Suggested Subject Headings:
United States - General
United States -- History
United States -- History -- 20th century
United States -- History -- 21st century
Suggested Call Number Ranges:
E151-E185.98
E600-E909
The bibliography of suggested biographies for class assignments related to this class is not exhaustive, but merely a sampling of suggested research in this discipline that meet the criteria of the assignment. Should you need further assistance, please see a librarian.
Reagan by
From master storyteller and New York Times bestselling historian H. W. Brands comes the definitive biography of a visionary and transformative president. In his magisterial new biography, H. W. Brands brilliantly establishes Ronald Reagan as one of the two great presidents of the twentieth century, a true peer to Franklin Roosevelt. Reagan conveys with sweep and vigor how the confident force of Reagan's personality and the unwavering nature of his beliefs enabled him to engineer a conservative revolution in American politics and play a crucial role in ending communism in the Soviet Union. Reagan shut down the age of liberalism, Brands shows, and ushered in the age of Reagan, whose defining principles are still powerfully felt today. Reagan follows young Ronald Reagan as his ambition for ever larger stages compelled him to leave behind small-town Illinois to become first a radio announcer and then that quintessential public figure of modern America, a movie star. When his acting career stalled, his reinvention as the voice of The General Electric Theater on television made him an unlikely spokesman for corporate America. Then began Reagan's improbable political ascension, starting in the 1960s, when he was first elected governor of California, and culminating in his election in 1980 as president of the United States. Employing archival sources not available to previous biographers and drawing on dozens of interviews with surviving members of Reagan's administration, Brands has crafted a richly detailed and fascinating narrative of the presidential years. He offers new insights into Reagan's remote management style and fractious West Wing staff, his deft handling of public sentiment to transform the tax code, and his deeply misunderstood relationship with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, on which nothing less than the fate of the world turned. Reagan is a storytelling triumph, an irresistible portrait of an underestimated politician whose pragmatic leadership and steadfast vision transformed the nation.
John F. Kennedy by
(PRINT) A modern portrait of the thirty-fifth president draws on a volume of newly released government archive material and the JFK library to offer insights into both his strengths and character flaws, offering new perspectives that ultimately contend that his virtues outweigh his shortcomings. 25,000 first printing.
Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream by
(PRINT) Doris Kearns Goodwin's classic life of Lyndon Johnson, who presided over the Great Society, the Vietnam War, and other defining moments the tumultuous 1960s, is a monument in political biography. From the moment the author, then a young woman from Harvard, first encountered President Johnson at a White House dance in the spring of 1967, she became fascinated by the man--his character, his enormous energy and drive, and his manner of wielding these gifts in an endless pursuit of power. As a member of his White House staff, she soon became his personal confidante, and in the years before his death he revealed himself to her as he did to no other. Widely praised and enormously popular,Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream is a work of biography like few others. With uncanny insight and a richly engrossing style, the author renders LBJ in all his vibrant, conflicted humanity.
The Wilderness Warrior by
In this groundbreaking epic biography, Douglas Brinkley draws on never-before-published materials to examine the life and achievements of our "naturalist president." By setting aside more than 230 million acres of wild America for posterity between 1901 and 1909, Theodore Roosevelt made conservation a universal endeavor. This crusade for the American wilderness was perhaps the greatest U.S. presidential initiative between the Civil War and World War I. Roosevelt's most important legacies led to the creation of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and passage of the Antiquities Act in 1906. His executive orders saved such treasures as Devils Tower, the Grand Canyon, and the Petrified Forest. Tracing the role that nature played in Roosevelt's storied career, Brinkley brilliantly analyzes the influence that the works of John James Audubon and Charles Darwin had on the young man who would become our twenty-sixth president. With descriptive flair, the author illuminates Roosevelt's bird watching in the Adirondacks, wildlife obsession in Yellowstone, hikes in the Blue Ridge Mountains, ranching in the Dakota Territory, hunting in the Big Horn Mountains, and outdoor romps through Idaho and Wyoming. He also profiles Roosevelt's incredible circle of naturalist friends, including the Catskills poet John Burroughs, Boone and Crockett Club cofounder George Bird Grinnell, forestry zealot Gifford Pinchot, buffalo breeder William Hornaday, Sierra Club founder John Muir, U.S. Biological Survey wizard C. Hart Merriam, Oregon Audubon Society founder William L. Finley, and pelican protector Paul Kroegel, among many others. He brings to life hilarious anecdotes of wild-pig hunting in Texas and badger saving in Kansas, wolf catching in Oklahoma and grouse flushing in Iowa. Even the story of the teddy bear gets its definitive treatment. Destined to become a classic, this extraordinary and timeless biography offers a penetrating and colorful look at Roosevelt's naturalist achievements, a legacy now more important than ever. Raising a Paul Revere?like alarm about American wildlife in peril--including buffalo, manatees, antelope, egrets, and elk--Roosevelt saved entire species from probable extinction. As we face the problems of global warming, overpopulation, and sustainable land management, this imposing leader's stout resolution to protect our environment is an inspiration and a contemporary call to arms for us all.
Colonel Roosevelt by
Of all our great presidents, Theodore Roosevelt is the only one whose greatness increased out of office. When he toured Europe in 1910 as plain "Colonel Roosevelt," he was hailed as the most famous man in the world. Crowned heads vied to put him up in their palaces. "If I see another king," he joked, "I think I shall bite him." Had TR won his historic "Bull Moose" campaign in 1912 (when he outpolled the sitting president, William Howard Taft), he might have averted World War I, so great was his international influence. Had he not died in 1919, at the early age of sixty, he would unquestionably have been reelected to a third term in the White House and completed the work he began in 1901 of establishing the United States as a model democracy, militarily strong and socially just. This biography by Edmund Morris, the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author of The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Rex, is itself the completion of a trilogy sure to stand as definitive. Packed with more adventure, variety, drama, humor, and tragedy than a big novel, yet documented down to the smallest fact, it recounts the last decade of perhaps the most amazing life in American history. What other president has written forty books, hunted lions, founded a third political party, survived an assassin's bullet, and explored an unknown river longer than the Rhine? Colonel Roosevelt begins with a prologue recounting what TR called his "journey into the Pleistocene"--a yearlong safari through East Africa, collecting specimens for the Smithsonian. Some readers will be repulsed by TR's bloodlust, which this book does not prettify, yet there can be no denying that the Colonel passionately loved and understood every living thing that came his way: The text is rich in quotations from his marvelous nature writing. Although TR intended to remain out of politics when he returned home in 1910, a fateful decision that spring drew him back into public life. By the end of the summer, in his famous "New Nationalism" speech, he was the guiding spirit of the Progressive movement, which inspired much of the social agenda of the future New Deal. (TR's fifth cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt acknowledged that debt, adding that the Colonel "was the greatest man I ever knew.") Then follows a detailed account of TR's reluctant yet almost successful campaign for the White House in 1912. But unlike other biographers, Edmund Morris does not treat TR mainly as a politician. This volume gives as much consideration to TR's literary achievements and epic expedition to Brazil in 1913-1914 as to his fatherhood of six astonishingly different children, his spiritual and aesthetic beliefs, and his eager embrace of other cultures--from Arab and Magyar to German and American Indian. It is impossible to read Colonel Roosevelt and not be awed by the man's universality. The Colonel himself remarked, "I have enjoyed life as much as any nine men I know." Morris does not hesitate, however, to show how pathologically TR turned upon those who inherited the power he craved--the hapless Taft, the adroit Woodrow Wilson. When Wilson declined to bring the United States into World War I in 1915 and 1916, the Colonel blasted him with some of the worst abuse ever uttered by a former chief executive. Yet even Wilson had to admit that behind the Rooseveltian will to rule lay a winning idealism and decency. "He is just like a big boy--there is a sweetness about him that you can't resist." That makes the story of TR's last year, when the "boy" in him died, all the sadder in the telling: the conclusion of a life of Aristotelian grandeur.
Truman by
The Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Harry S. Truman, whose presidency included momentous events from the atomic bombing of Japan to the outbreak of the Cold War and the Korean War, told by America's beloved and distinguished historian. The life of Harry S. Truman is one of the greatest of American stories, filled with vivid characters-Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Eleanor Roosevelt, Bess Wallace Truman, George Marshall, Joe McCarthy, and Dean Acheson-and dramatic events. In this riveting biography, acclaimed historian David McCullough not only captures the man-a more complex, informed, and determined man than ever before imagined-but also the turbulent times in which he rose, boldly, to meet unprecedented challenges. The last president to serve as a living link between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, Truman's story spans the raw world of the Missouri frontier, World War I, the powerful Pendergast machine of Kansas City, the legendary Whistle-Stop Campaign of 1948, and the decisions to drop the atomic bomb, confront Stalin at Potsdam, send troops to Korea, and fire General MacArthur. Drawing on newly discovered archival material and extensive interviews with Truman's own family, friends, and Washington colleagues, McCullough tells the deeply moving story of the seemingly ordinary "man from Missouri" who was perhaps the most courageous president in our history.
Jimmy Carter by
(PRINT) "He is known as the Great Peace Maker, a man whose humanitarian ideals prompt his diplomatic intervention in places like Haiti, North Korea, Bosnia, the Middle East. Whether negotiating a cease-fire in shell-shocked Sarajevo or building houses for the homeless in Appalachia, Jimmy Carter can be found at the helm of a vast array of humanitarian efforts. An annual nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize, he embodies the qualities that the American public mourns having lost in its politicians: integrity, honesty, ethics, and dedication." "Yet Jimmy Carter, thirty-ninth president of the United States, is curiously apolitical. Despite his two diligent battles for the governorship of Georgia (he succeeded in 1970) and his "coup d'etat" election to the presidency in 1976, his was always less a political agenda than a moral one. He saw the office as a vehicle for constructive change, propelled by firm and very Christian convictions about right and wrong." "To understand James Earl Carter, one must understand his upbringing, his faith, his unwavering beliefs. Peter Bourne traces Carter's dogma to its roots in Plains, Georgia, deep in the Baptist South, where the imbalanced society created by inherited wealth and segregation could not suppress the everyman farm worker who held dear the tenets of social justice and strove toward the highest goals. Tenacity and self-confidence would propel Carter from the Naval Academy to the governorship to the presidency. Along the way, he remained devoted to Rosalynn and his family, to his religion, and to the ideology that the state and government have a responsibility to create a better society. As Bourne reveals, there would be no need for Carter to "reinvent" himself after public office. James Earl Carter went on to build houses for Habitat for Humanity; to create the Carter Presidential Center to focus on international conflict resolution, the Global 2000 program to reduce hunger and disease in Africa, and the Atlanta Project to address the most intractable inner city problems, all out of devotion to his life-long convictions." "Jimmy Carter provides an insightful, intimate, and frank portrayal of the thirty-ninth president of the United States from a close friend and advisor of more than twenty-five years."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
The Man He Became by
Here, from James Tobin, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography, is the story of the greatest comeback in American political history, a saga long buried in half-truth, distortion and myth- Franklin Roosevelt's ten-year climb from paralysis to the White House. In 1921, at the age of thirty-nine, Roosevelt was the brightest young star in the Democratic Party. One day he was racing his children around their summer home. Two days later he could not stand up. Hopes of a quick recovery faded fast. "He's through," said allies and enemies alike. Even his family and close friends misjudged their man, as they and the nation would learn in time. With a painstaking reexamination of original documents, James Tobin uncovers the twisted chain of accidents that left FDR paralyzed; he reveals how polio recast Roosevelt's fateful partnership with his wife, Eleanor; and he shows that FDR's true victory was not over paralysis but over the ancient stigma attached to the crippled. Tobin also explodes the conventional wisdom of recent years-that FDR deceived the public about his condition. In fact, Roosevelt and his chief aide, Louis Howe, understood that only by displaying himself as a man who had come back from a knockout punch could FDR erase the perception that had followed him from childhood-that he was a pampered, too smooth pretty boy without the strength to lead the nation. As Tobin persuasively argues, FDR became president less in spite of polio than because of polio. The Man He Became affirms that true character emerges only in crisis and that in the shaping of this great American leader character was all.
Barack Obama by
(PRINT) From one of our preeminent journalists and modern historians comes the epic story of Barack Obama and the world that created him. In Barack Obama: The Story, David Maraniss has written a deeply reported generational biography teeming with fresh insights and revealing information, a masterly narrative drawn from hundreds of interviews, including with President Obama in the Oval Office, and a trove of letters, journals, diaries, and other documents. The book unfolds in the small towns of Kansas and the remote villages of western Kenya, following the personal struggles of Obama's white and black ancestors through the swirl of the twentieth century. It is a roots story on a global scale, a saga of constant movement, frustration and accomplishment, strong women and weak men, hopes lost and deferred, people leaving and being left. Disparate family threads converge in the climactic chapters as Obama reaches adulthood and travels from Honolulu to Los Angeles to New York to Chicago, trying to make sense of his past, establish his own identity, and prepare for his political future. Barack Obama: The Story chronicles as never before the forces that shaped the first black president of the United States and explains why he thinks and acts as he does. Much like the author's classic study of Bill Clinton, First in His Class, this promises to become a seminal book that will redefine a president.
First Son by
Offers a portrait of the two-time governor of Texas, George W. Bush, and describes his political family and presidential aspirations.
The Life of Herbert Hoover by
Provocative, brilliantly written, and exhaustively researched, this book is the first definitive study of the presidency of one of America's most maligned and poorly understood Chief Executives. Born in a Quaker hamlet in Iowa and orphaned at nine, Herbert Hoover had already risen to wealth and global fame as an international mining engineer, the savior of Belgium during the Great War, Woodrow Wilson's Food Administrator, and perhaps the greatest Secretary of Commerce in American history by the time he assumed the presidency. Modest, shy, humble, with a subtle sense of humor, he lacked the self-promotional style of professional politicians and eschewed political invective. While in the cabinet he had helped to engineer the prosperity of the 1920s and vainly warned of an economy overheated by speculation, but the ensuing Wall Street Crash of 1929 would come to overwhelmingly define his legacy. Combining public and private resources, he made history as the first president to pit government action against the economic cycle, creating a precedent that would be employed by his successor and all other future presidents. His economic measures mitigated the effects of the Great Depression, yet they failed to end it. In foreign policy he sponsored naval disarmament and made world peace his priority. Unfairly painted as a miserly misanthrope and the architect of the stock market crash, he lost the 1932 campaign to Franklin D. Roosevelt by a slightly larger margin than he had defeated Al Smith in 1928. Glen Jeansonne's study sweeps away the cobwebs of neglect from Hoover's presidency. His lively prose humanizes Hoover for us and allows a greater understanding of our thirty-first president, one that is more valuable now than ever before.
Grant Wood by
He claimed to be “the plainest kind of fellow you can find. There isn’t a single thing I’ve done, or experienced,” said Grant Wood, “that’s been even the least bit exciting.” Wood was one of America’s most famous regionalist painters; to love his work was the equivalent of loving America itself. In his time, he was an “almost mythical figure,” recognized most supremely for his hard-boiled farm scene, American Gothic, a painting that has come to reflect the essence of America’s traditional values—a simple, decent, homespun tribute to our lost agrarian age. In this major new biography of America’s most acclaimed, and misunderstood, regionalist painter, Grant Wood is revealed to have been anything but plain, or simple . . . R. Tripp Evans reveals the true complexity of the man and the image Wood so carefully constructed of himself. Grant Wood called himself a farmer-painter but farming held little interest for him. He appeared to be a self-taught painter with his scenes of farmlands, farm workers, and folklore but he was classically trained, a sophisticated artist who had studied the Old Masters and Flemish art as well as impressionism. He lived a bohemian life and painted in Paris and Munich in the 1920s, fleeing what H. L. Mencken referred to as “the booboisie” of small-town America. We see Wood as an artist haunted and inspired by the images of childhood; by the complex relationship with his father (stern, pious, the “manliest of men”); with his sister and his beloved mother (Wood shared his studio and sleeping quarters with his mother until her death at seventy-seven; he was forty-four). We see Wood’s homosexuality and how his studied masculinity was a ruse that shaped his work. Here is Wood’s life and work explored more deeply and insightfully than ever before. Drawing on letters, the artist’s unfinished autobiography, his sister’s writings, and many never-before-seen documents, Evans’s book is a dimensional portrait of a deeply complicated artist who became a “National Symbol.” It is as well a portrait of the American art scene at a time when America’s Calvinistic spirit and provincialism saw Europe as decadent and artists were divided between red-blooded patriotic men and “hothouse aesthetes.” Thomas Hart Benton said of Grant Wood: “When this new America looks back for landmarks to help gauge its forward footsteps, it will find a monument standing up in the midst of the wreckage . . . This monument will be made out of Grant Wood’s works.”
Andrew Wyeth by
An insightful and essential new survey of Wyeth's entire career, situating the milestones of his art within the trajectory of 20th-century American life This major retrospective catalogue explores the impact of time and place on the work of beloved American painter Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009). While previous publications have mainly analyzed Wyeth's work thematically, this publication places him fully in the context of the long 20th century, tracing his creative development from World War I through the new millennium. Published to coincide with the centenary of Wyeth's birth, the book looks at four major chronological periods in the artist's career: Wyeth as a product of the interwar years, when he started to form his own "war memories" through military props and documentary photography he discovered in his father's art studio; the change from his "theatrical" pictures of the 1940s to his own visceral responses to the landscape around Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and his family's home in Mai≠ his sudden turn, in 1968, into the realm of erotic art, including a completely new assessment of Wyeth's "Helga pictures"--a series of secret, nude depictions of his neighbor Helga Testorf--within his career as a who≤ and his late, self-reflective works, which includes the discussion of his previously unknown painting entitled Goodbye, now believed to be Wyeth's last work.
Norman Rockwell by
Norman Rockwell’s tremendously successful, prolific career as a painter and illustrator has rendered him a twentieth-century American icon. However, the very popularity and accessibility of his idealized, nostalgic depictions of middleclass life have caused him to be considered not a serious artist but a “mere illustrator”–a disparagement only reinforced by the hundreds of memorable covers he drew for The Sunday Evening Post. Symptomatic of critics’ neglect is the fact that Rockwell has never before been the subject of a serious critical biography. Based on private family archives and interviews and publishes to coincide with a major two-year travelling retrospective of his work, this book reveals for the first time the driven workaholic who had three complicated marriages and was a distant father —so different from the loving, all-American-dad image widely held to this day. Critically acclaimed author Laura Claridge also breaks new ground with her reappraisal of Rockwell’s art, arguing that despite his popular sentimental style, his artistry was masterful, complex, and far more manipulative than people realize.
Full Bloom by
Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) was one of the most successful American artists of the 20th-century: her arresting paintings of enormous, intimately rendered flowers, desert landscapes and stark white cow skulls are seminal works of modern art. But behind O'Keeffe's bold work and celebrity was a woman misunderstood by even her most ardent admirers. 23 years her senior. The relationship was physically and intellectually passionate, but Atieglitz was a man of the world. Driven to a nervous breakdown by Stieglitz's affair, O'Keefe relocated and redefined herself in New Mexico, where she created her unforgettable signature paintings. Stieglitz's longtime paramour - this biography offers an insight into O'Keefe's defining relationships and the effect of her husband's infidelity, and offers an honest portrayal of a life shrouded in myth.
Frank Lloyd Wright by
From the way we build to the way we live, Frank Lloyd Wright’s influence on American architecture is visible all around us. Now, Ada Louise Huxtable, the Pulitzer Prize- winning architecture writer for The Wall Street Journal—and chief architecture critic for The New York Timesfor nearly twenty years—offers an outstanding look at the architect and the man. She explores the sources of his tumultuous and troubled life and his long career as master builder as well as his search for lasting, true love. Along the way, Huxtable introduces readers to Wright’s masterpieces: Taliesin, rebuilt after tragedy and murder; the Imperial Hotel, one of the few structures left standing after Japan’s catastrophic 1923 earthquake; and tranquil Fallingwater, to which millions have traveled to experience its quiet grace. Through the journey, Huxtable takes us not only into the mind of the man who drew the blueprints, but also into the very heart of the medium, which he changed forever. A story of great triumph and heartbreak, Frank Lloyd Wrightis, like Wright’s own creations, an expertly wrought tribute to a man whose genius lives on in the very landscape of American architecture.
Mistress of Modernism by
Peggy Guggenheim emerges in Mistress of Modernism as the ultimate self-invented woman, a cultural mover and shaker who broke away from her poor-little-rich-girl origins to shape a life for herself as the enfant terrible of the art world. Peggy's visionary Art of This Century gallery in New York, which brought together the European surrealist artists with the American abstract expressionists, was an epoch-shaking "happening" at the center of its time. Dearborn's unprecedented access to the Guggenheim family, friends, and papers contributes rich insight to Peggy's traumatic childhood in German-Jewish "Our Crowd" New York, her self-education in the ways of art and artists, her caustic battles with other art-collecting Guggenheims, and her legendary sexual appetites: her lovers included Max Ernst, Samuel Beckett, and Marcel Duchamp, to name a mere few. Here too is a poignant portrait of Peggy's last years as l'ultima dogaressa -- the last duchess -- in her palazzo in Venice, where her collection still draws thousands of visitors every year. Mistress of Modernism is the first definitive biography of a woman whose wit, passion, and provocative legacy come compellingly to life.
Peggy Guggenheim by
From the prizewinning Jewish Lives series, a "vibrant" (New Yorker) portrait of the colorful, irrepressible, and iconoclastic American collector who fearlessly advanced the cause of modern art "A whirlwind tour in a compact, peppy car through the tumultuous life of the most famous patron of modern art."--Prudence Peiffer, Artforum One of twentieth-century America's most influential patrons of the arts, Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979) brought to wide public attention the work of such modern masters as Jackson Pollock and Man Ray. In her time, there was no stronger advocate for the groundbreaking and the avant-garde. Her midtown gallery was the acknowledged center of the postwar New York art scene, and her museum on the Grand Canal in Venice remains one of the world's great collections of modern art. Yet as renowned as she was for the art and artists she so tirelessly championed, Guggenheim was equally famous for her unconventional personal life, and for her ironic, playful desire to shock. Acclaimed best-selling author Francine Prose offers a singular reading of Guggenheim's life that will enthrall enthusiasts of twentieth-century art, as well as anyone interested in American and European culture and the interrelationships between them. The lively and insightful narrative follows Guggenheim through virtually every aspect of her extraordinary life, from her unique collecting habits and paradigm-changing discoveries, to her celebrity friendships, failed marriages, and scandalous affairs, and Prose delivers a colorful portrait of a defiantly uncompromising woman who maintained a powerful upper hand in a male-dominated world. Prose also explores the ways in which Guggenheim's image was filtered through the lens of insidious antisemitism. About Jewish Lives: Jewish Lives is a prizewinning series of interpretative biography designed to explore the many facets of Jewish identity. Individual volumes illuminate the imprint of Jewish figures upon literature, religion, philosophy, politics, cultural and economic life, and the arts and sciences. Subjects are paired with authors to elicit lively, deeply informed books that explore the range and depth of the Jewish experience from antiquity to the present. In 2014, the Jewish Book Council named Jewish Lives the winner of its Jewish Book of the Year Award, the first series ever to receive this award. More praise for Jewish Lives: "Excellent." -New York Times "Exemplary." -Wall Street Journal "Distinguished." -New Yorker "Superb." -The Guardian
The Genius of Gilbert Stuart by
Gilbert Stuart was probably the most gifted American portraitist of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. He is best known for his "Athenaeum" portrait of George Washington, which is today a national icon. In this book, Dorinda Evans combines a wealth of original insights with revealing new documentation to present a long-needed, scholarly treatment of Stuart's life and influential work. Evans begins by tracing Stuart's early years and artistic beginnings in Rhode Island. She follows him to London, where he rose to prominence among such artistic luminaries as Sir Joshua Reynolds and Benjamin West. She then examines his career in the United States, where he became the favored portraitist for the country's leading citizens. In assessing Stuart's artistic importance, Evans argues that his 1796 "Athenaeum" portrait of Washington--the most recognized likeness of the president--was a landmark in the expression of contemporary ideas about moral strength. More generally, she shows that Stuart's painting reflected a genius for interpreting the sitter's personality and a growing awareness of painting's public role in conveying uplifting messages about social dignity and virtue. She challenges the view that his later paintings show a decline, revealing many as concerned with expressing the human soul in a fresh and naturalistic way. Evans also explores Stuart's private life, discounting recent portrayals of him as an outcast and a confidence trickster. She concludes that his notoriously erratic behavior, which veered from prolonged lethargy to reckless activity and extravagance, was a sign of manic-depressive illness. Evans gathered information about Stuart from a wide variety of previously untapped sources, including unpublished interviews with the artist that shed new light on controversies over his portraits of Washington and Thomas Jefferson. The book presents not only Stuart's most famous pictures--including The Skater and his portraits of early American presidents--but also many paintings never before published. Meticulously researched, elegantly written, and richly illustrated, The Genius of Gilbert Stuart will become the standard account of one of America's most important early artists.
Vinnie Ream by
She was able, through clever maneuvering and dogged determination, to achieve a commission from the Congress for a life-sized statue of the assassinated president—this despite the very real animus against women artists at that time, which is apparent in the heated arguments against granting her the Lincoln commission arguments spearheaded in the Senate by Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. Steeped in the history of her time, Vinnie Ream was involved with dozens of senators and congressmen and other powerful men—not least of all Generals Sherman and Custer—and her studio on Capitol Hill became a legendary stopping place for many admirers and tourists. Her statue of Lincoln stands in the rotunda of the capitol building; her statue of Admiral Farragut stands in a Washington, D.C. park; other works are in Statuary Hall and various museums. This is an engaging biography of a spirited female artist, and an effective portrait of Washington, D.C. in the Civil War era.
George Bellows
This richly illustrated and insightful publication will be the First truly comprehensive exhibition catalogue on the work of George Bellows (1182-1925), with ten thematic essays by leading art and social historians that will provide a rigorous analysis of Bellows' life and career. The catalogue will document the range of Bellow's artistic achievements in all mediums, reconsidering his standing in relationship to artists such as Hopper, Picasso and Manet in order to better understand his unique place in the history of both American and Western art.0Exhibition: National Gallery of Art, Washington (10.6.2012-8.10.2012), The Royal Academy of Arts, London (16.3.2013-9.6.2013).
Peggy by
Based on lengthy interviews with Peggy Guggenheim, her relatives, friends, and associates, this portrait reveals a woman of contradictions: scandalous yet shy, witty and intelligent but considered stupid and not taken seriously by acquaintances. Weld also creates a vivid picture of the bohemian life of the artistic and literary intelligentsia that surrounded Peggy, although the recitation of everyone's sexual escapades becomes a bit tedious. From a troubled life emerges a major proponent and collector of modern art. Because countless artists and writers played a part in Peggy's life, readers should have some prior familiarity with them. Though truth and legend seem blurred at times, this book nonetheless makes an interesting companion to Peggy's own memoirs, Confessions of an Art Addict and Out of This Century . Lynell A. Morr, John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art Lib., Sarasota, Fla.
Sinatra by
From the best-selling author ofGoddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe,the first fully documented, comprehensively researched, birth-to-death biography—the definitive life—of Frank Sinatra. Sinatrais the story of an American icon who held the imagination of millions for more than fifty years and whose influence in popular music was unsurpassed in the twentieth century. As a child, he said, he had heard “symphonies from the universe” in his head. No one could have imagined where those sounds would lead him. Tracing the arc of this incredible life, from the humble beginnings in Hoboken to the twilight years as a living legend in Malibu,Sinatrafollows a career built on raw talent, sheer willpower—and criminal connections. Drawing on a treasure trove of documents and interviews, Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan reveal stunning new information about Sinatra’s links to such Mafia figures as Sam Giancana and Lucky Luciano. And we see for the first time where the Mafia connection began, how and why it lasted, and how it impinged on others, not least President John F. Kennedy. Here, too, is the core of the private Sinatra—alternately caustic and sympathetic—that the singer so long concealed. The heartbreaking truth about his passion for Ava Gardner emerges from never-before-published conversations with Gardner herself. In exclusive, intimate interviews, the women who loved Sinatra—some of them unknown to the public until now—share memories of the joy and pain of their relationships with him. And we learn what it was like to be the friend of a man who was generous and loyal to a fault, yet—as some of his fellow Rat Packers discovered—who could turn abruptly into a vindictive brute. Dramatic, eye-opening, and unfailingly fair-minded,Sinatrais masterful biography: the revelatory story of a brilliant artist and an infinitely complex man.
Elvis Presley by
It is hard to believe that there would be any fresh takes on a figure as written about as Elvis Presley. Joel Williamson, an eminent Southern historian, has been working on Elvis for over twenty years and in this biography examines Presley as a product of his time and place in Southernculture, as well as the culture of the Southern girls and women who became his first fans. Rather than interpreting him through the lens of the rise of rock 'n roll and its impact on performers, Williamson looks seriously at the roots of Elvis' life, particularly his "country come to city" family, Tupelo and Memphis in the Depression and wartime years, and the ways in which this shapedhis generation of first fans. He discusses how Presley became the subject of unprecedented interest as a figure of sexual desire for people who, by the standards of their time and place, were not supposed to express sexual ecstasy, especially in public. While Elvis could not understand why he and his music were seen as a threat to good morals, he nonetheless took advantage of female sexual desire for him but lived in fear that the public would see him as a lecherous man who got away with a lifestyle of sexual indulgence. While he drew on blackmusic, especially gospel, and popularized it for white audiences, and worked with black musicians, he never took a public stand in the Civil Rights Movement bubbling around him in Memphis and the places around the South where he performed. Williamson notes how the early years of performing set thepattern of Elvis' career, leading to long periods after age 23 when he was not making music of much consequence or performing live, but his fans from the early years remained obsessed with him. In the later part of his career, when he performed regular gigs in Las Vegas and toured second-tiercities, he moved beyond the South to a national audience who had bought his albums and watched his movies, but the makeup of his fan base did not substantially change. Nor did Elvis himself ever move up the Southern class ladder despite his wealth. And, as Williamson notes, many residents of Memphisignored or were ambivalent about the resident of Graceland during his lifetime.Williamson's work does not attempt to displace Peter Guralnick's Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love but offers a highly readable account of the Presley family, especially Gladys and Vernon, their class, their finances, their religion, and the opportunities for men and women of Elvis'generation and region. It is not a tell-all account by someone who was associated with Elvis, but a historically informed biography by a scholar who moved to Memphis to teach in 1964. Through his emotionally powerful biography emerge the good Elvis, the bad Elvis, and the psychopathic Elvis.
Dorothea Lange by
We all know Dorothea Lange’s iconic photos―the “Migrant Mother” holding her child, the gaunt men forlornly waiting in breadlines―but few know the arc of her extraordinary life. In this sweeping account, renowned historian Linda Gordon charts Lange’s journey from polio-ridden child to wife and mother, to San Francisco portrait photographer, to chronicler of the Great Depression and World War II. Gordon uses Lange’s life to anchor a moving social history of twentieth-century America, re-creating the bohemian world of San Francisco, the Dust Bowl, and the Japanese American internment camps. She explores Lange’s growing radicalization as she embraced the democratic power of the camera, and she examines Lange’s entire body of work, reproducing more than one hundred images, many of them previously unseen and some of them formerly suppressed. Lange reminds us that beauty can be found in unlikely places, and that to respond to injustice, we must first simply learn how to see it.
Thelonious Monk by
(PRINT) Thelonious Monk is one of the most popular jazz composers and pianists since Duke Ellington, and a cultural icon of cool. This first complete biography is written with full access to the family's archives.
Jack London by
(PRINT) A revelatory look at the life of the great American author--and how it shaped his most beloved works Jack London was born a working class, fatherless Californian in 1876. In his youth, he was a boundlessly energetic adventurer on the bustling West Coast--an oyster pirate, a hobo, a sailor, and a prospector by turns. He spent his brief life rapidly accumulating the experiences that would inform his acclaimed bestselling booksThe Call of theWild,White Fang, andThe Sea-Wolf. The bare outlines of his story suggest a classic rags-to-riches tale, but London the man was plagued by contradictions. He chronicled nature at its most savage, but wept helplessly at the deaths of his favorite animals. At his peak the highest paid writer in the United States, he was nevertheless forced to work under constant pressure for money. An irrepressibly optimistic crusader for social justice and a lover of humanity, he was also subject to spells of bitter invective, especially as hishealth declined. Branded by shortsighted critics as little more than a hack who produced a couple of memorable dog stories, he left behind a voluminous literary legacy, much of it ripe for rediscovery. InJack London: An American Life, the noted Jack London scholar Earle Labor explores the brilliant and complicated novelist lost behind the myth--at once a hard-living globe-trotter and a man alive with ideas, whose passion for seeking new worlds to explore never waned until the day he died. Returning London to his proper place in the American pantheon, Labor resurrects a major American novelist in his full fire and glory.
Mockingbird by
(PRINT) The colorful life of the remarkable woman who created To Kill a Mockingbird - the classic that became a touchstone for generations of Americans To Kill a Mockingbird, the twentieth-century's most widely read American novel, has sold thirty million copies and still sells a million yearly. Yet despite the book's perennial popularity, its creator, Harper Lee has become a somewhat mysterious figure. Now, after years of research, Charles J. Shields has brought to life the warmhearted, high-spirited, and occasionally hardheaded woman who gave us two of American literature's most unforgettable characters - Atticus Finch and his daughter, Scout - and who contributed to the success of her lifelong friend Truman Capote's masterpiece, In Cold Blood.At the center of Shields's lively book is the story of Lee's struggle to create her famous novel. But her life contains many other highlights as well: her girlhood as a tomboy in overalls in tiny Monroeville, Alabama; the murder trial that made her beloved father's reputation and inspired her great work; her journey to Kansas as Capote's ally and research assistant to help report the story of the Clutter murders; the surrogate family she found in New York City.Drawing on six hundred interviews and much new information, Mockingbird is the first book ever written about Harper Lee. Highly entertaining, filled with humor and heart, this is an evocative portrait of a writer, her dream, and the place and people whom she made immortal.
J. D. Salinger by
(PRINT) One of the most popular and mysterious figures in American literary history, author of the classic Catcher in the Rye,nbsp;J. D. Salinger eluded fans and journalists for most of his life. Now comes a new biography that Peter Ackroyd in The Times of London calls "energetic and magnificently researched"--a book from which "a true picture of Salinger emerges." Filled with new information and revelations--garnered from countless interviews, letters, and public records--J. D. Salinger presents an extraordinary life that spanned nearly the entire twentieth century. Kenneth Slawenski explores Salinger's privileged youth, long obscured by misrepresentation and rumor, revealing the brilliant, sarcastic, vulnerable son of a disapproving father and doting mother and his entrance into a social world where Gloria Vanderbilt dismissively referred to him as "a Jewish boy from New York." Here too are accounts of Salinger's first broken heart--Eugene O'Neill's daughter, Oona, left him for the much older Charlie Chaplin--and the devastating World War II service ("a living hell") of which he never spoke and which haunted him forever. J. D. Salinger features all the dazzle of this author's early writing successes, his dramatic encounters with luminaries from Ernest Hemingway to Laurence Olivier to Elia Kazan, his surprising office intrigues with famous New Yorker editors and writers, and the stunning triumph of The Catcher in the Rye, which would both make him world-famous and hasten his retreat into the hills of New Hampshire. Whether it's revealing the facts of his hasty, short-lived first marriage or his lifelong commitment to Eastern religion, which would dictate his attitudes toward sex, nutrition, solitude, and creativity, J. D. Salinger is this unique author's unforgettable story in full--one that no lover of literature can afford to miss. nbsp;
Carson McCullers by
(PRINT) "Writing is my occupation," Carson McCullers often said. "I must do it. I have done it for so long." The beloved author of such classics as THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER, THE MEMBER OF THE WEDDING, and REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE, McCullers began writing her first best-selling novel at the age of twenty. It was the start of a lifelong love affair with stories and language -- and of the creation of a body of work that continues to draw new generations of readers. In CARSON MCCULLERS: A LIFE, Josyane Savigneau gives us at last a truly popular biography of one of America's greatest women novelists. Carson McCullers's life story rivals the plot of any of her novels. A brilliant, sensitive artist who had a painful small-town childhood in the South and early international success, she was crippled by a mysterious disease in early adulthood. A woman who composed the most romantic of letters, she struggled to find lasting happiness with her husband, Reeves, whom she married twice. Carson wrote often of the loneliness of the human condiiton, and yet she surrounded herself with a constellation of witty, always entertaining celebrities: Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Katherine Anne Porter, Richard Wright, John Huston, and Edward Albee, among others. The first biographer to have the full cooperation of the McCullers esate, Josyane Savigneau has uncovered the private Carson McCullers, a woman who never really grew up yet was always seductive, a woman whose candor and immense emotional needs sometimes overshadowed her great charm, generosity, loyalty, humor, and deep intelligence. Above all, Carson was a life force, a person who needed to write and who did so despite great physical pain, up until the very end. Published to rave reviews in France, this passionate biography is one that "must [be] read . . . to measure the full extent of McCullers's torment and her determination to overcome her suffering" (L'EXPRESS).
Becoming Ray Bradbury by
(PRINT) Becoming Ray Bradbury chronicles the making of an iconic American writer by exploring Ray Bradbury's childhood and early years of his long life in fiction, film, television, radio, and theater. Jonathan R. Eller measures the impact of the authors, artists, illustrators, and filmmakers who stimulated Bradbury's imagination throughout his first three decades. Unprecedented access to Bradbury's personal papers and other private collections provides insight into his emerging talent through his unpublished correspondence, his rare but often insightful notes on writing, and his interactions with those who mentored him during those early years. Beginning with his childhood in Waukegan, Illinois, and Los Angeles, this biography follows Bradbury's development from avid reader to maturing author, making a living writing for pulp magazines. Eller illuminates the sources of Bradbury's growing interest in the human mind, the human condition, and the ambiguities of life and death--themes that became increasingly apparent in his early fiction. Bradbury's correspondence documents his frustrating encounters with the major trade publishing houses and his earliest unpublished reflections on the nature of authorship. Eller traces the sources of Bradbury's very conscious decisions, following the sudden success of The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man, to voice controversial political statements in his fiction, and he highlights the private motivations behind the burst of creative energy that transformed his novella "The Fireman" into the classic novel Fahrenheit 451. Becoming Ray Bradbury reveals Bradbury's emotional world as it matured through his explorations of cinema and art, his interactions with agents and editors, his reading discoveries, and the invaluable reading suggestions of older writers. These largely unexplored elements of his life pave the way to a deeper understanding of his more public achievements, providing a biography of the mind, the story of Bradbury's self-education and the emerging sense of authorship at the heart of his boundless creativity.
The Life of Maxwell Anderson by
(PRINT) Anderson, Maxwell, 1888-1959; Dramatists, American -- 20th century -- Biography
Thomas Edison by
(PRINT) Thomas Alva Edison, a self-educated man who stressed common sense and hard work, is arguably the most prolific inventor in history. Edison revolutionized life in America with inventions such as the phonograph, the incandescent light bulb, and the first talking motion pictures.
Albert Einstein by
(PRINT) "Albert Einstein's achievements are not just milestones in the history of science; decades ago they became an integral part of the twentieth-century world in which we live. Like no other modern physicist he altered and expanded our understanding of nature. Like few other scholars, he stood fully in the public eye. In a world changing with dramatic rapidity, he embodied the role of the scientist by personal example." "Albrecht Folsing, relying on previously unknown sources and letters, brings Einstein's "genius" into focus. Whereas former biographies, written in the tradition of the history of science, seem to describe a heroic Einstein who fell to earth from heaven, Folsing attempts to reconstruct Einstein's thought in the context of the state of research at the turn of the century. Thus, perhaps for the first time, Einstein's surroundings come to light."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
The Most Defiant Devil by
(PRINT) The late nineteenth and early twentieth century were a brutal time for American wildlife, with many species pushed to the brink of extinction. (Some are endangered to this day.) And yet these decades also saw the dawn of the conservationist movement. Into this contradictory era came William Temple Hornaday, a larger-than-life dynamo who almost uncannily embodies these conflicting threads in our history. In The Most Defiant Devil, a compelling new biography of this complex figure, Gregory Dehler explores the life of Hornaday the hunter, museum builder, zoologist, author, conservationist, and anti-Bolshevist crusader. A deeply religious man, he was nonetheless anything but peaceful and was racist even by his era’s standards, going so far as to display an Mbuti pygmy as a "living specimen" in a zoo. A passionate hunter, Hornaday killed thousands of animals, including some of the last wild buffalo in America, but he was far ahead of his time in his influential views on the protection of wildlife. Hornaday designed and built the New York Zoological Park (which became the Bronx Zoo) and was chief taxidermist for what would later become the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.In this single, fascinating individual, we can discern some of the Progressive Era's most destructive forces and some of its most enlightened visions.
Dr. Spock by
(PRINT) Dr. Benjamin Spock, through his Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, may have had a greater effect on the everyday lives of more people than any other living American. His personal life, however, was shaken by failure and tragedy. Thomas Maier's extensive interviews with Spock, his family, and others who knew him draw the first complete picture of this complicated man, an American original of the importance of Henry Ford or Thomas Alva Edison. Known for his fatherly, folksy wisdom, Spock was at the same time a revolutionary and a magnet for controversy throughout his life. He camouflaged Fruen for Americans in his baby-care book, one of the best-selling books of all time. When he applied his ideals to politics, Spock shocked the country by protesting against the Vietnam war with Martin Luther King in 1967 and was attacked both by conservatives for fostering a "permissive" society and by feminists for his traditional attitudes about women's role in the family. Perhaps even more surprising, however, is Spock's troubled personal life: the breakdown and alcoholism of his first wife, his own failures as husband and father, his marriage to a much younger woman, and the suicide of his grandson. Although a tragic example of a man who helped millions but couldn't benefit from his own advice, Dr. Spock helped to create America as it is today, and Dr. Spock shows how the man reflects both the successes and failures of our society.
Pioneer of Tropical Landscape Architecture by
"The first comprehensive study of Phillips, by someone who knew him. . . . A significant, in-depth, and highly entertaining biography of [the man who] was one of the first to develop landscaping with tropical and subtropical plants [and who]. . . left us with one great masterpiece--the Fairchild Tropical Garden."--R. Brinsley Burbidge, director, Fairchild Tropical Garden, Miami "This biography provides a long-needed history of the early days of tropical landscape architecture. . . . Mrs. Jackson's investigation and research are extraordinary. "--Jonathan G. Seymour, landscape architect William Lyman Phillips (1885-1966) played a seminal role in the landscaping of Florida and in the history of landscape architecture, designing the world-famous Fairchild Tropical Garden in Miami (begun in 1938) as well as hundreds of other sites, four of them on the National Register. This biography, written by a woman who knew Phillips and who shared his northeastern upbringing, education, taste, and childlike apprehension of the exotic, brings to life the story of the quiet, self-effacing man whose love of Florida's tropical and subtropical botany has had such a profound influence on the way Florida looks today. Jackson's biography of Phillips is also the story of a fascinating life. A student of Frederick Law Olmsted at Harvard in landscape architecture and engineering, Phillips later became a representative of the Olmsted firm. He spent the next 45 years pioneering the use of palms and tropical plants, which had been largely ignored or treated with contempt. His Olmsted commissions took him to places as far-flung as Panama, Camp Jackson in South Carolina, and France. In 1924 he married and moved to Florida. From that point forward, Phillips's story coincides with that of Florida in its boom years, from the 1930s through the 1960s. As project superintendent of the first wave of Florida's Civilian Conservation Corps and later as consultant to the national and county park services, Phillips built all of south Florida's public parks as well as a large number of its private ones and designed dozens of public housing sites, hospitals, cemeteries, airports, roads, highways, private gardens, and college campuses. And he completed his masterpiece, the Fairchild Tropical Garden. Including 170 photographs, extensive plant lists, and many of Phillips's most famous plans, Jackson's biography is an intimate look at the pioneering vision of the man largely responsible for popularizing Florida's exotic landscape. Faith Jackson, educator, writer, former book editor of the Miami Herald, avid master gardener, and sometime garden designer, had the good fortune to learn from William Lyman Phillips while he designed her south Florida garden. Her reviews and articles have appeared in American Horticulturist and Mid-Atlantic Monthly, among others. She lives in Washington, D.C.
I Invented the Modern Age by
(PRINT) From the acclaimed popular historian Richard Snow, who "writes with verve and a keen eye" (The New York Times Book Review), comes a fresh and entertaining account of Henry Ford and his invention of the Model T-the ugly, cranky, invincible machine that defined twentieth-century America. Every century or so, our republic has been remade by a new technology: 170 years ago the railroad changed Americans' conception of space and time; in our era, the microprocessor revolutionized how humans communicate. But in the early twentieth century the agent of creative destruction was the gasoline engine, as put to work by an unknown and relentlessly industrious young man named Henry Ford. Born the same year as the battle of Gettysburg, Ford died two years after the atomic bombs fell, and his life personified the tremendous technological changes achieved in that span. Growing up as a Michigan farm boy with a bone-deep loathing of farming, Ford intuitively saw the advantages of internal combustion. Resourceful and fearless, he built his first gasoline engine out of scavenged industrial scraps. It was the size of a sewing machine. From there, scene by scene, Richard Snow vividly shows Ford using his innate mechanical abilities, hard work, and radical imagination as he transformed American industry. In many ways, of course, Ford's story is well known; in many more ways, it is not. Richard Snow masterfully weaves together a fascinating narrative of Ford's rise to fame through his greatest invention, the Model T. When Ford first unveiled this car, it took twelve and a half hours to build one. A little more than a decade later, it took exactly one minute. In making his car so quickly and so cheaply that his own workers could easily afford it, Ford created the cycle of consumerism that we still inhabit. Our country changed in a mere decade, and Ford became a national hero. But then he soured, and the benevolent side of his character went into an ever-deepening eclipse, even as the America he had remade evolved beyond all imagining into a global power capable of producing on a vast scale not only cars, but airplanes, ships, machinery, and an infinity of household devices. A highly pleasurable read, filled with scenes and incidents from Ford's life, particularly during the intense phase of his secretive competition with other early car manufacturers, I Invented the Modern Age shows Richard Snow at the height of his powers as a popular historian and reclaims from history Henry Ford, the remarkable man who, indeed, invented the modern world as we know it.
Black Apollo of Science by
This biography illuminates the racial attitudes of an elite group of American scientists and foundation officers. It is the story of a complex and unhappy man. It blends social, institutional, black, and political history with the history of science.
Sally Ride by
(PRINT) The definitive biography of Sally Ride, America's first woman in space, with exclusive insights from Ride's family and partner, by the ABC reporter who covered NASA during its transformation from a test-pilot boys' club to a more inclusive elite. Sally Ride made history as the first American woman in space. A member of the first astronaut class to include women, she broke through a quarter-century of white male fighter jocks when NASA chose her for the seventh shuttle mission, cracking the celestial ceiling and inspiring several generations of women. After a second flight, Ride served on the panels investigating the Challenger explosion and the Columbia disintegration that killed all aboard. In both instances she faulted NASA's rush to meet mission deadlines and its organizational failures. She cofounded a company promoting science and education for children, especially girls. Sherr also writes about Ride's scrupulously guarded personal life-she kept her sexual orientation private-with exclusive access to Ride's partner, her former husband, her family, and countless friends and colleagues. Sherr draws from Ride's diaries, files, and letters. This is a rich biography of a fascinating woman whose life intersected with revolutionary social and scientific changes in America. Sherr's revealing portrait is warm and admiring but unsparing. It makes this extraordinarily talented and bold woman, an inspiration to millions, come alive.
The Wright Brothers by
(PRINT) Two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize David McCullough tells the dramatic story-behind-the-story about the courageous brothers who taught the world how to fly: Wilbur and Orville Wright. On a winter day in 1903, in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, two unknown brothers from Ohio changed history. But it would take the world some time to believe what had happened: the age of flight had begun, with the first heavier-than-air, powered machine carrying a pilot. Who were these men and how was it that they achieved what they did? David McCullough, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, tells the surprising, profoundly American story of Wilbur and Orville Wright. Far more than a couple of unschooled Dayton bicycle mechanics who happened to hit on success, they were men of exceptional courage and determination, and of far-ranging intellectual interests and ceaseless curiosity, much of which they attributed to their upbringing. The house they lived in had no electricity or indoor plumbing, but there were books aplenty, supplied mainly by their preacher father, and they never stopped reading. When they worked together, no problem seemed to be insurmountable. Wilbur was unquestionably a genius. Orville had such mechanical ingenuity as few had ever seen. That they had no more than a public high school education, little money and no contacts in high places, never stopped them in their "mission" to take to the air. Nothing did, not even the self-evident reality that every time they took off in one of their contrivances, they risked being killed. In this thrilling book, master historian David McCullough draws on the immense riches of the Wright Papers, including private diaries, notebooks, scrapbooks, and more than a thousand letters from private family correspondence to tell the human side of the Wright Brothers' story, including the little-known contributions of their sister, Katharine, without whom things might well have gone differently for them.
Untamed by
(PRINT) Carol Ruckdeschel is the wildest woman in America. She wrestles alligators, eats roadkill, rides horses bareback, and lives in a ramshackle cabin that she built by hand in an island wilderness. A combination of Henry David Thoreau and Jane Goodall, Carol is a self-taught scientist who has become a tireless defender of sea turtles on Cumberland Island, a national park off the coast of Georgia. Cumberland, the country’s largest and most biologically diverse barrier island, is celebrated for its windswept dunes and feral horses. Steel magnate Thomas Carnegie once owned much of the island, and in recent years, Carnegie heirs and the National Park Service have clashed with Carol over the island’s future. What happens when a dirt-poor naturalist with only a high school diploma becomes an outspoken advocate on a celebrated but divisive island?Untamed is the story of an American original standing her ground and fighting for what she believes in, no matter the cost.
American Empire : Roosevelt's geographer and the prelude to globalization by
(PRINT) An American Empire, constructed over the last century, long ago overtook European colonialism, and it has been widely assumed that the new globalism it espoused took us "beyond geography." Neil Smith debunks that assumption, offering an incisive argument that American globalism had a distinct geography and was pieced together as part of a powerful geographical vision. The power of geography did not die with the twilight of European colonialism, but it did change fundamentally. That the inauguration of the American Century brought a loss of public geographical sensibility in the United States was itself a political symptom of the emerging empire. This book provides a vital geographical-historical context for understanding the power and limits of contemporary globalization, which can now be seen as representing the third of three distinct historical moments of U.S. global ambition. The story unfolds through a decisive account of the career of Isaiah Bowman (1878-1950), the most famous American geographer of the twentieth century. For nearly four decades Bowman operated around the vortex of state power, working to bring an American order to the global landscape. An explorer on the famous Machu Picchu expedition of 1911 who came to be known first as "Woodrow Wilson’s geographer," and later as Frankin D. Roosevelt’s, Bowman was present at the creation of U.S. liberal foreign policy. A quarter-century later, Bowman was at the center of Roosevelt’s State Department, concerned with the disposition of Germany and heightened U.S. access to European colonies; he was described by Dean Acheson as a key "architect of the United Nations." In that period he was a leader in American science, served as president of Johns Hopkins University, and became an early and vociferous cold warrior. A complicated, contradictory, and at times controversial figure who was very much in the public eye, he appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Bowman’s career as a geographer in an era when the value of geography was deeply questioned provides a unique window into the contradictory uses of geographical knowledge in the construction of the American Empire. Smith’s historical excavation reveals, in broad strokes yet with lively detail, that today's American-inspired globalization springs not from the 1980s but from two earlier moments in 1919 and 1945, both of which ended in failure. By recharting the geography of this history, Smith brings the politics--and the limits--of contemporary globalization sharply into focus.
Tesla by
(PRINT) Nikola Tesla was a major contributor to the electrical revolution that transformed daily life at the turn of the twentieth century. His inventions, patents, and theoretical work formed the basis of modern AC electricity, and contributed to the development of radio and television. Like his competitor Thomas Edison, Tesla was one of America's first celebrity scientists, enjoying the company of New York high society and dazzling the likes of Mark Twain with his electrical demonstrations. An astute self-promoter and gifted showman, he cultivated a public image of the eccentric genius. Even at the end of his life when he was living in poverty, Tesla still attracted reporters to his annual birthday interview, regaling them with claims that he had invented a particle-beam weapon capable of bringing down enemy aircraft. Plenty of biographies glamorize Tesla and his eccentricities, but until now none has carefully examined what, how, and why he invented. In this groundbreaking book, W. Bernard Carlson demystifies the legendary inventor, placing him within the cultural and technological context of his time, and focusing on his inventions themselves as well as the creation and maintenance of his celebrity. Drawing on original documents from Tesla's private and public life, Carlson shows how he was an "idealist" inventor who sought the perfect experimental realization of a great idea or principle, and who skillfully sold his inventions to the public through mythmaking and illusion. This major biography sheds new light on Tesla's visionary approach to invention and the business strategies behind his most important technological breakthroughs.
Universal Man : the lives of John Maynard Keynes by
(PRINT) In Universal Man, noted biographer and historian Richard Davenport-Hines revives our understanding of John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), the twentieth century’s most charismatic and revolutionary economist. Keynes helped FDR launch the New Deal, saved Britain from financial crisis twice over the course of two World Wars, and instructed Western nations on how to protect themselves from revolutionary unrest, economic instability, high unemployment, and social dissolution. Isaiah Berlin called Keynes “the cleverest man I ever knew”—both “superior and intellectually awe-inspiring.” Eric Hobsbawm, the twentieth century’s preeminent historian, considered him as influential as Lenin, Stalin, Roosevelt, Hitler, Churchill, Gandhi, and Mao. Keynes was nothing less than the Adam Smith of his time: his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published in 1936, became the most important economics book of the twentieth century, as important as Smith’s Wealth of Nations in inaugurating an economic era. Keynes’s brilliant ideas made possible 35 years of prosperity after the Second World War, the most sustained period of rapid expansion in history. And now, and in the wake of the 2008 global economic collapse, he is once again shaping our world. Every day, we are likely to hear about “Keynesian economics” or the “Keynesian Revolution,” terms that testify to his continuing influence on both economic theory and government policies. Indeed, with the thorough discrediting of his opponents—Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Alan Greenspan, and other supporters of the notion that capitalism is self-regulating, and needs no government intervention—nations across the world are turning to Keynes’s signature innovations: above all that governments must involve themselves in their economies to stave off financial collapse. Previous biographies have explored Keynes economic thought at great length and often in the jargon of the discipline. Universal Man is the first accessible biography of Keynes, and reveals Keynes as much more than an economist. Like many Englishmen of his class and era, Keynes compartmentalized his life. Accordingly, Davenport-Hines views Keynes through multiple windows, as a youthful prodigy, a powerful government official, an influential public man, a bisexual living in the shadow of Oscar Wilde’s persecution, a devotee of the arts, and an international statesman of great renown. Delving into Keynes’s experiences and thought, Davenport-Hines shows us a man who was equally at ease socialising with the Bloomsbury Group as he was persuading heads of state to adopt his policies. Exploring the desires and experiences that compelled Keynes to innovate, Davenport-Hines is the first to argue that Keynesian economics has an aesthetic basis. In this book we come to understand not just the most enduringly influential economist of the modern era, but one of the most gifted and vital men of our times: a disciplined logician with a capacity for glee who persuaded people, seduced them, subverted old ideas, and installed new ones; a man whose high brilliance did not give people vertigo, but clarified and lengthened their perspectives. Engaging, learned, and sparkling with wit and insight, Universal Man is the perfect match for its subject.
American Caesar - Douglas Macarthur, 1880-1964 by
(PRINT) MacArthur, the public figure, the private man, the soldier-hero whose mystery and appeal created a uniquely American legend, portrayed in a brilliant biography that will challenge the cherished myths of admirers and critics alike.
The Most Dangerous Man in America by
(PRINT) At times, even his admirers seemed unsure of what to do with General Douglas MacArthur. Imperious, headstrong, and vain, MacArthur matched an undeniable military genius with a massive ego and a rebellious streak that often seemed to destine him for the dustbin of history. Yet despite his flaws, MacArthur is remembered as a brilliant commander whose combined-arms operation in the Pacific--the first in the history of warfare--secured America’s triumph in World War II and changed the course of history. InThe Most Dangerous Man in America, celebrated historian Mark Perry examines how this paradox of a man overcame personal and professional challenges to lead his countrymen in their darkest hour. As Perry shows, Franklin Roosevelt and a handful of MacArthur’s subordinates made this feat possible, taming MacArthur, making him useful, and finally making him victorious. A gripping, authoritative biography of the Pacific Theater’s most celebrated and misunderstood commander,The Most Dangerous Man in America reveals the secrets of Douglas MacArthur’s success--and the incredible efforts of the men who made it possible.
General Patton by
(PRINT) "War is my work and I know I sound sometimes as though I liked it; perhaps I do -- how can I tell? -- but this war hurts everybody." -- Patton to Henry J. Taylor, 1945 General George S. Patton, Jr., an inspirational leader and outstanding tactician, has intrigued and confounded his biographers. Now, utilizing untapped archival materials in both the United States and England, government documents, family papers, and oral histories, Stanley P. Hirshson creates the most balanced portrait of Patton ever written. It reveals Patton as a complex soldier capable of brilliant military maneuvers but also of inspiring his troops with fiery speeches that resulted in horrendous acts, such as the massacres of Italian civilians, It explains Pattons belief in a soldiers Valhalla, connects the familys wealth to one of Americas bitterest labor strikes, and disputes the usual interpretation of Pattons relief from command of the Third Army. In investigating this complex man, Hirshson has uncovered surprising material about a series of civilian massacres in Sicily, about the two slapping incidents, about attempts to exploit Pattons diary after his death, and about Pattons relations with top Allied generals. Patton emerges as a soldier of great imagination and courage, and his military campaigns make for edge-of-the-seat reading. All the drama of Pattons life comes alive in this meticulously documented volume.
George Marshall by
(PRINT) Based on exhaustive research and filled with rich detail, George Marshall is sure to be hailed as the definitive work on one of the most influential figures in American history--the general who ran the U.S. campaign during the Second World War, the secretary of state who oversaw the successful rebuilding of postwar Europe, and the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. While Eisenhower Patton, Bradley, Montgomery, MacArthur, Nimitz, and Leahy waged battles in Europe and the Pacific, one military leader, George C. Marshall, chief of staff of the U.S. Army from 1939 to 1945, actually ran World War II for America, overseeing all personnel and logistics. This biography, the first to offer a complete picture of his life, follows George C. Marshall from his childhood in western Pennsylvania and his training at the Virginia Military Institute to his role during and after World War II and his death in 1959 at the age of seventy-eight. It casts light on the inspiration he took from historical role models, such as George Washington and Robert E. Lee, and his relationships with military brass, the Washington political establishment, and world leaders, from Harry Truman to Chiang Kai-shek. It explores Marshall's triumphs and defeats during World War II, and his contributions through two critical years of the emerging Cold War--including the transformative Marshall Plan, which saved Western Europe from Soviet domination, and his failed attempt to unite China's Nationalists and Communists.
The Real Custer by
(PRINT) The Real Custer takes a good hard look at the life and storied military career of George Armstrong Custer--from cutting his teeth at Bull Run in the Civil War, to his famous and untimely death at Little Bighorn in the Indian Wars. Author James Robbins demonstrates that Custer, having graduated last in his class at West Point, went on to prove himself again and again as an extremely skilled cavalry leader. Robbins argues that Custer's undoing was his bold and cocky attitude, which caused the Army's bloodiest defeat in the Indian Wars. Robbins also dives into Custer’s personal life, exploring his letters and other personal documents to reveal who he was as a person, underneath the military leader.The Real Custer is an exciting and valuable contribution to the legend and history of Custer that will delight Custer fans as well as readers new to the legend.
Son of the Morning Star by
(PRINT) The Palio Siena "s famously dangerous and hard-fought horse race. A year of planning, ten riders, three circuits of the piazza - and all over in a single moment. But for two women watching far more than the coveted prize is at stake. For beautiful Pia of the Tolomei the Palio is her last hope of escaping a violent marriage. For Violante de Medici, isolated in her palace, it marks the start of what her enemies intend to be her last month asSiena "s ruler. The trumpets sound. And into the piazza rides an unknown horseman. What he does during the race will not only change the lives of Pia and Violante, but alter the course of the Medici dynasty itself... Alive with all the colour and rich historical detail that marks Marina Fiorato "s work,Daughter of Sienais a dramatic and compelling story of treachery, courage and the power of love.
Admiral Bull Halsey by
(PRINT) From the tragic aftermath of Pearl Harbor, when he fashioned America's first response to the attack, to the war's final day in Tokyo Bay when he witnessed Japan's surrender, Admiral William F. Halsey stamped a mighty imprint on the Pacific during World War II. He led or participated significantly in the Navy's first offensive strikes against the Marshall Islands and Wake Island, the Guadalcanal campaign, and the offensive toward Japan. As a commander, he never shied from engaging the enemy, but boldly entered into battle, ready for a fight. As a consequence, Halsey became the face of the Navy and its most attractive public relations phenomenon. Due to his bold tactics and quotable wit, Halsey continues to be a beloved and debated figure. In this balanced biography, historian John Wukovits illuminates the life of a man who ultimately deserves recognition as one the great naval commanders in U.S. history. Europe had Patton; the Pacific had William "the Bull" Halsey.
A Very Principled Boy: the life of Duncan Lee, Red spy and cold warrior by
(PRINT) Duncan Chaplin Lee was a Rhodes Scholar, patriot, and descendent of one of America’s most distinguished families--and possibly the best-placed mole ever to infiltrate U.S. intelligence operations. InA Very Principled Boy intelligence expert and former CIA officer Mark A. Bradley traces the tangled roots of Lee’s betrayal and reveals his harrowing struggle to stay one step ahead of America’s spy hunters during and after World War II. Exposed to leftist politics while studying at Oxford, Lee became a committed, albeit covert, member of the Communist Party. After following William "Wild Bill” Donovan to the newly formed Office of Strategic Services, Lee rose quickly through the ranks of the U.S. intelligence service--and just as quickly gained value as a Communist spy. As one of the chief aides to the head of the OSS, Lee was uniquely well placed to pass sensitive information to his Soviet handlers, including the likely timeframe of the D-Day invasion and the names of OSS personnel under investigation for suspected communist affiliations. In 1945, one of Lee’s former handlers confessed to the FBI and named Lee as a Soviet agent. For the next thirteen years, J. Edgar Hoover would tirelessly, but futilely, attempt to prove Lee’s guilt. Despite being accused of treason in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, the increasingly paranoid Lee miraculously escaped again and again. In a move to atone for what he had done, Lee later became a Cold Warrior in China, fighting Mao Zedong’s communists. He died a free but conflicted man. InA Very Principled Boy, Bradley weaves a fast-paced cat-and-mouse tale of misguided idealism, high treason, and belated redemption. Drawing on Lee’s letters and thousands of previously unreleased CIA, FBI, and State Department records, Bradley tells the unlikely story of a spy who chose his conscience over his country and its dark consequences.
Sonia Sotomayor by
The definitive biography of the first Latina and third woman ever appointed to the Supreme Court-from the national bestselling biographer of Condoleeza Rice and Laura Bush. National bestselling biographer Antonia Felix delves behind the headlines to tell the compelling story of how the daughter of Puerto Rican immigrants living in the South Bronx became one of the greatest legal minds in the country. With insight and thoughtful analysis, Felix explores the tenacity that makes Sotomayor a sharp, fearless judge; the sense of compassion that drives her to seek justice for the underprivileged; and her strong community ties, which never let her forget where she came from. Drawing on candid interviews with figures from Sotomayor's personal and professional life-as well as speeches, interviews with Sotomayor, and published papers-Felix paints a revealing portrait of the woman who would come to meet President Obama's rigorous criteria for a Supreme Court justice and whose appointment would make history.
Sandra Day O'Connor by
Drawing on information from once-private papers of the justices, hundreds of interviews, and insight gained from 17 years of covering the Supreme Court, the author examines the remarkable career of the first woman on the Supreme Court.
The Life and Legends of Calamity Jane by
Everyone knows the name Calamity Jane. Scores of dime novels and movie and TV Westerns have portrayed this original Wild West woman as an adventuresome, gun-toting hellion. Although Calamity Jane has probably been written about more than any other woman of the nineteenth-century American West, fiction and legend have largely obscured the facts of her life. This lively, concise, and exhaustively researched biography traces the real person from the Missouri farm where she was born in 1856 through the development of her notorious persona as a Wild West heroine. Before Calamity Jane became a legend, she was Martha Canary, orphaned when she was only eleven years old. From a young age she traveled fearlessly, worked with men, smoked, chewed tobacco, and drank. By the time she arrived in the boomtown of Deadwood, South Dakota, in 1876, she had become Calamity Jane, and the real Martha Canary had disappeared under a landslide of purple prose. Calamity became a hostess and dancer in Deadwood's saloons and theaters. She imbibed heavily, and she might have been a prostitute, but she had other qualities, as well, including those of an angel of mercy who ministered to the sick and the down-and-out. Journalists and dime novelists couldn't get enough of either version, nor, in the following century, could filmmakers. Sorting through the stories, veteran western historian Richard W. Etulain's account begins with a biography that offers new information on Calamity's several "husbands" (including one she legally married), her two children, and a woman who claimed to be the daughter of Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity, a story Etulain discredits. In the second half of the book, Etulain traces the stories that have shaped Calamity Jane's reputation. Some Calamity portraits, he says, suggest that she aspired to a quiet life with a husband and family. As the 2004-2006 HBO series Deadwood makes clear, well more than a century after her first appearance as a heroine in the Deadwood Dick dime novels, Calamity Jane lives on--raunchy, unabashed, contradictory, and ambiguous as ever.
Ida Mckinley by
Published in cooperation with The National First Ladies Library
This is the first full-length biography of Ida Saxton McKinley (1847- 1907), the wife of William McKinley, president of the United States from 1897 to his assassination in 1901. Long demeaned by history because she suffered from epilepsy--which the society of her era mistakenly believed to border on mental illness--Ida McKinley was an exceptional woman who exerted a strong influence on her husband's political decisions.
Born in Canton, Ohio, Ida Saxton was the eldest of three children. Throughout her youth, Ida was remarkably independent and energetic. She was interested in art, architecture, and current events, and she was sensitive to the plight of working women. In 1871 she married lawyer and Civil War veteran William McKinley. Following the deaths of their two daughters and her mother, Ida's physical condition deteriorated. During the years her husband served as a U.S. congressman and as Ohio governor, her health fluctuated.
Throughout William's 1896 presidential campaign, delegations came to the McKinley home in Canton to hear the candidate speak from the front porch. Occasionally, Ida was healthy enough to speak with and meet political figures; sometimes she simply sat to hear his speeches; at other times she was entirely absent. Her husband's devotion to her in her state became an attribute of the campaign. Author Carl Sferrazza Anthony shows that despite her frail health, Ida was determined to fulfill as much of her role as First Lady as she could. She made keen and accurate political observations--particularly in assessing the motives of those ambitious for appointments--and her unrelenting lobbying on behalf of Methodist missionary efforts factored into the president's decision to retain the Philippine Islands for the United States.
This fascinating biography is essential reading for anyone interested in the life and times of an extraordinary First Lady.
Madeleine Albright by
[PRINT] A portrait of the U.S. Secretary of State chronicles her early life as the child of Czech-Jewish parents, her role in the women's movement, and her rise to power in Washington.
Mistress of Modernism by
Peggy Guggenheim emerges in Mistress of Modernism as the ultimate self-invented woman, a cultural mover and shaker who broke away from her poor-little-rich-girl origins to shape a life for herself as the enfant terrible of the art world. Peggy's visionary Art of This Century gallery in New York, which brought together the European surrealist artists with the American abstract expressionists, was an epoch-shaking "happening" at the center of its time. Dearborn's unprecedented access to the Guggenheim family, friends, and papers contributes rich insight to Peggy's traumatic childhood in German-Jewish "Our Crowd" New York, her self-education in the ways of art and artists, her caustic battles with other art-collecting Guggenheims, and her legendary sexual appetites: her lovers included Max Ernst, Samuel Beckett, and Marcel Duchamp, to name a mere few. Here too is a poignant portrait of Peggy's last years as l'ultima dogaressa -- the last duchess -- in her palazzo in Venice, where her collection still draws thousands of visitors every year. Mistress of Modernism is the first definitive biography of a woman whose wit, passion, and provocative legacy come compellingly to life.
Jessie Ball Dupont by
[PRINT] By 1970, the year of her death, Jessie Ball duPont had given away $100,000,000 and had helped build a financial empire that dominated the economy of Florida and beyond. Although marriage to Alfred I. duPont catapulted her from the modest life of a schoolteacher on the California frontier into the luxurious world where philanthropy was possible, Jessie Ball's strong sense of her own identity was firmly established in 1921, the year of her wedding to the wealthy Delaware maverick. Born to a conservative Tidewater Virginia family in 1884, Jessie Dew Ball broke from the tradition that imposed domesticity on women of her class. Her appreciation for education endured throughout her life: along with hundreds of individual scholarships that she personally monitored, some of her major donations were to educational institutions, particularly women's colleges. Early, I realized that love and knowledge were the only things of value, she wrote. One being (I thought) forever denied me, I concentrated all my forces and efforts on the other. But what had been denied--the secret passion that she hid for twenty years for Alfred I. duPont, a family acquaintance--was alive in her fantasies. In 1919, while duPont was still married to his second wife, their infrequent--and proper--correspondence changed into romance. Overnight, she was describing to him the moonlight, a sight that convinced her more than ever that such a night was never meant for sleep. Their fourteen years of marriage centered around the duPont estates in Delaware and Florida where Jessie, Alfred, and her brother Ed Ball invested in timberland, real estate, banks, and commercial property. After Alfred's death in 1935, Jessie and Edsettled into the loyal, but ambivalent, relationship that prevailed throughout their lives: Ed made money and she found ways to give it away. Her charities included hospitals, community centers, churches, historic preservation projects, and of course colleges and universities. No issue caused her more anxiety than the federal government's efforts to impose racial integration in public schools and colleges. How she addressed the civil rights issue is a major theme in this intimate portrait of a genteel southern woman.
Peggy Guggenheim by
From the prizewinning Jewish Lives series, a "vibrant" (New Yorker) portrait of the colorful, irrepressible, and iconoclastic American collector who fearlessly advanced the cause of modern art "A whirlwind tour in a compact, peppy car through the tumultuous life of the most famous patron of modern art."--Prudence Peiffer, Artforum One of twentieth-century America's most influential patrons of the arts, Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979) brought to wide public attention the work of such modern masters as Jackson Pollock and Man Ray. In her time, there was no stronger advocate for the groundbreaking and the avant-garde. Her midtown gallery was the acknowledged center of the postwar New York art scene, and her museum on the Grand Canal in Venice remains one of the world's great collections of modern art. Yet as renowned as she was for the art and artists she so tirelessly championed, Guggenheim was equally famous for her unconventional personal life, and for her ironic, playful desire to shock. Acclaimed best-selling author Francine Prose offers a singular reading of Guggenheim's life that will enthrall enthusiasts of twentieth-century art, as well as anyone interested in American and European culture and the interrelationships between them. The lively and insightful narrative follows Guggenheim through virtually every aspect of her extraordinary life, from her unique collecting habits and paradigm-changing discoveries, to her celebrity friendships, failed marriages, and scandalous affairs, and Prose delivers a colorful portrait of a defiantly uncompromising woman who maintained a powerful upper hand in a male-dominated world. Prose also explores the ways in which Guggenheim's image was filtered through the lens of insidious antisemitism. About Jewish Lives: Jewish Lives is a prizewinning series of interpretative biography designed to explore the many facets of Jewish identity. Individual volumes illuminate the imprint of Jewish figures upon literature, religion, philosophy, politics, cultural and economic life, and the arts and sciences. Subjects are paired with authors to elicit lively, deeply informed books that explore the range and depth of the Jewish experience from antiquity to the present. In 2014, the Jewish Book Council named Jewish Lives the winner of its Jewish Book of the Year Award, the first series ever to receive this award. More praise for Jewish Lives: "Excellent." -New York Times "Exemplary." -Wall Street Journal "Distinguished." -New Yorker "Superb." -The Guardian
Condi by
[PRINT] A portrait of George W. Bush's national security advisor traces her childhood, early musical ambitions, foreign policies, receipt of the NAACP Image Award, and distinguished career as a scholar, professor, provost, and advisor.
Sally Ride by
(PRINT) The definitive biography of Sally Ride, America's first woman in space, with exclusive insights from Ride's family and partner, by the ABC reporter who covered NASA during its transformation from a test-pilot boys' club to a more inclusive elite. Sally Ride made history as the first American woman in space. A member of the first astronaut class to include women, she broke through a quarter-century of white male fighter jocks when NASA chose her for the seventh shuttle mission, cracking the celestial ceiling and inspiring several generations of women. After a second flight, Ride served on the panels investigating the Challenger explosion and the Columbia disintegration that killed all aboard. In both instances she faulted NASA's rush to meet mission deadlines and its organizational failures. She cofounded a company promoting science and education for children, especially girls. Sherr also writes about Ride's scrupulously guarded personal life-she kept her sexual orientation private-with exclusive access to Ride's partner, her former husband, her family, and countless friends and colleagues. Sherr draws from Ride's diaries, files, and letters. This is a rich biography of a fascinating woman whose life intersected with revolutionary social and scientific changes in America. Sherr's revealing portrait is warm and admiring but unsparing. It makes this extraordinarily talented and bold woman, an inspiration to millions, come alive.
No Place for a Woman by
This text offers an account of Margaret Chase Smith's 33 years in the US Congress, for most of her 24 years as a senator she served as the only woman. By the time she left office she was a powerful woman in America, she exercised influence over a range of military, foreign and domestic policies.
Alice Roosevelt Longworth by 
Mary Boykin Chesnut by
[PRINT]
On His Own Terms by
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE BOSTON GLOBE AND KIRKUS REVIEWS From acclaimed historian Richard Norton Smith comes the definitive life of an American icon: Nelson Rockefeller--one of the most complex and compelling figures of the twentieth century. Fourteen years in the making, this magisterial biography of the original Rockefeller Republican draws on thousands of newly available documents and over two hundred interviews, including Rockefeller's own unpublished reminiscences. Grandson of oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, Nelson coveted the White House from childhood. "When you think of what I had," he once remarked, "what else was there to aspire to?" Before he was thirty he had helped his father develop Rockefeller Center and his mother establish the Museum of Modern Art. At thirty-two he was Franklin Roosevelt's wartime coordinator for Latin America. As New York's four-term governor he set national standards in education, the environment, and urban policy. The charismatic face of liberal Republicanism, Rockefeller championed civil rights and health insurance for all. Three times he sought the presidency--arguably in the wrong party. At the Republican National Convention in San Francisco in 1964, locked in an epic battle with Barry Goldwater, Rockefeller denounced extremist elements in the GOP, a moment that changed the party forever. But he could not wrest the nomination from the Arizona conservative, or from Richard Nixon four years later. In the end, he had to settle for two dispiriting years as vice president under Gerald Ford. In On His Own Terms, Richard Norton Smith re-creates Rockefeller's improbable rise to the governor's mansion, his politically disastrous divorce and remarriage, and his often surprising relationships with presidents and political leaders from FDR to Henry Kissinger. A frustrated architect turned master builder, an avid collector of art and an unabashed ladies' man, "Rocky" promoted fallout shelters and affordable housing with equal enthusiasm. From the deadly 1971 prison uprising at Attica and unceasing battles with New York City mayor John Lindsay to his son's unsolved disappearance (and the grisly theories it spawned), the punitive drug laws that bear his name, and the much-gossiped-about circumstances of his death, Nelson Rockefeller's was a life of astonishing color, range, and relevance. On His Own Terms, a masterpiece of the biographer's art, vividly captures the soaring optimism, polarizing politics, and inner turmoil of this American Original. Praise for On His Own Terms "[An] enthralling biography . . . Richard Norton Smith has written what will probably stand as a definitive Life. . . . On His Own Terms succeeds as an absorbing, deeply informative portrait of an important, complicated, semi-heroic figure who, in his approach to the limits of government and to government's relation to the governed, belonged in every sense to another century."--The New Yorker "[A] splendid biography . . . a clear-eyed, exhaustively researched account of a significant and fascinating American life."--The Wall Street Journal "A compelling read . . . What makes the book fascinating for a contemporary professional is not so much any one thing that Rockefeller achieved, but the portrait of the world he inhabited not so very long ago."--The New York Times "[On His Own Terms] has perception and scholarly authority and is immensely readable."--The Economist
Flagler by
From reviews of the first edition: "A succinct and informed account of [Flagler's] leadership in transforming Florida's economy."--American Historical Review "An important contribution to the understanding of Standard Oil's extended partnership and how the personal desire of Flagler led to the early development of Florida's Atlantic Coast."--The Historian Henry M. Flagler (1830-1913), the ambitious Gilded Age tycoon who designed and built much of Florida's fashionable east coast, rode to success on the rails. As John D. Rockefeller's closest adviser in the 1870s, Flagler helped assemble the Standard Oil empire. In this thoroughly researched biography, Akin shows that Flagler understood early in his career that cheap freight rates determined industrial profits. Portraying Flagler as an aggressive entrepreneur, Akin documents his shrewd negotiations to obtain reduced rates, rebates, and drawbacks from the railroads, thus assuring Standard Oil's national domination over oil transportation costs. Flagler drove himself as hard as he drove a bargain, obsessed with the desire to create a monument to himself that he called "my domain." His legacy was no less than modern Florida. In 1885, at the age of fifty-five, he turned his attention away from Standard Oil and began construction of the Ponce de León luxury hotel in St. Augustine, the city where he had honeymooned with his second wife. Realizing he could never fill its rooms unless better transportation with the North was available, he embarked on the second railroad venture of his lifetime, creation of the Florida East Coast Railway. Flagler's resort empire eventually included The Breakers in Palm Beach and the Royal Palm in Miami; his Atlantic coast railroad extended all the way to Key West, an engineering achievement that was called the "eighth wonder of the world." By the beginning of the twentieth century, Flagler dominated not just the resort and railroad industries in Florida but steamship and agricultural operations, too. Florida politicians gave his projects preferential treatment, even changing the state's divorce law so he could marry for a third time. Woven into this biography are details about Flagler's family, personality, three marriages, alienation from his only son, and devotion to the Presbyterian church--copy that fueled society gossip columns from New York to Palm Beach for decades. Edward N. Akin, author of Mississippi: An Illustrated History and other works on southern history, taught at Mississippi College in Clinton. His biography of Henry Flagler won the 1985 Phi Alpha Theta manuscript prize.
Florida's Flagler by
[PRINT]
Henry Flagler, Visionary of the Gilded Age by
[PRINT]
Nancy by
[PRINT] A new biography of Nancy Astor, American socialite and social crusader who blazed a trail through British society amid two World Wars In 1919, Nancy Astor became the first female Member of Parliament elected to the House of Commons--she was not what had been expected. Far from a virago who had suffered for the cause of female suffrage, Lady Astor was already near the center of the ruling society that had for so long resisted the political upheavals of the early twentieth century, having married into one of the richest families in the world. She wasn't even British, but the daughter of a famous Virginian family, and fiercelyproud of her expatriate ancestry. But her moral drive was strong, and she would utilize her position of privilege and influence to blow a bracing American wind into what she regarded as the stuffy corners of British politics. This account charts Nancy Astor's incredible story, from relative penury in the American South to a world of enormous countryside estates and townhouses, and the most lavish entertainments, peopled by the great figures of the day--Churchill, Chamberlain, FDR, Charlie Chapin, J. M. Barrie, and Lawrence of Arabia were all part of her social circle. But hers was not to be an easy life of power and pure glamour; it was also defined by principles and bravery, war and sacrifice, love, and the mostembittered disputes. With glorious, page-turning brio, Adrian Fort brings to life this restless, controversial American dynamo, an unforgettable woman who left a deep and lasting imprint on the political life of a nation.
Jessie Ball Dupont by
[PRINT] By 1970, the year of her death, Jessie Ball duPont had given away $100,000,000 and had helped build a financial empire that dominated the economy of Florida and beyond. Although marriage to Alfred I. duPont catapulted her from the modest life of a schoolteacher on the California frontier into the luxurious world where philanthropy was possible, Jessie Ball's strong sense of her own identity was firmly established in 1921, the year of her wedding to the wealthy Delaware maverick. Born to a conservative Tidewater Virginia family in 1884, Jessie Dew Ball broke from the tradition that imposed domesticity on women of her class. Her appreciation for education endured throughout her life: along with hundreds of individual scholarships that she personally monitored, some of her major donations were to educational institutions, particularly women's colleges. Early, I realized that love and knowledge were the only things of value, she wrote. One being (I thought) forever denied me, I concentrated all my forces and efforts on the other. But what had been denied--the secret passion that she hid for twenty years for Alfred I. duPont, a family acquaintance--was alive in her fantasies. In 1919, while duPont was still married to his second wife, their infrequent--and proper--correspondence changed into romance. Overnight, she was describing to him the moonlight, a sight that convinced her more than ever that such a night was never meant for sleep. Their fourteen years of marriage centered around the duPont estates in Delaware and Florida where Jessie, Alfred, and her brother Ed Ball invested in timberland, real estate, banks, and commercial property. After Alfred's death in 1935, Jessie and Edsettled into the loyal, but ambivalent, relationship that prevailed throughout their lives: Ed made money and she found ways to give it away. Her charities included hospitals, community centers, churches, historic preservation projects, and of course colleges and universities. No issue caused her more anxiety than the federal government's efforts to impose racial integration in public schools and colleges. How she addressed the civil rights issue is a major theme in this intimate portrait of a genteel southern woman.
I Invented the Modern Age by
(PRINT) From the acclaimed popular historian Richard Snow, who "writes with verve and a keen eye" (The New York Times Book Review), comes a fresh and entertaining account of Henry Ford and his invention of the Model T-the ugly, cranky, invincible machine that defined twentieth-century America. Every century or so, our republic has been remade by a new technology: 170 years ago the railroad changed Americans' conception of space and time; in our era, the microprocessor revolutionized how humans communicate. But in the early twentieth century the agent of creative destruction was the gasoline engine, as put to work by an unknown and relentlessly industrious young man named Henry Ford. Born the same year as the battle of Gettysburg, Ford died two years after the atomic bombs fell, and his life personified the tremendous technological changes achieved in that span. Growing up as a Michigan farm boy with a bone-deep loathing of farming, Ford intuitively saw the advantages of internal combustion. Resourceful and fearless, he built his first gasoline engine out of scavenged industrial scraps. It was the size of a sewing machine. From there, scene by scene, Richard Snow vividly shows Ford using his innate mechanical abilities, hard work, and radical imagination as he transformed American industry. In many ways, of course, Ford's story is well known; in many more ways, it is not. Richard Snow masterfully weaves together a fascinating narrative of Ford's rise to fame through his greatest invention, the Model T. When Ford first unveiled this car, it took twelve and a half hours to build one. A little more than a decade later, it took exactly one minute. In making his car so quickly and so cheaply that his own workers could easily afford it, Ford created the cycle of consumerism that we still inhabit. Our country changed in a mere decade, and Ford became a national hero. But then he soured, and the benevolent side of his character went into an ever-deepening eclipse, even as the America he had remade evolved beyond all imagining into a global power capable of producing on a vast scale not only cars, but airplanes, ships, machinery, and an infinity of household devices. A highly pleasurable read, filled with scenes and incidents from Ford's life, particularly during the intense phase of his secretive competition with other early car manufacturers, I Invented the Modern Age shows Richard Snow at the height of his powers as a popular historian and reclaims from history Henry Ford, the remarkable man who, indeed, invented the modern world as we know it.
Diamond Jim Brady: prince of the Gilded Age by
Praise for H. Paul Jeffers An Honest President: The Life and Presidencies of Grover Cleveland "A well-written and timely book that reminds us of Grover Cleveland's courage, commitment, and honesty at a time when these qualities seem so lacking in so much of American politics." ?James MacGregor Burns, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award Colonel Roosevelt: Theodore Roosevelt Goes to War, 1879-1898 "A handsome narrative of a crucial period in the career of one of our country's most colorful politicians." ?Publishers Weekly Commissioner Roosevelt: The Story of Theodore Roosevelt and the New York City Police, 1895-1897 "A lively, entertaining, and well-researched portrait of a zealous reformer during the historic crusade that successfully launched his career in government." ?Publishers Weekly
The First Tycoon: the epic life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by
A gripping, groundbreaking biography of the combative man whose genius and force of will created modern capitalism. Founder of a dynasty, builder of the original Grand Central, creator of an impossibly vast fortune, Cornelius "Commodore" Vanderbilt is an American icon. Humbly born on Staten Island during George Washington's presidency, he rose from boatman to builder of the nation's largest fleet of steamships to lord of a railroad empire. Lincoln consulted him on steamship strategy during the Civil War; Jay Gould was first his uneasy ally and then sworn enemy; and Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president of the United States, was his spiritual counselor. We see Vanderbilt help to launch the transportation revolution, propel the Gold Rush, reshape Manhattan, and invent the modern corporation--in fact, as T. J. Stiles elegantly argues, Vanderbilt did more than perhaps any other individual to create the economic world we live in today. In "The First Tycoon," Stiles offers the first complete, authoritative biography of this titan, and the first comprehensive account of the Commodore's personal life. It is a sweeping, fast-moving epic, and a complex portrait of the great man. Vanderbilt, Stiles shows, embraced the philosophy of the Jacksonian Democrats and withstood attacks by his conservative enemies for being too competitive. He was a visionary who pioneered business models. He was an unschooled fistfighter who came to command the respect of New York's social elite. And he was a father who struggled with a gambling-addicted son, a husband who was loving yet abusive, and, finally, an old man who was obsessed with contacting the dead. "The First Tycoon" is the exhilarating story of a man and a nation maturing together: the powerful account of a man whose life was as epic and complex as American history itself.
No compromise : the story of Harvey Milk by
Presents a biography of Harvey Milk, a committed champion for social justice.
The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy by 
Brandeis by
[PRINT]
A Southern Rebel by
Williams, an Alabama liberal committed to civil rights long before such a position was expedient in the South, became the director of the National Youth Administration where he hired blacks and supported labor unions, public housing, public health, and public education. This biography contributes to our knowledge of the Roosevelt administration and sheds new light on the civil rights movement and the power of right-wing political groups to undermine the democratic process. Originally published in 1983. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
William Jennings Bryan by
A biography of this outspoken American hero who took strong stands on a variety of subjects, including the Scopes evolution question.
No Place for a Woman by
This text offers an account of Margaret Chase Smith's 33 years in the US Congress, for most of her 24 years as a senator she served as the only woman. By the time she left office she was a powerful woman in America, she exercised influence over a range of military, foreign and domestic policies.
Little Flower by Clarence Darrow by 
Mangas Coloradas by
The first full-length life of the Apache warrior-leader, Mangas Coloradas, describes his outstanding qualities, the Apache culture in which he rose to power, and the battles against white and Mexican settlements in New Mexico that made him widely feared. UP.
Sitting Bull by
[PRINT] "If that is Long Hair, I am the one who killed him," White Bull, the young nephew of Sitting Bull, said when Bad Juice pointed out Custer's body immediately after the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Yet it was Sitting Bull who acquired the notoriety and was paraded in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show as "the warrior who killed Custer." But this new edition of Stanley Vestal's classic biography of the famous chief emphasizes that "Sitting Bull's fame does not rest upon the death of Custer’s five troops. Had he been twenty miles away shooting antelope that morning, he would still remain the greatest of the Sioux." The stirring account of the death throes of a mighty nation and its leader is the story of the "greatest of the Sioux" and his struggle to keep his people free and united. The Sioux were formidable warriors, as attested to by men who fought against them, like General Anson Mills, who said, "They were the best cavalry in the world; their like will never be seen again," but they were up against an overwhelming tide of soldiers, homesteaders, and bureaucrats. Sitting Bull fought long and hard and "He was ... a statesman, one of the most farsighted we have had," but statesmanship could not prevail against such odds. This powerful biography of Sitting Bull is brought to a new generation of readers in h a new and expanded edition, for much new material had been added to the original edition (published in 1932) that could not be disclosed while the informants were still living. Sitting Bull is a moving account of the epic courage of one man in the face of his inevitable defeat as the last defender of his people's rights.
Let the Trumpet Sound by
Winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award Winner of the Christopher Award A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year By the acclaimed biographer of Abraham Lincoln, Nat Turner, and John Brown, Stephen B. Oates's prizewinning Let the Trumpet Sound is the definitive one-volume life of Martin Luther King, Jr. This brilliant examination of the great civil rights icon and the movement he led provides a lasting portrait of a man whose dream shaped American history.
An Original Man by
The first biography of Elijah Muhammad describes his youth in Georgia, his rise to the leadership of the Nation of Islam, and his role in the African American nationalist movement.
George Washington Williams by
In "George Washington Williams," John Hope Franklin reconstructs the life of the controversial, self-made black intellectual who wrote the first history of African Americans in the United States. Awarded the Clarence L. Holte Literary Prize, this book traces Franklin's forty-year quest for Williams's story, a story largely lost to history until this volume was first published in 1985. The result, part biography and part social history, is a unique consideration of a pioneering historian by his most distinguished successor. Williams, who lived from 1849 to 1891, had a remarkable career as soldier, minister, journalist, lawyer, politician, freelance diplomat, and African traveler, as well as a historian. While Franklin reveals the accomplishments of this neglected figure and emphasizes the racism that curtailed Williams's many talents, he also highlights the personal weaknesses that damaged Williams's relationships and career. Williams led the way in presenting African American history accurately through the use of oral history and archival research, sought to legitimize it as a field of historical study, and spoke out in support of an American Negro Historical Society and as a critic of European imperialism in Africa. He also became erratic and faithless to his family and creditors and died at the age of forty-one, destitute and alienated from family and friends. "George Washington Williams" is nothing less than a classic biography of a brilliant though flawed individual whose "History of the Negro Race in America" remains a landmark in African American history and American intellectual history.
Up from History by
Since the 1960s, Martin Luther King, Jr., has personified black leadership with his use of direct action protests against white authority. A century ago, in the era of Jim Crow, Booker T. Washington pursued a different strategy to lift his people. In this compelling biography, Norrell reveals how conditions in the segregated South led Washington to call for a less contentious path to freedom and equality. He urged black people to acquire economic independence and to develop the moral character that would ultimately gain them full citizenship. Although widely accepted as the most realistic way to integrate blacks into American life during his time, Washington’s strategy has been disparaged since the 1960s. The first full-length biography of Booker T. in a generation, Up from History recreates the broad contexts in which Washington worked: He struggled against white bigots who hated his economic ambitions for blacks, African-American intellectuals like W. E. B. Du Bois who resented his huge influence, and such inconstant allies as Theodore Roosevelt. Norrell details the positive power of Washington’s vision, one that invoked hope and optimism to overcome past exploitation and present discrimination. Indeed, his ideas have since inspired peoples across the Third World that there are many ways to struggle for equality and justice. Up from History reinstates this extraordinary historical figure to the pantheon of black leaders, illuminating not only his mission and achievement but also, poignantly, the man himself.
King by
Acclaimed by leading historians and critics when it appeared shortly after the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., this foundational biography wends through the corridors in which King held court, posing the right questions and providing a keen measure of the man whose career and mission enthrall scholars and general readers to this day. Updated with a new preface and more than a dozen photographs of King and his contemporaries, this edition presents the unforgettable story of King's life and death for a new generation.
Medgar Evers by
[PRINT] Civil rights activist Medgar Wiley Evers was well aware of the dangers he would face when he challenged the status quo in Mississippi in the 1950s and '60s, a place and time known for the brutal murders of Emmett Till, Reverend George Lee, Lamar Smith, and others. Nonetheless, Evers consistently investigated the rapes, murders, beatings, and lynching's of black Mississippians and reported the horrid incidents to a national audience, all the while organizing economic boycotts, sit-ins, and street protests in Jackson as the NAACP's first full-time Mississippi field secretary. He organized and participated in voting drives and nonviolent direct-action protests, joined lawsuits to overturn state-supported school segregation, and devoted himself to a career that cost him his life. This biography of a lesser-known but seminal civil rights leader draws on personal interviews from Myrlie Evers-Williams (Evers's widow), his two remaining siblings, friends, grade-school-to-college schoolmates, and fellow activists to elucidate Evers as an individual, leader, husband, brother, and father. Extensive archival work in the Evers Papers, the NAACP Papers, oral history collections, FBI files, Citizen Council collections, and the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission Papers, to list a few, provides a detailed account of Evers's NAACP work and a clearer understanding of the racist environment that ultimately led to his murder. Selfless dedication marked the life of Medgar Evers, and while this remains his story, it is also a testament to the important role that grassroots activism played in exacting social change during some of America's most turbulent and violent times.
Condi by
[PRINT] A portrait of George W. Bush's national security advisor traces her childhood, early musical ambitions, foreign policies, receipt of the NAACP Image Award, and distinguished career as a scholar, professor, provost, and advisor.
Barack Obama by
(PRINT) From one of our preeminent journalists and modern historians comes the epic story of Barack Obama and the world that created him. In Barack Obama: The Story, David Maraniss has written a deeply reported generational biography teeming with fresh insights and revealing information, a masterly narrative drawn from hundreds of interviews, including with President Obama in the Oval Office, and a trove of letters, journals, diaries, and other documents. The book unfolds in the small towns of Kansas and the remote villages of western Kenya, following the personal struggles of Obama's white and black ancestors through the swirl of the twentieth century. It is a roots story on a global scale, a saga of constant movement, frustration and accomplishment, strong women and weak men, hopes lost and deferred, people leaving and being left. Disparate family threads converge in the climactic chapters as Obama reaches adulthood and travels from Honolulu to Los Angeles to New York to Chicago, trying to make sense of his past, establish his own identity, and prepare for his political future. Barack Obama: The Story chronicles as never before the forces that shaped the first black president of the United States and explains why he thinks and acts as he does. Much like the author's classic study of Bill Clinton, First in His Class, this promises to become a seminal book that will redefine a president.
Black Apollo of Science by
This biography illuminates the racial attitudes of an elite group of American scientists and foundation officers. It is the story of a complex and unhappy man. It blends social, institutional, black, and political history with the history of science.
Doc Holliday by
This is the definitive biography of legendary Western gunslinger, Doc Holliday. He was a dentist from the South believed to have gone west because of tuberculosis, a man who went on to become a gambler, a faro dealer, and one of the most feared (and fearless) gunfighters of his time - a close friend of Wyatt Earp and a key participant in the famous 1881 shootout at the OK Corral. He's been portrayed on screen by actors ranging from Victor Mature and Kirk Douglas to Dennis Quaid and Val Kilmer. But who was the real Doc Holliday? Drawing on 20 years of meticulous, primary-source research, Western historian Gary Roberts strips away the legends and reveals the truth about this enigmatic man, offering many new and surprising discoveries. Gary L. Roberts (Tifton, GA), an Emeritus Professor of History at Abraham Baldwin College, is the author of over 75 articles on Western history as well as Death Comes for the Chief Justice: The Slough-Rynerson Quarrel and Political Violence in New Mexico.
Wyatt Earp by
Finalist for the 2014 Weber-Clements Book Prize for the Best Non-fiction Book on Southwestern America In popular culture, Wyatt Earp is the hero of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, and a beacon of rough cowboy justice in the tumultuous American West. The subject of dozens of films, he has been invoked in battles against organized crime (in the 1930s), communism (in the 1950s), and al-Qaeda (after 2001). Yet as the historian Andrew C. Isenberg reveals inWyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life, the Hollywood Earp is largely a fiction--one created by none other than Earp himself. The lawman played on-screen by Henry Fonda and Burt Lancaster is stubbornly duty-bound; in actuality, Earp led a life of impulsive lawbreaking and shifting identities. When he wasn't wearing a badge, he was variously a thief, a brothel bouncer, a gambler, and a confidence man. As Isenberg writes, "He donned and shucked off roles readily, whipsawing between lawman and lawbreaker, and pursued his changing ambitions recklessly, with little thought to the cost to himself, and still less thought to the cost, even the deadly cost, to others." By 1900, Earp's misdeeds had caught up with him: his involvement as a referee in a fixed heavyweight prizefight brought him national notoriety as a scoundrel. Stung by the press, Earp set out to rebuild his reputation. He spent his last decades in Los Angeles, where he befriended Western silent film actors and directors. Having tried and failed over the course of his life to invent a better future for himself, in the end he invented a better past. Isenberg argues that even though Earp, who died in 1929, did not live to see it, Hollywood's embrace of him as a paragon of law and order was his greatest confidence game of all. A searching account of the man and his enduring legend, and a book about our national fascination with extrajudicial violence,Wyatt Earp: AVigilante Lifeis a resounding biography of a singular American figure.
William Clark and the Shaping of the West by
Between 1803 and 1806, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark co-captained the most famous expedition in American history. But while Lewis ended his life just three years later, Clark, as the highest-ranking Federal official in the West, spent three decades overseeing its consequences: Indian removal and the destruction of Native America. In a rare combination of storytelling and scholarship, best-selling author Landon Y. Jones presents for the first time Clark's remarkable life and influential career in their full complexity. Like every colonial family living on Virginia's violent frontier, the Clarks killed Indians and acquired land; acting on behalf of the United States, William would prove successful at both. Clark's life was spent fighting in America's fifty-year running war with the Indians (and their European allies) over the Western borderlands. The struggle began with his famed brother George Roger's western campaigns during the American Revolution, continued through the vicious battles of the War of 1812, and ended with the Black Hawk War in the 1830s. In vividly depicting Clark's life, Jones memorably captures not only the dark and bloody ground of America's early West, but also the qualities of character and courage that made him an unequalled leader in America's grander enterprise: the shaping of the West. No one played a larger part in that accomplishment than William Clark. William Clark and the Shaping of the West is an unforgettable human story that encompasses in a single life the sweep of American history from colonial Virginia to the conquest of the West.
A River Running West by
If the word "hero" still belonged in the historian's lexicon, it would certainly be applied to John Wesley Powell. Intrepid explorer, careful scientist, talented writer, and dedicated conservationist, Powell led the expedition that put the Colorado River on American maps and revealed the Grand Canyon to the world. Now comes the first biography of this towering figure in almost fifty years--a book that captures his life in all its heroism, idealism, and ambivalent, ambiguous humanity. In A River Running West, Donald Worster, one of our leading Western historians, tells the story of Powell's great adventures and describes his historical significance with compelling clarity and skill. Worster paints a vivid portrait of how this man emerged from the early nineteenth-century world of immigrants, fervent religion, and rough-and-tumble rural culture, and barely survived the Civil War battle at Shiloh. The heart of Worster's biography is Powell's epic journey down the Colorado in 1869, a tale of harrowing experiences, lethal accidents, and breathtaking discoveries. After years in the region collecting rocks and fossils and learning to speak the local Native American languages, Powell returned to Washington as an eloquent advocate for the West, one of America's first and most influential conservationists. But in the end, he fell victim to a clique of Western politicians who pushed for unfettered economic development, relegating the aging explorer to a quiet life of anthropological contemplation. John Wesley Powell embodied the energy, optimism, and westward impulse of the young United States. A River Running West is a gorgeously written, magisterial account of this great American explorer and environmental pioneer, a true story of undaunted courage in the American West.