At the height of World War II, five hundred Army flight nurses served with the Army Air Forces as members of thirty-one medical air evacuation squadrons located throughout the world on both the European and Pacific fronts. Their work was not insignificant—over one million patients were evacuated by air between January 1943 and May 1945. These specially trained Army nurses took nursing to new heights. Often decorated for their accomplishments, they exemplify the ability of a group of nurses to cope successfully with the challenges of war.

Beyond the Plain and Simple reminds readers that although the Amish dress in almost identical clothing, they have distinct personalities and convictions. In vignettes and reflections she reveals the ways in which members of the Amish community live out their faith against the background of their communal culture, all the while emphasizing their individuality. Topics range from Amish family values to women to a retirement community in Florida to an Amish intellectual. Stevick’s eloquent narration is descriptive rather than expository as she often draws comparisons between Amish society and mainstream society, sometimes preferring the Amish ways and at other times questioning them. Beyond the Plain and Simple portrays the Amish as dynamic people who experience struggles, failures, and successes not unique to their community.

In Beyond the Velvet Curtain, Karen Kovacik illustrates Czeslaw Miloxz’s dictum that “the purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person.” Peopled with such diverse characters as Richard Nixon, Nikita Khruschev, Kafka’s father, Dorothea Lange, William Carlos Williams, Lawrence Welk, Robespierre, and a feisty Catholic saint, this original collection of poems takes us on an amusement-park ride through world history and art. Kovacik’s poetry places us in the strange drama of cataclysmic events and ordinary life.

Few are familiar with one of the Holocaust’s most monstrous acts, the systematic murder of 5,000 Jewish residents in a Nazi-occupied Polish town, Trochenbrod, on August 11, 1942. Of the 33 who escaped death, only one person remains to describe these events—Betty Gold. Twelve-year-old Betty and her family hid inside a secret wall built by her father and, when it seemed safe, crept toward the forest, which became their home.

Arthur d’Arazien’s particular talent was to photograph American industry. He recorded with artistry, precision, and passion the powerful, emotional impact of giant machines, immense structures, and complex artifacts. His photographs are the result of meticulous planning and implementation on a grand scale. He was an experimenter and an innovator, pioneering such techniques as multiple exposures on a single sheet of film; lights in motion in the dark; and the use of reflectors, flash powder, and strobe lights to illuminate huge interior and exterior spaces. He experimented with films, cameras, lenses, focus, exposure, filters, and lighting to achieve just the right effects.

In the summer of 1885, ex-convict George Graham bigamously married Cora Lee, foster daughter of nationally known temperance revivalist Emma Molloy, and the three took up residence together on the Molloy farm near Springfield, Missouri. When the body of Graham’s first wife, Sarah, was found at the bottom of an abandoned well on the farm early the next year, Graham was charged with murder, and Cora and Emma were implicated as accessories. As Larry E. Wood notes, this sensational story made headlines across the country and threatened Mrs. Molloy’s career as a prominent evangelist and temperance revivalist.

This latest collaboration of Carolyn V. Platt and Gary Meszaros is a beautifully photographed book that explores Lake Erie and its effects on the birds that make this region their home. Birds of the Lake Erie Region observes a year of weather changes and avian migrations—from the wintertime convergence of ducks and other waterbirds on the lake’s last ice-free areas to the excitement of the raptor and shorebird migrations in the fall.

Grounded in archival research conducted in the archives of the World Bank, Food and Agriculture Organization, and World Health Organization, as well as in other archives in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain, The Birth of Development provides a foundational understanding for many of today’s debates on economic globalization, especially those that involve the World Bank and World Trade Organization. Given the current role of international peacekeepers and multinational aid agencies, this story is timely and makes clear that the issues that confronted early postwar planners and reformers remain in many ways unsolved even today.

Black Hair in a White World is a groundbreaking, serious study of the cultural history, perceptions, and increasing acceptance of Black hair in broader American society. Editor Tameka N. Ellington brings together a varied group of scholars who together make an important contribution to ongoing discussions about race, gender, sociology, and self-expression.

Black, White, and Red All Over explores socialist periodicals in the agrarian heartland; views socialists’ attempts to provide alternatives to urban dailies; explores the radical press crusade to champion workers; analyzes the role anarchist periodicals played in their pioneering battles for a free press, free speech, and free love; surveys socialism in the black press; and details the federal government’s wartime campaign to suppress the radical press. It draws parallels with Occupy Wall Street’s social media movement. Despite the distance from the typewriter to Twitter, Lumsden concludes that twenty-first-century social movement media perform nearly the same function as did their nearly forgotten predecessors.