In this first biography, H. Wayne Morgan focuses on Cox’s development and personality, treating his art as an expression of his idealism. Cox was born in Warren, Ohio grew up in the Cincinnati area, and attended the McMicken School of Design there. His art training continued in Paris, where he studied for five years in the academic setting of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts as well as in private ateliers, such as those of Emile Carolus-Duran, Rodolphe Julian, and Jean-Leon Gerome. An academic, Cox was committed to learning traditional drawing and composition before establishing his own artistic identity. Cox became well known as a muralist during the prosperous years from 1897 to the 1920s, providing works for the new state capitols of Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota, the Library of Congress, and several public buildings in New York City. His large allegorical decorations rested on a thorough knowledge of Italian renaissance masters, many of whose works he had seen as an impressionable student. In addition, Cox’s gift for pithy phrases and his obvious knowledge gained him considerable prominence as a critic and reviewer. Throughout his career, he emphasized the values of craftsmanship and of attachments to ongoing traditional ideals that emphasized harmony, order, and unity of artist and public.

The conflict between modern and traditional art is one of the best known episodes in American cultural history. The modernists on the war in the sense that their styles and attitudes of mind dominated the discussion and production of new art. But the traditionalists remained strong in the arenas of public opinion and taste. It is a testament to the importance of the ideas involved that the basic issues are not yet settled in the larger cultural world. Kenyon Cox, a painter as well as critic, revealed a steadfast devotion to the ideals of a high art tradition, derived in his later years chiefly from admiration for the Italian Renaissance. He knew western art history, surveyed the current art scene in many reviews and analytical essays, and wrote with careful attention to the canons of scholarship. Royals Cartissoz, the art editor of the New York Tribune for over fifty years, was an appreciator and connoisseur. His belief in “beauty” in a well-done and recognizable form left him open to more innovation than was the case with Cox. He based his views on a self-confessed ideal of common sense that left the art experience open to any sensitive person. He was well suited to speak to and for the growing middle class in the Progressive era. This viewpoint was equally adaptable, if more debatable intellectually, when modernism triumphed. The fact that he remained a significant figure in art circles long after his tastes ceased to be dominant, testified to the nature of the audience for whom and to whom he spoke. Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., was the most realistic of these critics in estimating how art appealed in society. He knew a lot about many things and was concerned to see that the arts remained integrated in public esteem and thought. Mather took comfort from the history of art, which revealed to him that great works and their creators could survive time and criticism. This sense of historical process and his great need for the unifying power of art experience let Mather escape the bitterness that so affected Cox, and to a lesser extent Cortissoz, as tastes changed. The artist’s mission was to maintain and extend forms of art that promoted order and integration in society and in individual personalities. Society in turn had to see the artist as a harbinger of an intensified emotional life, but which accommodated changed perception in constructive ways. The chief fear of the traditionalists was that the new art, which seemed shocking in form and disruptive in intent, would separate artist and public to the detriment of both.

In this first full-length study of Lynd’s activist career, author Carl Mirra charts the development of the New Left and traces Lynd’s journey into the southern civil rights and anti–Vietnam War movements during the 1960s. He details Lynd’s service as a coordinator of the Mississippi Freedom Schools, his famous and controversial peace mission to Hanoi with Tom Hayden, his turbulent academic career, and the legendary attempt by the Radical Historians’ Caucus within the American Historical Association to elect him AHA president. The book concludes with Lynd’s move in the 1970s to Niles, Ohio, where he assisted in the struggle to keep the steel mills open and where he works as a labor lawyer today.

“Gentleman George” not only provides a microcosm of Democratic Party operations during Pendleton’s lifetime but is also a case study in the longevity of Jacksonian principles. In an era of intense Democratic factionalism stretching from the 1850s to the 1880s, Pendleton sought to unite the divided party around its traditional Jacksonian principles, which, when reapplied to address the changing political issues, became the foundation of the midwestern Democratic ideology.

The son of a Kentucky tobacco farmer, Raymond Kerns dropped out of high school after the eighth grade to help on the farm. He enlisted in the Army in 1940 and, after training as a radio operator in the artillery, was assigned to Schofield Barracks (Oahu) where he witnessed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and participated in the ensuing battle.

Strikes affect entire communities, and in the end they need the communities’ support to succeed. This was exemplified in the legendary 1937 sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan, when strikers occupied the GM plants. The striking workers needed food; they also needed information and advance warning on what management might be up to. The Women’s Emergency Brigade, formed during the Flint strike, proved indispensable to the union effort more than once. Genora Johnson Dollinger helped create the Women’s Emergency Brigade and became one of the strike’s leaders. She and her followers waded into the fray against the Flint police, the Pinkertons, and local officials sympathetic to GM, helping to achieve victory for the United Auto Workers and generating the first contract ever signed between GM and the UAW.

The Hasslers, in their analyses of the letters, explore Machen’s versatility as a writer and offer an interpretation of his group and its opposition to literary modernism. This extensive publication of his letters will fascinate fans of horror fiction, for whom Machen is an early classic, and scholars of fantasy, science fiction, and literature in general. Book collectors and historians of bookselling and collecting also will find much of interest here.

H. Lark Hall presents the first comprehensive biography of Vernon Louis Parrington (1871-1929). The recipient of the 1928 Pulitzer Prize in history for the first two volumes of his Main Currents in American Thought (3 vols., 1927, 1930), Parrington remains one of the most influential literary and historical scholars of the early 20th century. Parrington was a man in search of a personal myth. He found his self-image successively mirrored in Victorian novels, painting, poetry, Populism, religion, the arts and crafts movement, American literature, and American history. These changes also were reflected in his teaching as a professor of English at the College of Emporia, the University of Oklahoma, and the University of Washington. Published late in his career, Main Currents represented the culmination of his search. Drawing upon previously inaccessible personal papers-including correspondence, diaries, Harvard student course work, Main Currents chapter drafts, and other unpublished writings–Hall traces Parrington’s intellectual development from his midwestern childhood through a midlife engagement with English poet and artist William Morris, then from the radical impact of “the new history” to the tempered postwar reflection of his late career at the University of Washington.

In The Sage of Tawawa, Annetta L. Gomez-Jefferson offers Ransom as a symbol of an era and a larger movement and recalls him to be a man of deep faith and conviction. Educated at Wilberforce University in Ohio (after losing his scholarship from Oberlin College for protesting the segregation of the campus dining halls), Reverdy Cassius Ransom worked with and for the African Methodist Episcopal Church. His duties saw him run for Congress, be elected bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, serve as editor of the A.M.E. Church Review, and serve as church historiographer. In July 1941, Ransom received a letter from President Roosevelt appointing him to the Volunteer Participation Committee in the Office of Civilian Defense.

Gomez-Jefferson captures the growing concern of the Black middle-class with civil rights and its persistent attempts to confront problems with tactics less confrontational than those of the sixties and seventies. More than a biography, In Darkness with God is a history of Black life during the early part of the century and a chronicle of the political and religious struggles of the first autonomous Black church in the United States.