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883 books match the query 'Historical' and 4 start with v

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Victorine du Pont

Leonard C. Spitale

University of Delaware Press, 2023

Victorine Elizabeth du Pont, the first child of Eleuthère Irénée du Pont and his wife Sophie, was seven years old when her family emigrated to America, where her father established the humble beginnings of what would become a corporate giant. Through correspondence with friends and relatives from the ages of eight to sixty-eight, Victorine unwittingly chronicled the first sixty years of the du Pont saga in America. As she recovered from personal tragedy, she became first tutor of her siblings and relations. This biography makes the case that Victorine has had the broadest—and most enduring—influence within the entire du Pont family of any family member. The intellectual heir of her venerable grandfather, Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, although Victorine grew up in an age where women's opportunities were limited, her pioneering efforts in education, medicine, and religion transformed an entire millworkers’ community.

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Vita Nuova

A Novel

Bohumil Hrabal

Northwestern University Press, 2010

Vita Nuova is the second in a trilogy of memoirs written from the perspective of Bohumil Hrabal’s wife, Elis.ka, about their life in Prague from the 1950s to the 1970s, when Communist repression of artists was at its peak.

Hrabal’s inimitable humor, which in Elis.ka’s ruminations ranges from bawdy slapstick to cutting irony, is all the more penetrating for being directed at himself. Vita Nuova showcases Hrabal’s legendary bohemian intellectual life, particularly his relationship with Vladimír Boudník. Hrabal creates a shrewd, lively portrait of Eastern European intellectual life in the mid-twentieth century.

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Voices from the Gulag

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Northwestern University Press, 2010

After the publication in 1962 of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn began receiving, and would continue to receive throughout his life, testimonies from fellow survivors of the gulag. Originally selected by Solzhenitsyn, the memoirs in this volume are an important addition to the literature of the Soviet gulag. Written by men from a wide variety of occupations and social classes, the writing in Voices from the Gulag lends a voice to the many ordinary people—including a circus performer, a teenage boy, and a Red Army soldier—whom a brutal system attempted to erase from memory.

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