Richard James Oglesby is best known for introducing the rail-splitter image into Abraham Lincoln's successful presidential campaign of 1860, and in many ways his career ran parallel to Honest Abe's. This biography of the three-time governor of Illinois offers the first detailed view of a key figure in the great changes that swept Illinois and the ......
Winner of the Carr P. Collins Award and the Miss Ima Hogg Historical Achievement Award, Last Cavalier is the never-before-told story of the remarkable life and career of John A. Lomax, pioneering American folklorist, canny businessman, influential educator, and patriarch of an extended family of artists, performers, and scholars.
Brilliant and bedraggled, the picaresque Jewish philosopher Solomon Maimon was one of the great thinkers of the eighteenth century. Now the definitive English version of Maimon's remarkable Autobiography, the 1888 translation by J. Clark Murray, is available for the first time in paperback, enhanced with a new introduction by Jewish studies ......
Dating from her years as a philosophy student at the Sorbonne, this is the 1926-27 diary of the teenager who would become the famous French philosopher, author, and feminist, Simone de Beauvoir. Written years before her first meeting with Jean-Paul Sartre, these diaries reveal previously unknown details about her life and offer critical insights ......
Marianne Faithfull singer, dope addict and lover of Mick Jagger and other rich and famous people tells us her story, in a frank, revealing autobiography.
For as long as she can remember, Barbro Karlén has harboured terrible memories of a previous existence on earth as the Jewish girl Anne Frank, author of the famous Diary. Until recently, she had kept this knowledge private. Now, prompted by a series of events which culminated in a struggle for her survival, she is ready to tell her amazing ......
Supported by The Walter and May Reuther Memorial Fund Previously published by Basic Books as The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor''Management has no divine rights.''--Walter Reuther ''A splendid biography of America's most creative and commanding labor leader with an illuminating diagnosis of the ......
Alaska's Commercial Fishing Women Tell Their Lives
Why do women choose an occupation that has been ranked the most dangerous in the nation? What do women give up--and get in return--when they take on the tasks of fishermen? The Entangling Net explores these issues through the stories of twenty women who have chosen to work in this extremely risky, male-dominated profession.Leslie Leyland Fields ......
One of the most gifted athletes in the world, Babe Didrikson Zaharias dominated track and field, winning two Olympic gold medals in 1932. She went on to compete in baseball, bowling, basketball, tennis, and particularly in golf. The American public was smitten with her wit, frankness, and ''unladylike'' bravado. She became an American legend. The ......
This first full-length biography of the first published Asian North American fiction writer portrays both the woman and her times. The eldest daughter of a Chinese mother and British father, Edith Maude Eaton was born in England in 1865. Her family moved to Quebec, where she was removed from school at age ten to help support her parents and twelve ......
This intimate and provocative autobiography, first published in 1936, reveals the innermost thoughts of a great American poet. Edgar Lee Masters was a transitional figure in American literature with one foot planted in the nineteenth century and the other firmly placed on the path of what we now think of as the modern period. Masters expounds on ......
Hilda Satt Polacheck's family emigrated from Poland to Chicago in 1892, bringing their old-world Jewish traditions with them into the Industrial Age. Throughout her career as a writer and activist, Polacheck (1882-1967) never forgot the immigrant neighborhoods, the markets, and the scents and sounds of Chicago's West Side. Here, in charming and ......
Incidents of Interest, and Experiences in the Author's Life
Originally published in 1887, The Pioneer Preacher is a lively account of a Congregationalist minister's attempts to lead a sin-free existence on the American frontier. Sherlock Bristol (1815-1906) was a California gold miner, wagon train captain, Wisconsin farmer, Idaho rancher, Indian fighter, abolitionist, and Oberlin-trained clergyman. While ......
John L. Lewis (1880-1969), who ruled the United Mine Workers for four decades beginning in 1919, defied presidents, challenged Congress, and kept American political life in an uproar. Drawing upon previously untapped resources in the UMW archives and upon oral histories by major figures of the 1930s and 1940s, the authors have created a remarkable ......
Plain Folk depicts both the ordinary occupations and ethnic and racial diversity of America at the turn of the century. Katzman and Tuttle have drawn upon 75 brief autobiographies or ''lifelets'' of working-class Americans published between 1902 and 1906 in The Independent magazine. Among the seventeen life stories included here are those of a ......
This story is told in the words of a tragic figure in American history - a hook-nosed, hollow-cheeked old Sauk warrior who lived under four flags while the Mississippi Valley was being wrested from his people. The author is Black Hawk himself - once pursued by an army whose members included Captain Abraham Lincoln and Lieutenant Jefferson Davis. ......