Texas, for years, was a one-party state controlled by white democrats. In 1962, a young eighteen-year-old heard the first rumblings of Chicano community organization in the barrios of Cristal. The rumor in the town was that five Mexican Americans were going to run for all five seats on the city council. But first, poor citizens had to find a way to pay the $1.75 poll tax. Money had to be raised-through bake sales of tamales, cake walks, and dances. So began the political activism of Jose Angel Gutierrez. Gutierrez's autobiography, The Making of a Chicano Militant, is the first...
Texas, for years, was a one-party state controlled by white democrats. In 1962, a young eighteen-year-old heard the first rumblings of Chicano com...
Dictated in an idiomatic, associative style, this book exposes the doubleness of Carson McCullers's life. A mine of information for anyone interested in McCullers and American literary life in the 1950s, these memoirs are also a testament to the courage and love of life of their author.
Dictated in an idiomatic, associative style, this book exposes the doubleness of Carson McCullers's life. A mine of information for anyone interested ...
Born on a Kentucky plantation in 1815, Bibb first attempted to escape from bondage at the age of ten. He was recaptured and escaped several more times before he eventually settled in Detroit and joined the antislavery movement as a lecturer. This autobiography was first published in 1849.
Born on a Kentucky plantation in 1815, Bibb first attempted to escape from bondage at the age of ten. He was recaptured and escaped several more times...
"Diaries of Girls and Women" captures and preserves the diverse lives of forty-seven girls and women who lived in Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin between 1837 and 1999 young schoolgirls, adolescents coming of age, newlywed wives, mothers grieving the loss of children, teachers, nurses, elderly women, Luxembourger immigrant nuns, and women traveling abroad. A compelling work of living history, it brings together both diaries from historical society archives and diaries still in possession of the diarists or their descendents. Editor Suzanne L. Bunkers has selected these excerpts from...
"Diaries of Girls and Women" captures and preserves the diverse lives of forty-seven girls and women who lived in Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin be...
Since the late 1960s, American film and video makers of all stripes have been fascinated with themes of self and identity. Though the documentary form is most often used to capture the lives of others, Jim Lane turns his lens on those media makers who document their own lives, their own identities. He looks at the ways in which autobiographical documentaries - Roger and Me, Sherman's March, and Silverlake Life are but a few of the more prominent examples - raise weighty questions about American cultural life. What is the role of women in society? What does it mean to die from AIDS? How do...
Since the late 1960s, American film and video makers of all stripes have been fascinated with themes of self and identity. Though the documentary form...
Despite the range and abundance of autobiographical writing from the Anglophone Caribbean, this book is the first to explore this literature fully. It covers works from the colonial era up to present-day AIDS memoirs and assesses the links between more familiar works by George Lamming, C. L. R. James, Derek Walcott, V. S. Naipaul, and Jamaica Kincaid and less frequently cited works by the Hart sisters, Mary Prince, Mary Seacole, Claude McKay, Yseult Bridges, Jean Rhys, Anna Mahase, and Kamau Brathwaite. Sandra Pouchet Paquet charts the intersection of multiple, contradictory viewpoints of the...
Despite the range and abundance of autobiographical writing from the Anglophone Caribbean, this book is the first to explore this literature fully. It...
Jean M. Humez offers a biographical overview based on extensive new research and a compilation of the complete texts of the stories Harriet Tubman told about her life - a virtual autobiography culled by Humez from rare early publications and manuscript sources.
Jean M. Humez offers a biographical overview based on extensive new research and a compilation of the complete texts of the stories Harriet Tubman tol...
A Cuban woman who moved to New Orleans in the 1850s and eloped with her American lover, Loreta Janeta Velazquez fought in the Civil War for the Confederacy as the cross-dressing Harry T. Buford. As Buford, she single-handedly organized an Arkansas regiment; participated in the historic battles of Bull Run, Balls Bluff, Fort Donelson, and Shiloh; romanced men and women; and eventually decided that spying as a woman better suited her Confederate cause than fighting as a man. In the North, she posed as a double agent and worked to traffic information, drugs, and counterfeit bills to support the...
A Cuban woman who moved to New Orleans in the 1850s and eloped with her American lover, Loreta Janeta Velazquez fought in the Civil War for the Confed...
A search for roots and identity has rarely been captured with such irony, unusual insight, and surprising humor as in this memoir of heartbreak and hope. Today a distinguished American poet, Colette Inez first came to the United States when she was eight years old, as an apparent Belgian orphan escorted by two complete strangers. Growing up in post-World War II America, a stranger to her own past, she survived a harrowing adolescence and an increasingly menacing, abusive adoptive family by learning to define her single solace: a developing passion for literature. Facing possible deportation...
A search for roots and identity has rarely been captured with such irony, unusual insight, and surprising humor as in this memoir of heartbreak and ho...
The life narratives in this collection are by ethnically diverse women of energy and ambition--some well known, some forgotten over generations--who confronted barriers of gender, class, race, and sexual difference as they pursued or adapted to adventurous new lives in a rapidly changing America. The engaging selections--from captivity narratives to letters, manifestos, criminal confessions, and childhood sketches--span a hundred years in which women increasingly asserted themselves publicly. Some rose to positions of prominence as writers, activists, and artists; some sought education or...
The life narratives in this collection are by ethnically diverse women of energy and ambition--some well known, some forgotten over generations--who c...
