Results by title
5159 books match the query 'Biography' and 934 start with t
The Battle to Stay in America
Immigration's Hidden Front LineMichael Kagan
University of Nevada Press, 2025
The Battle to Stay in America is the story of a community coming to grips with the federal government’s crackdown on immigrants, and learning how to defend itself. Informative and personal, this is a story about mothers and fathers, lawyers and activists, local police and federal agencies, and a struggle for the identity of a nation. This is the quintessential story of the war on immigrants, as fought and felt on the front lines in the heart of America.
The Beat Cop
Chicago's Chief O'Neill and the Creation of Irish MusicMichael O'Malley
University of Chicago Press, 2022
The remarkable story of how modern Irish music was shaped and spread through the brash efforts of a Chicago police chief.
Irish music as we know it today was invented not just in the cobbled lanes of Dublin or the green fields of County Kerry, but also in the burgeoning metropolis of early-twentieth-century Chicago. The genre’s history combines a long folk tradition with the curatorial quirks of a single person: Francis O’Neill, a larger-than-life Chicago police chief and an Irish immigrant with a fervent interest in his home country’s music.
Michael O’Malley’s The Beat Cop tells the story of this singular figure, from his birth in Ireland in 1865 to his rough-and-tumble early life in the United States. By 1901, O’Neill had worked his way up to become Chicago’s chief of police, where he developed new methods of tracking criminals and recording their identities. At the same time, he also obsessively tracked and recorded the music he heard from local Irish immigrants, enforcing a strict view of what he felt was and wasn’t authentic. Chief O’Neill’s police work and his musical work were flip sides of the same coin, and O’Malley delves deep into how this brash immigrant harnessed his connections and policing skills to become the foremost shaper of how Americans see, and hear, the music of Ireland.
The Beat Of My Drum
An AutobiographyMichael Babatunde Olatunji
Temple University Press, 2005
The Beggar and the Professor
A Sixteenth-Century Family SagaEmmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
University of Chicago Press, 1997
"Le Roy Ladurie paints a remarkably contemporary picture of life in the sixteenth century. . . . It's a good story, told with a deft narrative touch."—Michael S. Kimmel, The Nation
"Le Roy Ladurie is a master of the representative detail and uses the Platters' lives as a means to see a whole century 'through a glass, darkly'."—The Independent
"Le Roy Ladurie has not only thoroughly sketched out the Platters' particular brand of gusto, he has also made it seem a defining characteristic of the sixteenth century."—The New Republic
"All [of] the drama and pathos of a Disney film."—Emily Eakin, Lingua Franca
The Bell Ringer
Victor Rodriguez
University of North Texas Press, 2002
The Best I Recall
A MemoirBy Gary Cartwright
University of Texas Press, 2015
Gary Cartwright is one of Texas’s legendary writers. In a career spanning nearly six decades, he has been a newspaper reporter, Senior Editor of Texas Monthly, and author of several acclaimed books, including Blood Will Tell, Confessions of a Washed-up Sportswriter, and Dirty Dealing. Cartwright was a finalist for a National Magazine Award for reporting excellence, and he has won several awards from the Texas Institute of Letters, including its most prestigious—the Lon Tinkle Award for lifetime achievement. His personal life has been as colorful and occasionally outrageous as any story he reported, and in this vivid, often hilarious, and sometimes deeply moving memoir, Cartwright tells the story of his writing career, tangled like a runaway vine with great friendships, love affairs, four marriages, four or five great dogs . . . looking always to explain, at least to himself, how the pattern probably makes a kind of perverted sense.
Cartwright’s career began at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and Fort Worth Press, among kindred spirits and fellow pranksters Edwin “Bud” Shrake and Dan Jenkins. He describes how the three rookie writers followed their mentor Blackie Sherrod to the Dallas Times Herald and the Dallas Morning News, becoming the “best staff of sportswriters anywhere, ever” and creating a new kind of sportswriting that “swept the country and became standard.” Cartwright recalls his twenty-five years at Texas Monthly, where he covered everything from true crime to notable Texans to Texas’s cultural oddities. Along the way, he tells lively stories about “rebelling against sobriety” in many forms, with friends and co-conspirators that included Willie Nelson, Ann Richards, Dennis Hopper, Willie Morris, Don Meredith, Jack Ruby, and countless others. A remarkable portrait of the writing life and Austin’s counterculture, The Best I Recall may skirt the line between fact and fiction, but it always tells the truth.
The Best Specimen of a Tyrant
The Ambitious Dr. Abraham Van Norstrand and the Wisconsin Insane HospitalThomas Doherty
University of Iowa Press, 2012
The Best Writings of Ulysses S. Grant
Edited by John F. Marszalek
Southern Illinois University Press, 2015
Famous for his military acumen and for his part in saving the Union during the American Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant also remains known for his two-volume memoirs, considered among the greatest military memoirs ever written. Grant’s other writings, however, have not received the same acclaim, even though they show the same literary skill. Originally published in the thirty-two volumes of The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, the letters and speeches are the major source of information about Grant’s life and era and have played a key role in elevating his reputation to that of the leading general of the Civil War and the first of the modern presidents. In this collection, editor John F. Marszalek presents excerpts from Grant’s most insightful and skillfully composed writings and provides perspective through introductory comments tying each piece to the next. The result is a fascinating overview of Grant’s life and career.
In sixteen chronological chapters, selections from Grant’s letters and other writings reveal his personal thoughts on the major events of his momentous life, including the start of the Civil War, the capture of Vicksburg, Lincoln’s reelection, Lee’s surrender, his terms as president, the Panic of 1873, and his bouts of mouth and throat cancer. Throughout, Grant’s prose reveals clearly the power of his words and his ability to present them well. Although some historians have maligned his presidency as one of the most corrupt periods in American history, these writings reinforce Grant’s greatness as a general, demonstrate the importance of his presidency, and show him to be one of the driving forces of the nineteenth century.
With this compendium, Marszalek not only celebrates the literary talent of one of America’s greatest military figures but also vindicates an individual who, for so long, has been unfairly denigrated. A concise reference for students of American history and Civil War enthusiasts as well as a valuable introduction for those who are new to Grant’s writings, this volume provides intriguing insight into one of the nineteenth century’s most important Americans.
The Best of No Depression
Writing about American MusicEdited by Grant Alden and Peter Blackstock
University of Texas Press, 2005
Since the magazine's founding in 1995, No Depression has reported on and helped define the music that goes by names such as alt.country, Americana, and roots music. Though dismissed by the commercial country music establishment as "music that doesn't sell," alternative country has attracted thousands of listeners who long for the authenticity and rich complexity that come from its potent blend of country and rock 'n' roll and any number of related musical genres and subgenres.
To celebrate No Depression's tenth anniversary and spotlight some of the most important artists and trends in alt.country music, editors Grant Alden and Peter Blackstock have compiled this anthology of twenty-five of the magazine's best and most representative feature articles. Their subjects range from venerated country artists such as Johnny Cash and Ray Price to contemporary songwriters such as Lucinda Williams and Buddy and Julie Miller to the post-punk country-influenced bands Wilco and the Drive-By Truckers. All of the articles included here illustrate No Depression's commitment to music writing that puts the artist front-and-center and covers his or her career in sufficient depth to be definitive. Alden and Blackstock have also written a preface to this volume in which they discuss the alt.country phenomenon and the history and editorial philosophy that have made No Depression the bible for everyone seeking genuine American roots music.
The Biographical Dictionary of Iowa
David Hudson
University of Iowa Press, 2009
Written by an impressive team of more than 150 scholars and writers, the readable narratives include each subject’s name, birth and death dates, place of birth, education, and career and contributions. Many of the names will be instantly recognizable to most Iowans; others are largely forgotten but deserve to be remembered. Beyond the distinctive lives and times captured in the individual biographies, readers of the dictionary will gain an appreciation for how the character of the state has been shaped by the character of the individuals who have inhabited it.
From Dudley Warren Adams, fruit grower and Grange leader, to the Younker brothers, founders of one of Iowa’s most successful department stores, The Biographical Dictionary of Iowa is peopled with the rewarding lives of more than four hundred notable citizens of the Hawkeye State. The histories contained in this essential reference work should be eagerly read by anyone who cares about Iowa and its citizens.
Entries include Cap Anson, Bix Beiderbecke, Black Hawk, Amelia Jenks Bloomer, William Carpenter, Philip Greeley Clapp, Gardner Cowles Sr., Samuel Ryan Curtis, Jay Norwood Darling, Grenville Dodge, Julien Dubuque, August S. Duesenberg, Paul Engle, Phyllis L. Propp Fowle, George Gallup, Hamlin Garland, Susan Glaspell, Josiah Grinnell, Charles Hearst, Josephine Herbst, Herbert Hoover, Inkpaduta, Louis Jolliet, MacKinlay Kantor, Keokuk, Aldo Leopold, John L. Lewis, Marquette, Elmer Maytag, Christian Metz, Bertha Shambaugh, Ruth Suckow, Billy Sunday, Henry Wallace, and Grant Wood.
Excerpt from the entry on:
Gallup, George Horace (November 19, 1901–July 26, 1984)—founder of the American Institute of Public Opinion, better known as the Gallup Poll, whose name was synonymous with public opinion polling around the world—was born in Jefferson, Iowa. . . . . A New Yorker article would later speculate that it was Gallup’s background in “utterly normal Iowa” that enabled him to find “nothing odd in the idea that one man might represent, statistically, ten thousand or more of his own kind.” . . . In 1935 Gallup partnered with Harry Anderson to found the American Institute of Public Opinion, based in Princeton, New Jersey, an opinion polling firm that included a syndicated newspaper column called “America Speaks.” The reputation of the organization was made when Gallup publicly challenged the polling techniques of The Literary Digest, the best-known political straw poll of the day. Calculating that the Digest would wrongly predict that Kansas Republican Alf Landon would win the presidential election, Gallup offered newspapers a money-back guarantee if his prediction that Franklin Delano Roosevelt would win wasn’t more accurate. Gallup believed that public opinion polls served an important function in a democracy: “If govern¬ment is supposed to be based on the will of the people, somebody ought to go and find what that will is,” Gallup explained.
The Birdman of Koshkonong
The Life of Naturalist Thure KumlienMartha Bergland
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2021
For all of his achievements, Kumlien never gained the widespread notoriety of Wisconsin naturalists John Muir, Increase Lapham, or Aldo Leopold. Kumlien did his work behind the scenes, content to spend his days in the marshes and swamps rather than in the public eye. He once wrote that he was not “cut out for pretensions and show in the world.” Yet, his detailed observations of Wisconsin’s natural world—including the impact of early agriculture on the environment—were hugely important to the fields of ornithology and botany. As this carefully researched and lovingly rendered biography proves, Thure Kumlien deserves to be remembered as one of Wisconsin’s most influential naturalists.
The Bitterroot and Mr. Brandborg
Clearcutting and the Struggle for Sustainable Forestry in the Northern RockiesFrederick H. Swanson
University of Utah Press, 2011
Winner of the Wallace Stegner Prize in American Environmental or Western History
Fredrick Swanson tells the story of Guy M. Brandborg and his impact on the practices of the U.S. Forest Service. As supervisor of Montana’s Bitterroot National Forest from 1935 to 1955, Brandborg engaged in a management style that promoted not only the well-being of the forest community but also the social and economic welfare of the local people. By relying on selective cutting, his goal was to protect the watersheds and wildlife habitats that are devastated by clear-cutting, and to prevent the job losses that follow such practices. Following his retirement, he became concerned that his agency was deviating from the practice of sustained-yield management of the forest’s timber lands, and led a highly visible public outcry that became known as the Bitterroot controversy. Brandborg’s behind-the-scenes lobbying contributed materially to the passage of the National Forest Management Act of 1976, the single most important law affecting public forestry since the creation of the Forest Service.
Winner of the Western Writers of America Spur Award for Best Western Nonfiction-Contemporary.
The Black Body
Anna Maria Gehnyei (Karima 2G)
Rutgers University Press, 2025
Best Translation of a Literary Work Published in 2025 from the American Association of Italian Studies
In her memoir, Anna Maria Gehnyei, better known as singer, rapper, and producer Karima 2G, reveals the challenges she faced as the child of Liberian immigrants, born and raised in Rome but perpetually viewed by her fellow Italians as a foreigner.
The daughter of the first Kpelle man to ever leave his native village and emigrate to Europe, Anna is proud of her heritage but only knows Liberia as a mystical, faraway land that appears in her parents’ stories. Though Italy is the only homeland she knows, she is merely classed as a resident, not a permanent citizen. At school and in the streets of Rome, she is treated to a mixture of patronizing condescension and xenophobic hostility. But Anna refuses to be bullied into mute submission, finding her voice as a performer and activist who demands recognition for Italy’s growing immigrant population.
The Black Citizen-Soldiers of Kansas, 1864-1901
Roger D. Cunningham
University of Missouri Press, 2008
Roger Cunningham examines a lost history to show that, in addition to black regulars, hundreds of other black militiamen and volunteers from the Sunflower State provided military service from the Civil War until the dawn of the twentieth century. He tells how African Americans initially filled segregated companies hurriedly organized to defend the state from the threat of Confederate invasion, with some units ordered into battle around Kansas City. Then after the state constitution was amended to admit blacks into the Kansas National Guard, but its generals still refused to integrate, blacks served in reserve militia and independent companies and in all-black regiments that were raised for the Spanish-American and Philippine wars.
Cunningham has researched service records, African American newspapers, and official correspondence to give voice to these citizen-soldiers. He shares stories of real people like William D. Matthews, a captain in the First Kansas Colored Infantry who was refused a commission when his regiment was mustered into the Union army; Charles Grinsted, who commanded the first black militia company after the Civil War; and other unsung heroes.
More than a military history, Cunningham’s account records the quest of black men, many of them former slaves, for inclusion in American society. Many came from the bottom of the socioeconomic order and found that as militiamen they could gain respect within their communities. And by marching in public ceremonies and organizing fund-raising activities to compensate for lack of financial support from the state, they also strengthened the ties that bound African American communities together.
The Black Seasons
Glowinski
Northwestern University Press, 2005
When six-year-old Michal Glowinski first heard the adults around him speak of the ghetto, he understood only that the word was connected with moving-and conjured up a fantastical image of a many-storied carriage pulled through the streets by some umpteen horses. He was soon to learn that the ghetto was something else entirely. A half-century later, Glowinski, now an eminent Polish literary scholar, leads us haltingly into Nazi-occupied Poland. Scrupulously attentive to the distance between a child's experience and an adult's reflection, Glowinski revisits the images and episodes of his childhood: the emaciated violinist playing a Mendelssohn concerto on the ghetto streets; his game of chess with a Polish blackmailer threatening to deliver him to the Gestapo; and his eventual rescue by Catholic nuns in an impoverished, distant convent. In language at once spare and eloquent, Glowinski explores the horror of those years, the fragility of existence, and the fragmented nature of memory itself.
The Blind African Slave
Memoirs of Boyrereau Brinch, Nicknamed Jeffrey BraceJeffrey Brace, as told to Benjamin F. Prentiss, Esq.
University of Wisconsin Press, 2005
The Blues Dream of Billy Boy Arnold
Billy Boy Arnold with Kim Field
University of Chicago Press, 2021
Simply put, Billy Boy Arnold is one of the last men standing from the Chicago blues scene’s raucous heyday. What’s more, unlike most artists in this electrifying melting pot, who were Southern transplants, Arnold—a harmonica master who shared stages with Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters, and Howlin’ Wolf, plus a singer and hitmaker in his own right who first recorded the standards “I Wish You Would” and “I Ain’t Got You”—was born right here and has lived nowhere else. This makes his perspective on Chicago blues, its players, and its locales all the rarer and all the more valuable. Arnold has witnessed musical generations come and go, from the decline of prewar country blues to the birth of the electric blues and the worldwide spread of rock and roll. Working here in collaboration with writer and fellow musician Kim Field, he gets it all down. The Blues Dream of Billy Boy Arnold is a remarkably clear-eyed testament to more than eighty years of musical love and creation, from Arnold’s adolescent quest to locate the legendary Sonny Boy Williamson, the story of how he named Bo Diddley Bo Diddley, and the ups and downs of his seven-decade recording career. Arnold’s tale—candidly told with humor, insight, and grit—is one that no fan of modern American music can afford to miss.
The Body of Brooklyn
David Lazar
University of Iowa Press, 2003
The Bonds of War
A Story of Immigrants and Esprit de Corps in Company C, 96th Illinois Volunteer InfantryDiana L. Dretske
Southern Illinois University Press, 2021
When curator Diana L. Dretske discovered that the five long-gone Union soldiers in a treasured photograph in the Bess Bower Dunn Museum were not fully identified, it compelled her into a project of recovery and reinterpretation. Utilizing an impressive array of local and national archives, as well as private papers, the author’s microhistorical approach records events that often go unnoticed, such as a farmer enlisting in the middle of a crop field, a sister searching her brother’s face for signs of war, and an immigrant dying in an effort to become a good American citizen.
This book, the most intensive examination of the 96th Illinois Volunteer Infantry since the regiment’s history was published in 1887 centers on immigrants from the British Isles who wished to be citizens of a country at war with itself. Far removed from their native homelands, they found new promise in rural Illinois. These men, neighbors along the quiet Stateline Road in Lake County, decide to join the fighting at its most dangerous hour. The bonds of war become then the bonds of their new national identity.
The Bonds of War uncovers the common soldier from the cataclysm that is the American Civil War by offering a collective biography of five soldiers of the 96th in the Western Theater. The human drama of their lives unfolds before the reader on battlefields such as Chickamauga and within the high pine stockades of Andersonville. Their lives argue that those who seem to matter least in military history are the very ones who can tell us the most about the experience of war and the reasons for remembering.
The Bone Doctor's Concerto
Music, Surgery, and the Pieces in BetweenAlvin H. Crawford, MD
Ohio University Press, 2023
Published by the University of Cincinnati Press
Born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1939, Dr. Alvin Crawford grew up and attended medical school in a segregated world. Beginning with his early life in Orange Mound—a self-contained community for freed slaves established in the 1890s—Crawford’s autobiography describes his flirtation with a music degree and time spent playing in jazz bands through the segregated South. In 1960, Crawford began his ground-breaking medical career with his entrance into the University of Tennessee College of Medicine, becoming the school’s first African American student. After completing his medical training and traveling the world as a surgeon for the Navy, Crawford found himself in Cincinnati, where he established the Comprehensive Pediatric Orthopedic Clinic at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, the first in the region.
Underlying this story are the systemic and very personal incidents of racism Crawford experienced throughout his career. His autobiography is a personal account of segregation, integration, ambition, hard work, and taking risks.
The Book Keeper
A Memoir of Race, Love, and LegacyJulia McKenzie Munemo
Ohio University Press, 2020
“A fiercely felt memoir about family shame and the transformative power of love even as it’s also an ongoing meditation on privilege and race in twenty-first-century America. This is a debut striking in its empathetic imagination, observational acuity, and emotional intelligence.” — Jim Shepard, author of Like You’d Understand, Anyway.
In a memoir that’s equal parts love story, investigation, and racial reckoning, Munemo unravels and interrogates her whiteness, a shocking secret, and her family’s history.
When interracial romance novels written by her long-dead father landed on Julia McKenzie Munemo’s kitchen table, she—a white woman—had been married to a black man for six years and their first son was a toddler. Out of shame about her father’s secret career as a writer of “slavery porn,” she hid the books from herself, and from her growing mixed-race family, for more than a decade. But then, with police shootings of African American men more and more in the public eye, she realized that understanding her own legacy was the only way to begin to understand her country.
The Book of Bauer
Stories from a Forgotten TownStephen S. Lottridge
University of Utah Press, 2023
Graffiti-covered industrial concrete ruins are all that remain today to remind us of the lives, adventures, and human relationships that once animated Bauer, Utah. Located just south of Tooele, across the Oquirrh Mountains west of the Salt Lake Valley, Bauer was abandoned in 1979 and declared a toxic waste site. The Book of Bauer: Stories from a Forgotten Town brings it back to life, evoking mid-twentieth century family and community in that company town as seen through the eyes of an observant adolescent boy.
Presenting a dramatic snapshot of life in Bauer in narrative autobiographical form, the book recalls the fate of hundreds of derelict mining towns throughout the mountain and sagebrush West. With vivid prose and intimate observation, The Book of Bauer offers an unparalleled memoir of small-town life in Utah and the Great Basin.
The Book of Pontiffs of the Church of Ravenna (Medieval Texts in Translation)
Deborah Mauskopf Agnellus of Ravenna
Catholic University of America Press, 2004
The Border between Them
Violence and Reconciliation on the Kansas-Missouri LineJeremy Neely
University of Missouri Press, 2007
The most bitter guerrilla conflict in American history raged along the Kansas-Missouri border from 1856 to 1865, making that frontier the first battleground in the struggle over slavery. That fiercely contested boundary represented the most explosive political fault line in the United States, and its bitter divisions foreshadowed an entire nation torn asunder. Jeremy Neely now examines the significance of the border war on both sides of the Kansas-Missouri line and offers a comparative, cross-border analysis of its origins, meanings, and consequences.
A narrative history of the border war and its impact on citizens of both states, The Border between Them recounts the exploits of John Brown, William Quantrill, and other notorious guerrillas, but it also uncovers the stories of everyday people who lived through that conflict. Examining the frontier period to the close of the nineteenth century, Neely frames the guerrilla conflict within the larger story of the developing West and squares that violent period with the more peaceful—though never tranquil—periods that preceded and followed it.
Focusing on the countryside south of the big bend in the Missouri River, an area where there was no natural boundary separating the states, Neely examines three border counties in each state that together illustrate both sectional division and national reunion. He draws on the letters and diaries of ordinary citizens—as well as newspaper accounts, election results, and census data—to illuminate the complex strands that helped bind Kansas and Missouri together in post–Civil War America. He shows how people on both sides of the line were already linked by common racial attitudes, farming practices, and ambivalence toward railroad expansion; he then tells how emancipation, industrialization, and immigration eventually eroded wartime divisions and facilitated the reconciliation of old foes from each state.
Today the “border war” survives in the form of interstate rivalries between collegiate Tigers and Jayhawks, allowing Neely to consider the limits of that reconciliation and the enduring power of identities forged in wartime. The Border between Them is a compelling account of the terrible first act of the American Civil War and its enduring legacy for the conflict’s veterans, victims, and survivors, as well as subsequent generations.
The Borderlands of Culture
Americo Paredes and the Transnational ImaginaryRamón Saldívar
Duke University Press, 2006
Saldívar demonstrates how Paredes’s poetry, prose, and journalism prefigured his later work as a folklorist and ethnographer. In song, story, and poetry, Paredes first developed the themes and issues that would be central to his celebrated later work on the “border studies” or “anthropology of the borderlands.” Saldívar describes how Paredes’s experiences as an American soldier, journalist, and humanitarian aid worker in Asia shaped his understanding of the relations between Anglos and Mexicans in the borderlands of south Texas and of national and ethnic identities more broadly. Saldívar was a friend of Paredes, and part of The Borderlands of Culture is told in Paredes’s own words. By explaining how Paredes’s work engaged with issues central to contemporary scholarship, Saldívar extends Paredes’s intellectual project and shows how it contributes to the remapping of the field of American studies from a transnational perspective.
The Borderlands of Race
Mexican Segregation in a South Texas TownBy Jennifer R. Nájera
University of Texas Press, 2015
Throughout much of the twentieth century, Mexican Americans experienced segregation in many areas of public life, but the structure of Mexican segregation differed from the strict racial divides of the Jim Crow South. Factors such as higher socioeconomic status, lighter skin color, and Anglo cultural fluency allowed some Mexican Americans to gain limited access to the Anglo power structure. Paradoxically, however, this partial assimilation made full desegregation more difficult for the rest of the Mexican American community, which continued to experience informal segregation long after federal and state laws officially ended the practice.
In this historical ethnography, Jennifer R. Nájera offers a layered rendering and analysis of Mexican segregation in a South Texas community in the first half of the twentieth century. Using oral histories and local archives, she brings to life Mexican origin peoples’ experiences with segregation. Through their stories and supporting documentary evidence, Nájera shows how the ambiguous racial status of Mexican origin people allowed some of them to be exceptions to the rule of Anglo racial dominance. She demonstrates that while such exceptionality might suggest the permeability of the color line, in fact the selective and limited incorporation of Mexicans into Anglo society actually reinforced segregation by creating an illusion that the community had been integrated and no further changes were needed. Nájera also reveals how the actions of everyday people ultimately challenged racial/racist ideologies and created meaningful spaces for Mexicans in spheres historically dominated by Anglos.
The Botanical Odyssey of Richard S. Felger
Edited by Benjamin T. Wilder, Bill Broyles, and Thomas Bowen
University of Arizona Press, 2026
This work is a vibrant tribute to Richard Stephen Felger, who was one of the most influential scientists of the American Southwest and northwestern Mexico. Known as a desert botanist, Felger’s work transcended regional boundaries, blending rigorous fieldwork with global ecological vision. This work offers an intimate and multifaceted portrait of a man whose tireless advocacy for biodiversity and biocultural conservation shaped generations of desert scientists..
Edited by Benjamin T. Wilder, Bill Broyles, and Thomas Bowen, this book is both a celebration and a resource. The work is separated into four parts. With humor, insight, and deep empathy, Felger’s own voice leads the journey in part 1, recounting his most memorable field experiences with masterful prose and sly wit. Part 2 brings together heartfelt reflections from colleagues who worked alongside Felger in the field, revealing the eccentric brilliance and relentless curiosity that defined his career. Part 3 explores his family history and the unconventional path that shaped his life’s work, while part 4 presents a comprehensive bibliography of his most important publications. The book contains four maps that help take you around the world on Felger’s journeys, and fifty images selected from the thousands of slides from his archive that further transport and anchor you in the adventure.
Felger’s own voice, paired with reflections from twenty colleagues, creates a rich, multifaceted narrative, offering readers a rare glimpse into the life of a scientific icon whose legacy continues to inspire desert researchers and conservationists across the globe.
Contributors
James Aronson
Thomas Bowen
Bill Broyles
Alberto Búrquez
Susan Davis Carnahan
Mark Alan Dimmitt
Exequiel Ezcurra
Gil Gillenwater
Russ Kleinman
Angelina Martínez-Yrízar
Gregory McNamee
Cathy Moser Marlett
Gary Paul Nabhan
Wallace J. Nichols
William R. Norris
Humberto Romero Morales
Sue Rutman
Silke Schneider
Jeffrey Seminoff
Jane Spinti
Benjamin T. Wilder
The Boy Governor
Stevens T. Mason and the Birth of Michigan PoliticsDon Faber
University of Michigan Press, 2012
In 1831, Stevens T. Mason was named Secretary of the Michigan Territory at the tender age of 19, two years before he could even vote. The youngest presidential appointee in American history, Mason quickly stamped his persona on Michigan life in large letters. After championing the territory's successful push for statehood without congressional authorization, he would defend his new state's border in open defiance of the country's political elite and then orchestrate its expansion through the annexation of the Upper Peninsula---all before his official election as Michigan's first governor at age 24, the youngest chief executive in any state's history.
The Boy Governor tells the complete story of this dominant political figure in Michigan's early development. Capturing Mason's youthful idealism and visionary accomplishments, including his advocacy for a strong state university and legislating for the creation of the Soo Locks, this biography renders a vivid portrait of Michigan's first governor---his conflicts, his desires, and his sense of patriotism. This book will appeal to anyone with a love of American history and interest in the many, larger-than-life personalities that battled on the political stage during the Jacksonian era.
The Boy Is Gone
Conversations with a Mau Mau GeneralLaura Lee P. Huttenbach
Ohio University Press, 2015
A story with the power to change how people view the last years of colonialism in East Africa, The Boy Is Gone portrays the struggle for Kenyan independence in the words of a freedom fighter whose life spanned the twentieth century’s most dramatic transformations. Born into an impoverished farm family in the Meru Highlands, Japhlet Thambu grew up wearing goatskins and lived to stand before his community dressed for business in a pressed suit, crisp tie, and freshly polished shoes. For most of the last four decades, however, he dressed for work in the primary school classroom and on his lush tea farm.
The General, as he came to be called from his leadership of the Mau Mau uprising sixty years ago, narrates his life story in conversation with Laura Lee Huttenbach, a young American who met him while backpacking in Kenya in 2006. A gifted storyteller with a keen appreciation for language and a sense of responsibility as a repository of his people’s history, the General talks of his childhood in the voice of a young boy, his fight against the British in the voice of a soldier, and his long life in the voice of shrewd elder. While his life experiences are his alone, his story adds immeasurably to the long history of decolonization as it played out across Africa, Asia, and the Americas.
The Boy from Altheimer
From the Depression to the BoardroomWilliam H. Bowen
University of Arkansas Press, 2006
The Boy of Battle Ford and the Man
W. S. Blackman
Southern Illinois University Press, 2012
A classic story of a young man’s journey to adulthood, The Boy of Battle Ford covers Blackman’s years growing up in early post-settlement Illinois, where he gave in to temptations such as drinking, gambling, and the lure of prostitutes before joining the army, finding God and becoming a preacher. Blackman, who notes that he is determined to “write facts” in this book, peppers his story with the sordid details of the sinful times of his life as well as with discussions of faith and of struggling to understand his God and his beliefs.
The Boys of Winter
Life and Death in the U.S. Ski Troops During the Second World WarCharles J. Sanders
University Press of Colorado, 2005
The Boys of Winter tells the true story of three young American ski champions and their brutal, heroic, and fateful transformation from athletes to infantrymen with the 10th Mountain Division. Charles J. Sanders's fast-paced narrative draws on dozens of interviews and extensive research to trace these boys' lives from childhood to championships and from training at Mount Rainier and in the Colorado Rockies to battling against the Nazis.
The Brazil Chronicles
Stephen G. Bloom
University of Missouri Press, 2024
As a young journalist at the Brazil Herald from 1979-81, Stephen G. Bloom spent his early professional years working in Rio’s seedy Lapa district, surrounded by fugitives, drug runners, pornographers, and stealth CIA agents. Bloom shares the wild story of this English-language newspaper in The Brazil Chronicles. The expat newspaper was a breeding ground for a different kind of storyteller — audacious risk-takers who told madcap tales of Amazon plantations, Confederate emigres, and lost Indian tribes. Several renown journalists cut their teeth at the Brazil Herald, including acclaimed New York Times correspondent Tad Szulc, Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau, and an untamed Gonzo reporter by the name of Hunter S. Thompson.
Drawing from extensive archival research and more than 150 interviews with his former colleagues, Bloom’s eye-opening narrative dive is both entertaining and academically rigorous. With a backdrop of coups, nonstop political instability, censorship, hyper-inflation, and weekends at sultry Ipanema Beach, The Brazil Chronicles doubles as a coming-of-age memoir, following young Bloom as he embarks on his quest to become a foreign correspondent, relocating to a foreign country to pursue under-the-radar stories and tall tales. His firsthand experience provides an insider, eye-witness account of the newspaper’s colorful history, transporting the reader to its sweltering newsroom and delving into the multifarious lives of its eclectic, trailblazing, polyglot staff.
Even as Bloom weaves between personal narrative, history, and accounts from journalism luminaries, it’s clear who the book’s main character is: the one-of-a-kind newspaper itself.
The Breakaway
The Inside Story of the Wirtz Family Business and the Chicago BlackhawksBryan Smith
Northwestern University Press, 2018
When Rocky Wirtz took over the Wirtz Corporation in 2007, including management of the Chicago Blackhawks, the fiercely beloved hockey team had fallen to a humiliating nadir. As chronic losers playing to a deserted stadium, they were worse than bad—they were irrelevant. ESPN named the franchise the worst in all of sports. Rocky's resurrection of the team's fortunes was—publicly, at least—a feel-good tale of shrewd acumen. Behind the scenes, however, it would trigger a father, son, and brother-against-brother drama of Shakespearean proportions. The Breakaway reveals that untold story.
Arthur Wirtz founded the family's business empire during the Depression. From roots in real estate, "King Arthur" soon expanded into liquor and banking, running his operations with an iron hand and a devotion to profit that earned him the nickname Baron of the Bottom Line. His son Bill further expanded the conglomerate, taking the helm of the Blackhawks in 1966. "Dollar Bill" Wirtz demanded unflinching adherence to Arthur's traditions and was notorious for an equally fierce temperament.
Yet when Rocky took the reins of the business after Bill's death, it was an organization out of step with the times and financially adrift. The Hawks weren't only failing on the ice—the parlous state of the team's finances imperiled every facet of the Wirtz empire. To save the team and the company, Rocky launched a radical turnaround campaign. Yet his modest proposal to televise the Hawks' home games provoked fierce opposition from Wirtz family insiders, who considered any deviation from Arthur and Bill's doctrines to be heresy.
Rocky's break with the edicts of his grandfather and father led to a reversal for the ages—three Stanley Cup championships in six years, a feat Fortune magazine called "the greatest turnaround in sports business history." But this resurrection came at a price, a fracturing of Rocky's relationships with his brother and other siblings. In riveting prose that recounts a story spanning three generations, The Breakaway reveals an insider's view of a brilliant but difficult Chicago business and sports dynasty and the inspiring story of perseverance and courage in the face of intense family pressures.
The Bridges of Vietnam
From the Journals of a U.S. Marine Intelligence OfficerFred L. Edwards Jr.
University of North Texas Press, 2000
The Briny South
Displacement and Sentiment in the Indian Ocean WorldNienke Boer
Duke University Press, 2023
The Brodsky Center at Rutgers University
Three Decades, 1986-2017Ferris Olin
Rutgers University Press, 2024
Published in partnership with the Zimmerli Museum.
The Brothers Robidoux and the Opening of the American West
Robert J. Willoughby
University of Missouri Press, 2012
The Buffalo, Ben, and Me
Todd Parnell & Foreword by Jim Baker
University of Missouri Press, 2007
The Buffalo River in northwest Arkansas is one of the longest free-flowing, undammed rivers west of the Mississippi—and one of the most beautiful waterways on earth. Almost lost to development, it proved to be the perfect testing ground for a young boy almost lost to mediocrity.
Middle-schooler Ben is struggling with learning challenges that have left him resentful and underachieving. His father, middle-ager Todd, wants to help his son gain self-confidence but is searching for his own identity. For twelve adventure-filled days on the river—all 125 miles of her navigable course, from Ponca to the White River—father and son discover the formative, curative, and redemptive powers of nature.
Leaving video games and cell phones behind isn’t easy for kids these days, but in the great outdoors parents and youngsters can connect in unimaginable ways. The Buffalo, Ben, and Me shares such a connection in an adventure story set on a wild river. It is a captivating tale featuring a host of colorful characters and enlivened by photos that reflect the essence of the wilderness.
But deeper than that, it is the story of crossing a threshold from dream to possibility—of one man’s search for meaning in his life and his efforts to motivate his son, blending love of family with love of nature in a tale of transformation. It tells how a rebellious teen and a bored banker conspired to buck a system keyed to predictability, and how a wild river inspired both to a better use of their lives. “This trip hit me as hard as it did Ben,” writes Parnell, “as a wake-up call to life, to what is important, to what is not.”
The trip down the Buffalo was one that even Ben admits changed his life in more ways than one, as he later went on to earn a master of science degree specializing in stream ecology. For any reader who loves the outdoors—and especially those seeking to connect with their children—The Buffalo, Ben, and Me is essential reading that reminds us of possibilities to be had in facing life head-on as it raises awareness of the need to protect the Ozarks’ water resources and heritage.
The Bullet Meant for Me
By Jan Reid
University of Texas Press, 2005
Jan Reid's powerful, moving account of what being shot during a robbery in Mexico City and the painful road to recovery taught him about manhood, friendship, and marriage.
On April 20, 1998, Jan Reid was shot during a robbery in Mexico City, where he had gone to watch his friend, the boxer Jesus Chavez, fight. In The Bullet Meant for Me, Reid powerfully recounts his ordeal, the long chain of life events that brought him to that fateful attack, and his struggle to regain the ability to walk and to be a full partner in a deeply satisfying marriage. Re-examining the whole trajectory of his life, Reid questions how much the Texan ideal of manhood shaped his identity, including his love for boxing and participation in the sport. He meditates on male friendship as he tells the story of his close relationship with Chavez, whose career and personal travails Reid details with empathy and insight. And he describes his long months in physical therapy, during which he drew on the unwavering love of his wife and daughter, as well as the courage and strength he had learned from boxing, to heal his body and spirit. A moving, intimate portrait of a man, a friendship, and a marriage, The Bullet Meant for Me is Jan Reid's most personal book.
The Button Box
A Daughter's Loving Memoir of Mrs. George S. PattonRuth Ellen Patton Totten, Edited by James Patton Totten, Foreward by Carlo W. D'Este
University of Missouri Press, 2005
"There was never a moment in our lives that we were not reminded that our father was the finest, bravest, most gallant, and best-looking man who ever lived and that he was destined for unimaginable glory. This we took for granted. Being our father’s children was a special influence in all our lives, but the greatest, most pervasive, and most interesting influence in my life was Ma."
The Button Box is the loving memoir of Beatrice Ayer Patton (1886–1953), the wife of one of the greatest military figures in history, General George S. Patton, Jr. Written by the Pattons’ daughter, Ruth Ellen, the book covers Beatrice’s life from her youth in a wealthy New England family until her death, with an emphasis on her years of marriage to George Patton. A supportive and loving wife, Beatrice was accomplished in her own right as an equestrian, musician, lecturer, sailor, and internationally published author. Courageous and adventurous, Beatrice played a significant role in her husband’s life. Without her, General Patton might never have reached his own level of success.
The California Days of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Brian C. Wilson
University of Massachusetts Press, 2022
In the spring of 1871, Ralph Waldo Emerson boarded a train in Concord, Massachusetts, bound for a month-and-a-half-long tour of California—an interlude that became one of the highlights of his life. On their journey across the American West, he and his companions would take in breathtaking vistas in the Rockies and along the Pacific Coast, speak with a young John Muir in the Yosemite Valley, stop off in Salt Lake City for a meeting with Brigham Young, and encounter a diversity of communities and cultures that would challenge their Yankee prejudices.
Based on original research employing newly discovered documents, The California Days of Ralph Waldo Emerson maps the public story of this group’s travels onto the private story of Emerson’s final years, as aphasia set in and increasingly robbed him of his words. Engaging and compelling, this travelogue makes it clear that Emerson was still capable of wonder, surprise, and friendship, debunking the presumed darkness of his last decade.
The Callendar Effect
The Life and Work of Guy Stewart Callendar (1898-1964)James Rodger Fleming
American Meteorological Society, 2007
The Calling of History
Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire of TruthDipesh Chakrabarty
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Through close readings of more than twelve hundred letters to and from Sarkar along with other archival documents, Dipesh Chakrabarty demonstrates that historians in colonial India formulated the basic concepts and practices of the field via vigorous—and at times bitter and hurtful—debates in the public sphere. He furthermore shows that because of its non-technical nature, the discipline as a whole remains susceptible to pressure from both the public and the academy even today. Methodological debates and the changing reputations of scholars like Sarkar, he argues, must therefore be understood within the specific contexts in which particular histories are written.
Insightful and with far-reaching implications for all historians, The Calling of History offers a valuable look at the double life of history and how tensions between its public and private sides played out in a major scholar’s career.
The Canals of Mars
A MemoirGary Fincke
Michigan State University Press, 2010
The Canals of Mars is a memoir that explores and ponders "weakness," which in Gary Fincke's family was the catch-all term for every possible human flaw-physical, psychological, or spiritual. Fincke grew up near Pittsburgh during the 1950s and 1960s, raised by blue-collar parents for whom the problems that beset people-from alcoholism to nearsightedness to asthma to fear of heights-were nothing but weaknesses.
In a highly engaging style, Fincke meditates on the disappointments he suffered-in his body, his mind, his work-because he was convinced that he had to be "perfect." Anything less than perfection was weakness and no one, he understood from an early age, wants to be weak.
Six of the chapters in the book have been cited in Best American Essays. The chapter that provides the book's title, The Canals of Mars, won a Pushcart Prize and was included in The Pushcart Book of Essays: The Best Essays from a Quarter Century of the Pushcart Prize.
The Caning
The Assault That Drove America to Civil WarStephen Puleo
Westholme Publishing, 2012
Early in the afternoon of May 22, 1856, ardent pro-slavery Congressman Preston S. Brooks of South Carolina strode into the United States Senate Chamber in Washington, D.C., and began beating renowned anti-slavery Senator Charles Sumner with a gold-topped walking cane. Brooks struck again and again—more than thirty times across Sumner’s head, face, and shoulders—until his cane splintered into pieces and the helpless Massachusetts senator, having nearly wrenched his desk from its fixed base, lay unconscious and covered in blood. It was a retaliatory attack. Forty-eight hours earlier, Sumner had concluded a speech on the Senate floor that had spanned two days, during which he vilified Southern slaveowners for violence occurring in Kansas, called Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois a “noise-some, squat, and nameless animal,” and famously charged Brooks’s second cousin, South Carolina Senator Andrew Butler, as having “a mistress. . . who ugly to others, is always lovely to him. . . . I mean, the harlot, Slavery.” Brooks not only shattered his cane during the beating, but also destroyed any pretense of civility between North and South.
One of the most shocking and provocative events in American history, the caning convinced each side that the gulf between them was unbridgeable and that they could no longer discuss their vast differences of opinion regarding slavery on any reasonable level.The Caning: The Assault That Drove America to Civil War tells the incredible story of this transformative event. While Sumner eventually recovered after a lengthy convalescence, compromise had suffered a mortal blow. Moderate voices were drowned out completely; extremist views accelerated, became intractable, and locked both sides on a tragic collision course.
The caning had an enormous impact on the events that followed over the next four years: the meteoric rise of the Republican Party and Abraham Lincoln; the Dred Scott decision; the increasing militancy of abolitionists, notably John Brown’s actions; and the secession of the Southern states and the founding of the Confederacy. As a result of the caning, the country was pushed, inexorably and unstoppably, to war. Many factors conspired to cause the Civil War, but it was the caning that made conflict and disunion unavoidable five years later.
The Captain’s Best Mate
The Journal of Mary Chipman Lawrence on the Whaler Addison, 1856–1860Mary Chipman. Lawrence
University Press of New England, 1986
The Carleton Bigamy Trial
Mary Carleton
Iter Press, 2023
Mary Carleton was an ordinary woman from Canterbury who entered historical records when she was accused of bigamy. The seven pamphlets in this edition focus on the bigamy trial of Mary Carleton, in which the accused eloquently defends herself and is ultimately acquitted. Written in the early years of the English Restoration, they demonstrate that narratives presenting what “she said” and what “he said” can reveal, forcefully and painfully, how truth can be fragmented in the different arenas of law, love, and politics. Through their disparate accounts of a marriage gone wrong, these pamphlets reinforce the social status quo even while they radically shatter the very foundations that give it heft. In asking readers to question absolutes, they unmask the precarious relationship between words and the world.
The Case of the Slave-Child, Med
Free Soil in Antislavery BostonKaren Woods Weierman
University of Massachusetts Press, 2019
The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne
Vol. VI, True Stories From History and BiographyNathaniel Hawthorne
The Ohio State University Press, 1972