Michael J. McManus’s study of political abolitionism in Wisconsin demonstrates the overriding importance of slavery-related issues in bringing on the political crisis of the 1850s and the American Civil War. In the years prior to the war, the political struggle to free enslaved blacks and block the “peculiar institution’s” spread into the western territories became intertwined with concerns over the future of republican institutions in America and the liberties of northern Whites.

Before his election to the state’s executive office in 1861, David Tod was widely regarded as Ohio’s most popular Democrat. Tod rose to prominence in the old Western Reserve, rejecting the political influence of his well-known father, a former associate justice of Ohio’s Supreme Court, a previous member of the Federalist Party, and a new, devoted Whig. As a fierce Democratic Party lion, the younger Tod thrilled followers with his fearless political attacks on Whig adversaries and was considered an unlikely figure in the battle to keep the Union intact.

This carefully researched and engagingly written political biography marks the first full treatment of Ohio native and politician Martin L. Davey. An important figure on the local, state, and national political scene in the early decades of the twentieth century, Davey served as mayor of Kent, Ohio, was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, and completed two terms as Ohio governor.

A Politician Turned General offers a critical examination of the turbulent early political career and the controversial military service of Stephen Augustus Hurlbut, an Illinois Whig, Republican politician, and Northern political general who rose to distinction as a prominent member of the Union high command in the West during the Civil War.

Politicians, the Press, and Propaganda represents the most recent and most extensive research on Alfred Harmsworth (Lord Northcliffe), one of the “press lords” who influenced British politics and policy during the First World War. Thompson’s is the only study to deal with Northcliffe and the inseparable quality of his public and political career from his journalism. Politicians, the Press, and Propaganda addresses a wide range of topics—the Great War, journalism, propaganda, censorship, the use and misuse of power, his preoccupation with America, and Northcliffe’s influence on David Lloyd George—and will appeal to those interested in the history of modern journalism as well as twentieth-century British history.

Anuta, a small Polynesian community in the eastern Solomon Islands, has had minimal contact with outside cultural forces. Even at the start of the 21st century, it remains one of the most traditional and isolated islands in the insular Pacific. In Polynesian Oral Traditions, Richard Feinberg offers a window into this fascinating and relatively unfamiliar culture through a collection of Anutan historical narratives, including indigenous texts and English translations.

This richly illustrated book explores the theory and technique used by Anutans in construction, use, and handling of their craft; the navigational skills still employed in interisland voyaging; and their culturally patterned attitudes toward the ocean and travel on the high seas. Further, the discussion is set within the context of social relations, values, and the Anutan’s own symbolic definitions of the world in which they live.

Spanning oceans and continents, language and the imagination, the unfathomable distances between people and their desires, Allison Davis’s Poppy Seeds creates an “immaculate atlas.” Here language is “broken. . . against the margin of the sea,” and a word is a thing that can be “wash[ed] away.” Here the body is both a lesson and a place with an edge you can drive to. The book “longs[s] for as long as Ohio rivers.” Tangled between worlds and languages both old and new, our deepest emotions search for their roots, hoping to find a place to call home.

As editor and executive editor of the Ravenna-Kent Record-Courier, Loris C. Troyer has been a pivotal figure in Portage County, Ohio, for over sixty years. Since retiring, he has written a weekly historical column entitled “Portage Pathways” on topics ranging from historical landmarks and events to eminent or interesting people to politics, society, and the value of recording local history. This book collects over 140 of his most memorable essays, illustrated with historical photographs.

When David Hunter Strother, also known by his pen name Porte Crayon, arrived as U.S. consul general in Mexico City in 1879, Mexico and its society, only a decade removed from French occupation, were initially struggling with questions of national order and stability, with maintenance of independence, and with all aspects of modernization. Achieving these goals without sacrificing its patrimony to imperialistic powers, which had capital to invest, proved to be difficult for Mexico and pushed the nation’s quest for stability into another dictatorship. Strother was present at the beginning of U.S. involvement with this phase of Mexico’s evolution under President Porfirio Diaz.