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Music Is My Life is the first comprehensive analysis of Louis Armstrong's autobiographical writings (including his books, essays, and letters) and their relation to his musical and visual performances. Combining approaches from autobiography theory, literary criticism, intermedia studies, cultural history, and musicology, Daniel Stein reconstructs Armstrong's performances of his life story across various media and for different audiences, complicating the monolithic and hagiographic views of the musician.

The book will appeal to academic readers with an interest in African American studies, jazz studies, musicology, and popular culture, as well as general readers interested in Armstrong's life and music, jazz, and twentieth-century entertainment. While not a biography, it provides a key to understanding Armstrong's oeuvre as well as his complicated place in American history and twentieth-century media culture.

Composers featured: Michael Abels, H. Leslie Adams, Lettie Beckon Alston, Thomas J. Anderson, Dwight Andrews, Regina Harris Baiocchi, David Baker, William C. Banfield, Ysaye Maria Barnwell, Billy Childs, Noel DaCosta, Anthony Davis, George Duke, Leslie Dunner, Donal Fox, Adolphus Hailstork, Jester Hairston, Herbie Hancock, Jonathan Holland, Anthony Kelley, Wendell Logan, Bobby McFerrin, Dorothy Rudd Moore, Jeffrey Mumford, Gary Powell Nash, Stephen Newby, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, Michael Powell, Patrice Rushen, George Russell, Kevin Scott, Evelyn Simpson-Curenton, Hale Smith, Billy Taylor, Frederick C. Tillis, George Walker, James Kimo Williams, Julius Williams, Tony Williams, Olly Wilson, and Michael Woods

George McGovern is chiefly remembered for his landslide loss to Richard Nixon in 1972. Yet at the time, his candidacy raised eyebrows by invoking the prophetic tradition, an element of his legacy that is little studied. In My Brother's Keeper, Mark A. Lempke explores the influence of McGovern's evangelical childhood, Social Gospel worldview, and conscientious Methodism on a campaign that brought antiwar activism into the mainstream.

McGovern's candidacy signified a passing of the torch within Christian social justice. He initially allied with the ecumenical movement and the mainline Protestant churches during a time when these institutions worked easily with liberal statesmen. But the senator also galvanized a dynamic movement of evangelicals rooted in the New Left, who would dominate subsequent progressive religious activism as the mainline entered a period of decline. My Brother's Keeper argues for the influential, and often unwitting, role McGovern played in fomenting a “Religious Left” in 1970s America, a movement that continues to this day. It joins a growing body of scholarship that complicates the dominant narrative of that era's conservative Christianity.

My Brother's Madness is part thriller, part exploration that not only describes the causes, character, and journey of mental illness, but also makes sense of it. It is ultimately a story of our own humanity, and answers the question, Am I my brother's keeper?

We stopped, and we heard the biggest racket you ever heard up in the house.

“What’s the matter, son?”

“Why, Maw and Paw are up there fightin’.”

“Who is your Paw, son?”

“Well, that’s what they are fightin’ over.”

Brimming with ballads, stories, riddles, tall tales, and great good humor, My Curious and Jocular Heroes pays homage to four people who guided and inspired Loyal Jones’s own study of Appalachian culture. His sharp-eyed portraits introduce a new generation to Bascom Lunsford, the pioneer behind the “memory collections” of song and story at Columbia University and the Library of Congress; the Sorbonne-educated collector and performer Josiah H. Combs; Cratis D. Williams, the legendary father of Appalachian studies; and the folklorist and master storyteller Leonard W. Roberts. Throughout, Jones highlights the tales, songs, jokes, and other collected nuggets that define the breadth of each man’s research and repertoire.

Cornelia Wadsworth Adair’s ancestors had pioneered in western New York, where they opened and developed large, palatial estates; and the life they lived was elegant and aristocratic. Adair too was discreetly cultured; yet she took great personal pleasure in the rough and primitive land of her famed JA Ranch in north Texas. Because of physical discomfort and noisy passengers, she detested traveling by railroad coach; yet she could ride all day on horseback and lie down to sleep on a makeshift cot by a waterhole or on an Indian’s flea-infested buffalo rug. She was a lady of interesting contradictions.

This little Diary is her lively account of a two-month trip which she and her husband made into the western part of the United States in 1874. The ostensible purpose of the trip was to hunt buffalo; however, these large beasts actually play a very small part in the journal. Rather, the book is an interesting and often amusing account, by an observant woman, of the long journey from her husband’s estate in Ireland to New York, to Chicago and on into upper Michigan, across Lake Superior to Minnesota, down the Mississippi for several days, out to the buffalo-hunting grounds in Nebraska, then to Denver and the wonders of the Rocky Mountains, and finally back to New York and the Europe-bound ship.

Adair writes with an easy fluency; and her eye for picturesque detail, her taste for amusing incongruities, her romanticist’s delight in Nature, and her instinct for a “good tale” combine to make her Diary pleasant and entertaining reading, while her powers of keen observation provide valuable insight into life as it was then in the West. First printed for private circulation in 1918, the original book is now a rare collector’s item of Western Americana. Mrs. Adair said that she was allowing its publication for two reasons. First, she was afraid that her grandchildren and young friends would remember her only as “an old lady who sat in an armchair, and whose stick had to be looked for”; she wanted them to know that she had once been “a very lively person . . . [who] did all sorts of exciting things.” Second, she felt it worthwhile to record her experiences because “the world is changing so quickly, ways of travelling especially so . . . and I think it may be interesting to compare what was done in 1874 with what will be done by the time the children are able to travel. No doubt they will do their journeys by air, and do many, many things that I have not been able to do; but they can never see the prairies of America in their wild uncivilised state, or hunt buffalo over them, nor can they pow-wow with the Red Indians in a camp on the Platte River. So every time has its own special joys, and the great thing is to miss as little as possible, and to share as much.”

Almost a century and a half went into the making of My Eighty Years in Texas. It began as a diary, kept by fifteen-year-old William Physick Zuber after he joined Sam Houston’s Texas army in 1836, hoping he could emulate the heroism of American Revolutionary patriots. Although his hopes were never realized, Zuber recorded the privations, victories, and defeats of armies on the move during the Texas Revolution, the Indian campaigns, and, as he styled it, the Confederate War.

In 1910, at the age of ninety, Zuber began the enormous task of transcribing his diaries and his memories for publication. After his death in 1913, the handwritten manuscript, 1, was placed in the Texas State Archives, where it was used as a reference source by students and scholars of Texas history. Over a half century after Zuber’s death, Janis Boyle Mayfield finally brought his publication plans to fruition.

Zuber details his early zest for learning and his laborious methods of self-education. He tells of the trials of organizing and teaching schools in the sparsely populated plains. He recalls the day-by-day happenings of a private soldier in the Texas army of 1836, the Texas Militia, and the Confederate army—including the mishaps of army life and the encounters with enemies from San Jacinto to Cape Girardeau. After the Civil War, his interest turns to the politics of Reconstruction, the veterans’ pension, and the founding of the Texas Veterans Association.

This is the story of and by an outspoken Texian, complete with his attitudes, principles, and moralizings, and the nineteenth-century style and flavor of his writing.

Included as an appendix is “An Escape from the Alamo,” the account of Moses Rose for which Zuber, who was a prolific writer, was best known. A historiography of the Rose story, a bibliography of Zuber’s published and unpublished writings, annotation, and an introduction are provided by Llerena Friend.

A compelling story of a unit of Buffalo Soldiers and their white commander fighting on the Italian front during World War II.

The 92nd Division of the Fifth Army was the only African American infantry division to see combat in Europe during 1944 and 1945, suffering more than 3,200 casualties. Members of this unit, known as Buffalo Soldiers, endured racial violence on the home front and experienced racism abroad. Engaged in combat for nine months, they were under the command of southern white infantry officers like their captain, Eugene E. Johnston. 

Carolyn Ross Johnston draws on her father’s account of the war and her extensive interviews with other veterans of the 92nd Division to describe the experiences of a naïve southern white officer and his segregated unit on an intimate level. During the war, the protocol that required the assignment of southern white officers to command black units, both in Europe and in the Pacific theater, was often problematic, but Johnston seemed more successful than most, earning the trust and respect of his men at the same time that he learned to trust and respect them. Gene Johnston and the African American soldiers were transformed by the war and upon their return helped transform the nation.

Henry David Thoreau was a twenty-year-old scholarship student at Harvard when he met Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1837. Emerson, fourteen years Thoreau's senior and independently wealthy, had recently shaken the intellectual world of New England with the publication of Nature. Despite the disparity in their circumstances, Thoreau and Emerson quickly formed a close relationship that lasted until Thoreau's death at the age of forty-four. This book tells the story of their friendship. Harmon Smith emphasizes their personal bond, but also shows how their relationship affected their thought and writing, and was in turn influenced by their careers.

Without Emerson's interest and support, it is unlikely that Thoreau could have expended the energy on writing that enabled him to achieve greatness. By inviting Thoreau into his home to live during two different periods in the 1840s, Emerson effectively made Thoreau “one of the family.” He provided him with work, lent him money, and allowed him to build a cabin on the shore of Walden Pond. Emerson also broadened Thoreau's horizon immeasurably by introducing him to an ever-widening circle of friends and colleagues.

Although the bond between Thoreau and Emerson was strong, their needs were often greatly at variance. While this led to a prolonged period of estrangement between them, they were ultimately able to reconcile their differences. Many years after Thoreau died, Emerson could look back over his long life and say that Henry had been his best friend. Since the thoughts and feelings of the two men are so well documented in their journals and letters, Smith is able to trace the pattern of their emotional involvement in great detail. What emerges is both a remarkable portrait of their relationship and an intimate look at the nature of friendship itself.

    "I am willing to relate all I can remember, but I wish it clearly understood that it must be in my own way,  and at my own time.  I will not be hurried or dictated to.  It is my history and not yours I propose to tell.”—Mariano Guadelupe Vallejo, on “Recuerdos históricos y personales”  (1875)
    My History, Not Yours is a landmark study of the autobiographical writings of Mexican Americans in the century following the US-Mexican War of 1846-1848.  Some 75,000 inhabitants of what is now Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California were suddenly foreigners on their own lands.  Faced with the deliberate obliteration of their history, culture, language, and personal experiences, these women and men set down the stories of their lives and their communities, as a means of both remembering and resisting.
    Genaro M. Padilla and other scholars have begun to uncover the huge store of literary materials forgotten in manuscript archives:  memoirs long out of print, others unpublished and unread, diaries, family histories, poetry, correspondence, and texts of corridos (ballads).  Padilla writes, “Lives are scattered on broken pages, faded, partially lost at the margins, suspended in language unread until there is a reader who opens the file and begins.  It is my intention to initiate a recovery of that autobiographical formation that emerged after a war of conquest.”
    In providing an overview of this rich literature, Padilla also points out the power relations embedded in the narratives, showing that the reconstruction of the Mexican past was not merely nostalgic idealization, but often an angry and deeply politicized recovery of a world ruptured by American domination.