William Dean Howells: A Writer’s Life
Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson
University of California Press, 2005

Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson like to finish each other’s sentences. Actually, the colleagues from the University of Delaware (who also happen to be wife and husband) edited each other endlessly when they wrote their biography of William Dean Howells (1837–1920).

Howells wrote more than 100 books and served as editor of the Atlantic Monthly magazine in Boston. He counted Mark Twain and Henry James among his closest friends and mentored many young writers before they gained wider exposure. As a political critic, he found company in his opposition to slavery, but stood nearly alone in his condemnation of the Haymarket trials of 1886 and ’87 and the subsequent execution of four Chicago anarchists. Goodman and Dawson used a letter from the Huntington collection in describing the lack of courage among Howells’ contemporaries: Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier lamented to Boston writer Annie Fields, confessing his shame in “being only a looker on.” Other items show a glimpse of Howells’ private life. The Huntington’s collection of the family papers of Howells’ sister, Annie Fréchette, contain letters and diaries that describe family reunions and the declining mental condition of their youngest sibling, Henry.

The co-authors’ collaborative approach seems to work. They are currently divvying up the nearly 4,000 letters from the Huntington’s Mary Hunter Austin Papers as they polish their Austin biography. Goodman explains that biographers not only must attempt to show how someone lived in the world. “We must also describe that world.”

Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1680–1820
Eve Tavor Bannet
Cambridge University Press, 2006
Manuals on the art of letter-writing spread norms of polite conduct and communication in England, Scotland, and America. They also helped connect and unify different regions of the British empire. Bannet explores their history and analyzes 18th-century novels, periodicals, and other kinds of writing that used the letter form.

Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling
Richard Lyman Bushman
Alfred A. Knopf, 2005
Joseph Smith founded the largest home-grown Christian church in American history, publishing the Book of Mormon when he was just 23 years old. Bushman moves beyond a one-dimensional portrait of Smith, evaluating the Mormon prophet’s contributions to Christian theology and situating him culturally in the modern world.

Kathleen and Christopher: Christopher Isherwood’s Letters to His Mother
Edited by Lisa Colletta
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
Colletta edits and introduces more than 100 previously unpublished letters written by Christopher Isherwood to his mother between 1935 and 1940. Composed while Isherwood was still a struggling writer, they offer an eyewitness account of Europe on the brink of war and an intimate look at the early career of a major literary figure.

Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769–1850
Steven W. Hackel
University of North Carolina Press, 2005
As Spaniards colonized what would later become California, they forced Indians to forge communities in missions under Franciscan oversight. Yet these missions proved disastrously unhealthful and coercive, as Franciscans sought control over Indians’ beliefs and instituted unfamiliar systems of labor and punishment. Hackel draws on a wide variety of sources, using Mission San Carlos Borromeo—the administrative center of colonial California—as a case study.


Consuming Splendor: Society and Culture in Seventeenth-Century England
Linda Levy Peck
Cambridge University Press, 2005
Peck explores the ways in which the consumption of luxury goods transformed social practices, gender roles, royal policies, and the economy of 17th-century England. Her book charts the development of new ways of shopping; new aspirations and identities shaped by print, continental travel, and trade to Asia, Africa, the East and West Indies; new building, furnishing, and collecting; and the new relationship of technology, luxury, and science.

Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment
David J. Weber
Yale University Press, 2005
Weber explains how late-18th-century Spanish administrators tried to fashion a more enlightened policy toward the people they called bárbaros, or “savages.” Even Spain’s most powerful monarchs failed, however, to enforce a consistent, well-reasoned policy toward Indians. Although the Crown sometimes recognized autonomous tribal governments, it also authorized bloody wars against Indians when Spanish officers believed they could defeat them.

Pulitzer Prize
Historian Edmund S. Morgan received a Special Citation from the Pulitzer board in April “for a creative and deeply influential body of work that spans the last half century.” Morgan, whose essay “Cultivating Surprise” appeared in the premier issue of Huntington Frontiers in 2005, has authored more than a dozen books on early colonial history since first serving as a research fellow at The Huntington in 1952–53.