Kategoria BISAC: Biography & Autobiography >> Historical

An important story of one man's life, lived with courage and principle.

During the decades of Bourbon ascendancy after 1874, Alabama institutions like those in other southern states were dominated by whites. Former slave and sharecropper Jack Turner refused to accept a society so structured. Highly intelligent, physically imposing, and an orator of persuasive talents, Turner was fearless before whites and emerged as a leader of his race. He helped to forge a political alliance between blacks and whites that defeated and humiliated the Bourbons in Choctaw County, the heart...

The book tells of Stephen R. Mallory's support of naval inventions, strategy, and ideas. It also sheds light on the the successes and failures of Jefferson Davis. Durkin gives a well-balanced biography of Mallory and his life in the Confederate navy.

Remaining human in the face of life's greatest threat.

This book is a rendezvous of history and imagination and dreams and of hopes and disenchantments. It unfolds in a succession of reminiscences that weave together a shimmering tapestry depicting a lost world. The setting is Lodz, Poland, in the years between the author's childhood and early maturity, a period overtaken by the cataclysmic events of the 1930s and early 1940s. The narrative approach presents a powerful personal testament and reflects the determination of an entire community to remain human in the face of its...

Originally published in 1975, this Pulitzer Prize for History-winning biography chronicles the life of Archbishop Jean Baptiste Lamy (1814-1888), New Mexico's first resident bishop and the most influential, reform-minded Catholic official in the region during the late 1800s. Lamy's accomplishments, including the endowing of hospitals, orphanages, and English-language schools and colleges, formed the foundation of modern-day Santa Fe and often brought him into conflict with corrupt local priests. His life story, also the subject of...

"Robert Stafford of Cumberland Island" offers a rare glimpse into the life and times of a nineteenth-century planter on one of Georgia's Sea Islands. Born poor, Robert Stafford (1790-1877) became the leading planter on his native Cumberland Island. Specializing in the highly valued long staple variety of cotton, he claimed among his assets more than 8,000 acres and 350 slaves.

Mary R. Bullard recounts Stafford's life in the context of how events from the Federalist period to the Civil War to Reconstruction affected Sea Island planters. As she discusses Stafford's associations with other...

In "Battlegrounds of Memory" Clay Lewis crosses seven generations of his family to illuminate a heritage of romantic hope and abject defeat, seeking freedom from the past by understanding it. His story is a cry from the heart, reaching into the depths of a family's collective soul and finding hope in the midst of despair.

Heritage was a heavy burden on Lewis's parents, children of the South whose denial of their past bound them more tightly to it. Their battles with each other and their son followed old patterns of intergenerational conflict. The book opens with a harrowing scene in...

For years, serious naturalists have treasured their copies of Francis Harper's naturalist's edition of "The Travels of William Bartram" as the definitive version of Bartram's pioneering survey. Complete with notes and commentary, an annotated index, maps, a bibliography, and a general index, this classic is now back in print for the first time in decades. Harper's knowledge of natural history transforms Bartram's accounts of the southern states from a curious record of personal observation from the past into a guidebook useful to modern biologists, historians, ornithologists, and...

In "Separate Pasts" Melton A. McLaurin honestly and plainly recalls his boyhood during the 1950s, an era when segregation existed unchallenged in the rural South. In his small hometown of Wade, North Carolina, whites and blacks lived and worked within each other's shadows, yet were separated by the history they shared. "Separate Pasts" is the moving story of the bonds McLaurin formed with friends of both races--a testament to the power of human relationships to overcome even the most ingrained systems of oppression.

A new afterword provides historical context for the development of...

On July 18, 1863, the African American soldiers of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry led a courageous but ill-fated charge on Fort Wagner, a key bastion guarding Charleston harbor. Confederate defenders killed, wounded, or made prisoners of half the regiment. Only hours later, the body of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, the regiment's white commander, was thrown into a mass grave with those of twenty of his men. The assault promoted the young colonel to the higher rank of martyr, ranking him alongside the legendary John Brown in the eyes of abolitionists.

In this biography of Shaw,...

On the Boston Common stands one of the great Civil War memorials, a magnificent bronze sculpture by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. It depicts the black soldiers of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry marching alongside their young white commander, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. When the philosopher William James dedicated the memorial in May 1897, he stirred the assembled crowd with these words: "There they march, warm-blooded champions of a better day for man. There on horseback among them, in the very habit as he lived, sits the blue-eyed child of fortune."

In this book Shaw speaks for...

More than thirty years after the murder of Viola Liuzzo by the Ku Klux Klan, she remains an enigma. Some saw her as a dedicated civil rights worker, others as a troubled housewife. Some thought she was a victim of random violence and government conspiracy, while others thought she was an unfit mother who got what she deserved.

"From Selma to Sorrow" is the first full-length biography of the only white woman honored at the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery. Born and reared in the South, Liuzzo moved to Detroit as an adult. At the time of her death she was married to a high-ranking...

As the wife of a frequently absent slaveholder and public figure, Anna Matilda Page King (1798-1859) was the de facto head of their Sea Island plantation. This volume collects more than 150 letters to her husband, children, parents, and others. Conveying the substance of everyday life as they chronicle King's ongoing struggles to put food on the table, nurse her "family black and white," and keep faith with a disappointing husband, the letters offer an absorbing firsthand account of antebellum coastal Georgia life.

Anna Matilda Page was reared with the expectation that she would marry a...

This detailed biography of a man who flourished in two very different worlds opens a new doorway into the societies of prerevolutionary France and postrevolutionary Georgia. Christophe Poulain DuBignon (1739-1825) was the son of an impoverished Breton aristocrat. Breaking social convention to engage in trade, he began his long career first as a cabin boy in the navy of the French India Company and later as a sea captain and privateer. After retiring from the sea, DuBignon lived in France as a "bourgeois noble" with income from land, moneylending, and manufacturing.

Uprooted by the French...

Few men in the history of Georgia have come down to the present in hearsay and folklore as profusely and as controversially as has James Monroe Smith, who became a millionaire farmer around the turn of the twentieth century. He was born near Washington, Georgia, in 1839 and died on his plantation a few miles from Athens in 1915.

Smith s plantation Smithonia was measured in terms of square miles. He developed an empire of farming and allied interests, among which was a railroad to connect his plantation with other rail lines. He served terms in the state legislature in both the house and...

Although he was the first African American fighter pilot, Eugene J. Bullard is still a relative stranger in his homeland. An accomplished professional boxer, musician, club manager, and impresario of Parisian nightlife between the world wars, Bullard found in Europe a degree of respect and freedom unknown to blacks in America. There, for twenty-five years, he helped define the expatriate experience for countless other African American artists, writers, performers, and athletes.

This is the first biography of Bullard in thirty years and the most complete ever. It follows Bullard's...

A rogue, a megalomaniac, a plodder, and a depressive: the men whose previously unpublished diaries are collected in this volume were four very different characters. But they had much in common too. All were from the Deep South. All were young, between seventeen and twenty-five. All had a connection to cotton and slaves. Most obviously, all were diarists, enduring night upon night of cramped hands and candle bugs to write out their lives.

Down the furrows of their fathers' farms, through the thickets of their local woods, past the familiar haunts of their youth, Harry Dixon, Henry...