Biography & Autobiography - Historical

By the time Henry Kissinger was made secretary of state in 1973, he had become, according to a Gallup poll, the most admired person in America and one of the most unlikely celebrities ever to capture the world's imagination. Yet Kissinger was also reviled...

For historical aficionados and curious readers alike, this is the perfect 'short life' - gripping and hilariously funny, this biography sheds much-needed light on the life of the Russian icon: Grigory Rasputin.Grigory Rasputin, Siberian peasant-turned-mystic and court sage, was as fascinating as he was...

Callimachus was one of the most important Greek poets, and can also be one of the most rewarding to read. He was a pivotal figure in the history of ancient literature and an influential presence in later ancient poetry, including Catullus and Vergil. Yet...

This year-on-year study of Norfolk at war is the first such for many years, which utilizes material that has not been published in book form before or, sometimes, at all. In both the First and Second World War, Norfolk was pivotal, albeit for different...

In the first and most reliable biography of Daniel Boone in more than fifty years, award-winning historian Faragher brilliantly portrays America's famous frontier hero, while illuminating the American hero-making process itself. Drawing from popular narrative, the public record, scraps of documentation from Boone's own...

Twenty-four-year-old Prince Edward Augustus, the future father of Queen Victoria, arrived in Quebec City in 1791 and found himself immersed in a society struggling for an identity. His life became woven into the fabric of a highly-charged society and left an indelible mark on...

In 1936, George Orwell went to Spain to report on the civil war and instead joined the POUM militia to fight against the Fascists. In this now justly famous account of his experience, he describes both the bleak and the comic aspects of trench...

The Viking Conquest of England in 1016 - a far tougher and more brutal campaign than the Norman Conquest exactly half a century later - saw two great warriors, the Danish prince Cnut and his equally ruthless English opponent King Edmund Ironside, fight an...

Richard, 3rd Duke of York is frequently used to recall the colours of the rainbow with the mnemonic 'Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain', wrongly believed to be the Grand Old Duke of York who had 10,000 men, or mistaken for his youngest...

Edward II is one of the most controversial kings of English history. On numerous occasions he brought England to the brink of civil war. Author Stephen Spinks argues that Edward and the later murdered Piers Gaveston were lovers, not merely 'brothers-in-arms'. Influenced by successive...

Fyodor Dostoyevsky's life and literature are still potent today, nearly two hundred years after his birth. He is credited with writing some of the greatest novels of all time; a compatriot of Tolstoy and a contemporary of Dickens, his struggle for recognition was long...

In the summer of 1894 Oscar Wilde spent eight weeks in Worthing, during which he wrote his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest.This family holiday was a microcosm of Wilde's complicated life during the three years between his falling in love with Lord Alfred...

Queen Victoria was our longest-reigning monarch, a symbol of Britain's great age of power and imperialism. But her life could so easily have been cut short. Just three years after she ascended to the throne, a humble 'pot-boy' left his house with two pistols...

One of the most controversial figures of the New Deal Era, Harry Hopkins elicited few neutral responses from his contemporaries. Millions admired him and believed the New Deal agencies he headed had rescued them from despair, but many of President Roosevelt's enemies passionately hated...

Returning to the turbulent days of a nation divided, best-selling author and acclaimed historian James Robertson explores 70 fascinating figures who shaped America during Reconstruction and beyond. Relentless politicians, intrepid fighters, cunning innovators--the times called for bold moves, and this resilient generation would not...

In The Red Earl Selina Hastings tells the extraordinary story of her father, Jack Hastings, 16th Earl of Huntingdon. In 1925, Hastings infuriated his ultra-conservative parents by turning his back on centuries of tradition to make a scandalous run-away marriage. With his beautiful Italian...

Edmund Pickens lived through a crucial period in Chickasaw history. During Removal in 1836, he traveled with his wife and children on the sad journey from the Chickasaw homelands to Indian Territory. Like other Chickasaws, he faced many hardships after settling in the new...

Japan is the only country in the world where women writers laid the foundations of classical literature. The Kagerō Diary commands our attention as the first extant work of that rich and brilliant tradition. The author, known to posterity as Michitsuna's Mother, a member...

An icon of the Southern Appalachian region known for the seminal books Camping and Woodcraft and Our Southern Highlanders, Horace Kephart was instrumental in efforts to create a national park in the Smokies and to establish the Appalachian Trail through North Carolina and Tennessee....

A distinctive and original voice within the Modernist movement, the English novelist Mary Butts was a prodigy of style, learning and energy, whose work compared with Katherine Mansfield, D.H. Lawrence and T.S. Eliot, and was championed by Pound, Robert McAlmon, Ford Madox Ford, and...

Much of the wealth from the great mining bonanzas of the nineteenth century American West flowed into San Francisco and made possible the growth of the city and some fabulous personal fortunes. Among the wealthiest and most powerful of the Bonanza Kings were William...

Charleston Blacksmith is a guidebook to the beautiful ironwork of Charleston created by the historic city's best-known blacksmith, Philip Simmons. Simmons's mastery of the craft and his love for the hammer and anvil are evident in more than one hundred photographs of his ironwork...

Revolutionary War general Thomas Posey (1750-1818) lived his life against the backdrop of one of the most dramatic periods in American history. Posey, who played a minor role in the actual War for Independence, went on to participate in the development and foundation of...

In the late 1920s, Canada's economy was showing all the signs of a full-fledged depression. Life savings were evaporating, unemployment was up, and exports were dramatically down. Riding on the popularity of his promise to "blast" Canada's way into world markets -- and thus...

This biography of Jesuit missionary and humanist Jose de Acosta provides a new look at his influential writing, which would later become the foundation for liberation theology.Author: Claudio M. Burgaleta, S. J. BurgaletaISBN-10: 0829410635ISBN-13: 9780829410631Publisher: Loyola PressLanguage: EnglishPublished: 04/01/1999Pages: 200Format: PaperbackWeight: 0.81lbsSize: 8.94h x...

A confidant of Governor John Burns, a member of the Board of Supervisors of the City and County of Honolulu, a business associate of developer and financier Chinn Ho, a trustee of the Bishop Estate - Matsuo Takabuki has been at the heart of...

"I want to talk about my tragic story, because if I don't, it will get into my mind and get into my dream and make me crazy." When the Navajos were taken from their land by the federal government in the 1860s, thousands lost...

Examines the hopes and disappointments, the victories and defeats, and the integrity and weaknesses of the men who have held the office of President of the Unites States. Featuring up-to-date information, including the inauguration of Barack Obama, this iAuthor: Neil A. HamiltonISBN-10: 0816082472ISBN-13: 9780816082476Publisher:...

In Inheriting the Holocaust, Paula S. Fass explores her own past as the daughter of Holocaust survivors to reflect on the nature of history and memory. Through her parents' experiences and the stories they recounted, Fass defined her engagement as a historian and used...

Written by a Czech Jewish boy, A Boy in Terez匤 covers a year of Pavel Weiner's life in the Theresienstadt transit camp in the Czech town of Terez匤 from April 1944 until liberation in April 1945. The Germans claimed that Theresienstadt was "the town...

"Patrick emerges from this diary as the GI Joe of 1861-1865." --Charles L. Dufour In April, 1861, Private Robert Patrick, a talented clerk in the Commissary and Quartermaster departments of the Fourth Louisiana Infantry, began a diary that he continued until the last days...

Shortly after the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1886, two young sisters from Pictou County, Nova Scotia, took the train west to British Columbia. Jessie and Annie McQueen each intended to teach there for three years and then return home. In fact they...

Most modern historians perpetuate the myth that Giuliano de' Medici (1479-1516), son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, was nothing more than an inconsequential, womanizing hedonist with little inclination or ability for politics. In the first sustained biography of this misrepresented figure, Josephine Jungic re-evaluates Giuliano's...

The British ambassador in Washington during the US Civil War and ambassador in Paris before and after the Franco-Prussian war, Lord Lyons (1817-1887) was one of the most important diplomats of the Victorian period. Although frequently featured in histories of the United States and...

The first full-length biography of the man once believed to be a likely candidate to succeed Josef Stalin Zhdanov was Stalin's main assistant in both the massive bureaucracy of the Communist Party and the attempt to restore ideological orthodoxy In The Life and Times...

On May 17, 1876, Elizabeth Bacon Custer kissed her husband George goodbye and wished him good fortune in his efforts to fulfill the Army's orders to drive in the Native Americans who would not willingly relocate to a reservation. Adorned in a black taffeta...

Henry 'Birdie' Bowers realised his life's ambition when he was selected for Captain Scott's Terra Nova expedition to the Antarctic, yet he also met his death on the return journey from the South Pole in 1912. Bowers was born in 1883 on the Firth...

Gruffudd ap Llywelyn was Wales' greatest king. Ambitious and battle-sure, he succeeded in doing what no Welsh king before him was capable of: he ruled all Wales as a united and independent state. He went further by turning the Viking threat to his realm...

Prince Albert Victor, King Edward Vll's (r. 1901-10) first son and heir to the throne, popularly known as Eddy, has virtually been airbrushed out of history. Eddy was as popular and charismatic a figure in his own time as Princess Diana a century later....

Nothing prepares a man for war and Private Charles Waite, of the Queen's Royal Regiment, was ill-prepared when his convoy took a wrong turning near Abbeville and met 400 German soldiers and half a dozen tanks. He lost his freedom that day in May...

D-Day's only Victoria Cross winner, Company Sergeant Major Stanley Hollis, was, uniquely, twice recommended for this coveted award on June 6, 1944. A tough Teesside, working-class rebel, Hollis was no model soldier. Earlier in the war he was forever being "busted" for various misdemeanors....

Blitz Boy is a fascinating recollection of life in the Blitz and of evacuation to Cornwall. Charismatic author Alf Townsend tells the harrowing and touching tale of what it was like for a young inner-city child to suffer the trials of war at first...

Elizabeth Woodville is a historical character whose life no novelist would ever have dared invent. She has been portrayed as an enchantress, as an unprincipled advancer of her family's fortunes and a plucky but pitiful queen in Shakespeare's histories. She has been alternatively championed...

It took Henry VIII twenty-eight years, three wives, and a break with Rome before he secured a legitimate male heir. Yet he already had a son - the illegitimate Henry Fitzroy. Fitzroy was born in 1519 after the King's affair with Elizabeth Blount. He...

Noblewoman, vividly documents both the great and the trivial events of her long life. They cover her life from her childhood days, when she witnessed the funeral of Queen Elizabeth I, to her last months, when she recalled her past from her room in...

The newspapers called her 'Australia's most beautiful bad woman' and she was deadly to know... This is the story of 'pretty' Dulcie Markham, a key figure of the underworld of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, who, according to one crime reporter, 'saw more violence...

Between 1483 and 1485 Viscount Francis Lovell was one of the most important and influential men in the government of his childhood friend Richard III, becoming the King's Chamberlain and a Knight of the Garter. Lovell continued to support a Ricardian claim to the...

The year 2022 sees the 100th anniversary of the death of solider and politician Michael Collins, the legendary leader of Irish republicanism.Born in Clonakilty, County Cork, in 1890, Collins joined Sinn F駟n at age 18 and later took part in the 1916 Rising. In...

In print continuously for more than thirty years, this book is long established as a reliable and affectionate portrait. First, published in 1971, its great strength is that the author was able to interview Collins' surviving contemporaries and was offered unrestricted access to personal...

One of the century's greatest philosophers, without whom there would be no Sartre, no Foucault, no Frankfurt School, Martin Heidegger was also a man of great failures and flaws, a Faustus who made a pact with the devil of his time, Adolf Hitler. The...