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5159 books match the query 'Biography' and 28 start with u
UNDER THE FLAG OF THE NATION
DIARIES AND LETTERS OF OWEN JOHNSTON HOPKINS, A YANKEE VOLUNTEER IN THE CIVIL WAROwen Johnston Hopkins
The Ohio State University Press, 1998
Owen Hopkins was a young man brought to maturity by the agony of war, but in spite of the horror of battle and the tedium of life in camp, he maintained a lively sense of humor and a constant devotion to the ideals for which he fought. The Civil War in these pages is a savage, vindictive conflict fought with canister, "minnie balls," grapeshot, the Enfield rifle, and the bayonet. Only seventeen when he enlisted in 1861, Hopkins was a foot soldier and a witness to the action that took place on the field of battle.
A vital part of Hopkins's life in the army was his correspondence with Julia Allison, who lived in his hometown of Bellefontaine. They began writing each other in 1863, and their friendship deepened into love. Each was a fervent patriot, and their shared devotion to their country was a significant fact of their relationship. They were married in 1865.
An epilogue tells what happened to Hopkins after June of 1865: his career, his family, and his death in 1902. Originally published in1961, this work is now available for the first time in paperback.
Ubuntu
George M. Houser and the Struggle for Peace and Freedom on Two ContinentsSheila D. Collins
Ohio University Press, 2020
This remarkable biography features a white American pacifist minister whose tireless work for justice and human rights helped reshape Black civil rights in the U.S. and Africa.
George M. Houser (1916–2015) was one of the most important civil rights and antiwar activists of the twentieth century. A conscientious objector during World War II, in 1942 Houser cofounded and led the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), whose embrace of nonviolent protest strategies and tactics characterized the modern American Civil Rights Movement. Beginning in the 1950s, Houser played a critical role in pan-Africanist anticolonial movements, and his more than thirty-year dedication to the cause of human rights and self-determination helped prepare the ground for the toppling of the South African apartheid regime.
Throughout his life, Houser shunned publicity, preferring to let his actions speak his faith. Sheila Collins’s well-researched biography recounts the events that informed Houser’s life of activism—from his childhood experiences as the son of missionaries in the Philippines to his early grounding in the Social Gospel and the teachings of Mohandas Gandhi. In light of the corruption the U.S. and the world face today, Houser’s story of faith and decisive action for human rights and social justice is one for our time.
Ukrainian Bishop, American Church
Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak
Catholic University of America Press, 2018
Ulysses S. Grant
A Photographic HistoryJames Bultema, with a Foreword by Frank J. Willilams
Southern Illinois University Press, 2022
As Grant battled relentlessly down the Tennessee River and across Tennessee, defending Shiloh, he was followed by an enterprising group of studio photographers hoping to profit from the public’s demand for images of the rising general from the West. They never stopped because Grant never stopped. Thus far, 307 distinct photographs have been found of Ulysses S. Grant, revealing him to be the most photographed American of the nineteenth century.
Readers of Ulysses S. Grant: A Photographic History travel alongside Grant through the Civil War and his two terms as president, on his unusual two-year journey around the world, and to his final days on Mount McGregor. The sheer volume of exposure shows the toll of duty, war, and command. From every angle, this collection captures Grant’s regard for soldier and family, his disregard of uniform, and his disheveled appearance that reflected his resilience. The reader will look into the eyes of a man who saw the worst and labored for the best.
This curated volume opens the largest collection of Grant photos to the public for the first time. Excerpts from Grant’s personal writings divulge his candid thoughts about the people he posed with and the situations he faced around the time the photographs were taken. An extraordinary addition to Grant scholarship, Ulysses S. Grant: A Photographic History will be the photographic reference work on Grant for decades to come as the simple man from Ohio continues to astonish the world.
Unbecoming
Eric Michaels
Duke University Press, 1997
Unbelievable Happiness and Final Sorrow
The Hemingway-Pfeiffer MarriageRuth A. Hawkins
University of Arkansas Press, 2012
Undaunted Women of Nanking
The Wartime Diaries of Minnie Vautrin and Tsen Shui-fangEdited and Translated by Hua-ling Hu and Zhang Lian-hong
Southern Illinois University Press, 2010
One of the Chinese American Librarians Association’s Ten Best Books of 2010
During the infamous “Rape of Nanking,” a brutal military occupation of Nanking, China, that began on December 13, 1937, it is estimated that Japanese soldiers killed between 200,000 and 300,000 Chinese and raped between 20,000 and 80,000 women. To shelter civilian refugees, a group of Westerners established a Nanking Safety Zone. Among these humanitarians was Minnie Vautrin, an American missionary and acting president of Ginling College. She and Tsen Shui-fang, her Chinese assistant and a trained nurse, turned the college into a refugee camp, which protected more than 10,000 women and children during the height of the ordeal. The Undaunted Women of Nanking juxtaposes day-by-day the exhausted and terrified women’s wartime diaries, providing vital eyewitness accounts of the Rape of Nanking and a unique focus on the Ginling refugee camp and the sufferings of women and children. Vautrin's diary reveals the humanity and courage of a female missionary in a time of terror. Tsen Shui-fang’s diary, never before published in English and translated here for the first time, is the only known daily account by a Chinese national written during the crisis and not retrospectively. As such, it records a unique perspective: that of a woman grappling with feelings of anger, sorrow, and compassion as she witnesses the atrocities being committed in her war-torn country.
Editors Hua-ling Hu and Zhang Lian-hong have added many informative annotations to the diary entries from sources including the proceedings of the Tokyo War Crimes Trial of 1946, Vautrin’s correspondence, John Rabe’s diary, and other historical documents. Also included are biographical sketches of the two women, a note on the diaries, and information about the aftermath of the tragedy, as well as maps and photos—some of which appear in print in this book for the first time.
Under the Devil's Thumb
David Gessner
University of Arizona Press, 1999
In the West Gessner began to rewrite his life. Under the Devil's Thumb is a story of rugged determination and sweat, as well as humor, adventure and hope. In and around his new hometown of Boulder, Colorado, Gessner hiked hard and ran alongside flooded creeks. He found that the West was a place of stories—stories that grow out of the ground, flow out of the dirt, work their way through one's limbs, and drive people to push their physical limits. Hiking up scree slopes toward the Devil's Thumb, a massive outcrop of orange rock that attracts climbers, hikers, and contemplaters, Gessner reflects on the illness he has so recently survived. He pushes his physical limits, hoping to outrun death, to outrun dread. He finds momentary transcendence in the joys and self-inflicted pain of mountain biking. "Nothing but the hardest ride has the power to flush out worry, mind clutter, and dread." In tranquil moments he seeks a chance to recover an animal self that is strong and powerful enough to conquer mountains, but also still and quiet enough to see things human beings ignore.
In the mountain West, Gessner finds what Wallace Stegner called "the geography of hope." He finds within himself an interior landscape that is healthy and strong. Combining memoir, nature writing, and travel writing, Under the Devil's Thumb is one man's journey deep into a place of healing.
Under the Sun
A Black Journalist's JourneyHarold Jackson
University of Alabama Press, 2025
A determined journalist’s account of rising to Pulitzer Prize–winning heights
Under the Sun: A Black Journalist’s Journey is Harold Jackson’s powerful memoir that chronicles his path from a Birmingham, Alabama, housing project in the 1950s and ’60s to becoming a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist. Growing up in the segregated South, Jackson didn’t see a writing career as feasible, especially with the financial struggles his family faced after his father’s death. However, his freshman English teacher’s encouragement set him on a course that would change his life.
Jackson’s journey began in high school, where he became one of the first Black students in the University of Alabama’s summer journalism workshop. It was there that he discovered his unique voice as a writer, setting the stage for a remarkable forty-five-year career as a newspaper writer and editor. Despite the pervasive racial prejudices of the time, Jackson learned to navigate the complexities of being Black in a predominantly white profession. He reflects on the duality of living as a Black person in America, a concept W. E. B. Du Bois described as “double consciousness,” and the ways journalism allowed Jackson to connect with people from all walks of life.
Through his work at prominent news venues such as the Birmingham Post-Herald, United Press International, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Birmingham News, the Baltimore Sun, and the Houston Chronicle, Jackson’s story is not just one of professional success but also of personal growth and understanding. Under the Sun is a testament to his resilience, his ability to see past racial barriers, and his unwavering commitment to giving a voice to those who need it most.
Undercurrents
From Oceanographer to University PresidentJohn V. Byrne
Oregon State University Press, 2018
As president of OSU, John Byrne used the lessons learned in industry and government to guide the university through a period of turbulence caused by severe state budget restrictions. During this period of economic contraction, OSU continued under Byrne’s leadership to grow in programs, facilities, and external funding. Byrne was one of the first to introduce Total Quality Management techniques to higher education. He emphasized the importance of international education and was a supporter of significant academic reform in higher education.
While focusing on his professional career, Byrne’s memoir also shares personal stories of a childhood and youth shaped by the Great Depression and World War II. Undercurrents demonstrates on every page the curiosity, intellect, and humanity that made John Byrne successful as a scientist, educator, and administrator. Anyone pursuing a career in science or academia, and anyone interested in the history and legacy of land grant universities will welcome this richly detailed and warmly written account of Byrne’s career.
Undertones of War
Edmund Blunden
University of Chicago Press, 2007
In Undertones of War, one of the finest autobiographies to come out of World War I, the acclaimed poet Edmund Blunden records his devastating experiences in combat. After enlisting at the age of twenty, he took part in the disastrous battles at the Somme, Ypres, and Passchendaele, describing them as “murder, not only to the troops but to their singing faiths and hopes.”
All the horrors of trench warfare, all the absurdity and feeble attempts to make sense of the fighting, all the strangeness of observing war as a writer—of being simultaneously soldier and poet—pervade Blunden’s memoir. In steely-eyed prose as richly allusive as any poetry, he tells of the endurance and despair found among the men of his battalion, including the harrowing acts of bravery that won him the Military Cross.
Now back in print for American readers, the volume includes a selection of Blunden’s war poems that unflinchingly juxtapose death in the trenches with the beauty of Flanders’s fields. Undertones of War deserves a place on anyone’s bookshelf between Siegfried Sassoon’s poetry and Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That.
Undocumented Motherhood
Conversations on Love, Trauma, and Border CrossingElizabeth Farfán-Santos
University of Texas Press, 2022
2023 SANA Book Award, Society for the Anthropology of North America
2023 Honorable Mention, Outstanding Book Award NACCS Tejas Foco Award for Non-Fiction, National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies
2022 Nonfiction Discovery Prize, Writers' League of Texas
An intimate portrayal of the hardships faced by an undocumented family navigating the medical and educational systems in the United States.
Claudia Garcia crossed the border because her toddler, Natalia, could not hear. Leaving behind everything she knew in Mexico, Claudia recounts the terror of migrating alone with her toddler and the incredible challenges she faced advocating for her daughter’s health in the United States. When she arrived in Texas, Claudia discovered that being undocumented would mean more than just an immigration status—it would be a way of living, of mothering, and of being discarded by even those institutions we count on to care.
Elizabeth Farfán-Santos spent five years with Claudia. As she listened to Claudia’s experiences, she recalled her own mother’s story, another life molded by migration, the US-Mexico border, and the quest for a healthy future on either side. Witnessing Claudia’s struggles with doctors and teachers, we see how the education and medical systems enforce undocumented status and perpetuate disability. At one point, in the midst of advocating for her daughter, Claudia suddenly finds herself struck by debilitating pain. Claudia is lifted up by her comadres, sent to the doctor, and reminded why she must care for herself.
A braided narrative that speaks to the power of stories for creating connection, this book reveals what remains undocumented in the motherhood of Mexican women who find themselves making impossible decisions and multiple sacrifices as they build a future for their families.
Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives
Women in Science, 1789-1979Edited by Pnina Abir-Am and Dorinda Outram
Rutgers University Press, 1987
An international group of historians of science discuss a wide range of European and American women scientists--from early nineteenth-century English botanists to Marie Curie to the twentieth-century theoretical biologist, Dorothy Wrinch.
Unheard Witness
The Life and Death of Kathy Leissner WhitmanJo Scott-Coe
University of Texas Press, 2023
2025 San Antonio Conservation Society Publication Award
Unheard Witness foregrounds a young woman’s experience of domestic abuse, resistance, and survival before the mass shooting at the University of Texas at Austin in 1966.
In 1966, Kathy Leissner Whitman was a twenty-three-year-old teacher dreaming of a better future. She was an avid writer of letters, composing hundreds in the years before she was stabbed to death by her husband, Charles Whitman, who went on to commit a mass shooting from the tower at the University of Texas at Austin. Kathy’s writing provides a rare glimpse of how one woman described, and sought to change, her short life with a coercive, controlling, and violent partner.
Unheard Witness provides a portrait of Kathy’s life, doing so at a time when Americans are slowly grasping the link between domestic abuse and mass shootings. Public violence often follows violence in the home, yet such private crimes continue to be treated separately and even erased in the public imagination. Jo Scott-Coe shows how Kathy's letters go against the grain of the official history, which ignored Kathy’s perspective. With its nuanced understanding of abuse and survival, Unheard Witness is an intimate, real-time account of trust and vulnerability—in its own way, a prologue to our age of atrocities.
Universal Tonality
The Life and Music of William ParkerCisco Bradley
Duke University Press, 2021
Unloose My Heart
A Personal Reckoning with the Twisted Roots of My Southern Family TreeMarcia Edwina Herman-Giddens
University of Alabama Press, 2023
A deeply personal memoir that unearths a family history of racism, slaveholding, and trauma as well as love and sparks of delight.
Marcia Herman’s family moved to Birmingham in 1946, when she was five years old, and settled in the steel-making city dense with smog and a rigid apartheid system. Marcia, a shy only child, struggled to fit in and understand this world, shadowed as it was by her mother’s proud antebellum heritage. In 1966, weary of Alabama’s toxic culture, Marcia and her young family left Birmingham and built a life in North Carolina.
Later in life, Herman-Giddens resumed a search to find out what she did not know about her family history. Unloose My Heart interweaves the story of her youth and coming of age in Birmingham during the Civil Rights Movement together with this quest to understand exactly who and what her maternal ancestors were and her obligations as a white woman within a broader sense of American family.
More than a memoir set against the backdrop of Jim Crow and the civil rights struggle, this is the work of a woman of conscience writing in the twenty-first century. Haunted by the past, Unloose My Heart is a journey of exploration and discovery, full of angst, sorrow, and yearning. Unearthing her forebears’ centuries-long embrace of plantation slavery, Herman-Giddens dug deeply to parse the arrogance and cruelty necessary to be a slaveholder and the trauma and fear that ripple out in its wake. All this forced her to scrutinize the impact of this legacy in her life, as well as her debt to the enslaved people who suffered and were exploited at her ancestors’ hands. But she also discovers lost connections, new cousins and friends, unexpected joys, and, eventually, a measure of peace in the process. With heartbreak, moments of grace, and an enduring sense of love, Unloose My Heart shines a light in the darkness and provides a model for a heartfelt reckoning with American history.
Unnatural Selection
A Memoir of Adoption and WildernessAndrea Ross
CavanKerry Press, 2021
Unpacking My Father's Bookstore
Laurence Roth
Rutgers University Press, 2025
2026 Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY) Silver Medal in the West – Pacific Non-Fiction category
Unpacking My Father’s Bookstore brings to life the history of J. Roth / Bookseller of Fine & Scholarly Judaica, which was a microcosm of the Los Angeles Jewish community from 1966 to 1994 and one of the premier Jewish bookstores in the United States. Blending critical analysis with a personal account of growing up in his father’s bookstore, and connecting both to larger forces that helped shape Jewish and American book retailing in the twentieth-century, Laurence Roth crafts a richly felt narrative about his family’s Jewish experience in America. It is a reminder, too, that while most independent bookstores like J. Roth Bookseller disappear from history, these retailers often had outsized effects on their communities. Breaking with conventional modes of scholarship, Unpacking My Father’s Bookstore tells a unique and troubled story that rarely gets told, one that is both personal and analytical, theoretical but rooted in the everyday.
Unraveling Time
Thirty Years of Ethnography in Cuenca, EcuadorAnn Miles
University of Texas Press, 2022
Ann Miles has been chronicling life in the Ecuadorian city of Cuenca for more than thirty years. In that time, she has witnessed change after change. A large regional capital where modern trains whisk residents past historic plazas, Cuenca has invited in the world and watched as its own citizens risk undocumented migration abroad. Families have arrived from rural towns only to then be displaced from the gentrifying city center. Over time, children have been educated, streetlights have made neighborhoods safer, and remittances from overseas have helped build new homes and sometimes torn people apart. Roads now connect people who once were far away, and talking or texting on cell phones has replaced hanging out at the corner store.
Unraveling Time traces the enduring consequences of political and social movements, transnational migration, and economic development in Cuenca. Miles reckons with details that often escape less committed observers, suggesting that we learn a good deal more when we look back on whole lives. Practicing what she calls an ethnography of accrual, Miles takes a long view, where decades of seemingly disparate experiences coalesce into cultural transformation. Her approach not only reveals what change has meant in a major Latin American city but also serves as a reflection on ethnography itself.
Unsettled
The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern EnglandPatricia Fumerton
University of Chicago Press, 2006
Migrants made up a growing class of workers in late sixteenth- and seventeenth- century England. In fact, by 1650, half of England’s rural population consisted of homeless and itinerant laborers. Unsettled is an ambitious attempt to reconstruct the everyday lives of these dispossessed people. Patricia Fumerton offers an expansive portrait of unsettledness in early modern England that includes the homeless and housed alike.
Fumerton begins by building on recent studies of vagrancy, poverty, and servants, placing all in the light of a new domestic economy of mobility. She then looks at representations of the vagrant in a variety of pamphlets and literature of the period. Since seamen were a particularly large and prominent class of mobile wage-laborers in the seventeenth century, Fumerton turns to seamen generally and to an individual poor seaman as a case study of the unsettled subject: Edward Barlow (b. 1642) provides a rare opportunity to see how the laboring poor fashioned themselves, for he authored a journal of over 225,000 words and 147 pages of drawings. Barlow’s journal, studied extensively here for the first time, vividly charts what he himself termed his “unsettled mind” and the perpetual anxieties of England’s working and wayfaring poor. Ultimately, Fumerton explores representations of seamen as unsettled in the broadside ballads of Barlow’s time.
Unspeakable
A Life beyond Sexual MoralityRachel Hope Cleves
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Unspeakable approaches Douglas as neither monster nor literary hero, but as a man who participated in an exploitative sexual subculture that was tolerated in ways we may find hard to understand. Using letters, diaries, memoirs, police records, novels, and photographs—including sources by the children Douglas encountered—Cleves identifies the cultural practices that structured pedophilic behaviors in England, Italy, and other places Douglas favored. Her book delineates how approaches to adult-child sex have changed over time and offers insight into how society can confront similar scandals today, celebrity and otherwise.
Until Antietam
The Life and Letters of Major General Israel B. Richardson, U.S. ArmyJack C. Mason
Southern Illinois University Press, 2009
While researching this book, Jack C. Mason made the kind of discovery that historians dream of. He found more than one hundred unpublished and unknown letters from Union general Israel B. Richardson to his family, written from his time as a West Point cadet until the day before his fatal wounding at the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest day in American history. Using these freshly uncovered primary sources as well as extensive research in secondary materials, Mason has written the first-ever biography of Israel Bush Richardson.
Mason traces Richardson’s growth as a soldier through his experiences and the guidance of his superiors, and then as a leader whose style reflected the actions of the former commanders he respected. Though he was a disciplinarian, Richardson took a relaxed attitude toward military rules, earning him the affection of his men. Unfortunately, his military career was cut short just as high-ranking officials began to recognize his aggressive leadership. He was mortally wounded while leading his men at Antietam and died on November 3, 1862.
Until Antietam brings to life a talented and fearless Civil War infantry leader. Richardson’s story, placed within the context of nineteenth-century warfare, exemplifies how one soldier’s life influenced his commanders, his men, and the army as a whole.
Winner of the Army Historical Foundation 2009 Distinguished Book Award
Unvarnished Arkansas
The Naked Truth about Nine Famous ArkansansSteven Teske
Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, 2012
Unveiled Voices, Unvarnished Memories
The Cromwell Family in Slavery and Segregation, 1692-1972Adelaide M. Cromwell
University of Missouri Press, 2006
Unveiling the Prophet
The Misadventures of a Reluctant DebutanteLucy Ferriss
University of Missouri Press, 2005
Up Against the Wall
Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther PartyCurtis J. Austin
University of Arkansas Press, 2008
Up the Capitol Steps
A Woman's March to the GovernorshipBarbara Roberts
Oregon State University Press, 2011
Ushering Civil Rights into Law
Judge Richard T. Rives and Desegregation in the Public SpherePat Arneson
University of Alabama Press, 2026
Illuminates the life and legacy of a federal jurist from Alabama, an unexpected but ardent defender of equal rights for all citizens under the law
Ushering Civil Rights into Law: Judge Richard T. Rives and Desegregation in the Public Sphere by Pat Arneson is a long-overdue exploration of one of the most consequential yet overlooked figures of the modern Civil Rights Movement. As debates over judicial philosophy and Civil Rights continue, Judge Richard T. Rives’s story serves as a powerful reminder of the judiciary’s role in shaping a more just society.
A native of Montgomery, Alabama, Judge Richard T. Rives served on the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit during the height of America’s battle over racial segregation. Once aligned with segregationist views, Rives underwent a profound evolution, emerging as a key legal architect of desegregation. His landmark ruling on behalf of the court in Browder v. Gayle ended segregation on Montgomery’s public buses and expanded the scope of Brown v. Board of Education beyond education. Rives’s decisions invalidated the legal underpinnings of Jim Crow laws and furthered equality in public education, voting rights, and jury selection. Writing for the court, Rives authored legal precedents that fundamentally reshaped the nation.
Through archival research, Arneson examines the cultural and political pressures Rives faced, the legal strategies he employed, and the lasting impact of his work. Constitutional rights remain a flashpoint in American discourse. Ushering Civil Rights into Law reveals how one judge’s principled stance helped define the legal landscape of modern Civil Rights and underscores the enduring significance of his legacy.