In this brisk, engaging exploration of 19th-century radical reformer and abolitionist Wendell Phillips, Peter Charles Hoffer makes the case that Phillips deserves credit as the nation’s first public interest lawyer, someone who led the antebellum crusade against slavery and championed First Amendment rights and equality for all Americans, including Black people and women.

Steven L Herman, chief national correspondent for the nonpartisan, government-funded Voice of America (VOA), weaves together memoir and history to pull back the curtain on the inner workings of the White House press corps, giving readers a rare glimpse into the historic and current relationship between the president and the press.

In Reading Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden, Carl P. Eby examines Hemingway’s original unrevised manuscript in relation to Scribner’s highly edited edition. The product of 30 years of research, this volume is the first to clarify for readers which parts of the original work had been retained, altered, and discarded in the publisher’s text. No other treatment of the text has been so thorough in its analysis and annotations. This volume gives the Scribner’s edition and the original manuscript equal consideration, helping readers to better understand the relationship between both versions of the novel.

In early 1864, many heavy artillery regiments in the Civil War were garrisoning the Washington defenses, including the Fifteenth New York. At the same time, newly minted Union general in chief Ulysses S. Grant sought to replenish the ranks of the Army of the Potomac, and the Fifteenth became one of the first outfits dispatched to Major General George Meade at Brandy Station.

Drawing on a wealth of previously unmined primary sources, Edward A. Altemos pays tribute to the Fifteenth, other heavy artillery regiments, and the thousands of immigrants who contributed to the Union army’s victory.

More than 175 years after his death, Senator Thomas Morris has remained one of the few early national champions of political and constitutional antislavery without a biography devoted to him. In this first expansive study of Morris’s life and contributions, David C. Crago persuasively argues that historians have wrongly marginalized Morris’s role in the early antislavery movement.

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.

Fraternal Light: On Painting While Black is a lyric evocation of the life and work of the great African American artist Beauford Delaney. These poems pay homage to Delaney’s resilience and ingenuity in the face of profound adversity. Although his work never garnered the acclaim it deserves—but is finally receiving—Delaney was well known and highly respected in African American cultural circles, among bohemian writers and artists based in Greenwich Village from the 1930s to the early 1950s, and in Parisian avant-garde and expatriate enclaves from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s.

In this remarkable work of close reading and analysis, Thomas P. Hillman gets to the heart of the tension between pity and the desire for power in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. As the book traces the entangled story of the One Ring and its effects, we come to understand Tolkien’s central paradox: while pity is necessary for destroying the Ring, it cannot save the Ring-bearer from the Ring’s lies and corruption.

This latest installment of The Complete Funky Winkerbean presents the comic strips from 2008, 2009, and 2010 and ushers the original Funky characters into middle age. In true Funky fashion, the characters have to grapple with very serious issues: nearly fatal car crashes, a war abroad, and a tanking economy at home. These years also mark the first appearance of Cayla, and her arrival on the scene is where cartoonist Tom Batiuk’s new time-jump era begins to coalesce and take on its unique identity.

Featuring more than 100 photographs taken by Richard W. Burry, Art and History in the Ohio Judicial Center is the first book to celebrate the building’s impressive architectural detail and highlight its 200 Art Deco– and Beaux Arts–style murals, reliefs, and mosaics. Burry tells the story of the public art in the Ohio Judicial Center and provides illuminating historical context, helping the present-day reader to understand the building’s art not only from a contemporary perspective but also through the eyes of those living almost a century ago.