In the fall of 1864, the Civil War’s outcome rested largely on Abraham Lincoln’s success in the upcoming presidential election. As the contest approached, cautious optimism buoyed the President’s supporters in the wake of Union victories at Atlanta and in the Shenandoah Valley. With all eyes on the upcoming election, Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant conducted a series of large-scale military operations outside Richmond and Petersburg, which have, until now, received little attention.

The election of 1860 was a crossroad in American history. Faced with four major candidates, voters in the North and South went to the polls not knowing that the result of the election would culminate in the bloodiest conflict the United States had ever seen. Despite its obvious importance, surprisingly few studies have focused exclusively on this electoral contest itself. In The Election of 1860 Reconsidered, seven historians offer insightful essays that challenge the traditional view of the election, present fresh inter- pretations, and approach the contest from new angles.

The sacred landmarks of Cleveland and the surrounding area provide a fascinating array of architectural styles and often serve as visual focal points and social centers in the area’s many ethnic communities. In A Guide to Greater Cleveland’s Sacred Landmarks, author Lloyd Ellis describes the origins of the area’s religious communities, outlines the history of their buildings, interprets their architectural styles, and provides details on significant interior features.

For more than fifty years the journal Civil War History has presented the best original scholarship in the study of America’s greatest struggle. The Kent State University Press is pleased to present a multivolume series reintroducing the most influential of the more than 500 articles published in the journal. From military command, strategy, and tactics, to political leadership, abolitionism, the draft, and women’s issues, from the war’s causes to its aftermath and Reconstruction, Civil War History has published pioneering and provocative analyses of the determining aspects of the Middle Period.

NATO after Sixty Years addresses the challenges of adaptation confronting the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in the early twenty-first century. Comprised of essays from a range of experts, each chapter examines an aspect of NATO’s difficult adjustment to the post–Cold War security challenges within and without its treaty-based responsibilities and competencies.

Private Silas W. Haven, a native New Englander transplanted to Iowa, enlisted in 1862 to fight in a war that he believed was God’s punishment for the sin of slavery. Only through the war’s purifying bloodshed, thought Haven, could the nation be redeemed and the Union saved. Marching off to war with the 27th Iowa Volunteer Infantry, Haven left behind his wife Jane and their three young children. Over the course of four years, he wrote her nearly two hundred letters, collected here for the first time.

Connie Mack: Grand Old Man of Baseball is filled with intimate glimpses of Mack and of the players he managed over the years. Mack and his teams always gave Athletics fans a great show—and readers can relive the excitement in this facsimile reprint of Frederick G. Lieb’s classic biography.

Despite its fascinating history, the attention paid by North American historians to Uruguay, a nation nestled in the corner of South America between Argentina and Brazil, is scant when compared to that shown to its neighbors. A major portion of the Uruguayan story revolves around the figure of two-time president José Batlle y Ordóñez, who was the nation’s dominant political figure between 1903 and 1929.

Author Rudy Dicks recreates the Steelers’ 1963 season game by game and profiles the ragtag squad of rejects, misfits, and scalawags that coach Buddy Parker jury-rigged into a contender. He shows how a group of unsung players banded together to overcome tough breaks, injuries, and a losing tradition, challenging the more glamorous Cleveland Browns and New York Giants for a conference title and a berth in the NFL Championship Game.

“Heather Lanier’s The Story You Tell Yourself may be a first book, but Lanier’s firm intelligence and lyrical artistry make poems that are clearly the confident work of an extraordinarily accomplished, even thrilling, poet. Lanier isn’t kidding when she says, auda- ciously, ‘I found a shape and made a world,/then crawled inside. Where else was […]