Biography & Autobiography - Historical

T.E. Lawrence (1888-1935)--known worldwide as Lawrence of Arabia-- was many people in one: scholar, archaeologist, intelligence officer, guerrilla leader, diplomat, aspiring writer, and ordinary serviceman hiding under aliases from the celebrity he had first largely created and then come to despise. Illegitimate, but with...

From his arrival in New York City in 1831 as a young printer from New Hampshire to his death in 1872 after losing the presidential election to General Ulysses S. Grant, Horace Greeley (b. 1811) was a quintessential New Yorker. He thrived on the...

Shortly before 5 p.m. on Saturday, September 1, 1928, Europe gained a new kingdom and its only Muslim king: 32-year-old Zog I of the Albanians. Few foreign journalists were present in the Parliament House in Tirana to hear him swear his oath on the...

Goes beyond the myths and legends to reveal new insights into the real life of Sojourner Truth Many Americans have long since forgotten that there ever was slavery along the Hudson River. Yet Sojourner Truth was born a slave near the Hudson River in...

In the 1820s, several years before Braille was invented, Therese-Adele Husson, a young blind woman from provincial France, wrote an audacious manifesto about her life, French society, and her hopes for the future. Through extensive research and scholarly detective work, authors Catherine Kudlick and...

An intriguing study of artist and civil rights activist Shirley Graham Du Bois One of the most intriguing activists and artists of the twentieth century, Shirley Graham Du Bois also remains one of the least studied and understood. In Race Woman, Gerald Horne draws...

From the Ivy League to the oval office, Woodrow Wilson was the only professional scholar to become a U.S. president. A professor of history and political science, Wilson became the dynamic president of Princeton University in 1902 and was one of its most prolific...

Examines a major Michigan timber baron and political figure who also founded a coal-mining empire in Kentucky. Near the turn of the twentieth century, "Pine King" Justus S. Stearns was Michigan's largest producer of manufactured lumber and the owner of a prosperous coal mining...

Looking at the Holocaust through the eyes of children who lived through it, this collection offers an inspiring assortment of perspectives on survival. This distinctive volume contains twenty first-person narrative essays from Holocaust survivors who were children at the time of the atrocity. As...

Dunmore's New World tells the stranger-than-fiction story of Lord Dunmore, the last royal governor of Virginia, whose long-neglected life boasts a measure of scandal and intrigue rare in the annals of the colonial world. Dunmore not only issued the first formal proclamation of emancipation...

The Mind of a Patriot presents an intellectual life of a major figure who has traditionally been seen as an anti-intellectual "child of nature." This was the view of Patrick Henry that William Wirt presented in his Life of Henry, and it has pervaded...

The University Press of Virginia edition of The Letters of Matthew Arnold, edited by Cecil Y. Lang, represents the most comprehensive and assiduously annotated collection of Arnold's correspondence available. When complete in six volumes, this edition will include close to four thousand letters, nearly...

Louisa Susanna Cheves McCord (1810-1879) was one of the most remarkable figures in the intellectual history of antebellum America. A conservative intellectual, she broke the confines of Southern gender roles. Over the past decade historians have begun to pay attention to McCord and find...

The University Press of Virginia edition of The Letters of Matthew Arnold, edited by Cecil Y. Lang, represents the most comprehensive and assiduously annotated collection of Arnold's correspondence available. When complete in six volumes, this edition will include close to four thousand letters, nearly...

Americans did not at first cherish the idea of political severance from their mother country. In just a few years, however, they came to desire indepen-dence above all else. What brought about this change of feeling and how did it affect the lives of...

Martin and Osa Johnson thrilled American audiences of the 1920s and 30s with their remarkable movies of far-away places, exotic peoples, and the dramatic spectacle of African wildlife. Their own lives were as exciting as the movies they made--sailing through the South Sea Islands,...

In 673, the recently elected King Wamba of Spain was confronted with a separatist rebellion in Visigothic Gaul and other territories in the northeast of his realm. After recapturing Barcelona and Gerona, the ruler crossed the Pyrenees at the head of his armies and,...

This book tells the fascinating story of Robert of Arbrissel (ca. 1045-1116). Robert was a parish priest, longtime student, reformer, hermit, wandering preacher, and, most famously, founder of the abbey of Fontevraud. There men and women joined together in a monastic life organized so...

Erich von Stroheim (1885-1957) was one of the giants in American film history. Stubborn, arrogant, and colorful, he saw himself as a cinema artist, which led to conflicts with producers and studio executives who complained about the inflated budgets and extraordinary length of his...

" With a new foreword by Gary W. Gallagher Selected as one of the best one hundred books ever written on the Civil War by Civil War Times Illustrated and by Civil War: The Magazine of the Civil War Society A new, revised edition...

Union general, federal judge, presidential contender, and cabinet officer-Walter Q. Gresham of Indiana stands as an enigmatic character in the politics of the Gilded Age, one who never seemed comfortable in the offices he sought. This first scholarly biography not only follows the turns...

Claire Louise Caudill is one of those rare people who have become legends in their own time. She delivered more than 8,000 babies over the years, in and around her hometown of Morehead, Kentucky. In 1995 she was named Country Doctor of the Year,...

Born in rural Florida during the Reconstruction, Charles Pelot Summerall (1867-1955) enrolled in West Point in 1888. After graduating, Summerall's Army career helped to pull his family out of extreme poverty and set him on a path to eventually become a decorated war hero,...

"The history books may write it Reverend King was born in Atlanta, and then came to Montgomery, but we feel that he was born in Montgomery in the struggle here, and now he is moving to Atlanta for bigger responsibilities." -- Member of Dexter...

"Do unto others as ye would have them do unto you" are the words upon which Samuel M. Jones, self-made millionaire and mayor of Toledo, Ohio (1897-1904) organized his life, business, and political career.Unlike most progressive reformers, Jones was in a position to initiate...

" In 1979 Robert Penn Warren returned to his native Todd Country, Kentucky, to attend ceremonies in honor of another native son, Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, whose United States citizenship had just been restored, ninety years after his death, by a special...

721024x768Normal0falsefalsefalseEN-USX-NONEX-NONE"Carefully recounts the breaking down of the old social order maintained between blacks and whites in coastal North Carolina from a Confederate point of view."--Civil War Books and Authors"This skillfully edited journal does an outstanding job of showing us how a zealous Confederate literally...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER America was flying high in the Roaring Twenties. Then, almost overnight, the Great Depression brought it crashing down. When the dust settled, people were primed for a star who could distract them from reality. Enter Gypsy Rose Lee, a strutting,...

The age of Napoleon transformed Europe, laying the foundations for the modern world. Now Alistair Horne, one of the great chroniclers of French history gives us a fresh account of that remarkable time. Born into poverty on the remote island of Corsica, he rose...

In Amerigo, the award-winning scholar Felipe Fern ndez-Armesto answers the question "What's in a name?" by delivering a rousing flesh-and-blood narrative of the life and times of Amerigo Vespucci. Here we meet Amerigo as he really was: a rogue and raconteur who counted Christopher...

"My Bondage and My Freedom," writes John Stauffer in his Foreword, " is] a deep meditation on the meaning of slavery, race, and freedom, and on the power of faith and literacy, as well as a portrait of an individual and a nation a...

"Dray captures the genius and ingenuity of Franklin's scientific thinking and then does something even more fascinating: He shows how science shaped his diplomacy, politics, and Enlightenment philosophy."-Walter Isaacson, author of Benjamin Franklin: An American Life Today we think of Benjamin Franklin as a...

The Classic Story of Life in Apartheid South AfricaMark Mathabane was weaned on devastating poverty and schooled in the cruel streets of South Africa's most desperate ghetto, where bloody gang wars and midnight police raids were his rites of passage. Like every other child...

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire...

Born in 1918 into the fabric of Arab-Jewish frontier life at the foot of Mt. Tabor, Yigal Allon rose to become one of the founding figures of the state of Israel and an architect of its politics. In 1945 Allon became commander of the...

Joseph Bonaparte, King of Naples and Spain, claimed that he had never wanted the overpowering roles thrust upon him by his illustrious younger brother Napoleon. Left to his own devices, he would probably have been a lawyer in his native Corsica, a country gentleman...

Named "one of the best books of 2006" by The New York Sun Described by Carl Van Doren as "a harmonious human multitude," Benjamin Franklin was the most famous American of his time, of perhaps any time. His life and careers were so varied...

"I have collected here, and offer in this volume, a great many bits of now scarce source material, from which you, the reader, may construct a mosaic of your own, appraising the value and proper placement of each item, should you wish to write...

William Carlos Williams's medical practice and his literary career formed an undivided life. For forty years he was a busy doctor in the town of Rutherford, New Jersey, and yet he was able to write more than thirty books. One of the finest chapters...

Mario Rigoni Stern was barely twenty-one and already a battle veteran at the time of the World War II disaster he describes in The Sergeant in the Snow. In July 1942 three divisions of Italian Alpini troops, specially trained for winter warfare, began retreating--entirely...

The Orthodox rabbi Heshel Melamed's sudden death by heart attack in 1919 set his widow and children free to leave Lithuania. In this deeply personal memoir, his grandson journeys to the nation after the fall of Communism, and his story is both a philosophical...

This is the acclaimed biography of a giant of American journalism. As editor-publisher of the Chicago Tribune, Robert R. McCormick came to personify his city. Drawing on McCormick's personal papers and years of research, Richard Norton Smith has written the definitive life of the...

Winner, ISHS Annual Award for a Scholarly Publication, 2017 Fort de Chartres, built in 1719-1720 in the heart of what would become the American Midwest, embodied French colonial power for half a century. Lives of Fort de Chartres, by David MacDonald, details the French...

WINNER, Russell P. Strange Memorial Book of the Year Award from the Illinois State Historical Society, 2007! University Press Books for Public and Secondary Schools 2013 edition In 2005, historian Jason Emerson discovered a steamer trunk formerly owned by Robert Todd Lincoln's lawyer and...

Bartolomé de Las Casas was a Dominican priest--a missionary who fought relentlessly for justice for the Native Americans and even for their status as human beings. He was fearless in standing up to the political and ecclesiastical powers of his time, and a tireless...

They are all infantrymen; none were commissioned officers. One is a German-speaking artist whose sole record is nineteen stunning watercolors that cover a year's enlistment. Another is a free black from Syracuse, New York. Six are from slave states, one of whom was a...

Scientist, abolitionist, revolutionary: that is the Benjamin Franklin we know and celebrate. To this description, the talented young historian David Waldstreicher shows we must add runaway, slave master, and empire builder. But Runaway America does much more than revise our image of a beloved...

In this fast-paced biography, Harvard Sitkoff presents a concise, stunningly relevant and radical Martin Luther King, Jr. whose greatest accomplishments may have been yet to come. King's murder in April 1968 did far more than cut tragically short the life of one of America's...

Clarence Darrow is best remembered as the defense attorney in some of the most famous (and infamous) cases in American legal history. With his brilliant closing argument that saved the thrill killers Leopold and Loeb from the gallows and his impassioned defense of John...

James Wilson, signer of the federal constitution and one of the most influential leaders in the formative period of the republic, has been the only great figure of his age to be without a biography. As a consequence his name is virtually unknown to...