Biography & Autobiography - Historical

An examination of the life of General Manton S. Eddy, this study details his experiences in World War II as leader of the U.S. 9th Infantry Division through North Africa, Sicily and France, and subsequently, as commander of XII Corps, into the heart of...

As part of a unique series covering the grand sweep of Western civilization from ancient to present times, this biographical dictionary provides introductory information on 315 leading cultural figures of late medieval and early modern Europe. Taking a cultural approach not typically found in...

Author: John Henrik ClarkeISBN-10: 0313259577ISBN-13: 9780313259579Publisher: PraegerLanguage: EnglishPublished: 07/23/1987Pages: 130Format: HardcoverWeight: 0.84lbsSize: 9.52h x 6.32w x 0.59d

In A Strange Eventful History, one of our greatest living biographers turns his attention to a gruop of history's most influential performers, a remarkable dynasty that presided over the golden age of theater. Ellen Terry was ther era's most powerful actress. George Bernard Shaw...

Maureen Waller has written a fascinating narrative history---a brilliant combination of drama and biographical insight on the British monarchy---of the six women who have ruled England in their own names. In the last millennium there have been only six English female sovereigns: Mary I...

In the Russian winter of 1878 a shy, aristocratic young woman named Vera Zasulich walked into the office of the governor of St. Petersburg, pulled a revolver from underneath her shawl, and shot General Fedor Trepov point blank. Revenge , she cried, for the...

Adam Smith was a Scottish professor of moral philosophy. He published his classic The Wealth of Nations in 1776, the year the American Revolution began. Smith became widely known for his ideas of free markets, laissez-faire commerce, and the invisible hand. Yet English politicians,...

In The American Revelation, Neil Baldwin, one of our most exciting and provocative intellectual historians, applies his formidable energies to the story of how the American Spirit developed over four centuries, through an inspiring--and unsparing--examination of selected ideals that have helped inform our culture...

This fascinating biography, full of new and original material from a noted British historian, chronicles the life of Queen Victoria and the passionate love she shared with the German Prince Albert. Victoria's reign embraced the industrialization of Britain, the creation of numerous inventions, and...

Author: Tony ButtittaISBN-10: 0312292546ISBN-13: 9780312292546Publisher: St. Martins Press-3PLLanguage: EnglishPublished: 12/31/2003Pages: 192Format: PaperbackWeight: 0.55lbsSize: 8.40h x 5.50w x 0.60d

In 1804, when Josephine Bonaparte knelt before her husband, Napoleon, to receive the imperial diadem, few in the vast crowd of onlookers were aware of the dark secrets hidden behind the imperial fa軋de. To her subjects, she appeared to vet hew most favored woman...

The letters of Heloise and Abelard will remain one of the great, romantic and intellectual documents of human civilization while they, themselves, are probably second only to Romeo and Juliet in the fame accrued by tragic lovers. Here for the first time in Mart...

Heloise, the twelfth-century French abbess and reformer, emerges from this book as one of history's most extraordinary women, a thinker-writer of profound insight and skill. Her supple and learned mind attracted the most radical philosopher of her time, Peter Abelard. He became her teacher,...

Alice Keppel, the married lover of Queen Victoria's eldest son and great-grandmother to Camilla Parker-Bowles, was a key figure in Edwardian society. Hers was the acceptable face of adultery. Discretion was her hallmark. It was her art to be the king's mistress and yet...

As Maureen Quilligan wrote in the New York Times Book Review of The First Elizabeth, Anne Boleyn was a real victim of the sexual scandals her brilliant daughter escaped, and a subject Ms. Erickson's sensitivity to sexual and political nuance should well serve. Indeed,...

In this remarkable biography, Carolly Erickson brings Elizabeth I to life and allows us to see her as a living, breathing, elegant, flirtatious, diplomatic, violent, arrogant, and outrageous woman who commands our attention, fascination, and awe. With the special skill for which she is...

Anastasia--the name has become synonymous with enigma. the story of the youngest daughter of the last Russian czar has become one of the world's most favorite romantic fascinations, and is one of the strangest, saddest, most haunting riddle of the twentieth century: Did she...

A New York Times Notable Book A National Jewish Book Award finalist In 1960, Adolf Eichmann took to the defendant's box in Jerusalem and insisted that he was no "manager of the Holocaust," as his accusers claimed, just a smalltime bureaucrat following orders. Like...

Nancy Mitford's life was as glamorous and as dramatic as her most famous novels, The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate.Mitford was witty, intelligent, often acerbic, a great tease, and an acute observer of upper-class English idiosyncrasies. With the publication of...

Here is the most important autobiography from Renaissance Italy and one of the most spirited and colorful from any time or place, in a translation widely recognized as the most faithful to the energy and spirit of the original. Benvenuto Cellini was both a...

Leni Riefenstahl, the woman known as "Hitler's filmmaker," made some of the greatest and most innovative documentaries ever made. They are also insidious glorifications of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. Now, Steven Bach reveals the truths and lies behind Riefenstahl's lifelong self-vindication as...

Before the robber barons there were Civil War barons--a remarkable yet largely unknown group of men whose contributions won the war and shaped America's future. The Civil War woke a sleeping giant in America, creating unprecedented industrial growth that not only supported the struggle...

A gripping, often startling biography of the Founding Father of an America that other Founding Fathers forgot--an America of women, African Americans, Jews, Roman Catholics, Quakers, indentured workers, the poor, the mentally ill, and war veterans Ninety percent of Americans could not vote and...

Alex's Wake is a tale of two parallel journeys undertaken seven decades apart. In the spring of 1939, Alex and Helmut Goldschmidt were two of more than 900 Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany aboard the St. Louis, "the saddest ship afloat" (New York Times)....

Joshua Chamberlain's exploits on Little Round Top have gained worldwide fame since the release of the film Gettysburg. Several books on Joshua Chamberlain have appeared in recent years, but most have been either hero-worship or have relied too heavily on his own account of...

"Provides a testament to the enormous and wide-ranging contributions made by Union women and suggests how these women began to undermine traditional conceptions of womanhood."--Nina Silber When secessionist chaos turned to bloodshed in 1861, Mary A. Livermore (1820-1905), editor, lecturer, and abolitionist, left her...

This fascinating collection of intimate letters from and to Jefferson Davis (1808-1889) illuminates the character and personality of the President of the Confederacy. These letters (the majority appearing fully in print for the first time) range widely over one of the most turbulent periods...

Robert the Bruce (1274-1329) famously defeated the English at Bannockburn and became the hero king responsible for Scottish independence. In this fascinating new biography of the renowned warrior, Michael Penman focuses on Robert's kingship in the fifteen years that followed his triumphant victory and...

A dazzling translation by Lydia Davis of the first volume of Michel Leiris's masterwork, perhaps the most important French autobiographical enterprise of the twentieth century Michel Leiris, a French intellectual whose literary works inspired high praise from the likes of Simone de Beauvoir and...

From the prizewinning Jewish Lives series, an unprecedented portrait of Moses's inner world and perplexing character, by a distinguished biblical scholar "Bringing together copious, diverse and sometimes dissonant references (spanning Hasidic masters, George Eliot, Zizek and Beckett, among others), Zornberg gives a new tour...

Clemens August Graf von Galen, Bishop of M?ster from 1933 until his death in 1946, is renowned for his opposition to Nazism, most notably for his public preaching in 1941 against Hitler's euthanasia project to rid the country of sick, elderly, mentally retarded, and...

A biography that restores /robert Ingersoll--America's foremost nineteenth-century champion of reason and secularism--to our still-contested twenty-first-century public square "Jacoby makes the case that Americans are dearly indebted to Ingersoll, and would be well-served to revisit his life and writings at a time when religious...

An intimate new portrait of one of history's most controversial figures: heroic revolutionary or the first terrorist? For some historians and biographers, Maximilien Robespierre (1758-94) was a great revolutionary martyr who succeeded in leading the French Republic to safety in the face of overwhelming...

Although his cousin Sir Francis Drake is more famous, Sir John Hawkins (1532-1595) was a more successful seaman and played a pivotal role in the history of England and the emergence of the global slave trade. Born into a family of wealthy pirates, Hawkins...

This first-ever biography of William Beckford provides a unique look at eighteenth-century British history from the perspective of the colonies. Even in his own time, Beckford was seen as a metaphor for the dramatic changes occurring during this era. He was born in 1709...

A major biography of the young Napoleon Bonaparte and his improbable rise to power "A satisfying, psychologically convincing account of Napoleon's early years. . . . Even-handed and authoritative."--Adam Zamoyski, Sunday Times (London) At just thirty years of age, Napoleon Bonaparte ruled the most...

From the prizewinning Jewish Lives series, a vivid portrait of one of the most powerful leaders in Israel's first decades of statehood Instantly recognizable with his iconic eye patch, Moshe Dayan (1915-1981) was one of Israel's most charismatic--and controversial--personalities. As a youth he earned...

From the prizewinning Jewish Lives series, an intriguing and unconventional biography about one of the Bible's most elusive figures Tradition has it that King Solomon knew everything there was to know--the mysteries of nature, of love, of God himself--but what do we know of...

Sixteen-year-old Richard Pipes escaped from Nazi-occupied Warsaw with his family in October 1939. Their flight took them to the United States by way of Italy, and Pipes went on to earn a college degree, join the U.S. Air Corps, serve as professor of Russian...

This book tells for the first time the extraordinary story of Sergei Degaev, a political terrorist in tsarist Russia who disappeared after participating in the assassination of the chief of Russia's security organization in 1883. Those who knew and admired Alexander Pell at the...

The most informative, balanced, and up-to-date short study of Catherine the Great and her reign, written by an eminent scholar of Russian history "Not just another biography of Catherine but a panoramic view of Russia's social, political, economic, and cultural development and of its...

Neither a feckless knight-errant nor a king who neglected his kingdom, Richard I was in reality a masterful and businesslike ruler. In this wholly rewritten version of a classic account of the reign of Richard The Lionheart, John Gillingham scrutinizes the reasons for the...

Henry the Navigator, fifteenth-century Portuguese prince and explorer, is a legendary, almost mythical figure in late medieval history. Considered along with Columbus to be one of the progenitors of modernity, Prince Henry challenged the scientific assumptions of his age and was responsible for liberating...

The reign of Queen Anne, the last Stuart monarch, was a period of significant progress for the country: Britain became a major military power on land, the union of England and Scotland created a united kingdom of Great Britain, and the economic and political...

In 1714 George Ludwig, the fifty-eight year old elector of Brunswick-Luneburg became, as George I, the first of the Hanoverian dynasty to rule Britain. Until his death in 1727 George served as both elector of Hanover and British monarch. An enigmatic figure whose real...

In this lively and engaging new biography, Harry Kelsey shatters the familiar image of Sir Francis Drake. The Drake of legend was a pious, brave, and just seaman who initiated the move to make England a great naval power and whose acts of pirac...

The reign of Louis XVI, which ended with the guillotining of Louis and his wife, Marie Antoinette, in 1793, is a dramatic and crucial part of French history. This book presents the first complete and authoritative biography of Louis XVI, a poignant tale that...

Knighted in 1911 for distinguished service as a British foreign officer, hanged five years later for high treason to the Crown, Roger Casement is one of the most enigmatic figures in the long history of troubles between England and Ireland. His true character has...

By turns outlandish, humorous, and scatological, the Historia Augusta is an eccentric compilation of biographies of the Roman emperors and usurpers of the second and third centuries. Historians of late antiquity have struggled to explain the fictional date and authorship of the work and...

In 1968, at the peak of the Vietnam War, centrist Congressman Melvin Laird (R-WI) agreed to serve as Richard Nixon's secretary of defense. It was not, Laird knew, a move likely to endear him to the American public--but as he later said, "Nixon couldn't...