“In 1989, the Supreme Court ruled that dissidents had a constitutional right under the First Amendment to burn the flag. During the Bush Administration, Congress passed the Flag Protection Act (FPA), and so doing reflected the broad spectrum of opinion that saw the flag as a sacred symbol of American freedoms. Robert Justin Goldstein’s Burning the Flag thoughtfully draws on the disciplines of law, political science and history to analyse the controversy in all its dimensions.” — London Review of Books

In A Few Small Candles, ten men tell why they resisted, what happened to them, and how they feel about that experience today. Their stories detail the resisters’ struggles against racial segregation in prison, as well as how they instigated work and hunger strikes to demonstrate against other prison injustices. Each of the ten has remained active in various causes relating to peace and social justice.

In Pantaloons and Power, Gayle V. Fischer depicts how the reformers’ denouncement of conventional dress highlighted the role of clothing in the struggle of power relations between the sexes. Wearing pantaloons was considered a subversive act and was often met with social ostracism. This carefully researched interdisciplinary study successfully combines the fields of costume history, women’s history, material culture, and social history to tell the story of one highly charged dress reform and its resonance in nineteenth-century society.

Economic Reforms and Modernization in Nigeria details the process and outcome of late-colonial and post-colonial Nigerian history. While its focus is on economic reforms, it includes a discussion of twentieth-century politics in order to place the events of the period in context. Author Toyin Falola presents statistical data on Nigeria’s economy that illustrate the nature of the changes made throughout the mid-twentieth century. Much of this information is presented here for the first time.

Dialogue on the Frontier is a remarkable departure from previous scholarship, which emphasized the negative aspects of the relationship between Protestants and Catholics in the early American republic. Author Margaret C. DePalma argues that Catholic-Protestant relations took on a different tone and character in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She focuses on the western frontier territory and explores the positive interaction of the two religions and the internal dynamics of Catholicism.

Nelson A. Miles began his military service as a volunteer officer in the Civil War. He later earned the appellation “the idol of the Indian fighters” and capped his controversial career by serving as Commanding General of the Army from 1895 to 1903. During his long and distinguished career, Miles made numerous enemies, including Theodore Roosevelt. Peter DeMontravel contends that the comments made by these enemies influenced the way historians have viewed Miles’s career. This reassessment of that career restores him to a degree of prominence.

In this collection of 11 essays, individualism is placed in a comparative, trans-national context that differentiates the American national experience from its European cultural heritage. The authors analyze meanings and usages of individualism in Europe—particularly France, Germany, and Great Britain—in order to clarify those found in American society. Also examined are the limitations of the concept in relation to minority groups and women. A 19th-century perspective of individualism is the central focus of American Chameleon, but the final chapter adds a contemporary dimension. Editors and authors Richard Curry and Lawrence Goodheart herein offer scholars, students and interested citizens new interpretations and a deeper understanding of the past, present, and future of American society itself.

The Frontier Republic examines the form these conflicts took in the settlement of the Ohio Country, as thousands of Americans streamed onto the lands west of the Appalachians. These settlers had experienced revolution and migration: now the process of creating new communities and a new state in the Northwest Territory forced them to deliverate on, and define, what these upheavals had accomplished. At issue was the very nature of human society and the role of government in it. Jeffersonian Republican ideals of individual liberty and local sovereignty were at odds with the Federalist vision of a well-ordered society and political control on the national level. Disagreements arose over such topics as rights of squatters, establishment of authority of the national government, the statehood movement, and the location of the new state’s capital. The effects of the Panic of 1819 and the need for internal improvements changed the early focus on individualism to an understanding of Ohio’s place in an interdependent society. Although this first generation of settlers failed to resolve their disputes completely, they ensured that the ideological foundation of nineteenth-century Ohio would be a synthesis of their conflicting revolutionary visions of the future of the United States.

Dr. Cassimatis offers the first, full-length account of this formative period in the history of Greek-American diplomacy. The issues separating the governments of the United States and Greece in the 1920s were simultaneously self-contained and international in scope. For Greece, they were self-contained because they involved solutions to domestic problems affecting the welfare—indeed, the survival—of the Greek nation. Internationally, they were interconnected because efforts to bring about their resolution contributed to an American entanglement in the Near-East policies of Great Britain, France and Italy. Thus, American loans, commercial aggrandizement, the inroads of American capital, philanthropy, and cultural relations were but components of a larger diplomatic setting in which the interests of the United States came into conflict with the interests of the Western European powers.

Many of the political institutions that would dominate 19th-century America (and the Midwest in particular) originated and first evolved in Ohio. The Pursuit of Public Power explores the origins and nature of political culture here from the American Revolution until the Civil War. Twelve essays examine topics such as voting practices, the role of the state in national economic development, the relationship between religion and politics, the rivalries between individual political leaders and between communities competing for social and economic dominance, the impact of slavery on politics, and the development of stable political systems within a rapidly changing state.