American Women Biographies

In Writings to Young Women from Laura Ingalls Wilder: On Life As a Pioneer Woman, Laura tells her readers what it was like to be a pioneer in the early 1900s. Her stories and insights show us how difficult even the simplest chores or tasks were for the early pioneers, yet through it all she...

No matter the intensity or vastness of any challenge, Favorite's raw depictions of her nearly 50 year journey with her Buddhist practice unfailingly proves the proof for turning poison into medicine is in the pudding. And, she happily divulges the ingredients needed to become your own champions!

Inspired by the Academy Award-nominated Netflix documentary What Happened, Miss Simone?, an intimate and vivid look at the legendary life of Nina Simone, the classically trained pianist who evolved into a chart-topping chanteuse and committed civil rights activist. From music journalist and...

Considering that her film career lasted just six years, it would seem as though the reputation of Grace Kelly far outweighs her actual output. From the time of her arrival in Hollywood in 1951, through her final film, High Society, in 1956, Kelly acted in just 11 films. Viewers were left to wonder whether Kelly was still in the beginning of her career, or whether High Society was a proper culmination to an extraordinarily brief stay in the film industry.

An accessible and entertaining biography of our nation’s greatest public servant and original political maverick John Quincy Adams, from the bassist of the Grammy-nominated band the Avett Brothers. During the tumultuous period between the era of the Founding Fathers and the disunion of the...

“Leaps at the throat of television history and takes down the patriarchy with its fervent, inspired prose. When Women Invented Television offers proof that what we watch is a reflection of who we are as a people.” —Nathalia Holt, New York Times bestselling author of Rise of the...

In 1910, Crystal Eastman was one of the most conspicuous progressive reformers in America. By the 1920s, her ardent suffragism, insistent anti-militarism, gregarious internationalism, and uncompromising feminism branded her "the most dangerous woman in America" and led to her exile in England. Yet a century later, her legacy in shaping several defining movements of the modern era-labor, feminism, free speech, peace - is unquestioned.

In Our Auntie Rosa, Mrs. Parks' loved ones share their remembrances and reflections to create a previously unpainted picture of the real woman behind the legend. Rosa Parks largely disappeared from the public when she and her husband, Raymond, relocated to Detroit in 1957, escaping the violently racist South. It was in Detroit where Mrs. Parks reconnected with her only sibling, Sylvester McCauley, whom she affectionately called "Brother", and her 13 nieces and nephews.

From a historian and senior editor at Atlas Obscura, a fascinating account of the daring nineteenth-century women who moved to South Dakota to divorce their husbands and start living on their own terms For a woman traveling without her husband in the late nineteenth century, there was only one...

Raised like a princess in one of the most powerful families in the American South, Henrietta Bingham was offered the helm of a publishing empire. Instead she ripped through the Jazz Age like an F. Scott Fitzgerald character. In New York, Louisville, and London, she drove both men and women wild with desire, and her youth blazed with sex. But her love affairs with women made her the subject of derision, and she suffered from years of addiction and breakdowns.

Anna May Wong remains one of Hollywood’s best-known Chinese American actors. Between 1919 and 1960, Anna May Wong starred in over fifty movies, sharing billing with stars such as Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, Ramon Novarro, and Warner Oland. Her life, though, is the prototypical story of an immigrant’s difficult path through the prejudices of American culture. In a narrative that recalls the pathos of life in LA's Chinese neighborhoods and the glamour of Hollywood’s pleasure palaces, Graham Russell Gao Hodges recovers the life of a Hollywood legend.

Born in rural Michigan during the Jim Crow era, the bold and irrepressible Merze Tate (1905-1996) refused to limit her intellectual ambitions, despite living in what she called a "sex and race discriminating world." Against all odds, the brilliant and hardworking Tate earned degrees in international relations from Oxford University in 1935 and a doctorate in government from Harvard in 1941. She then joined the faculty of Howard University, where she taught for three decades of her long life spanning the tumultuous twentieth century.

A can’t-miss story of family and lies, secrets and repressed memories, set against the stunning backdrop of Nantucket. “An exceptional and poignant escape to Nantucket.” —Kathi Macias Lynette Carlisle witnessed her mother’s death twelve years ago. But her memory only speaks through...

The inspiring story of the first female Marine to fly a combat mission in an F/A-18—and the transformative events that led to her bold decision to take on the most powerful man in the U.S. Senate. Amy McGrath grew up in Edgewood, Kentucky, a childhood shaped by love of country, baseball (the...

In 1849, Elizabeth Blackwell became the first American woman to obtain a medical degree. Following in her footsteps in the early 1980s, Brenda Berkman was the first woman to challenge New York City’s ban on female firefighters. During the last few centuries, countless women have made amazing contributions to society. Women are now Nobel Peace Prize winners, world-class athletes, and talented inventors and adventurers.

A New Yorker Best Book of the Year 2022 An “electrifying” biography of Walter White, a little-remembered Black civil rights leader who passed for white in order to investigate racist murders, help put the NAACP on the map, and change the racial identity of America forever (Chicago Review of...

The timely, never-before-told story of five brilliant, passionate women who, in the early 1960s, converged at the newly founded Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study and became friends as well as artistic collaborators, and who went on to shape the course of feminism in ways that are still...

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR A thwarted love triangle of heartbreak rediscovered after almost two hundred years—two men and a woman of equal ambition—that exploded in scandal and investigation, set between America's Revolution and its Civil War, revealing an age in subtle...

Discover the adventurous life of the stylish and scandalous Elizabeth Chudleigh, Duchess of Kingston—a woman whose infamous trial was bigger news in British society than the American War of Independence. “Bridgerton fans take note: For sheer incident and drama, Chudleigh’s story rivals any...

An accessible, exciting biography of the most powerful woman in the USA. First . . . student commencement speaker at Wellesley First . . . woman to become full partner at Rose Law Firm First . . . Lady of the United States First . . . First Lady to hold a postgraduate degree First . . . First...