In An Integrated Boyhood, Richards candidly describes how this exemplary middle-class Cleveland sojourn left him hopelessly confused and dislocated at the very moment of his parents’ triumph. His narrative of success provides the background to a more private turmoil: Richards’s struggle to read the shifting meanings of his privileged experience amid the city’s shifting racial lines, the fringe on the Left, the tumult of rising black consciousness, and the fears of nervous white suburban neighbors. This coming-of-age story sings the undersong of an older generation’s hard-won success. Like all black Clevelanders, Richards was forced to struggle for his understanding of the city’s—and his own—endless racial confusion in the midst of frightening historical change. It is this reality that recurs throughout Richards’s memoir: the early encounters of a scared, bookish African American boy from Mt. Pleasant with what can only be described as the real world.

When Richard Bassett returned from Korea on convalescent leave in 1953, he set down his experiences in training, combat, and captivity. Then he put the memoir away and tried to forget. More than twenty years later, hospitalized for acute Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, he once again faced his personal demons. Expanding the memoir to include his postwar struggles with the U.S. government and his own wounded psyche, the resulting comprehensive account is published here for the first time.

“If I didn’t know the poet personally, I’d think the name Catherine Pierce was a pseudonym, for these poems are not merely edgy, they are razor-sharp—they disembowel. What an extraordinary command of structure, persona, and humor this poet has! In one fell swoop, she has re-invented the ‘love’ poem and eschewed both pretentiousness and the anti-intellectual by being always smart and entertaining.”—Kathy Fagan

The Buckeye State’s many ponds and vernal pools are populated by a dizzying variety of wildlife. Animals of Ohio’s Ponds and Vernal Pools takes a close-up look at unique wetlands—from fascinating fish and amphibians to intriguing insects and birds—besides examining pond and vernal pool ecology, Ohio’s geologic history influencing wetland formation, and hydrology and energy cycles.

Focusing on the overlapping nature of culture and politics, historian Mark A. Lause delves into the world of antebellum bohemians and the newspapermen who surrounded them, including Ada Clare, Henry Clapp, and Charles Pfaff, and explores the origins and influence of bohemianism in 1850s New York. Against the backdrop of the looming Civil War, The Antebellum Crisis and America’s First Bohemians combines solid research with engaging storytelling to offer readers new insights into the forces that shaped events in the prewar years.

The relative importance of Civil War campaigns is a matter for debate among historians and buffs alike. Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Atlanta have their advocates. Gettysburg certainly maintains its hold on the popular imagination. More recently has come the suggestion that no single campaign or battle decided the war or even appreciably altered its direction. If any one battle was a dividing line, Antietam is a solid contender.

Revised to stimulate and engage an undergraduate student audience, Feinberg’s updated account of Anuta opens with a chapter on his varied experiences when he initially undertook fieldwork in this tiny, isolated Polynesian community in the Solomon Islands. The following chapters explore dominant cultural features, including language, kinship, marriage, politics, and religion—topics that align with subject matter covered in introductory anthropology courses. The final chapter looks at some of the challenges Anutans face in the twenty-first century. Like many other peoples living on small, remote islands, Anutans strive to maintain traditional values while at the same time becoming involved in the world market economy. In all, Feinberg gives readers magnificent material for studying the relations between demography, environment, culture, and society in this changing world.

Nin Andrews draws upon her childhood experiences of being raised on a farm in Virginia and her haunting dreams of her father in this Southern-flavored collection of poems.

Winner of the 1997 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize

“The Apprentice of Fever is a brilliantly corporeal first book…rooted in the day-to-day life of a man implicated in the AIDS epidemic, living on the edge, crossing, transforming and transgressing boundaries, always, always paying an extreme and active attention, which is the apotheosis of compassion, which is an act of love… Tayson’s voice is unmistakable: direct, witty, passionate and desperate, in poems with the crucial acid to etch themselves into the reader’s consciousness.” —from the Introduction by Marilyn Hacker, Judge

WILLIAM A. TIDWELL establishes the existence of a Confederate Secret Service and clarifies the Confederate decision making process to show the role played by Jefferson Davis in clandestine operations. While the book focuses on the Confederate Secret Service’s involvement with the Lincoln assassination, the information presented has implications for various other aspects of the Civil War. The most thorough description of the Confederate Secret Service to date, April ’65 provides previously unknown records and traces the development of Confederate doctrine for the conduct of irregular warfare. In addition it describes Confederate motives and activities associated with the development of a major covert effort to promote the creation of a peace party in the North. It shows in detail how the Confederates planned to attack the military command and control in Washington and how they responded to the situation when the wartime attack evolved into a peacetime assassination. One of the most significant pieces of new information is how the Confederates were successful in influencing the history of the assassination.