As a married man and Stanford graduate student nearing thirty, Christopher Donner would likely have qualified for an exemption from the draft. Like most of his generation, however, he responded promptly to the call to arms after Pearl Harbor. His wartime experiences in the Pacific Theater were seared into his consciousness, and in early 1946 he set out to preserve those memories while they were still fresh. Sixty-five years later, Donner’s memoir is now available to the public.

In Pantaloons and Power, Gayle V. Fischer depicts how the reformers’ denouncement of conventional dress highlighted the role of clothing in the struggle of power relations between the sexes. Wearing pantaloons was considered a subversive act and was often met with social ostracism. This carefully researched interdisciplinary study successfully combines the fields of costume history, women’s history, material culture, and social history to tell the story of one highly charged dress reform and its resonance in nineteenth-century society.

Displaying a range of voices and subjects—from dramatic monologues in the voices of Judas Iscariot and John the Baptist to harrowing personal lyrics of family, time, memory, and loss—Creech’s poems examine the difficulties of belief and the transcendent possibilities of common experience, pushing beyond mere surfaces to explore the “kingdom of desire.” Paper Cathedrals confronts the tensions between the here and hereafter, gravity and grace, and religious faith and an allegiance to the passing, sensual world.

Taft was the most prominent critic of mid-twentieth-century American liberalism. As a leading Republican senator and contender for the presidency, he played a significant role in the development of party politics, opposing the expanding administrative capacities of the federal government and the enlargement of America’s international commitments. Recent events, domestic and foreign, have given a contemporary relevance to his critique. The Papers of Robert A. Taft will be a major addition to the published papers of prominent modern leaders.

Robert A. Taft, prominent political leader and vocal critic of the expanding powers of the federal government and of the enlargement of America’s international commitments, played a significant role in the development of Republican party politics. This second volume of The Papers of Robert A. Taft documents the Ohioan’s first term in the United States Senate and marks his entrance onto the national political and policy-making stage.

This third volume in the series documents Robert A. Taft’s experience through World War II and his early postwar years. After winning a tough reelection battle as senator from Ohio in 1944, Taft moved steadily upward in the leadership ranks of his party and assumed a preeminent position among the bipartisan group of conservatives that increasingly dominated Congress. This volume continues the contribution that The Papers of Robert A. Taft provides to the study of United State political and diplomatic history, Ohio history, and conservative political theory.

This fourth and final volume of a selected edition of the papers of Robert A. Taft documents Taft’s post–World War II and congressional experiences until his death in 1953. Regardless of his conservative commitments, Taft saw the need for responsible reform. In the immediate postwar years, he recognized the need for federal aid to education, for social welfare legislation that assisted the poor, and for federal support for public housing. Out of political necessity, Taft became more partisan as the 1950 senatorial campaign approached, convinced he had to win reelection in Ohio by a large margin if he was to establish himself as a frontrunner in the primary campaign for the 1952 presidential election. Moderate Republicans spurned Taft and doubted that the serious, partisan senator could successfully head a national ticket. His support, nevertheless, was essential to the 1952 Eisenhower presidential campaign.

David J. Citino’s Paperwork is a collection of previously published essays, pieces of memoir, and poetry set within the borders of Ohio. A native of Cleveland, Citino has lived in Ohio all his life. Citino’s prose casts light on his poetry, and his poetry helps the reader understand his prose. The whole becomes a meditation on thirty years of serious writing and reading by someone very much the product of his environment. Citino’s work attempts to show the impact and relevance that poetry and prose can have on an individual and makes a case for poetry from his own perspective.

A Passion for the Land begins with a fast-moving narrative of Seiberling’s early life and a vivid description of the physical environment that stimulated his lifelong interests in nature and wilderness. Author Daniel Nelson provides a detailed examination of the congressman’s role as a dedicated environmentalist, covering Seiberling’s efforts to pass path-breaking legislation during the 1970s and the equally important period of defensive activity during the 1980s.

The Passion of Meter is the first extended critical study of Wordsworth’s metrical theory and his practice in the art of versification. Until now, relatively little attention has been paid to the relationship between Wordsworth’s attempt to incorporate into his poetry the language of “common life” and the highly complex and decidedly conventional metrical forms in which he presents this language. O’Donnell provides a detailed treatment of what Wordsworth calls the “innumerable minutiae” that the art of the poet depends upon and of the broader vision to which those minutiae contribute. Beginning with a reassessment of Wordsworth’s frequently misrepresented prose comments about meter, O’Donnell argues that these comments-considered in light of Wordsworth’s practice and within their 18th-century context are more unorthodox and challenging than previously thought. In emphasizing the physical body of the poem as the site of a dynamic tension between conflicting passions – “the passion of sense” and “the passion of meter.”