Bücher der Reihe Southern Biography Series

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Extraordinarily wealthy and influential, Stephen Duncan was a landowner, slaveholder, and financier with an array of social, economic, and political contacts in pre-Civil War America. Martha Jane Brazy offers a compelling portrait of antebellum life through exploration of Duncan's multifaceted personal networks in both the South and the North.

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.

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.