Recollections of a Long Life is an autobiography by John Stoughton. Stoughton was an English individualist minister and historian who became minister at Windsor and Kensington and was later elected chairman of the Congregational Union.

This six-volume memoir of nineteenth-century politician and friend of Byron, John Cam Hobhouse (1786-1869) was published in 1909-11.

Born in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Isaac Stephenson (1829-1918) followed his interests as a lumberman, sailor, and entrepreneur to Bangor, Maine and, later, to the northern woods of Wisconsin. In 1858, he purchased a one-quarter interest in the North Ludington Lumber Company in Marinette and went on to become that community's leading citizen. He founded the Stephenson National Bank, donated the Stephenson Public Library, developed the town's retail and commercial district, and used his involvement in local politics as a springboard for state and national office. Stephenson served in the Wisconsin State Assembly (1866-1868), as a U.S. Representative from Wisconsin (1883-1889), and also as a U.S. Senator from that same state (1907-1915). An active participant in the "Half-Breed" faction of Wisconsin's Republican party that supported Huagen and La Follette in their races for the governorship, he began publishing the Free Press of Milwaukee in 1901 as a means of conveying their reform-minded views to the public. In the Senate, La Follette and Stephenson soon found themselves differing over issues of patronage and efforts to eliminate graft and purify the political process. Stephenson had little interest in a national political agenda. Although much of his autobiography deals with his civic and political life, its first half provides inside perspectives on many aspects of the logging industry and life in the logging camps. There is also considerable information on local Native American groups, especially the Menominee, and the folklife of occupational and family groups in the rapidly developing areas of the Upper Midwest.

In Recollections of My Life as a Woman, Diane di Prima explores the first three decades of her extraordinary life. Born into a conservative Italian American family, di Prima grew up in Brooklyn but broke away from her roots to follow through on a lifelong commitment to become a poet, first made when she was in high school. Immersing herself in Manhattan's early 1950s Bohemia, di Prima quickly emerged as a renowned poet, an influential editor, and a single mother at a time when this was unheard of. Vividly chronicling the intense, creative cauldron of those years, she recounts her revolutionary relationships and sexuality, and how her experimentation led her to define herself as a woman. What emerges is a fascinating narrative about the courage and triumph of the imagination, and how one woman discovered her role in the world.

An electric portrait of the artist as a young woman that asks how a writer finds her voice in a society that prefers women to be silent In Recollections of My Nonexistence, Rebecca Solnit describes her formation as a writer and as a feminist in 1980s San Francisco, in an atmosphere of gender violence on the street and throughout society and the exclusion of women from cultural arenas. She tells of being poor, hopeful, and adrift in the city that became her great teacher; of the small apartment that, when she was nineteen, became the home in which she transformed herself; of how punk rock gave form and voice to her own fury and explosive energy. Solnit recounts how she came to recognize the epidemic of violence against women around her, the street harassment that unsettled her, the trauma that changed her, and the authority figures who routinely disdained and disbelieved girls and women, including her. Looking back, she sees all these as consequences of the voicelessness that was and still is the ordinary condition of women, and how she contended with that while becoming a writer and a public voice for women's rights. She explores the forces that liberated her as a person and as a writer--books themselves, the gay men around her who offered other visions of what gender, family, and joy could be, and her eventual arrival in the spacious landscapes and overlooked conflicts of the American West. These influences taught her how to write in the way she has ever since, and gave her a voice that has resonated with and empowered many others.

Rediscovered by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, this unique account of life before, during, and after the Civil War was written by the wife of Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan, who played a central role in some of the most significant civil rights decisions of his era. “Remarkable . . . a chronicle of the times, as seen by a brave woman of the era.”—Ruth Bader Ginsburg, from the foreword When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg began researching the history of the women associated with the Supreme Court, the Library of Congress sent her Malvina Harlan’s unpublished manuscript. Recalling Abigail Adams’s order to “remember the ladies,” Justice Ginsburg guided its long journey from forgotten document to published book. Malvina Shanklin Harlan witnessed—and gently influenced—national history from the perspective of a political leader’s wife. Her husband, Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan (1833–1911), wrote the lone dissenting opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson, the infamous case that endorsed separate but equal segregation. And for fifty-seven years he was married to a woman who was busy making a mental record of their eventful lives. After Justice Harlan’s death in 1911, Malvina wrote Some Memories of a Long Life, 1854–1911, as a testament to her husband’s accomplishments and to her own. The memoir begins with Malvina, the daughter of passionate abolitionists, becoming the teenage bride of John Marshall Harlan, whose family owned more than a dozen slaves. Malvina depicts her life in antebellum Kentucky, and her courageous defense of the Harlan homestead during the Civil War. She writes of her husband’s ascent in legal circles and his eventual appointment to the Supreme Court in 1877, where he was the author of opinions that continued to influence American race relations deep into the twentieth century. Yet Some Memories is more than a wife’s account of a famous and powerful man. It chronicles the remarkable evolution of a young woman from Indiana who became a keen observer of both her family’s life and that of her nation.