge, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 2003

Accounts of women's transgressive behavior in eighteenth-century literature and social documents have much to teach us about constructions of femininity during the period often identified as having formed our society's gender norms. Lewd and Notorious explores the eighteenth century's shadows, inhabited by marginal women of many kinds and degrees of contrariness. The reader meets Laetitia Pilkington, whose sexual indiscretions caused her to fall from social and literary grace to become an articulate memoirist of personal scandal, and Elizabeth Brownrigg, who tortured and starved her young servants, propelling herself to an infamy comparable to Susan Smith's or Myra Hindley's. More awful women wait between these covers to teach us about society's reception (and construction) of their debauchery and dangerousness.
The authors draw upon a rich range of contemporary texts to illuminate the lives of these women. Astute analysis of literary, legal, evangelical, epistolary, and political documents provides an understanding of 1700s womanhood. From lusty old maids to murderous mistresses, the characters who exemplify this period's vision of women on the edge are essential acquaintances for anyone wishing to understand the development and ramifications of conceptions of femininity.
Katharine Kittredge is Associate Professor of English, Ithaca College.
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Lewis and Clark in Missouri

Ann Rogers

University of Missouri Press, 2002

In May 1804 Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and the Corps of Discovery embarked on a seven-thousand-mile journey with instructions from President Thomas Jefferson to ascend the Missouri River to its source and continue on to the Pacific. They had spent five months in the St. Louis area preparing for the expedition that began with a six-hundred-mile, ten-week crossing of the future state of Missouri. Prior to this, the explorers had already seen about two hundred miles of Missouri landscape as they traveled up the Mississippi River to St. Louis in the autumn of 1803.
Lewis and Clark in Missouri focuses on the Missouri chapter of their epic journey, a portion of the story that has been slighted in other accounts. Ann Rogers uses the journals kept by members of the Corps along with many other primary source materials, providing a firsthand perspective on the people, plants, wildlife, rivers, and landscapes the explorers encountered. Beautiful color photographs and illustrations complement the text and support the passages Rogers quotes from the journals.
Brief biographies of Lewis, Clark, Sacagawea, John Colter, York, and other members of the expedition tell of their years in Missouri after the journey ended. Today’s followers of the Lewis and Clark Trail can find descriptions of sites to visit in Missouri, Kansas, and Illinois.
Carefully researched, yet highly readable, Lewis and Clark in Missouri will be of great interest not only to Missourians, but also to anyone wishing to learn more about the Corps of Discovery’s historic journey.
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Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque

Transatlantic Exchange and Transformation

Edited by Evonne Levy and Kenneth Mills

University of Texas Press, 2014

Over the course of some two centuries following the conquests and consolidations of Spanish rule in the Americas during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries—the period designated as the Baroque—new cultural forms sprang from the cross-fertilization of Spanish, Amerindian, and African traditions. This dynamism of motion, relocation, and mutation changed things not only in Spanish America, but also in Spain, creating a transatlantic Hispanic world with new understandings of personhood, place, foodstuffs, music, animals, ownership, money and objects of value, beauty, human nature, divinity and the sacred, cultural proclivities—a whole lexikon of things in motion, variation, and relation to one another.

Featuring the most creative thinking by the foremost scholars across a number of disciplines, the Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque is a uniquely wide-ranging and sustained exploration of the profound cultural transfers and transformations that define the transatlantic Spanish world in the Baroque era. Pairs of authors—one treating the peninsular Spanish kingdoms, the other those of the Americas—provocatively investigate over forty key concepts, ranging from material objects to metaphysical notions. Illuminating difference as much as complementarity, departure as much as continuity, the book captures a dynamic universe of meanings in the various midst of its own re-creations. The Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque joins leading work in a number of intersecting fields and will fire new research—it is the indispensible starting point for all serious scholars of the early modern Spanish world.

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cover of Liber Amicorum in Honour of Diana Scarisbrick: A Life in Jewels

Liber Amicorum in Honour of Diana Scarisbrick

A Life in Jewels

Edited by Beatriz Chadour-Sampson, Sandra Hindman, and Carla Van De Puttelaar

Paul Holberton Publishing, 2022

Coinciding with Diana Scarisbrick’s ninety-fourth birthday, this work honors her extraordinary career as the “world’s leading jewelry historian.”

Through twenty contributions by noted scholars, Liber Amicorum explores the pioneering research accomplished by jewelry historian Diana Scarisbrick. These collected pieces celebrate both the length of Scarisbrick’s career and its wide-ranging nature, touching upon her work with everything from gems, rings, chalices, bindings, and crown jewels to contemporary jewelry production, jewel theft, and individual collections.

Throughout the book, the insightful historical research of the contributors is beautifully supported by high-quality illustrations. These bring their essays to life, highlighting the splendor and fragility of some of the objects that are discussed as each delves into the work of this eminent scholar.

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cover of Liberal Christianity and Women's Global Activism: The YWCA of the USA and the Maryknoll Sisters

Liberal Christianity and Women's Global Activism

The YWCA of the USA and the Maryknoll Sisters

Amanda L. Izzo

Rutgers University Press, 2018

Religiously influenced social movements tend to be characterized as products of the conservative turn in Protestant and Catholic life in the latter part of the twentieth century, with women's mobilizations centering on defense of the “traditional” family. In Liberal Christianity and Women’s Global Activism, Amanda L. Izzo argues that, contrary to this view, liberal wings of Christian churches have remained an instrumental presence in U.S. and transnational politics. Women have been at the forefront of such efforts.

Focusing on the histories of two highly influential groups, the Young Women’s Christian Association of the USA, an interdenominational Protestant organization, and the Maryknoll Sisters, a Roman Catholic religious order, Izzo offers new perspectives on the contributions of these women to transnational social movements, women’s history, and religious studies, as she traces the connections between turn-of-the-century Christian women’s reform culture and liberal and left-wing religious social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Izzo suggests that shared ethical, theological, and institutional underpinnings can transcend denominational divides, and that strategies for social change often associated with secular feminism have ties to spiritually inspired social movements.  
 
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Liberal Suppression

Section 501(c)(3) and the Taxation of Speech

Philip Hamburger

University of Chicago Press, 2018

In the course of exempting religious, educational, and charitable organizations from federal income tax, section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code requires them to refrain from campaign speech and much speech to influence legislation. These speech restrictions have seemed merely technical adjustments, which prevent the political use of a tax subsidy. But the cultural and legal realities are more disturbing.

Tracing the history of American liberalism, including theological liberalism and its expression in nativism, Hamburger shows the centrality of turbulent popular anxieties about the Catholic Church and other potentially orthodox institutions. He argues persuasively that such theopolitical fears about the political speech of churches and related organizations underlay the adoption, in 1934 and 1954, of section 501(c)(3)’s speech limits. He thereby shows that the speech restrictions have been part of a broad majority assault on minority rights and that they are grossly unconstitutional.

Along the way, Hamburger explores the role of the Ku Klux Klan and other nativist organizations, the development of American theology, and the cultural foundations of liberal “democratic” political theory. He also traces important legal developments such as the specialization of speech rights and the use of law to homogenize beliefs. Ultimately, he examines a wide range of contemporary speech restrictions and the growing shallowness of public life in America.
His account is an unflinching look at the complex history of American liberalism and at the implications for speech, the diversity of belief, and the nation’s future.
 
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Liberalism Ancient and Modern

Leo Strauss

University of Chicago Press, 1995

Revered and reviled, Leo Strauss has left a rich legacy of work that continues to spark discussion and controversy. This volume of essays ranges over critical themes that define Strauss's thought: the tension between reason and revelation in the Western tradition, the philsophical roots of liberal democracy, and especially the conflicting yet complementary relationship between ancient and modern liberalism. For those seeking to become acquainted with this provocative thinker, one need look no further.
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Liberalism and Empire

A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought

Uday Singh Mehta

University of Chicago Press, 1999

We take liberalism to be a set of ideas committed to political rights and self-determination, yet it also served to justify an empire built on political domination. Uday Mehta argues that imperialism, far from contradicting liberal tenets, in fact stemmed from liberal assumptions about reason and historical progress. Confronted with unfamiliar cultures such as India, British liberals could only see them as backward or infantile. In this, liberals manifested a narrow conception of human experience and ways of being in the world.

Ironically, it is in the conservative Edmund Burke—a severe critic of Britain's arrogant, paternalistic colonial expansion—that Mehta finds an alternative and more capacious liberal vision. Shedding light on a fundamental tension in liberal theory, Liberalism and Empire reaches beyond post-colonial studies to revise our conception of the grand liberal tradition and the conception of experience with which it is associated.

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Liberalism and Leadership

The Irony of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Emile Lester

University of Michigan Press, 2019

Most scholars and pundits today view Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy as aggressive liberal leaders, while viewing Schlesinger’s famous histories of their presidencies as celebrations of their steadfast progressive leadership. A more careful reading of Schlesinger’s work demonstrates that he preferred an ironic political outlook emphasizing the virtues of restraint, patience, and discipline. For Schlesinger, Roosevelt and Kennedy were liberal heroes and models as much because they respected the constraints on their power and ideals as because they tested traditional institutions and redefined the boundaries of presidential power.

Aggressive liberalism involves the use of inspirational rhetoric and cunning political tactics to expand civil liberties and insure economic equality. Schlesinger’s emphasis on the crucial role that irony has played and should play in liberalism poses a challenge to the aggressive liberalism advocated by liberal activists, political thinkers, and pundits. That his counsel was grounded in conservative insights as well as liberal values makes it accessible to leaders across the political spectrum.
 

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cover of Liberalism and Transformation: The Global Politics of Violence and Intervention

Liberalism and Transformation

The Global Politics of Violence and Intervention

Dillon Stone Tatum

University of Michigan Press, 2021

Liberalism and Transformation is the first scholarly work that explores the historical, philosophical, and intellectual development of global liberalism since the nineteenth century in the context of the deployment of violence, force, and intervention. Using an approach that includes interpretive and contextual analysis of texts from writers, philosophers, and policy-makers across nearly two centuries, as well as historiographical and historical analysis of archival documents (some of which have been recently declassified) and other media, Liberalism and Transformation narrates the messy history of emancipatory liberalism and its engagement with issues of war and peace. The book contributes to both a rethinking of liberal democracy and its relationship to world politics, as well as the effects of liberal internationalism on global processes. Furthermore, Liberalism and Transformation invites readers to reflect on global ethics and transformation in world politics. In the first place, it shows how ethical imaginings of the world have direct effects on actions of transformative importance. In the second place, it suggests that discourses are fluid, changing, and complex.

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Liberalism and the Culture of Security

The Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric of Reform

Katherine Henry

University of Alabama Press, 2011

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Figures of protection and security are everywhere in American public discourse, from the protection of privacy or civil liberties to the protection of marriage or the unborn, and from social security to homeland security. Liberalism and the Culture of Security traces a crucial paradox in historical and contemporary notions of citizenship: in a liberal democratic culture that imagines its citizens as self-reliant, autonomous, and inviolable, the truth is that claims for citizenship—particularly for marginalized groups such as women and slaves—have just as often been made in the name of vulnerability and helplessness.
 
Katherine Henry traces this turn back to the eighteenth-century opposition of liberty and tyranny, which imagined our liberties as being in danger of violation by the forces of tyranny and thus in need of protection. She examines four particular instances of this rhetorical pattern. The first chapters show how women’s rights and antislavery activists in the antebellum era exploited the contradictions that arose from the liberal promise of a protected citizenry: first by focusing primarily on arguments over slavery in the 1850s that invoke the Declaration of Independence, including Harriet Beecher Stowe’s fiction and Frederick Douglass’s “Fourth of July” speech; and next by examining Angelina Grimké’s brief but intense antislavery speaking career in the 1830s.
 
New conditions after the Civil War and Emancipation changed the way arguments about civic inclusion and exclusion could be advanced. Henry considers the issue of African American citizenship in the 1880s and 1890s, focusing on the mainstream white Southern debate over segregation and the specter of a tyrannical federal government, and then turning to Frances E. W. Harper’s fictional account of African American citizenship in Iola Leroy. Finally, Henry examines Henry James’s 1886 novel The Bostonians, in which arguments over the appropriate role of women and the proper place of the South in post–Civil War America are played out as a contest between Olive Chancellor and Basil ransom for control over the voice of the eloquent girl Verena Tarrant.
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cover of Liberalism and the Postcolony: Thinking the State in 20th-Century Philippines

Liberalism and the Postcolony

Thinking the State in 20th-Century Philippines

Lisandro E. Claudio

National University of Singapore Press, 2017

The Philippines entered the twentieth century newly free of Spanish rule and faced with the task of building a nation. Due in part to American control of the country for the first half of the twentieth century, liberalism played a dynamic role in shaping the government and philosophy of the Philippines.

Through the biographies of four Filipino scholar-bureaucrats—Camilo Osias, Salvador Araneta, Carlos P. Romulo, and Salvador P. Lopez—Lisandro E. Claudio argues that liberal thought served as the grammar of Filipino democracy in the twentieth century. Melding political philosophy and narrative history, he takes us through various articulations of liberalism in pedagogy, international affairs, economics, and literature. In this first book on Filipino liberals in the twentieth century, Claudio brings to light an obscured history of the Philippine state and also argues for a new liberalism rooted in the postcolonial experience, a timely intervention in light of the ascent of President Rodrigo Duterte and the current developments in Southeast Asian politics.
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Liberalism in the Jungle

Race, Rubber, and the State in the Ecuadorian Amazon

Matthew Ford

University of Texas Press, 0

The untold story of how liberal reform, Indigenous resistance, and the rubber trade transformed Ecuador’s Amazon.

Ecuador’s 1895 Liberal Revolution was a turning point for the nation. Along with crippling the power of the Catholic Church, the new Liberal government expanded the ranks of political participation, spearheaded projects to soften endemic regionalism, integrated the national economy into global markets through an export-oriented economic strategy, and launched a program of “Indian Redemption” aimed at “civilizing” what elites deemed as the “backward” Indigenous masses. The cacao economy was essential to the Liberal state reform, as it facilitated infrastructure modernizatoin and the ability to provide unprecedented public goods and services.

East of the Andes, the Liberal state launched the first attempt to incorporate the Amazonian frontier (the “Oriente”) and expand state power into the region. But, as Matthew Ford shows, a very different global commodity was transforming the Oriente. Unlike most economic booms, the global demand for rubber debilitated state efforts in the region. Liberalism in the Jungle traces how local, national, and global forces shaped the contours of Liberal efforts in the Amazon. By the end, readers will understand how the region transformed from an isolated outpost to the heart of the national economy and home to one of the world’s most powerful social movements.

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