Showing results by publisher "Spoken Realms" in Biographies & Memoirs

Despite attempts to suppress its publication and the advertising ban placed on it, The President’s Daughter enjoyed bestseller rankings after its eventual publication in 1927. Written so that Britton could raise enough funds to support her (and Harding’s) daughter and thus argue for the true legitimacy of children born out of wedlock, this tell-all about the affair between a starry-eyed girl and the man who would eventually become the twenty-ninth president of the United States is still a fascinating and relevant story in the context of the Me Too era.

One of the most notorious murders in US history, the 1892 killing of Andrew and Abby Borden in Fall River, Massachusetts, officially remains an unsolved case. Although Lizzie Borden was charged with the axe murders of her father and stepmother, the jury found her not guilty. No one else was ever charged. Edwin H. Porter was a young police reporter for the Fall River Daily Globe who covered the crime. Beginning with the discovery of the bodies, all the way through the investigation, trial, and final verdict, Porter gives a detailed account with first-hand access to the crime scene.

In Little Women, Mr. March went off to war. But in real life it was Jo (Louisa May Alcott herself, an avowed abolitionist) who traveled to Washington to nurse Northern soldiers. Despite the subject matter, her account is full of amusing anecdotes as she makes her way alone from Concord to DC, trying to finagle a free ticket and convinced she will drown during the journey.

A remarkably fresh and engaging account of Britain’s long-reigning monarch, Queen Victoria, who ascended to the throne at 18, in 1837, and died in 1901. Lytton Strachey captures her essential spirit in concise and elegant prose, with an eye and an ear keenly attuned to human nature, and its foibles. Written only 20 years after her death, this biography exemplifies the emergence of modern thought from the Victorian Era.

These are the memoirs of the US Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during World War I, abridged for this production in order to focus on the mass deportations and systematic killings of Turkey's Armenian population. This work is a renowned primary source for this Armenian Genocide, a crime since recognized by 29 countries. Ambassador Morgenthau offers detailed profiles of the Turkish leaders with whom he interacts, finding that they are responsible for a "death warrant to a whole race".

Harriet Tubman was born into slavery around 1820. This biography by Elizabeth Ross Haynes was published just eight years after Harriet's death (1913) as a part of her book Unsung Heroes. Over the years Ms. Tubman's legacy as a former slave, an abolitionist, a humanitarian, a suffragette, and a spy and agent for the US Army has grown. Beginning in 2020 her face will grace the US 20 dollar bill.

In this missive Ambrose Bierce recounts two days in his life, April 6 and April 7, 1862, perhaps the two most significant days of his life. He and over 100,000 other combatants have gathered about a small church near the town of Corinth, "a wretched place--the capital of a swamp, two days' march west of the Tennessee River". The church is Shiloh, and it will lend its name to the great battle that took place there.

Nellie Bly, born Elizabeth Jane Cochran on May 5, 1864, was an American journalist, author, and charity worker who received initial renown after writing a stinging expose of the mistreatment of the mentally ill while faking insanity and living undercover at a New York mental institution. At a time when women were just beginning to break into the field of journalism, the type of undercover investigative reporting undertaken by Bly set an important precedent, allowing her to successfully pioneer working in the male dominated field of newspaper writing.

Placed on a ventilator for lung failure in 1999, M.K. McDaniel fought for her life in a drug-induced coma for three weeks. Misfit in Hell to Heaven Expat is based on a story of M.K.’s experiences before, during, and after a dark near-death experience. Her family waited and prayed, totally unaware of the horrors M.K. was bravely facing and miserably enduring in a seemingly eternal hell, culminating in her eventual glimpse of heaven and chat with her deceased fiancé.

The editor, Oklahoma school superintendent Stephen Melvil Barrett, first met Geronimo in the summer of 1904, and felt that the 76 year old Bedonkohe Apache leader and medicine man from New Mexico and Arizona, a prisoner of war for 20 years far from his home, who had never told his side of history before, should finally do so. President Theodore Roosevelt granted Barrett's request to interview Geronimo, and this is the result, without Barrett's clarifications or intrusions - "write what I have spoken," as Geronimo said.

A four-star general pays tribute to a remarkable man in this biography. Believing that America owes a debt to a great character, a superb aviator, and a devoted citizen that was not paid, General Kenney tells the story of Paul Irvin "Pappy" Gunn with the hope that it will help discharge some of that debt. Gunn, who was known during World War II as an expert in daredevil low-level flying and as a hero and mechanical genius, modified light and medium bombers and transformed them into attack aircraft to hit Japanese targets in New Guinea, the Philippines, and Okinawa.

When James Forrestal resigned as secretary of defense in March 1949 before apparently committing suicide (arguably the highest ranking US government official to do so), he left in his office a large accumulation of files and papers. Among them was a private record. This was the "diary", as he called it, that he had maintained in one form or another since the middle of 1944, shortly after his appointment as secretary of the Navy.

Written in 1860 in the language of the day by William and Ellen Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom tells the story of a husband and wife's plight to escape slavery in 1848 Georgia. Unlike many slaves who escaped in the dead of night chased by slave hunters and bloodhounds, the Crafts traveled in first-class trains, dined with a steamboat captain, and stayed in the best hotels during their escape to Philadelphia and freedom. Ellen, who was nearly white, disguised herself as a young male cotton planter traveling with his slave, William.

A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson is the harrowing first-person account of one mother's struggle to survive after she and her children are attacked in their home and captured by Native Americans during the winter of 1675.

In the novel Little Women, Mr. March goes off to war. But in real life, it was Jo March (Louisa May Alcott herself, an avowed abolitionist) who traveled to Washington to nurse Northern soldiers. This is Alcott’s memoir but she chose to use the pseudonym “Tribulation Periwinkle” to tell her story. Despite the subject matter, her account is full of amusing anecdotes as she makes her way alone from Concord, Massachusetts to DC, trying to finagle a free ticket and convinced she will drown during the journey.

William Osler was one of the big four founding fathers of the Johns Hopkins Hospital and later became the Regis Professor of Medicine at Oxford. But this acclaimed physician was so much more. This is a remarkable story.

In this new biography of General Donn Starry, armor officer Mike Guardia examines the life and work of this pioneering, crusading officer using extracts from interviews with veterans and family and from Starry's personal papers.

There's honest graft and dishonest graft, according to George Washington Plunkitt. Listen to this candid discourse from a 19th-century politician and decide for yourself if things have changed.

This account of the life of St. Ignatius, dictated by himself to Father Gonzalez, is a most valuable record of the great Founder of the Society of Jesus. It, more than any other work, gives an insight into the spiritual life of St. Ignatius. Few works in ascetical literature, except the writings of St. Teresa and St. Augustine, impart such a knowledge of the soul.The saint in his narrative always refers to himself in the third person, and this mode of speech has here been retained.

Indian lore of the Cuyamaca Mountains and surrounding region in San Diego County, California, abounds in myths and legends handed down from generation to generation by tribal song and squaw-tale. Yet so swiftly has the hand of civilization wiped out the old traditions and customs, that but few Indians remain who remember them, and fewer still are those willing to divulge them. Only when one comes into intimate contact with them is one accorded the privilege and honor of hearing the tales of their ancestors.