Kate Field was among the first celebrity journalists. A literary and cultural sensation, she reported the news while frequently becoming news herself because of her sharp wit and vibrant presence. She wrote for several prestigious newspapers, such as the Boston Post, Chicago Tribune, and New York Herald, as well her own Kate Field’s Washington. Field’s friends and professional acquaintances included Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Anthony Trollope, and George Eliot. Legendary novelist Henry James patterned the character of Henrietta Stackpole after her in The Portrait of a Lady. In this eloquent and immensely readable biography, Gary Scharnhorst offers a fascinating, often poignant portrait of a fiercely intelligent and enormously independent woman who contributed significantly to America’s intellectual and social life in the late nineteenth century. Kate Field was an outspoken advocate for the rights of black Americans and founder of the first woman’s club in America. She campaigned to make Yosemite a national park and saved John Brown’s Adirondack farm for the nation. The range of Field’s activities should foster interest in her biography from students and scholars of nineteenth-century American literature, women’s studies, journalism, and biography, and from both public and academic libraries.

Although famous during her lifetime, Kate Field (1838-1896) subsequently slipped into such a state of obscurity that in 1964, when the St. LouisAmerican published a bicentennial article to honor one of the city's most distinguished daughters, the eulogy bore the title "Who Was Kate Field?" Carolyn Moss has collected correspondence ranging over more than fifty years to allow Field to answer that question herself. Field was acquainted with, among numerous others, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, Julia Ward Howe, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, the Brownings, and the Trollopes. Outside the world of literature, she hobnobbed with such men and women as Harriet Hosmer, Horace Greeley, Gilbert and Sullivan, Stanley and Livingstone, and Alexander Graham Bell. That Field's contemporaries attached much importance to her correspondence is demonstrated by the fact that her letters were preserved and found their way into more than thirty archives. For those of us heading into the twenty-first century, the letters enrich our knowledge of Field's contemporaries and help illuminate an epoch. Taking a chronological approach, Moss has divided the correspondence into ten parts. Part 1 covers Field's St. Louis childhood, her days as a Boston schoolgirl, and her trip to Europe. Part 2 deals with her stay in Florence and her friendship with the Brownings, the Trollopes, and other literary visitors. In part 3, Field returns to America, where she achieves fame as a journalist, lecturer, and author. In part 4, she writes of her voyage to London and the grief and readjustment occasioned by the death of her mother. She becomes, in part 5, a playwright and actress, promotes Bell's telephone, and helps establish the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. Part 6 finds Field founding the Ladies' Cooperative Dress Association. Part 7 deals with her campaign against the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints. In part 8, Field crosses America to promote Alaska and to lecture against prohibition. Part 9 contains Field's correspondence as owner and editor of Kate Field's Washington, and part 10 shows her final days. While Field's achievements are indeed impressive, Moss points out that the dauntless spirit of this voteless, unmarried, and at times destitute woman is more impressive still.

“The four chapters of this easy reader zip right along with a straightforward, breezy plot and two charming, mischievous mice leading the way.” — Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books Fergus loves being the class pet. When the teacher plans a field trip to a museum, Fergus doesn’t want to miss the fun, so he stows away in a backpack and sets off for an adventure. The museum is a little overwhelming — huge and full of exciting things to see. Luckily, Fergus meets a new friend, Zeke, who knows the ropes, and together they explore everything from moon rocks to butterflies to a giant dinosaur skeleton. But when it’s time for the bus to leave, will Fergus make it back to school to take his place as class pet once more?

The disappearance behind the Iron Curtain of the American brothers Noel and Hermann Field in 1949, followed by that of Noel’s wife and their foster daughter, was one of the most publicized international mysteries of the Cold War. This dual memoir gives an intensely human dimension to that struggle, with Hermann narrating all that happened to him from the day he was abducted from the Warsaw airport to his release five years later, and Kate relating her unrelenting efforts to find her husband. Thousands of potential victims of Hitler’s dragnet were rescued in 1939 and during World War II through separate efforts of the Field brothers. Arrested in Czechoslovakia in 1949, Noel was taken to Hungary and used as an example of American perfidy in show trials. Hermann went to Poland primarily to find out what had happened to his brother. After Hermann’s abduction, he was taken to the cellar of a secret Polish prison, where he was held for five years. He gives us a detailed account of his battle to survive, alternating despair and horror with mordant humor. Meanwhile, his family had no idea whether he was still alive and if so, where. This moving story, based on detailed notes made by the authors during and shortly after the events described, presents an inside-outside counterpoint, as Hermann’s chapters on his inward journey in his cellar world alternate with Kate’s efforts in London to find him by scrutinizing accounts of political events in Eastern Europe for clues and penetrating the diplomatic corridors of power in the West for help. Hermann had been arrested by a Polish security agent who later defected and became one of the West’s most important informants on Soviet operations in Eastern Europe. The search for the Field brothers was complicated by their history of leftist connections, for this tense period in the Cold War was also the era of McCarthyism in the United States. The book ends with an Epilogue that analyzes the events of fifty years ago in the light of what we know today, as the result of newly available archival material.

She might not have much in this world, but it costs nothing to be kind...

This collection of original critical essays explores how women periodical editors in the long 19th century redefined women's identities and roles, and influenced public opinion about such issues as abolition and woman suffrage.

In 1907, author, poet, essayist, and folk art historian Eliza Calvert Hall (1856–1935) published Aunt Jane of Kentucky, a collection of stories about rural life infused with the spirit and gentle good humor of its elderly narrator, Aunt Jane. The book and several sequels achieved wide popularity, reaching an estimated one million readers in her lifetime, and placed Hall in the front ranks of "local color" fiction writers of her time. Eliza Calvert Hall's life and work unfolded during a time of restlessness and change for American women. Born Eliza "Lida" Calvert in Bowling Green, Kentucky, Hall experienced the upheaval of both the Civil War and family scandal. Forced to help support her mother and four siblings by teaching school, she became a published poet, adopting her grandmother's name, Hall, as her pseudonym. At twenty-nine, she married William A. Obenchain, and in the space of eight years gave birth to four children. As Hall struggled to balance her writing career with the duties of a nineteenth-century wife and mother, suffragist Laura Clay was lobbying for every woman's right to vote. Hall joined the battle, writing fearlessly in support of suffrage and equality. While her passionate essays served as a direct appeal for this cause, her creative writing also carried a feminist spirit, celebrating the strength, humor, love, and art of the common woman. In Eliza Calvert Hal: Kentucky Author and Suffragistl, Lynn E. Niedermeier tells the story of this remarkable Kentuckian for the first time. Hall's challenge was to balance the artist's creative ambitions with the crusader's passion for achieving the goal of political equality for American women. Her successes did not stem from privilege or leisure; although she was an acclaimed writer, Hall was an ordinary woman, a wife and mother of moderate economic means. Through the power of her words, she challenged others to match her courage, independence, intellectual energy, and loyalty to her sex.

Women in Victorian England wore jewelry made from each other's hair and wrote poems celebrating decades of friendship. They pored over magazines that described the dangerous pleasures of corporal punishment. A few had sexual relationships with each other, exchanged rings and vows, willed each other property, and lived together in long-term partnerships described as marriages. But, as Sharon Marcus shows, these women were not seen as gender outlaws. Their desires were fanned by consumer culture, and their friendships and unions were accepted and even encouraged by family, society, and church. Far from being sexless angels defined only by male desires, Victorian women openly enjoyed looking at and even dominating other women. Their friendships helped realize the ideal of companionate love between men and women celebrated by novels, and their unions influenced politicians and social thinkers to reform marriage law. Through a close examination of literature, memoirs, letters, domestic magazines, and political debates, Marcus reveals how relationships between women were a crucial component of femininity. Deeply researched, powerfully argued, and filled with original readings of familiar and surprising sources, Between Women overturns everything we thought we knew about Victorian women and the history of marriage and family life. It offers a new paradigm for theorizing gender and sexuality--not just in the Victorian period, but in our own.

This volume profiles 60 American journalists from colonial times to the present and focuses on news reporters, editors, publishers, and broadcasters whose careers significantly advanced or were symbolic of major changes in their profession. Illustrations, fact boxes, and quotations from the subjects themselves, together with the depth and breadth of historical information, make this volume an illuminating and fascinating read.