In 1875, an Irish-born Baltimore policeman, Patrick McDonald, entered the home of Daniel Brown, an African American laborer, and clubbed and shot Brown, who died within an hour of the attack. In similar cases at the time, authorities routinely exonerated Maryland law enforcement officers who killed African Americans, usually without serious inquiries into the underlying facts. But in this case, Baltimore’s white community chose a different path. A coroner’s jury declined to attribute the killing to an accident or self-defense, the state’s attorney indicted McDonald and brought him to trial, and a criminal court jury convicted McDonald of manslaughter.

Under Kilimanjaro is the last of Hemingway’s manuscripts to be published in its entirety. Editors Robert W. Lewis and Robert E. Fleming believe that “this book deserves as complete and faithful a publication as possible without editorial distortion, speculation, or textually unsupported attempts at improvement. Our intent has been to produce a complete reading text of Ernest Hemingway’s manuscript. . . .Working on it was both a privilege and a responsibility. . . .Readers of this remarkable work will experience the mingled pleasure of revisiting the familiar and discovering the new.”

In Pat Frank’s 1959 novel Alas, Babylon, the character Helen says of her children: “All their lives, ever since they’ve known anything, they’ve lived under the shadow of war—atomic war. For them the abnormal has become normal.” The threat of nuclear annihilation was a constant source of dread during the Cold War, and in Under the Shadow, author David Seed examines how authors and filmmakers made repeated efforts in their work to imagine the unimaginable.

Famous Buckeyes are recognized by practically everyone. They range from presidents and inventors to aviators and astronauts. But other important Ohioans have been unfairly forgotten over the years. To find them, the authors of Unforgettable Ohioans dug beneath the layer of well-known names to discover a cache of remarkable individuals whose lives had significant national or international impact. They won’t show up on the top-ten list of most famous Ohioans, but their stories are nonetheless intriguing and important.

In Union and Emancipation, seven leading historians offer new perspectives on the issues of race and politics in American Society from the antebellum era to the aftermath of Reconstruction. The authors, all trained by Richard H. Sewell at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, address two major themes; the politics of sectional conflict prior to the Civil War, illuminated through ideological and institutional inquiry; and the central importance of race, slavery, and emancipation in shaping American political culture and social memory.

This collection draws on primary sources from previously unheard voices, including memoirs, autobiographies, official records, and oral histories, to present the coherent story of the AEF’s experience and the memories they evoked. Unknown Soldiers will be a welcome addition to World War I literature and a solid addition to the fields of military history and the history of memory.

Nearly three million white men of military age remained in the North during the Civil War, some attending institutions of higher learning. College life during the Civil War has received little close attention, however, in part because of the lack of published collections of letters and diaries by students during the war. In Untouched by the Conflict, Jonathan W. White and Daniel Glenn seek to fill that gap by presenting the unabridged letters of Singleton Ashenfelter, a student at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, to his closest friend at home near Philadelphia.

“Frederick S. Calhoun’s new book makes a timely and important contribution to examining one of the most serious questions confronting the nation’s foreign relations: When and how to use military force. By citing numerous examples from the past, Calhoun is able to show that there is an infinite variety of reasons behind, justification for, and consequences of, each decision to employ force abroad. The subject is of real contemporary significance as the United States and other nations in the post—Cold War age grapple with the question of under what circumstances the employment of military force may become necessary.