New Orleans--born Stanhope Bayne-Jones was one of the pivotal figures in the modernization of American medicine. Through his life story Albert E. Cowdrey's War and Healing dramatizes the growth of American medicine from a provincial and amateurish state into a major national endeavor.

Cowdrey shows the diversity and wide-ranging impact of Bayne-Jones's career. A brilliant student at Johns Hopkins, and a protege of William Welch, bayne-Jones became in turn dean of Yale Medical School, a foundation head, a general in the army's Medical Corps, president of the New York Hospital--Cornell...

In this exceptional biography, Canter Brown, Jr., removes Ossian Bingley Hart (1821 1874) a Unionist, the principal founder of the Republican Party in Florida, and a Reconstruction-era governor of the state from the shadows of history. Through an examination of Hart s life and career, Brown offers new insight into the political problems of the day the role of Unionism in Deep South politics in particular and enriches our understanding of the complexities of Reconstruction. Brown traces Hart s life from his privileged childhood in the newly founded port town of Jacksonville through his...

As Jefferson Davis paraded through the streets of Montgomery, Alabama, to take the oath of office as the first president of the Confederate States of America, two men accompanied him in his open coach: Alexander Stephens -- the vice-president-elect -- and Basil Manly. A noted southern Baptist preacher, educator, and the most ardent secessionist of them all, Manly had been selected to serve as chaplain to the provisional Confederate Congress and opened the inaugural ceremonies with a prayer. For nearly thirty years, Manly had worked devotedly for the establishment of a southern nation, and...

From his assumption of the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot's editorial helm in 1919 until his death in 1950, Louis Isaac Jaffe served as one of the South's leading and most respected liberal journalists. Prejudice he faced as a Jew created in him an abiding empathy with the downtrodden, and his World War I military service and subsequent Red Cross work deepened his sensitivity to injustice. Alexander Leidholdt's new biography maps the battlefield of intolerance and civil rights violations on which Jaffe fired his journalistic salvos and explores the complexities of a man who was poised to become a...

An esteemed planter, politician, and military leader influential in the affairs of both South Carolina and Texas, James Hamilton (1786--1857) so declined in reputation during the last twenty years of his life that his home state refused to acknowledge him when he died. Robert Tinkler's superb, first-published biography of Hamilton conveys the enormous drama, dignity, and pathos that marked Hamilton's pursuit of the greatness achieved by his prominent Revolutionary-era forebears and his subsequent profound reversal brought on by debt.

While a member of Congress during the 1820s, Hamilton...

Best remembered as the father of Vice President Al Gore, Albert Gore, Sr., worked tirelessly in politics himself, a Democratic congressman and senator from 1939 to 1971 and a representative of southern liberalism and American reformism. In the first comprehensive biography of Gore, Kyle Longley has produced an incisive portrait of a significant American political leader and an arresting narrative of the shaping of a southern and American political tradition. His research includes archival sources from across the country as well as interviews with Gore's colleagues, friends, and family....

Randall Lee Gibson of Louisiana offers the first biography of one of Louisiana's most intriguing nineteenth-century politicians and a founder of Tulane University. Gibson (1832--1892) grew up on his family's sugar plantation in Terrebonne Parish and was educated at Yale University before studying law at the University of Louisiana in New Orleans. He purchased a sugar plantation in Lafourche Parish in 1858 and became heavily involved in the pro-secession faction of the Democratic Party. Elected colonel of the Thirteenth Louisiana Volunteer Regiment at the start of the Civil War, he...

Of all the major figures of the Civil War era, Confederate general John Bankhead Magruder is perhaps the least understood. The third-ranking officer in Virginia's forces behind Robert E. Lee and Joseph E. Johnston, Magruder left no diary, no completed memoirs, no will, not even a family Bible. There are no genealogical records and very few surviving personal papers. Unsurprisingly, then, much existing literature about Magruder contains incorrect information. In John Bankhead Magruder, an exhaustive biography that reflects more than thirty years of painstaking archival research, Thomas M....