884 books match the query 'Historical' and 243 start with t

cover of The Upside-Down Forest: The Vanished Souls Duology, Book 2

The Upside-Down Forest

The Vanished Souls Duology, Book 2

Richard Zimler

Tagus Press, 2027

When cruelty is sanctified, betrayal is rewarded as virtue, and the innocent must hide their true identities to survive, seventeen-year-old Isaaque Zarco struggles to preserve the principles he lives by and protect the people he loves in this luminous and deeply moving conclusion to The Vanished Souls duology.

As Isaaque attempts to put his life back together, mysteries and conflicts continue to haunt him, most prominently his father’s inexplicable rejection and the knowledge that his survival depends on concealing his identity and faith.

His world is shaken by a letter saying his grandmother, Flor, has been arrested. Unable to abandon the woman who guided him throughout his childhood, Isaaque crosses into Spain, entering a society ruled by fear and deception, where anonymous accusations carry the force of law and compassion itself has become an act of defiance. Flor has been transferred to a prison in Madrid. She has been physically broken by imprisonment. Isaaque learns that, under torture, she revealed the names of two of his oldest friends as secret Jews. Racing back to his home village, he embarks on a desperate attempt to help them escape before the Inquisition comes for them.

The Upside-Down Forest portrays a society in which slander is revered as truth, mercy is condemned as weakness, and persecution masquerades as justice. Giving voice to victims whose suffering has too often been erased from history, Richard Zimler explores how systems of fear corrupt not only institutions but also the bonds between family, friends, and neighbors. Ultimately, it asks what remains of our humanity when the moral order itself has been turned upside down—and whether a life shaped by love, loyalty, and compassion can still endure when survival itself demands treachery and betrayal.

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cover of The Valet

The Valet

Thorvald Steen

Seagull Books, 2026

A gripping historical novel that explores how the Fourth Crusade plundered Constantinople and forever changed the course of European history.

The year is 1204. Stripped of his power and held captive, Massimo Gasparino, once the most trusted aide to the Doge of Venice, pens a desperate secret letter to Pope Innocent III. His confession? He has witnessed the most egregious crime in human history: the deliberate diversion of the Fourth Crusade from Jerusalem to the heart of Christian Europe, Constantinople. As the city is ruthlessly plundered and its treasures shipped to Venice, Gasparino’s letter exposes the Doge’s shocking betrayal, a sin that irrevocably alters the course of history. But with his life and the fate of this explosive truth hanging precariously in the balance, can he get his message to Pope Innocent III before the Doge silences him forever?

The Valet is a tense, intimate drama of ambition, guilt, and the enduring shadows of a war that still resonates in today’s world.
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cover of The Village of Vanished Souls: The Vanished Souls Duology, Book 1

The Village of Vanished Souls

The Vanished Souls Duology, Book 1

Richard Zimler

Tagus Press, 2027

Winner of Book of the Year in Portugal, The Village of Vanished Souls is a sweeping historical tale inspired by authentic records of the Portuguese Inquisition and the real lives of villagers whose stories have long been forgotten.

Portugal, 1671—Nine-year-old Isaaque Zarco lives a peaceful life in the remote mountain village of Castelo Rodrigo, where he helps his mother prepare meals, roams the surrounding forests with his spirited best friend Lena, and learns about nature from the village apothecary, Samuel. But his idyllic childhood is shattered when Lena and her family suddenly vanish, followed by a series of brutal murders that plunge the isolated community into fear.

When Isaaque’s formidable Castilian grandmother visits, she says what no one else dares: the Inquisition is hunting descendants of Jews who continue to secretly practice. Then she entrusts Isaaque with an even more dangerous secret—that he, too, belongs to a secret Jewish family. As she introduces him to the forbidden traditions and sacred writings of their ancestors, Isaaque’s understanding of his parents, his village, and himself is transformed forever.

As Isaaque comes of age, he is drawn into a clandestine network that helps persecuted Jews escape Portugal. Every mission carries the risk of imprisonment, torture, and death, yet this dangerous work gives Isaaque a profound sense of purpose while deepening his commitment to his heritage. When he learns that his beloved grandmother is ill, he embarks on a journey that will expose long-buried family secrets and reveal that learning to embrace his heritage is only the beginning of what will soon be asked of him.

Inspired by the names, arrest records, and testimonies preserved in Inquisitional archives, The Village of Vanished Souls recreates a little-known chapter of history with vivid historical detail and emotional depth. At once an unforgettable coming-of-age story and a moving portrait of resilience, identity, faith, and love, it gives voice to people whose courage endured despite centuries of persecution and forced silence.

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cover of The Visoko Chronicle

The Visoko Chronicle

Ivan Tavcar

Central European University Press, 2022

This historical novel—Visoška kronika in the Slovene original—is about two generations of the owners of the Visoko estate in the Duchy of Carniola, a predominantly Slovene province of the Habsburg Empire, in the seventeenth century. The events of the estate and the fate of its owners are affected by witchcraft persecutions, the mistreatment of Protestants, and the Thirty Years’ War. These themes are key to the construction of a Slovene national identity, which was going through a decisive phase as Tavčar was writing. By the time the novel was released in 1919, his nation had left the Habsburg Crown for the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.

The work is both romantic and realistic. The deeply romantic motive of crime, repentance, and punishment intertwines the lives of father and son. The very acquisition of the estate is connected to a murder, which casts a long shadow over the next generation. Tavčar insists on the principle of man’s full responsibility for his acts, which can be repaired with action and determination. The author’s bleak realistic description of the farm life at Visoko reflects his polemical view of the Slovene farmer of his time.

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cover of The Warwolf: A Peasant Chronicle of the Thirty Years War

The Warwolf

A Peasant Chronicle of the Thirty Years War

Hermann Lons

Westholme Publishing, 2006

The conflict that ravaged seventeeth-century Europe, as seen in a classic German novel—freshly translated
The Thirty Years War, fought between 1618 and 1648, was a ruthless struggle for political and religious control of central Europe. Engulfing most of present-day Germany, the war claimed at least ten million lives. The lengthy conflict was particularly hard on the general population, as thousands of undisciplined mercenaries serving Sweden, Spain, France, the Netherlands, and various German principalities, robbed, murdered, and pillaged communities; disease spread out of control and starvation became commonplace. In The Warwolf, Hermann Löns's acclaimed historical novel, the tragedy and horrors of war in general, and these times in particular are revealed. The Warwolf, based on the author's careful research, traces the life of Harm Wulf, a land-owning peasant farmer of the northern German heath who realizes after witnessing the murder of neighbours and family at the hands of marauding troops that he has a choice between compromising his morals or succumbing to inevitable torture and death. Despite his desire for peace, Wulf decides to band with his fellow farmers and live like "wolves," fiercely protecting their isolated communities from all intruders. Löns's brilliant portrayal of the two sides faced by any person in a moral crisis—in Harm Wulf's case, whether to kill or be killed—continues to resonate. Originally published in 1910 and still in print in Germany, The Warwolf is available for first time in English.
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cover of The Wife of Martin Guerre

The Wife of Martin Guerre

Janet Lewis

Ohio University Press, 2013

In this new edition of Janet Lewis’s classic short novel, The Wife of Martin Guerre, Swallow Press executive editor Kevin Haworth writes that Lewis’s story is “a short novel of astonishing depth and resonance, a sharply drawn historical tale that asks contemporary questions about identity and belonging, about men and women, and about an individual’s capacity to act within an inflexible system.” Originally published in 1941, The Wife of Martin Guerre has earned the respect and admiration of critics and readers for over sixty years.

Based on a notorious trial in sixteenth-century France, this story of Bertrande de Rols is the first of three novels making up Lewis’s Cases of Circumstantial Evidence suite (the other two are The Trial of Sören Qvist and The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron).

Swallow Press is delighted and honored to offer readers beautiful new editions of all three Cases of Circumstantial Evidence novels, each featuring a new introduction by Kevin Haworth.

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cover of The Wigwam and the Cabin: The Arkansas Edition

The Wigwam and the Cabin

The Arkansas Edition

William G. Simms

University of Arkansas Press, 2001

One of the most important volumes of short fiction published before the Civil War. The Wigwam and the Cabin represents William Gilmore Simms at his very best. It is the work that led Poe to say of Simms, ". . . in invention, in vigor, in movement, in the power of exciting interest, and in the artistical management of his themes, he has surpassed, we think, any of his countrymen." Praised by critics on both sides of the Atlantic, The Wigwam and the Cabin focuses n the Southern frontier that Simms knew so well, a frontier whose vernacular, courage, humor, folklore, violence, injustice, and beauty are vividly brought to life through the strokes of his pen. "I have seen the life," Simms wrote, "—have lived it—and much of my material . . . is the planter, the squatter, the Indian, the negro—the bold and hardy pioneer, the vigorous yeomen—these are the subjects." Simms's portrayal of frontier life is the most realistic and graphic in all nineteenth-century American literature; and the Arkansas edition of The Wigwam and the Cabin, with Dr. Guilds's fine editing and informative introductin, brings back into print an invaluable contribution to the development of the short story in America.
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cover of The Wire Devils

The Wire Devils

Frank L. Packard

University of Minnesota Press, 2013


Best known for his Jimmie Dale series of books, which have sold more than 3 million copies worldwide, Frank L. Packard first published The Wire Devils in 1918. A “wire thriller” that uses the booming railroads and telegraph lines of the old West as its backdrop for fast-paced adventure, The Wire Devils follows a criminal gang of the same name who hijack a railroad’s telegraph lines to glean information about profitable shipments. But foiling them again and again is the Hawk, the outlaw hero who robs from the robbers and is ultimately on the side of law and order.


Combining elements from dime-store novels and Packard’s own experience on the rails, The Wire Devils is at once a hybrid western and a thriller still worth reading nearly a century after it was written.


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cover of The Wisconsin Capitol: Stories of a Monument and Its People

The Wisconsin Capitol

Stories of a Monument and Its People

Michael Edmonds

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2017

On the occasion of the Capitol’s centennial in 2017, this book tells the remarkable story of the building—in all its incarnations—and the people who made history beneath its dome. The book covers the creation of the territorial capitol in 1837, the construction of the second capitol in the 1860s (and the fire that almost completely destroyed it in 1904), the eleven-year construction project that completed the third capitol in 1917, and the extensive conservation project of the 1990s that restored the building to its grandeur. Supporting the framework of this architectural history are colorful stories about the people who shaped Wisconsin from within the Capitol—attorneys, senators, and governors (from Henry Dodge to Scott Walker), as well as protesters, reformers, secretaries, tour guides, custodians, and even Old Abe, the Capitol’s resident eagle. Combining historical photographs with modern, full-color architectural photos, The Wisconsin Capitol provides fascinating details about the building, while also emphasizing the importance of the Capitol in Wisconsin’s storied history.

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cover of The Wished For Country

The Wished For Country

Wayne Karlin

Northwestern University Press, 2002

The Wished For Country is set during the founding of the Maryland colony in the mid-seventeenth century. It traces the entwined lives of James Hallam, a carpenter and indentured servant; Ezekiel, an African slave brought to Maryland from Barbados; and Tawzin, a Piscataway Indian, kidnapped to England when a child, and now back in America. While Hallam goes on to become a soldier and a player in the politics of the Maryland colony, Ezekiel and Tawzin become the center of an outcast group of Blacks, poor whites, and Native Americans, who find themselves striving to reinvent themselves and their world.

The stories of these three men, the women who love them, and the community they form, bring to vivid life the experiences of those who came to America pulled by a dream of what could be shaped from an emptiness that embodied promise, of those who were unwillingly brought to be the instruments of that dream, and of those who saw the shape of their world forever changed by the coming of the Europeans.
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cover of The Woman in Battle: The Civil War Narrative of Loreta Janeta Velazquez, Cuban Woman and Confederate Soldier

The Woman in Battle

The Civil War Narrative of Loreta Janeta Velazquez, Cuban Woman and Confederate Soldier

Loreta Janeta Velazquez

University of Wisconsin Press, 2003

A Cuban woman who moved to New Orleans in the 1850s and eloped with her American lover, Loreta Janeta Velazquez fought in the Civil War for the Confederacy as the cross-dressing Harry T. Buford. As Buford, she single-handedly organized an Arkansas regiment; participated in the historic battles of Bull Run, Balls Bluff, Fort Donelson, and Shiloh; romanced men and women; and eventually decided that spying as a woman better suited her Confederate cause than fighting as a man. In the North, she posed as a double agent and worked to traffic information, drugs, and counterfeit bills to support the Confederate cause. She was even hired by the Yankee secret service to find "the woman . . . traveling and figuring as a Confederate agent"—Velazquez herself.

Originally published in 1876 as The Woman in Battle, this Civil War narrative offers Velazquez’s seemingly impossible autobiographical account, as well as a new critical introduction and glossary by Jesse Alemán. Scholars are divided between those who read the book as a generally honest autobiography and those who read it as mostly fiction. According to Alemán’s critical introduction, the book also reads as pulp fiction, spy memoir, seduction narrative, travel literature, and historical account, while it mirrors the literary conventions of other first-person female accounts of cross-dressing published in the United States during wartime, dating back to the Revolutionary War. Whatever the facts are, this is an authentic Civil War narrative, Alemán concludes, that recounts how war disrupts normal gender roles, redefines national borders, and challenges the definition of identity.
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cover of The World of Juliette Kinzie: Chicago before the Fire

The World of Juliette Kinzie

Chicago before the Fire

Ann Durkin Keating

University of Chicago Press, 2019

When Juliette Kinzie first visited Chicago in 1831, it was anything but a city. An outpost in the shadow of Fort Dearborn, it had no streets, no sidewalks, no schools, no river-spanning bridges. And with two hundred disconnected residents, it lacked any sense of community. In the decades that followed, not only did Juliette witness the city’s transition from Indian country to industrial center, but she was instrumental in its development.

Juliette is one of Chicago’s forgotten founders. Early Chicago is often presented as “a man’s city,” but women like Juliette worked to create an urban and urbane world, often within their own parlors. With The World of Juliette Kinzie, we finally get to experience the rise of Chicago from the view of one of its most important founding mothers.

Ann Durkin Keating, one of the foremost experts on nineteenth-century Chicago, offers a moving portrait of a trailblazing and complicated woman. Keating takes us to the corner of Cass and Michigan (now Wabash and Hubbard), Juliette’s home base. Through Juliette’s eyes, our understanding of early Chicago expands from a city of boosters and speculators to include the world that women created in and between households. We see the development of Chicago society, first inspired by cities in the East and later coming into its own midwestern ways. We also see the city become a community, as it developed its intertwined religious, social, educational, and cultural institutions. Keating draws on a wealth of sources, including hundreds of Juliette’s personal letters, allowing Juliette to tell much of her story in her own words.

Juliette’s death in 1870, just a year before the infamous fire, seemed almost prescient. She left her beloved Chicago right before the physical city as she knew it vanished in flames. But now her history lives on. The World of Juliette Kinzie offers a new perspective on Chicago’s past and is a fitting tribute to one of the first women historians in the United States.
[more]
cover of The World of Juliette Kinzie: Chicago before the Fire

The World of Juliette Kinzie

Chicago before the Fire

Ann Durkin Keating

University of Chicago Press, 2019

This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.

When Juliette Kinzie first visited Chicago in 1831, it was anything but a city. An outpost in the shadow of Fort Dearborn, it had no streets, no sidewalks, no schools, no river-spanning bridges. And with two hundred disconnected residents, it lacked any sense of community. In the decades that followed, not only did Juliette witness the city’s transition from Indian country to industrial center, but she was instrumental in its development.

Juliette is one of Chicago’s forgotten founders. Early Chicago is often presented as “a man’s city,” but women like Juliette worked to create an urban and urbane world, often within their own parlors. With The World of Juliette Kinzie, we finally get to experience the rise of Chicago from the view of one of its most important founding mothers.

Ann Durkin Keating, one of the foremost experts on nineteenth-century Chicago, offers a moving portrait of a trailblazing and complicated woman. Keating takes us to the corner of Cass and Michigan (now Wabash and Hubbard), Juliette’s home base. Through Juliette’s eyes, our understanding of early Chicago expands from a city of boosters and speculators to include the world that women created in and between households. We see the development of Chicago society, first inspired by cities in the East and later coming into its own midwestern ways. We also see the city become a community, as it developed its intertwined religious, social, educational, and cultural institutions. Keating draws on a wealth of sources, including hundreds of Juliette’s personal letters, allowing Juliette to tell much of her story in her own words.

Juliette’s death in 1870, just a year before the infamous fire, seemed almost prescient. She left her beloved Chicago right before the physical city as she knew it vanished in flames. But now her history lives on. The World of Juliette Kinzie offers a new perspective on Chicago’s past and is a fitting tribute to one of the first women historians in the United States.
[more]
cover of The Worlds of William Penn

The Worlds of William Penn

Murphy, Andrew R

Rutgers University Press, 2019

William Penn was an instrumental and controversial figure in the early modern transatlantic world, known both as a leader in the movement for religious toleration in England and as a founder of two American colonies, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. As such, his career was marked by controversy and contention in both England and America. This volume looks at William Penn with fresh eyes, bringing together scholars from a range of disciplines to assess his multifaceted life and career. Contributors analyze the worlds that shaped Penn and the worlds that he shaped: Irish, English, American, Quaker, and imperial. The eighteen chapters in The Worlds of William Penn shed critical new light on Penn’s life and legacy, examining his early and often-overlooked time in Ireland; the literary, political, and theological legacies of his public career during the Restoration and after the 1688 Revolution; his role as proprietor of Pennsylvania; his religious leadership in the Quaker movement, and as a loyal lieutenant to George Fox, and his important role in the broader British imperial project. Coinciding with the 300th anniversary of Penn’s death the time is right for this examination of Penn’s importance both in his own time and to the ongoing campaign for political and religious liberty
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cover of There I Grew Up: Remembering Abraham Lincoln's Indiana Youth

There I Grew Up

Remembering Abraham Lincoln's Indiana Youth

William E. Bartelt

Indiana Historical Society Press, 2008

In 1859 Abraham Lincoln covered his Indiana years in one paragraph and two sentences of a written autobiographical statement that included the following: "We reached our new home about the time the State came into the union. It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals in the woods. There I grew up." William E. Bartelt uses annotation and primary source material to tell the history of Lincoln's Indiana years by those who were there. The book reveals, through the words of those who knew him, Lincoln's humor, compassion, oratorical skills and thirst for knowledge, and it provides an overview of Lincoln's Indiana experiences, his family, the community where the Lincolns settled and southern Indiana from 1816 to 1830.
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cover of This Soldier Life: The Diaries of Romine H. Ostrander, 1863 and 1865, in Colorado Territory

This Soldier Life

The Diaries of Romine H. Ostrander, 1863 and 1865, in Colorado Territory

Paul A. Malkoski

University Press of Colorado, 2006

Romine Ostrander, born in 1837 in Roseville, Illinois, had made his way to Colorado as a private in the First Colorado Cavalry by the time he was twenty-five. On February 26, 1863, he bought a small, leather-bound diary; over the next three years he filled this volume and two more with his thoughts, travels, and frustrations. The delicate, well-worn diaries accompanied the private in his saddlebags over miles of dusty Colorado trails, but eventually they disappeared. The 1863 and 1865 journals resurfaced in 1922 in a warehouse in Fresno. Annotated for historic interest but otherwise unedited, they offer a fascinating and infectious read - the young author creates a vivid portrait of frontier Colorado and comments on the events of his day: the Sand Creek Massacre, the Civil War, Lee's surrender, and his own encounters with Arapahos, Cheyennes, Comanches, Apaches, and Cherokees.

Jan. 24, 1865:
"I have had pretty spirited arguments with these third reg't ducks sometimes about the barbarity of indiscriminately murdering defenseless women and children of the Indians at sand creek. Some of them deny that any thing of the kind was done except in the general action when there was no telling the difference; and some acknowledge that there were women and children killed after the general action was over; but argue that it was right because Indians have done the same."

Oct. 17, 1863:
"I know that I have written a great many foolish - yes silly things in this book, and - well, what of it? What if I have? Who's business is it? Who's going to read them? I am!"

Published by the Colorado Historical Society
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cover of Thomas Ewing Jr.: Frontier Lawyer and Civil War General

Thomas Ewing Jr.

Frontier Lawyer and Civil War General

Ronald D. Smith

University of Missouri Press, 2008

An Ohio family with roots in the South, the Ewings influenced the course of the Midwest for more than fifty years. Patriarch Thomas Ewing, a former Whig senator and cabinet member who made his fortune as a real estate lawyer, raised four major players in the nation’s history—including William Tecumseh “Cump” Sherman, taken into the family as a nine-year-old, who went on to marry his foster sister Ellen. Ronald D. Smith now tells of this extraordinary clan that played a role on the national stage through the illustrious career of one of its sons.
In Thomas Ewing Jr.: Frontier Lawyer and Civil War General, Smith introduces us to the Ewing family, little known except among scholars of Sherman, to show that Tom Jr. had a remarkable career of his own: first as a real estate lawyer, judge, soldier, and speculator in Kansas, then as a key figure in national politics. Smith takes readers back to Bleeding Kansas, with its border ruffians and land speculators, reconstructing the rough-and-tumble of its courtrooms to demonstrate that its turmoil was as much about claim-jumping as about slavery. He describes the seat-of-the-pants law practice in which Ewing worked with his brothers Hugh and Charlie and foster brother Cump. He then tells how Tom came to national prominence in the fight over the proslavery Lecompton Constitution, was instrumental in starting up the Union Pacific Railroad, and became the first chief justice of the Kansas Supreme Court.
Ewing obtained a commission in the Union Army—as did his brothers—and raised a regiment that saw significant action in Arkansas and Missouri. After William Quantrill’s raid on Lawrence, Kansas, he issued the dramatic General Order No. 11 that expelled residents from sections of western Missouri. Then this confidant of Abraham Lincoln’s went on to courageously defend three of the assassination conspirators—including the disingenuous Samuel Mudd—and lobbied the key vote to block the impeachment of Andrew Johnson.
Smith examines Ewing’s life in meticulous detail, mining family correspondence for informative quotes and digging deep into legal records to portray lawmaking on the frontier. And while Sherman has been the focus of most previous work on the Ewings, this book fills the gaps in an interlocking family of remarkable people—one that helped shape a nation’s development in its courtrooms and business suites. Thomas Ewing Jr.: Frontier Lawyer and Civil War General retells a chapter of Kansas history and opens up a panoramic view of antebellum America, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Gilded Age.
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cover of Thomas Frederick Tout (1855–1929): refashioning history for the twentieth century

Thomas Frederick Tout (1855–1929)

refashioning history for the twentieth century

Edited by Joel T. Rosenthal and Caroline M. Barron

University of London Press, 2019

Thomas Frederick Tout (1855–1929) was arguably the most prolific English medieval historian of the early twentieth century. The son of an unsuccessful publican, he was described at his Oxford scholarship exam as ‘uncouth and untidy’; however he went on to publish hundreds of books throughout his distinguished career with a legacy that extended well beyond the academy. Tout pioneered the use of archival research, welcomed women into academia and augmented the University of Manchester’s growing reputation for pioneering research. This book presents the first full assessment of Tout’s life and work, from his early career at Lampeter, to his work in Manchester and his wide-ranging service to the study of history. Selected essays take a fresh and critical look at Tout’s own historical writing and discuss how his research shaped, and continues to shape, our understanding of the middle ages, particularly the fourteenth century. The book concludes with a personal reflection on Tout by his grandson, Tom Sharp.
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cover of Thomas Goode Jones: Race, Politics, and Justice in the New South

Thomas Goode Jones

Race, Politics, and Justice in the New South

Brent J. Aucoin

University of Alabama Press, 2016

Thomas Goode Jones of Alabama is the first comprehensive biography of a key Alabama politician and federal jurist whose life and times embody the conflicts and transformations in the Deep South between the Civil War and World War I.
 
A man who both represented and differed from his class, Thomas Goode Jones offers contemporary readers and scholars an ideal subject of study to understand a period of southern history that still shapes American life today. Often overshadowed by the pharaonic antebellum period, the Civil War, and the luminous heights of the civil rights movement, the deceptively placid decades at the turn of the century were, in fact, a period when southerners fiercely debated the course of the South’s future. In tracing Jones’s career, Brent J. Aucoin offers vivid accounts of the great events and trends of that pivotal period: Reconstruction, the birth of the “Solid South,” the Populist Revolt, and the establishment of racial disenfranchisement and segregation.
 
Born in 1844, Jones served in the Confederate army and after the war identified as a conservative “Bourbon” Democrat. He served as Alabama's governor from 1890 to 1894 and as a federal judge from 1901 until his death in 1914. As a veteran, politician, and judge, Jones embodied numerous roles in the shifting political landscape of the South.
 
Jones was not, however, a reflexive conformist and sometimes pursued policies at odds with his party. Jones’s rhetoric and support of African American civil rights were exceptional and earned him truculent criticism from unrepentant racist factions in his party. His support was so fearless that it inspired Booker T. Washington to recommend Jones to Republican president Theodore Roosevelt as a federal judge. On the bench, Jones garnered national attention for his efforts to end peonage and lynching, and yet he also enabled the establishment of legalized segregation in Alabama, confounding attempts easily to categorize him as an odious reactionary or fearless progressive.
 

 

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Thomas Wolfe Remembered

Edited by Mark Canada and Nami Montgomery

University of Alabama Press, 2018

A collection of reminiscences captures the private life of a great American writer.

Thomas Wolfe’s life may seem to be an open book. A life that, after all, was the source for his best-known works, including the novels Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River, as well as his numerous short stories and dramas. Since his death in 1938, scholars and admirers of Wolfe have relied largely on these texts to understand the man himself.

Thomas Wolfe Remembered provides something new: a rich, multifaceted portrait painted by those who knew him (casually or intimately), loved him (or didn’t), and saw, heard, and experienced the literary (and literal) giant. This volume gathers in one place for the first time dozens of reminiscences by friends, family members, colleagues, and casual acquaintances, adding color and fine details to the self-portrait the author created in his novels.

Wolfe found plenty to challenge and frustrate him throughout his life, from his boyhood in Asheville, North Carolina, to his education at the University of North Carolina and Harvard University, through his time in New York and Europe, his travels through the American West, and his death in Baltimore. He experienced two distracted parents in a loveless marriage, the premature death of a beloved brother, a minor stutter, and the difficulties of controlling a mercurial temper. Yet Wolfe’s exuberance, perceptiveness, memory, and compulsion to record virtually all that he experienced made for an extravagance of material that sometimes angered the people whose lives he used as source material.

Editors Mark Canada and Nami Montgomery have collected dozens of remembrances, many unpublished or long forgotten, including pieces from Julia Wolfe, Margaret Roberts, Frederick Koch, Maxwell Perkins, Elizabeth Nowell, Edward Aswell, and Martha Dodd. Some are endearing, others are disturbing, and many are comical. All provide glimpses into the vibrant, haunted, boyish, paranoid, disheveled, courteous, captivating, infuriating, and altogether fascinating giant who was Thomas Wolfe.

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cover of Thoreau in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates

Thoreau in His Own Time

A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates

Sandra Harbert Petrulionis

University of Iowa Press, 2012

More than any other Transcendentalist of his time, Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) embodied the full complement of the movement’s ideals and vocations: author, advocate for self-reform, stern critic of society, abolitionist, philosopher, and naturalist. The Thoreau of our time—valorized anarchist, founding environmentalist, and fervid advocate of civil disobedience—did not exist in the nineteenth century. In this rich and appealing collection, Sandra Harbert Petrulionis untangles Thoreau’s multiple identities by offering a wide range of nineteenth-century commentary as the opinions of those who knew him evolved over time.

The forty-nine recollections gathered in Thoreau in His Own Time demonstrate that it was those who knew him personally, rather than his contemporary literati, who most prized Thoreau’s message, but even those who disparaged him respected his unabashed example of an unconventional life. Included are comments by Ralph Waldo Emerson—friend, mentor, Walden landlord, and progenitor of the spin on Thoreau’s posthumous reputation; Nathaniel Hawthorne, who could not compliment Thoreau without simultaneously denigrating him; and John Weiss, whose extended commentary on Thoreau’s spirituality reflects unusual tolerance. Selections from the correspondence of Caroline Healey Dall, Maria Thoreau, Sophia Hawthorne, Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley, and Amanda Mather amplify our understanding of the ways in which nineteenth-century women viewed Thoreau. An excerpt by John Burroughs, who alternately honored and condemned Thoreau, asserts his view that Thoreau was ever searching for the unattainable.

The dozens of primary sources in this crisply edited collection illustrate the complexity of Thoreau’s iconoclastic singularity in a way that no one biographer could. Each entry is introduced by a headnote that places the selection in historical and cultural context. Petrulionis’s comprehensive introduction and her detailed chronology of personal and literary events in Thoreau’s life provide a lively and informative gateway to the entries themselves. The collaborative biography that Petrulionis creates in Thoreau in His Own Time contextualizes the strikingly divergent views held by his contemporaries and highlights the reasons behind his profound legacy.

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cover of Those Days in Muramatsu: One Woman's Memoir of Occupied Japan

Those Days in Muramatsu

One Woman's Memoir of Occupied Japan

Yumi Goto

National University of Singapore Press, 2014

In the aftermath of the Pacific War and Japan’s capitulation, Mrs Yumi Goto and her family lived in the small community of Muramatsu, where they had relocated to get away from Tokyo. Yumi Goto was an English-speaking graduate of one of Japan’s top universities for women, and when a contingent of American soldiers was sent to Muramatsu as a garrison force, she became an interpreter. The sudden influx of more than 1,800 Americans into a rural Japanese community was potentially traumatic, and their imminent arrival made the townspeople “depressed and fearful”. To everyone's surprise, they found the soldiers to be “open-hearted and humane”, and the two sides co-existed peacefully. Those Days in Muramatsu is a testimony to the capacity of ordinary people from vastly different backgrounds to co-exist harmoniously, even in the aftermath of war. 
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Tierra del Fuego

Sylvia Iparraguirre

Northwestern University Press, 2000

Tierra del Fuego is more than a suspenseful seafaring tale in the tradition of Captain Hornblower; it is also a chilling psychological and cultural tale, reminiscent of Heart of Darkness or Lord of the Flies, that probes deeply into human nature. Based on the true story of the Yámana Indian, Jemmy Button (parts of which are recorded in Chapter 10 of Charles Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle), the novel explores Captain Robert Fitzroy's abduction of Jemmy Button and his attempt to "civilize" him in England and return him to his country as a bearer of "enlightened society." His experiment leads to tragic consequences. The novel deals with European arrogance and exploitation, but avoids falling into the cliché of "the Noble Savage." Jemmy (the "Other") remains strange and the attempt to co-opt him fails.

Tierra del Fuego has already won two major awards for the Spanish edition: The Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award for the best work of fiction written by a woman and The Best Book of the Year Award at the Buenos Aires Book Fair.

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Ties That Bound

Founding First Ladies and Slaves

Marie Jenkins Schwartz

University of Chicago Press, 2017

Behind every great man stands a great woman. And behind that great woman stands a slave. Or so it was in the households of the Founding Fathers from Virginia, where slaves worked and suffered throughout the domestic environments of the era, from Mount Vernon, Monticello, and Montpelier to the nation’s capital. American icons like Martha Washington, Martha Jefferson, and Dolley Madison were all slaveholders. And as Marie Jenkins Schwartz uncovers in Ties That Bound, these women, as the day-to-day managers of their households, dealt with the realities of a slaveholding culture directly and continually, even in the most intimate of spaces.

Unlike other histories that treat the stories of the First Ladies’ slaves as separate from the lives of their mistresses, Ties That Bound closely examines the relationships that developed between the First Ladies and their slaves. For elite women and their families, slaves were more than an agricultural workforce; slavery was an entire domestic way of life that reflected and reinforced their status. In many cases slaves were more constant companions to the white women of the household than were their husbands and sons, who often traveled or were at war. By looking closely at the complicated intimacy these women shared, Schwartz is able to reveal how they negotiated their roles, illuminating much about the lives of slaves themselves, as well as class, race, and gender in early America.

By detailing the prevalence and prominence of slaves in the daily lives of women who helped shape the country, Schwartz makes it clear that it is impossible to honestly tell the stories of these women while ignoring their slaves.  She asks us to consider anew the embedded power of slavery in the very earliest conception of American politics, society, and everyday domestic routines.
 
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Timira

A Novel

Wu Ming Wu Ming 2

Rutgers University Press, 2027

Isabella Marincola lived between two cultures. The child of an Italian military officer father and a Somali mother, she was never fully part of either culture. In Somalia, she was seen as a child of the ruling colonizers, while in Italy her darker skin made her an object of both fascination and contempt. Even as she worked as an actress and model in postwar Italy, she was valued for her exotically beautiful body, not her keen mind or her captivating voice.

Titled after Isabella’s Somali name, Timira is a unique combination of novel, archival sources, and oral history. It finally gives her a chance to articulate her experiences of being a Black Italian woman in different epochs of Italian history, from Fascism to the 1990s, in all of which italianità was assumed to be exclusively white. 

Cowritten by her son Antar Mohamed Marincola and a founding member of the Wu Ming writers’ collective, it is based on a series of writings and interviews Isabella gave towards the end of her long, eventful life. A compelling novel rooted in truth, Timira reflects on Italy’s colonial legacy and ingrained racism, while telling the story of a courageous woman and her struggles to assert herself in a nation unprepared to accommodate its Black citizens. 

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Tito

Neil Barnett

Haus Publishing, 2006

Inspirational partisan leader; doctrinaire communist and yet a thorn in Moscow's side; leading light in the Non Aligned Movement. The break-up of Yugoslavia, the country Tito, the Croat turned Yugoslav had created was inevitable after his death in 1980.
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Tito

Neil Barnett

Haus Publishing, 2021

A biography of the charismatic and controversial Yugoslavian leader Josip Broz Tito.

The near-mythological figure Josip Broz Tito was a complicated one. An oppressor, a dictator, a reformer, and a playboy, Tito was an inspirational partisan leader and scourge of the Germans during their occupation of Yugoslavia in the Second World War, a doctrinaire communist, and an ever-present thorn in Moscow’s side. He managed Yugoslavia’s internal tensions through personality, a force of will, and political oppression.
 
It was only after his death in 1980 that the true scale of his influence was understood. At that time, Yugoslavia’s institutions and politicians were revealed as rudderless, and the country created by Tito—a Croat turned Yugoslav—collapsed into a bloody and at times genocidal civil war. These ethnic conflicts were Tito’s nightmare, yet, as Neil Barnett shows in this short but engaging biography, they were in many ways the result of his own myopic egomania.
 
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To Russia with Love

An Alaskan's Journey

Victor Fischer with Charles Wohlforth

University of Alaska Press, 2012

Son of the famous American journalist Louis Fischer, who corresponded from Germany and then Moscow, and the Russian writer Markoosha Fischer, Victor Fischer grew up in the shadow of Hitler and Stalin, watching his friends’ parents disappear after political arrests. Eleanor Roosevelt personally engineered the Fischer family’s escape from Russia, and soon after Victor was serving in the United States Army in World War II and fighting opposite his childhood friends in the Russian and German armies. 

As a young adult, he went on to help shape Alaska’s map by planning towns throughout the state. This unique autobiography recounts Fischer’s earliest days in Germany, Russia, and Alaska, where he soon entered civic affairs and was elected as a delegate to the Alaska Constitutional Convention—the body responsible for establishing statehood in the territory. A move to Washington, DC, and further government appointments allowed him to witness key historic events of his era, which he also recounts here. Finally, Fischer brings his memoir up to the present, describing how he has returned to Russia many times to bring the lessons of Alaska freedom and prosperity to the newly democratic states.
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Tomorrow Will Be Better

Surviving Nazi Germany

Walter Meyer with the assistance of Matt Valentine

University of Missouri Press, 1999

How does a young German who has been a member of the Hitler Youth and has competed in Nazi-organized athletic competitions become, over the span of two years, an eighty-pound, tuberculosis-stricken concentration camp escapee?

In this larger-than-life memoir, Walter Meyer leads readers from one harrowing moment to the next as he recounts his experiences during and after Hitler's reign. As a teenager, Meyer refused to conform to institutional rules. While serving in the Hitler Youth, he rebelled by joining a subversive group that focused its efforts on pranks against the youth organization. During World War II, Meyer was arrested, interrogated, and beaten for stealing shoes, but he received a sentence of one to four years, as opposed to the standard penalty for looting—death.

The sixteen-year-old Meyer's refusal to conform to prison regulations and his foiled escape attempts resulted in solitary confinement on several occasions. His fiery spirit eventually landed him in a Nazi work camp. Unbeknownst to his family, Meyer became a concentration camp prisoner. Transported to Ravensbrueck, he was forced to work under grueling conditions in a quarry. He struggled to reach his daily work quota so he could dine on watery broth and bits of bread. In these subhuman conditions, Meyer developed tuberculosis. Knowing he would soon die in the camp, he again plotted his escape. This time he succeeded.

Upon returning home to Duesseldorf, Meyer despaired at the destruction of his hometown. He lamented the pallor that had spread throughout the town and the country itself. After recovering his health, he regained his youthful lust for adventure. His postwar travels began with his infiltration of the Russian-occupied zone of Germany to retrieve his family's possessions. Meyer then began a whirlwind odyssey, ducking into train cars and stowing away on ships, occasionally landing in jail for traveling without a passport—from France to Spain, Belgium to Holland, and finally to South America--in pursuit of something other than the aftermath of war.

Meyer's memoir gives insight into the climate in Germany during World War II and in the defeated nation after the war. His experience as a non-Jewish survivor of the Nazi concentration camps provides an enlightening and varied perspective to the Holocaust dialogue.

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Tongues of Flame

Mary Ward Brown

University of Alabama Press, 1993

Winner of the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award

These beautifully crafted stories depict the changing relationships between black and white southerners, the impact of the civil rights movement, and the emergence of the New South.

Mary Ward Brown is a storyteller in the tradition of such powerful 20th-century writers as William Faulkner, Harper Lee, Flannery O'Connor, and Eudora Welty-writers who have explored and dramatized the tension between the inherited social structure of the South and its contemporary dissolution. With Tongues of Flame, her first collection of short stories, Brown bares the awkward, sometimes hopeful, and often tragic suffering of people caught in changing times within a timeless setting.

Here we meet such memorable characters as a dying black woman who seeks the advice of a now-alcoholic white doctor whom she knew in better years; a young woman, jilted at the altar, driven crazy by an illuminated cross erected by the church opposite her house; and a 95-year-old woman buying a tombstone for her long-deceased husband only to discover that he had been adulterous throughout their marriage. Brown constructs her characters in a disarmingly plain style while breathing life into them with compassion and honesty as they confront the large moments of their lives.

First published by E. P. Dutton in 1986 to immediate critical acclaim, Tongues of Flame won the 1987 PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award. The judges commended Brown for "seeing life whole, without prejudice, without sentimentality, without histrionics. Her voice may be quiet-sometimes she speaks in a whisper-but her words are, nevertheless, always forceful, clear, and ultimately lasting." With this new publication of Tongues of Flame and its inclusion in the University of Alabama Press's Deep South Books series, a whole new generation of readers may once more discover Mary Ward Brown's profound stories of pain, loss, and hope.

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cover of Toussaint Louverture: A Black Jacobin in the Age of Revolutions

Toussaint Louverture

A Black Jacobin in the Age of Revolutions

Charles Forsdick and Christian Høgsbjerg

Pluto Press, 2017

“In overthrowing me, you have done no more than cut down the trunk of the tree of the black liberty in St. Domingue—it will spring back from the roots, for they are numerous and deep.”
 
These are Toussaint Louverture’s last words before being taken to prison in France. Heroic leader of the only successful slave revolt in history, Louverture is one of the greatest anti-imperialist fighters who ever lived. Born into slavery on a Caribbean plantation, he was able to break from his bondage to lead an army of freed African slaves to victory against the professional armies of France, Spain, and Britain in the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804.
 
In this lively narrative biography, Louverture’s fascinating life is explored through the prism of his radical politics. Charles Forsdick and Christian Høgsbjerg champion the “black Robespierre,” whose revolutionary legacy has inspired people and movements in the two centuries since his death. For anyone interested in the roots of modern resistance movements and black political radicalism, Louverture’s extraordinary life provides the perfect groundwork.
 
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Toward Nationalism's End

An Intellectual Biography of Hans Kohn

Adi Gordon

Brandeis University Press, 2017

This intellectual biography of Hans Kohn (1891–1971) looks at theories of nationalism in the twentieth century as articulated through the life and work of its leading scholar and activist. Hans Kohn was born in late nineteenth-century Prague, but his peripatetic life took him from the Revolutionary-era Russia to interwar-era Palestine under the British Empire to the United States during the Cold War. Bearing witness to dramatic reconfigurations of national and political identities, he spearheaded an intellectual revolution that fundamentally challenged assumptions about the “naturalness” and the immutability of nationalism. Reconstructing Kohn’s long and fascinating career, Gordon uncovers the multiple political and intellectual trends that intersected with and shaped his theories of nationalism. Throughout his life, Kohn was not simply a theorist but also a participant in multiple and often conflicting movements: Zionism and anti-Zionism, pacifism, liberalism, and military interventionism. His evolving theories thus drew from and reflected fierce debates about the nature of internationalism, imperialism, liberalism, collective security, and especially the Jewish Question. Kohn’s scholarship was not an abstraction but a product of his lived experience as a Habsburg Jew, an erstwhile cultural Zionist, and an American Cold Warrior. As a product of the times, his concepts of nationalism reflected the changing world around him and evolved radically over his lifetime. His intellectual biography thus offers a panorama of the dynamic intellectual cornerstones of the twentieth century.
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Traces of My Father

William Radice

Northwestern University Press, 2002

I recall the long solo journeys when I would think about my father: the Oberfeldarzt (Retired), the Reichsamtsleiter in the SS, the adjutant to Heinrich Himmler, the author of New Foundations for Racial Research, the man described by the chief prosecutor in the Eichmann trial as a 'desk murderer,' the man I knew: my father.

In 1979 Sigfrid Gauch published the groundbreaking Vaterspuren, (Traces of My Father), the first of the so-called father books about the relationships of postwar Germans with their parents. It inspired a new genre in German literature. Ever since, such writings have contributed greatly to Germany's ongoing struggle to overcome its own past.

This autobiographical novel is Gauch's attempt to come to terms with his father, Hermann Gauch, a physician who had joined the National Socialists in the 1920s, wrote six books of "race research" as a member of the SS, and to his dying day remained an unrepentant Nazi. The story alternates between the images of the elder Gauch's death and burial and the author's memories of childhood and adolescence.

Unlike many of the father books, however, Traces of My Father is less a political attack than a personal journey. Gauch, though honest about his father's monstrous actions and ideas, does not shirk their shared emotional bond. The result is a poignant attempt by a son to relive his father's notorious life and in doing so free himself from the man's influence.
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Trails to Tiburón

The 1894 and 1895 Field Diaries of W J McGee

W. J. McGee; Transcribed by Hazel McFeely Fontana; Annotated and with an Introduction by Bernard L. Fontana

University of Arizona Press, 2000

When William John McGee set out from Washington, D.C., for the Sonoran Desert in 1894, he was inspired by a passion for adventure as much as a thirst for knowledge. McGee lived in an era when discovery was made through travel rather than study, and reputations were forged by going where no outsiders had gone before.

A self-taught scientist in the newly forming field of anthropology, McGee led two expeditions through southern Arizona and northern Sonora for the Bureau of American Ethnology. There he conducted ethnographic research among the Papagos (Tohono O'odham) and the Seris, and his subsequent publication The Seri Indians helped secure his place in the anthropological community.

McGee's complete journals of the expeditions, kept in small field notebooks and preserved in the Library of Congress, are published here for the first time. These journals contain detailed descriptions of the country and people McGee encountered and convey the adventure of traveling through wild and unfamiliar places—including a voyage to Isla Tiburón, or Shark Island, in the Gulf of California—and being plagued by foul weather, a shortage of supplies, and fear of attack from hostile Indians.

Trails to Tiburón features 57 historical photographs taken on the expedition, capturing the places McGee saw and the people he encountered. Fontana's notes to the diary provide useful botanical, geological, and ethnographic information, while his introduction places McGee and his field work in the context of late-nineteenth-century anthropology and science.

Trails to Tiburón reveals McGee's versatility as a field worker and shows his methods, often questioned today, to be the reasonable response of a man caught up in the intellectual fervor of his time. For anyone wanting to share in the spirit of adventure, these journals are a landmark in the annals of exploration.
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cover of Transmitting the Past: Historical and Cultural Perspectives on Broadcasting

Transmitting the Past

Historical and Cultural Perspectives on Broadcasting

Edited by J. Emmett Winn and Susan L. Brinson

University of Alabama Press, 2005

Original essays exploring important developments in radio and television broadcasting
 

The essays included in this collection represent some of the best cultural and historical research on broadcasting in the U. S. today. Each one concentrates on a particular event in broadcast history—beginning with Marconi’s introduction of wireless technology in 1899.

Michael Brown examines newspaper reporting in America of Marconi's belief in Martians, stories that effectively rendered Marconi inconsequential to the further development of radio. The widespread installation of radios in automobiles in the 1950s, Matthew Killmeier argues, paralleled the development of television and ubiquitous middle-class suburbia in America. Heather Hundley analyzes depictions of male and female promiscuity as presented in the sitcom Cheers at a time concurrent with media coverage of the AIDS crisis. Fritz Messere examines the Federal Radio Act of 1927 and the clash of competing ideas about what role radio should play in American life. Chad Dell recounts the high-brow programming strategy NBC adopted in 1945 to distinguish itself from other networks. And George Plasketes studies the critical reactions to Cop Rock, an ill-fated combination of police drama and musical, as an example of society's resistance to genre-mixing or departures from formulaic programming.

The result is a collection that represents some of the most recent and innovative scholarship, cultural and historical, on the intersections of broadcasting and American cultural, political, and economic life.
 

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cover of Trap with a Green Fence: Survival in Treblinka

Trap with a Green Fence

Survival in Treblinka

Richard Glazar

Northwestern University Press, 1995

Trap with a Green Fence is Richard Glazar's memoir of deportation, escape, and survival. In economical prose, Glazar weaves a description of Treblinka and its operations into his evocation of himself and his fellow prisoners as denizens of an underworld. Glazar gives us compelling images of these horrors in a tone that remains thoughtful but sober, affecting but simple.
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Trask

Don Berry

Oregon State University Press, 2004

Set in 1848 on the wild edge of the continent, in the rainforests and rugged headlands of the Oregon coast, Trask follows a mountain man's quest for new opportunities and new land to settle. Elbridge Trask is a restless man, a gambler with God, nature, and life itself. Yearning for change, he sets out with Wakila, a young Clatsop Indian, and Charley Kehwa, a tamanawis man or spiritual leader of the tribe, on an extraordinary journey of discovery.

Trask is at once a gripping tale of adventure and a portrayal of one man's return to the naked simplicity of life. Inspired by his belief in the transcendent power of nature, his fascination with Eastern philosophy, and the lives of historical men and women, Don Berry created a story that is strongly imagined and powerfully rendered-a landmark work. This new edition of Berry's celebrated first novel includes an introduction by Jeff Baker, book critic for The Oregonian.
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Treasures of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library

Edited by Glenna R. Schroeder-Lein

Southern Illinois University Press, 2014

Illinois State Historical Society Superior Achievement Award 2015

The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, Illinois, houses a trove of invaluable historical resources concerning all aspects of the Prairie State’s past. Treasures of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library commemorates the institution’s 125-year history, as well as its contributions to scholarship and education by highlighting a selection of eighty-five treasures from among more than twelve million items in the library’s collections.

After opening with a historical overview and extensive chronology of the Library, the volume organizes the treasures by various topics, including items that illustrate various locations and materials relating to business, the mid-nineteenth century and the Civil War, World Wars I and II, the oldest items, unusual treasures, ethnicity, and art. From the Gettysburg Address, Abraham and Mary Lincoln’s letters, and Governor Dan Walker’s boots to a Deering Harvester Company catalog, WPA publications, and an Adlai Stevenson I campaign hat, each entry includes a thorough description of the item, one or more images, and a discussion of its history and how the library acquired it, if known. Other treasures include the Thomas Yates General Store daybook, Dubin Pullman car materials, Civil War newspapers, a Lincoln coffin photograph, the Mary Lincoln insanity verdict, the Directory of Sangamon County’s Colored Citizens, andLincoln’s stovepipe hat.

To highlight the academic importance of the Library, nineteen researchers share how study in the Library’s collections proved essential to their projects. Although these treasures only scrape the surface of the vast holdings of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, together they epitomize the rich, varied, and sometimes quirky resources available to both serious scholars and curious tourists alike at this valuable cultural institution.

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cover of Troubadour on the Road to Gold: William B. Lorton's 1849 Journal to California

Troubadour on the Road to Gold

William B. Lorton's 1849 Journal to California

Edited by LeRoy Johnson and Jean Johnson, Foreword by Richard Saunders

University of Utah Press, 2020

During the California Gold Rush, many of the miners and merchants who hoped to strike it rich in California left behind letters and journals that provide valuable insights into one of the great migrations in American history. Of all the journals and diaries left behind, William B. Lorton's is perhaps the most informative and complete. Although known to historians for decades, Lorton’s journal has never been published. In this volume, LeRoy and Jean Johnson bring Lorton’s writings to life with meticulous research and commentary that broadens the context of his narrative.

Lorton’s work is revealing and entertaining. It captures glimpses of a growing Salt Lake City, the hardships of Death Valley, and the extraordinary and mundane aspects of daily life on the road to gold. With resilience and a droll sense of humor, Lorton shares accounts 
of life-threatening stampedes, dangerous hailstorms, mysteriously moving rocks, and slithering sidewinders. The inclusion of images, maps, and the editors’ detailed notes make this a volume that will entertain and inform.
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cover of Troubled Times: The Boston Courthouse Bombing of 1976

Troubled Times

The Boston Courthouse Bombing of 1976

Kevin Galvin

Brandeis University Press, 2026

Interweaves the stories of a revolutionary and a bombing victim to explore the roots and unintended consequences of political violence.

1976. The Vietnam War had ended, but radical political groups still operated clandestinely throughout the United States. Nowhere was the threat of civil unrest greater than in Boston. Racial tensions had been building since a federal judge ordered the desegregation of the Boston Public Schools, and civic leaders were counting on the pageantry of the nation’s Bicentennial to boost both tourism and investment. In April, the Sam Melville-Jonathan Jackson Unit, prison reformers schooled in Marxism and angered by US interventions abroad, bombed the Suffolk County Courthouse, injuring twenty-two people. The site of the blast marked the spot where the lives of two men intersected: a mill town kid who’d been radicalized in Vietnam and prison, and an immigrant waiting in line because he needed to renew a cab license.

Fifty years after the bombing shook the city, Troubled Times tells the story of lives changed by political violence at a time when the American experiment is again in crisis.

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Turning Archival

The Life of the Historical in Queer Studies

Daniel Marshall and Zeb Tortorici, editors

Duke University Press, 2022

The contributors to Turning Archival trace the rise of “the archive” as an object of historical desire and study within queer studies and examine how it fosters historical imagination and knowledge. Highlighting the growing significance of the archival to LGBTQ scholarship, politics, and everyday life, they draw upon accounts of queer archival encounters in institutional, grassroots, and everyday repositories of historical memory. The contributors examine such topics as the everyday life of marginalized queer immigrants in New York City as an archive; secondhand vinyl record collecting and punk bootlegs; the self-archiving practices of grassroots lesbians; and the decolonial potential of absences and gaps in the colonial archives through the life of a suspected hermaphrodite in colonial Guatemala. Engaging with archives from Africa to the Americas to the Arctic, this volume illuminates the allure of the archive, reflects on that which resists archival capture, and outlines the stakes of queer and trans lives in the archival turn.

Contributors. Anjali Arondekar, Kate Clark, Ann Cvetkovich, Carolyn Dinshaw, Kate Eichhorn, Javier Fernández-Galeano, Emmett Harsin Drager, Elliot James, Marget Long, Martin F. Manalansan IV, Daniel Marshall, María Elena Martínez, Joan Nestle, Iván Ramos, David Serlin, Zeb Tortorici
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cover of Two-Buck Chuck & The Marlboro Man: The New Old West

Two-Buck Chuck & The Marlboro Man

The New Old West

Frank Bergon

University of Nevada Press, 2019

Frank Bergon’s astonishing portrayals of people in California’s San Joaquin Valley reveal a country where the culture of a vanishing West lives on in many twenty-first-century Westerners, despite the radical technological transformations around them. All are immigrants, migrants, their children, or their grandchildren whose lives intertwine with the author’s, including several races and ethnicities: Chicanos, Mexicans, African Americans, Italians, Asians, Native Americans, Scots-Irish descendants of Steinbeck’s Okies, and Basques of the author’s own heritage.

Bergon presents a powerful array of rural and small-town Westerners who often see themselves as part of a region and a way of life most Americans aren’t aware of or don’t understand, their voices unheard, their stories untold. In these essays, Westerners from the diverse heritage of the San Joaquin Valley include California’s legendary Fred Franzia, the maker of the world’s best-selling Charles Shaw wines dubbed “Two-Buck Chuck,” and Darrell Winfield, a Dust Bowl migrant and lifelong working cowboy who for more than thirty years reigned as the iconic Marlboro Man. Their voices help us understand the complexities of today’s rural West, where Old West values intersect with New West realities. This is the West (and America today)—a region in conflict with itself.
 
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cover of Two-Moon Journey: The Potawatomi Trail of Death

Two-Moon Journey

The Potawatomi Trail of Death

Peggy King Anderson

Indiana Historical Society Press, 2018

Two Moon Journey tells the story of a young Potawatomi Indian named Simu-quah and her family and friends who were forced from their village at Twin Lakes, near Rochester, Indiana, where they had lived for generations, to beyond the Mississippi River in Kansas. Historically the journey is known as the Potawatomi Trail of Death. Like the real Potawatomi, Simu-quah would live forever with the vision of her home and the rest of the Twin Lakes village being burnt to the ground by the soldiers as she took her first steps to a distant and frightening westward land. She experiences the heat and exhaustion of endless days of walking; helps nurse sick children and the elderly in a covered wagon that was ill-smelling, hot, and airless; sleeps beside strange streams and caves—and turns from hating the soldiers to seeing them as people. In Kansas, as she planted corn seeds she had saved from her Indiana home, she turns away from the bitterness of removal and finds forgiveness, the first step in the journey of her new life in Kansas.
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