During the latter half of the twentieth century, the world witnessed the rise of the modern environmental movement. Chronicling this significant occurrence in Ohio, and specifically in Kent, a university town in the American Midwest, Botanical Essays from Kent is a collection of writings and photographs that capture the spirit and excitement of botanical fieldwork during the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. Kent Bog, dedicated as a state nature preserve in 1987, is the book’s focal point.

During the first half of the eighteenth century, Pennsylvania became home to a variety of German-speaking sectarians who rebelled against the oppression of European state-church establishments and migrated to the United States to form their own communions. One such group was the Snow Hill Cloister, which was founded in 1762 as an attempt to continue the monastic, communal lifestyle practiced at Georg Conrad Beissel’s famed Ephrata Cloister. In an engaging narrative that chronicles with humor and insight her research into this fascinating community of German Seventh-Day Baptists, Denise A. Seachrist tells the story of Snow Hill—its spiritual and work life; its music, writings, architecture, and crafts tradition; and its sad demise in the waning days of the twentieth century. A product of in situ fieldwork that explores the places and personalities behind the founding and prosperity and demise of the cloister, Snow Hill is a long-overdue study of one of America’s “experiments” in communal living. It speaks to another time and place and stands as a testament to the idealism of community and the tenaciousness of the human spirit.

Author H. L. Schreiner’s collection of “flying pulps” and aviation publications served as the primary impetus for his comprehensive research. Included in this handsomely illustrated aviation history are photos and plans that originally accompanied the model kits and a never-before-published illustrated-plans index. Rare color photographs of Cleveland National Air Race aircraft and their daredevil pilots will be of interest to modelers, collectors, pilots, and aviation historians, who will find this book to be a significant addition to their libraries.

Ohio can be a land of weather extremes. There are droughts followed by flood, arctic cold and soaring heat in one year, a Christmas warmed to 70 degrees and a Christmas white with thirty inches of snow. Ice jams on the Sandusky River and tornadoes across its southern counties, wind storms in Cleveland and floods in the Ohio River Valley inspire Ohioans to “remember when.” Thomas and Jeanne Schmidlin, native Ohioans, have brought together data from government records, scientific studies, memoirs, diaries, and newspapers in the first comprehensive book on Ohio weather. They highlight 200 weather events from 1790 to the present—extremes of rain, snow, storms, and temperature. Anecdotal, often first person, accounts are enhanced by statistics, photographs, and maps. They describe the place of weather in popular history and folklore and how forces of nature compelled the construction of extensive flood control and weather warning systems in Ohio. Thunder in the Heartland will be of interest to climatologist, cultural historians, and all who live the weather of the Oho Country.

In this lively memoir, William B. Saxbe narrates his life’s journey from his youth in a small Ohio town to his military career during World War II and Korea and through his career as a public servant in Ohio, in Washington, D.C., and overseas. He regales readers with stories about hopping a freight train when he was in the sixth grade, insights on being elected to the United States Senate, commentary on serving as Nixon’s attorney general at the height of the Watergate scandal, and descriptions of life as the U.S. ambassador to India.

At the time of his death in February 2003 Judah Rubinstein was working on this second edition of Merging Traditions: Jewish Life in Cleveland, which he initially co-wrote with the late Sidney Z. Vincent in 1978. This revised and updated pictorial review of the nearly two-century history of the Jewish community tells the story of Jewish settlement and achievement in Northeast Ohio and continues in the spirit of the original, illuminating the struggles and the successes of one particular immigrant group and providing a valuable perspective on Cleveland’s Jewish community, past and present.

With the first Christmas tree in American history, the creation of the candy cane as a Christmas icon, and the production of one of the most popular Christmas gifts of all time, the Etch A Sketch, Ohio can boast of a remarkable seasonal heritage. Christmas Stories from Ohio documents this heritage in fiction and memoir and celebrates the many moods of yuletide in the Buckeye State. With selections from some of Ohio’s most highly regarded classic and contemporary authors, including Kay Boyle, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes, and James Thurber, these tales span the generations, offering readers unique geographical, historical, and cultural perspectives on winter holiday traditions. The selections explore time-honored themes of Christmas: family, compassion, wonder, and the human desire for connections and reconnections. Their charm and wit recall the fun of Christmases past, while still looking to the yuletide magic yet to happen.

Founded in 1871 by a group of entrepreneurs from Cleveland, Akron, and Canton, the Valley Railway paralleled the Cuyahoga River Valley, stretching from southeast Cleveland to Akron and then on to Canton and Valley Junction in Tuscarawas County. The Railway filled a need in the region by providing an important passenger rail link among the three cities and provided direct access to the coal fields in Stark and Tuscarawas Counties, supplying coal for Cleveland’s iron mills and other growing industries. The Railway began operation in 1880, continued service until 1962, and was revived in the early 1970s.

The Cleveland Jewish Orphan Asylum was for fifty years (1868-1918) the home for some 3,500 boys and girls, most of them immigrants from Eastern Europe. Gary Polster’s study examines the efforts of the more acculturated German Jews of Cleveland to “Americanize” and make good workers of the newcomers, and to teach a Judaism quite removed from the Yiddish culture and religious orthodoxy of Eastern Europe. The dominant figure at the asylum during the formative years was Samuel Wofenstein (1841-1921), a native of Moravia who by the age of 22 had earned both a rabbinical degree and a Ph.D in philosophy.

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.