This volume collects the letters written over a thirty-year period by a second generation Chinese American woman, Flora Belle Jan (190650). Her writings illuminate the inner life of a sensitive, unconventional, and ambitious woman--an exceptional Chinese American flapper, writer, and journalist. Born in California to immigrant parents, Jan grew ......
One of the few publicly known communists in the South, Junius Scales organized textile workers, fought segregation, and was the only American to be imprisoned under the membership clause of the Smith Act during the McCarthy years. This compact collective memoir, built on three interconnected oral histories and including a historical essay by Gail ......
This is the first published edition of the diary of Abraham Plotkin, an American labor leader of immigrant Jewish origin who lived in Berlin between November 1932 and May 1933. A firsthand account of the Weimar Republic's final months and the early rise of Nazi power in Germany, Plotkin's diary focuses on the German working class, the labor ......
Despite historians' focus on the man as president and politician, Abraham Lincoln lived most of his adult life as a practicing lawyer. It was as a lawyer that he fed his family, made his reputation, bonded with Illinois, and began his political career. Lincoln the Lawyer explores the origins of Lincoln's desire to practice law, his legal ......
Conservationist, Planner, and Creator of the Appalachian Trail
Planner and originator of the Appalachian Trail and a cofounder of the Wilderness Society, Benton MacKaye (1879-1975) was a pioneer in linking the concepts of preservation and recreation. Spanning three-quarters of a century, his long and productive career had a major impact on emerging movements in conservation, environmentalism, and regional ......
Rudolf Friml (1879-1972) is best known as the composer of romantic 1920s operettas. Beginning in 1912 he wrote music in different styles for Broadway, and in 1914, along with Irving Berlin and Victor Herbert, he became a charter member of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP). Skilled at evoking far-away times and ......
Standing alongside J. P. Morgan, Carnegie, and Rockefeller, Charles Tyson Yerkes (1837-1905) was one of the most influential and controversial public figures in America. Robber Baron is the first biography of the traction magnate who was behind the Chicago Loop Elevated, an investor in the London Underground, namesake of the University of ......
A Black Entrepreneur in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco
Mary Ellen Pleasant arrived in Gold Rush-era San Francisco a free black woman with abolitionist convictions and a predilection for entrepreneurial success. Behind the convenient and trusted disguise of ''Mammy,'' she transformed domestic labor into enterprise, amassed remarkable real estate, wealth, and power, and gained notoriety for her work in ......
Mary Elizabeth Garrett was one of the most influential philanthropists and women activists of the Gilded Age. With Mary's legacy all but forgotten, Kathleen Waters Sander recounts in impressive detail the life and times of this remarkable woman, through the turbulent years of the Civil War to the early twentieth century. At once a captivating ......
