In Race and Medicine historian Todd Savitt presents revised and updated versions of his seminal essays on the medical history of African Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in the South. This collection examines a variety of aspects of African American medical history, including health and illnesses, medical experimentation, early medical schools and medical professionals, and slave life insurance.

“Race and Recruitment pulls readers right into the middle of the most important scholarly conversations about race, slavery, and the Civil War that have taken place over the last half century. Each of these sixteen essays has stood the test of time, asking the big questions and offering the answers that have forever changed the way historians talk about the middle of the nineteenth century.

In this brisk, engaging exploration of 19th-century radical reformer and abolitionist Wendell Phillips, Peter Charles Hoffer makes the case that Phillips deserves credit as the nation’s first public interest lawyer, someone who led the antebellum crusade against slavery and championed First Amendment rights and equality for all Americans, including Black people and women.

Essentially the story of WMMS, Radio Daze captures the radio scene during the ’70s and ’80s, chronicling how this small FM rock station became the top-rated station in Northeast Ohio and made Cleveland one of the most important radio markets in the world. Mike Olszewski obtained exclusive interviews with many radio legends, revealing how insidious and destructive the battle for radio dominance became. Among other things, he exposes the story behind the reports of ballot box stuffing by WMMS to win the prestigious Rolling Stone magazine Readers’ Poll for best radio station in the country and some of the dirty tricks played by radio stations to get the edge on their competitors.

In The Railroad Forger and the Detectives, real estate agent Thomas H. Cone vanishes suddenly. At the same time, the Pinkerton Detective Agency’s Philadelphia branch, helmed by Mr. Linden, is hired by the Adams Express railroad company to investigate a draft forgery case. Two checks totaling more than $1,200 had been intercepted in the mail and falsely endorsed by none other than Mr. Thomas Cone!

Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction is the first comprehensive textual, bibliographical, and cultural study of sixty years of Bradbury’s fiction. Drawing on correspondence with his publishers, agents, and friends, as well as archival manuscripts, The Life of Fiction examines the story of Bradbury’s authorship over more than a half-century, from his earliest writings, which include The Martian Chronicles, to his most recently published novel, Let’s All Kill Constance. It shows in detail the often devious and unsuspected interconnections between his unpublished fiction, his story collections, and his most celebrated novels.

In 1950, Ernest Hemingway was the most famous writer in the world, and he faced intense expectations for a masterwork to follow up his epic For Whom the Bell Tolls, published a decade earlier. The novel that emerged, Across the River and into the Trees, was a chronicle of the final days of the cantankerous American colonel Richard Cantwell, who spends his weekend leave in Venice hunting ducks, enjoying the city, and spending time with his beloved teenaged Italian contessa, Renata. This work elicited everything from full-throated praise to howls of derision and outrage. Sixty-five years later, it has been consigned to the margins of Hemingway’s legendary career.

Because of the fame The Sun Also Rises brought Ernest Hemingway, when Men Without Women was published just one year later, in 1927, it commanded popular and critical attention. Even reviewers who objected to a masculine emphasis and a sometimes harsh realism identified stories in the collection that could not be ignored. Close commentary, with special attention to allusions, demonstrates that Men Without Women merits a place among the best story collections in American literature.

The first volume in this new series is Reading Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, by H. R. Stoneback. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway’s first big novel, immediately established him as one of the great prose stylists and preeminent writers of his time. It is also the book that encapsulates the angst of the post–World War I generation, known as the “Lost Generation.” This poignant story of a group of American and English expatriates on an excursion to Pamplona represents a dramatic shift in Hemingway’s ever-evolving style. Featuring Left Bank Paris in the 1920s and brutally realistic descriptions of bullfighting in Spain, the story is about the flamboyant Lady Brett Ashley and the hapless Jake Barnes in an age of moral bankruptcy, spiritual dissolution, unrealized love, and vanishing illusions.

Published in 1937, Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not is that rare example of a novel whose cultural impact far outweighs its critical reputation. Long criticized for its fragmented form, its ham-fisted approach to politics, and its hard-boiled obsession with cojones, this blistering tale of a Florida Straits boat captain named Harry Morgan desperately trying to survive the economic ravages of the Great Depression by running rum and revolutionaries to Havana has fueled tourist industries in Key West and Cuba and has inspired at least three movie adaptations (including a classic cowritten by William Faulkner and starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall).