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This elegantly written biography depicts the combined effect of social structure, character, and national crisis on a woman's life - Mary Greenhow Lee (1819-1907). Lee's personal history is an intriguing story. It is also an account of the complex social relations that characterized nineteenth-century life.

A rare, fascinating personality emerges in Donald B. Cole's biography of Amos Kendall (1789-1869), the reputed intellectual engine behind Andrew Jackson's administration and an influential figure in the transformation of young America from an agrarian republic to a capitalist democracy.

Based on a rich cache of personal and business records, Curtis Evans's study of Daniel Pratt and his "Yankee" town in the heart of the Deep South challenges the conventional portrayal of the South as a premodern region hostile to industrialization and shows that the South was not so markedly different from the North.

In this lavishly illustrated biography of silversmith and graphic artist William Spratling (1900-1967), Taylor D. Littleton reintroduces one of the most fascinating American expatriates of the early twentieth century. Best known for his revolutionary silver designs, Spratling influenced an entire generation of Mexican and American silversmiths and transformed the tiny village of Taxco into the "Florence of Mexico." Littleton widens the context of Spratling's popular reputation by examining the formative periods in his life and art that preceded his brilliant entrepreneurial experiment in the Las Delicias workshop in Taxco, which left a permanent mark on Mexico's artistic orientation and economic life.Spratling made a fortune manufacturing and designing silver, but his true life's work was to conserve, redeem, and interpret the ancient culture of his adopted country. He explained for North American audiences the paintings of Mexico's modern masters and earned distinction as a learned and early collector of pre-Columbian art. Spratling and his workshop gradually became a visible and culturally attractive link between a steady stream of notable American visitors and the country they wanted to see and experience.Spratling had the rare good fortune to witness his own reputation-as one of the most admired Americans in Mexico-assume legendary status before his death. William Spratling, His Life and Art vividly reconstructs this richly diverse life whose unique aesthetic legacy is but a part of its larger cultural achievement of profoundly influencing Americans' attitudes toward a civilization different from their own.

Daniel Russell is a good example of what Carl Degler has termed "the other South". The son of an aristocratic North Carolina family of staunch Whig-Unionists, he entered politics when the Republican party first appeared in the state after the Civil War. For more than forty years he fought the solid South mentality of the Bourbon Democrats.

Set in the twilight years of southern aristocracy, The Percys of Mississippi is a biography of a family in whose bloodline ran both a strong commitment to public service and an equally strong but more private dedication to literature. Following four generations of Percy family history, Lewis Baker chronicles the lives and public careers of Colonel William Alexander Percy, a planter and lawyer; his son LeRoy, a lawyer and United States Senator; LeRoy's son Will, a poet and lawyer; and Will's nephew and adopted son, the novelist Walker Percy. Known as the "gray eagle of the delta" for his piercing eyes and silver hair, Colonel Percy served as a Confederate officer in both the eastern and western campaigns of the Civil War. He returned home to practice law and manage the family's property, but he was soon drawn into the arena of state politics, where he fought vigorously to strengthen the Mississippi River levee system and to protect his district from the perils of Reconstruction. With Colonel Percy's death in 1888, LeRoy Percy inherited his father's law practice and his mantle of leadership in the community. LeRoy used his power as a United States Senator to continue his father's long quest for an adequate levee system; struggled to loosen the Ku Klux Klan's grip of fear on the delta; and campaigned tirelessly to discredit the divisive creed of the state's rising demagogue politicians. In the election of 1911, LeRoy Percy was defeated in his bid to be returned to the Senate, losing to the flamboyant demagogue James Kimble Vardaman, the "White Chief." It was a defeat echoed across the South throughout the dawning years of the twentieth century, as poorer whites rejected the moderate counsel of the planter class, their traditional leaders, and embraced the demagogues' fiery gospel of resentment. It was this troubling, altered South that LeRoy Percy bequeathed to his son William Alexander. Will Percy fought in World War I, taught for a time, and stood at his father's side throughout many of the battles to safeguard the delta from extremism. But Will's true calling was as a poet, and his lasting contribution to the delta would be in the form of a memorial to its past--his memoir Lanterns on the Levee. "During my day," he wrote Will Percy not long before his death, " I have witnessed the disintegration of that moral cohesion of the South which had given it its strength and its sons their singleness of purpose and simplicity." It would be left to Walker Percy to fully confont htis modern, disintegrated South; to seek in such works as The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman, and The Second Coming the place of the Percy family's values in a world that has little use for aristocrats.

David Boyd's biography is the story of one man's dedicated struggle to protect and preserve Louisiana's fledgling state university from the cumulative effects of war, Reconstruction, political hostility, and parochial greed. Boyd fought hard to promote his vision of higher education among a largely antagonistic or apathetic citizenry.

A central political figure in the first post-Revolutionary generation, Felix Grundy epitomized the "American democrat". In Democracy's Lawyer, the first comprehensive biography of Grundy since 1940, J. Roderick Heller reveals how Grundy's life typifies the archetypal, post-founding fathers generation that forged America's culture and institutions.

Intelligent, adaptable, and strong-willed, Lucy Bakewell Audubon was, DeLatte shows, the partner Audubon needed for his life and for his work. As noted Audubon expert Christoph Irmscher says in his foreword, "When [DeLatte] slips into her character's skin, she does so unobtrusively and to great effect, thus, we are right there with Lucy."

When attorney John Jay Cornelison severely beat Kentucky Superior Court judge Richard Reid in public on April 16, 1884, for allegedly injuring his honour, the event became front-page news. James Klotter crafts a detective story, using historical, medical, legal, and psychological clues to piece together answers to the tragedy that followed.

Offers the first full-scale biography of a man of meager education and limited political experience who worked his way from the North Georgia mountains to the positions of governor and US senator. Drawing on previously unavailable documents, Parks captures the mood of Georgia as well as the personality of this astute and controversial politician.

From his birth in 1807 to his death in 1864, James Henry Hammond witnessed the rise and fall of the cotton kingdom of the Old South. A long-awaited biography, Drew Gilpin Faust's James Henry Hammond and the Old South reveals the South Carolina planter who was at once characteristic of his age and unique among men of his time.

The name Daniel Boone conjures up the image of an illiterate patriot who settled Kentucky and killed countless Indians. In this welcome book, Meredith Mason Brown separates the real Daniel Boone from the many fables that surround him, revealing a man far more complex - and far more interesting - than his legend.

Elite, personable, and persuasive, Edward Douglass White served on the United States Supreme Court for twenty-seven years. During his tenure, he significantly influenced American public law. Robert Highsaw' s extensive judicial biography stresses White's constitutional thought and philosophy.

Cutting across the Bourbon Era, the Populist Revolt, and the Progressive Movement, Hoke Smith's career gave expression to the Southern politics of his generation. In tis volume, Dewey Grantham examines in detail the central role of this leader as a key to the better understanding of the political mind of the New South.

In a region famous for its flamboyant politicians, Earl K. Long was one of the most flamboyant of them all. This biography of the former Louisiana governor explores his controversial life-style and his strong family ties, his raw humour and his political savvy, his abuse of power and his accomplishments in civil rights and public services.

First published in 1955 to wide acclaim, T. Harry Williams' P. G. T. Beauregard is universally regarded as "the first authoritative portrait of the Confederacy's always dramatic, often perplexing" general (Chicago Tribune).

Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut (1823-1886) is known today for her excellent firsthand account of life in the Confederate States of America. Elisabeth Muhlenfeld's expert biography utilises Mrs. Chesnut's autobiographical writings, her papers, and those of her family, as well as published sources.

In this highly acclaimed and enduring biography, John Alden traces the interwoven histories of George Washington and the nation he helped to create, defend, and guide toward the future. Alden revisits the major events of Washington's personal and professional life, but the core of the biography concerns Washington's leadership roles.

John Brown Gordon's career of prominent public service spanned four of America's most turbulent decades. Utilizing newspapers, scattered manuscript collections, and official records, Ralph Eckert presents a critical biography of Gordon that analyses all areas of his career.

In the first full-scale biography of John C. Calhoun in almost half a century, John Niven skillfully presents a new interpretation of this preeminent spokesman of the Old South. Niven shows Calhoun to have been at once a more consistent politician and a far more complex human being than previous historians have thought.

Rising from humble origins in the middle Georgia cotton belt, Alexander H. Stephens (1812-1883) became one of the South's leading politicians and lawyers. Thomas Schott's scholarly biography analyses the interplay between the public and private Stephens and between state and national politics during his contradictory career.

The premier secessionist of antebellum Mississippi, John A. Quitman was one of the half-dozen or so most prominent radicals in the entire South. In this full-length biography, Robert May reveals Quitman to have been an ambitious but relatively stable insider who reluctantly advocated secession because of a despondency over slavery's future.

Born in rural Virginia during Reconstruction, Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950) was a central figure in black history and an important American scholar. This important intellectual biography reveals the complex and dedicated individual Woodson was and the lasting significance of his pioneering work in black history.