(Napoleon Bonaparte was crowned as Emperor of the French w...)
Napoleon Bonaparte was crowned as Emperor of the French when he was only thirty-five. Within a few years, he became the effective master of Europe, his power unparalleled in modern history. His downfall was no less dramatic. The story of Napoleon has been written many times. In some versions, he is a military genius, in others a war-obsessed tyrant. Ida Tarbell, a famous autobiographer, wrote down Napoleon's whole life carefully, calmly and objectively.
(The book covers Lincoln's life from before he was even bo...)
The book covers Lincoln's life from before he was even born, with the origins of the Lincoln family back to the early 17th century, through his education, his service in the Black Hawk War, his early dabblings in politics, his experiences and attitudes as a lawyer, and the presidential campaign of 1860.
A Life of Napoleon Bonaparte / With a Sketch of Josephine, Empress of the French. Illustrated from the Collection Of Napoleon Engravings Made by the Late ...
(In this frank and informative autobiography, the veteran ...)
In this frank and informative autobiography, the veteran investigative journalist Ida M. Tarbell looks back on her nearly fifty-year career. At the age of eighty-two, one of the original muckrakers writes with her characteristic candor about a life spent defying categories and challenging complacency.
Ida Minerva Tarbell was an American teacher, author and investigative journalist. She was known for taking complex subjects - the oil industry, tariffs, labor practices - and breaking them down into informative and easy to understand articles. She wrote a bunch of scathing works about the robber barons and monopolies at the turn of the century, helping steer public opinion towards the kind of progres
Background
Ida Tarbell was born on November 5, 1857, in Erie County, Pennsylvania, United States, the daughter of a small oilman driven to the wall by the Rockefeller oil monopoly. Tarbell, unlike many famous people, spent an unusually well-adjusted childhood and had a healthy appreciation of her parents. She wrote of the log house in which she was born and of the pleasant memories it gave her. She felt loved and was perhaps even smug about it. She was born in the log cabin home of her maternal grandfather, Walter Raleigh McCullough, a Scots-Irish pioneer, and his wife. Her father's distant immigrant ancestors had settled in New England in the 17th century.
Education
Ida studied French revolutionary history and related subjects at the Sorbonne and College de France, Paris during 1891-94. She also received from Allegheny College her Bachelor of Arts in 1880, Master of Arts in 1883, L.H.D. in 1909. She finished Knox College with L.H.D. in 1909.
Before becoming involved in journalism, Tarbell taught for two years at Poland Union Seminary. In 1882 Ida became a staff member of the Chautauquan newspaper and eventually became its managing editor. She was with McClure's Magazine from 1894 to 1896, when she became associate editor of the American Magazine; she remained in that post until 1915. Tarbell's fame for biography rests mainly on her two-volume Life of Abraham Lincoln (1900).
However, in Paris she also did studies of Madame de Staël (1894), Napoleon Bonaparte (1895), Madame Roland (1896), Judge Elbert H. Gary (1925), and an "ideal businessman, " Owen D. Young (1932). Eight of her books relate to Lincoln. Nevertheless, when she shifted to Lincolniana, her heart fell, and she told herself, "If you once get into American history ..., that will finish France. " It did mean the end of great attention to her other projects, her desire to determine the nature of revolutions, and any important contribution to women's rights.
Tarbell is particularly well known for her two-volume History of the Standard Oil Company (1904). Despite her reputation as a trustbuster, she came to the defense of American business in her later years.
Her book on Young, plus other writings at the time, were expressions of hope and faith in a new kind of businessman.
Tarbell was criticized late in her career for her biographies The Life of Elbert H. Gary; The Story of Steel (1925) and Owen D. Young, a New Type of Industrial (1932), in which she seemingly reverses her earlier antibusiness stance. Responding to the criticism, she claimed it was not her sentiments that had changed, but the nature of big business. With The History of the Standard Oil Company, Tarbell’s attention shifted to depicting the practices of American big business. Critics observe, however, that in contrast to the muckrakers, with whom she is usually grouped, her politics were basically conservative.
The Tarbells converted to Methodism when Ida was a child.
Politics
Ida Tarbell supported "socialized democracy" and was opposed to left-flank movements, which she said would make people "mere cogs in a machine. "
Views
Ida Tarbell urged women to remain at home and raise children, arguing, to the disappointment of many of her admirers, that women could be more influential as mothers than as career professionals.
Membership
Ida Tarbell was a member of American History Association, English Society of Women Journalists, American Woman’s Association and others.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Steve Weinberg wrote that Ida Tarbell was "a feminist by example, but not by ideology".
Published more than a half of a century past the death of Tarbell in January 1944, Robert C. Kochersberger Jr.’s More Than a Muckraker: Ida Minerva Tarbell’s Lifetime in Journalism presents Tarbell as “a probusiness woman who as also concerned with the welfare of the worker”.