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 townsfolk of Logan, Ohio, a mined-out area of the Appalachian foothills, cheered as an innocent man was convicted and sent to death row. The occasion was the conviction of Dale N. Johnston. His trial ended nothing; the tragedies had just begun. What really happened on that bitter cold day in January 1984 was the total collapse of the local criminal justice system.

All students of the Civil War are indebted to Frank Haskell for his classic description of the battle of Gettysburg. A lieutenant on the staff of John Gibbon, Haskell stood at the focus of the Confederate assault on July 3, 1863. He wrote of the battle in a letter to his brother. When it came to light after the war it became and remains probably the most read and repeated account of Civil War combat written by a participant. It captures wholly the terrible fascination that the Civil War—and Gettysburg—holds for all Americans.

“Everywhere we have been since beginning/Is Mapped in the memory somewhere,’ writes Susan Neale at the outset of this ambitiously conceived and enormously satisfying collection of poems. Here is a poet who wants nothing less than to know the past. Her fields of study are the history of light and darkness, of language and other ways of saying, of reality and dream, and, especially, of women and men as they move toward one another and away in their seismic, often cataclysmic dancing, a continental rift and drift originating in a long-ago state of innocence and wholeness Neal calls ‘the heart’s Pangaea.’ In this debut collection sure to attract wide attention, Susan Neale gives us richly detailed maps leading to discoveries about where we human beings have been, where we are, and where in the world, together and apart, we’re bound.”—David Citino

What is it like to be a student nurse washing the feet of a dying patient? To be a newly graduated nurse, in charge of the Intensive Care Unit for the first time, who wonders if her mistake might have cost a life? Or to be an experienced nurse who, by her presence and care, holds a patient to this world? Poet and nurse practitioner Cortney Davis answers these questions by examining her own experiences and through them reveals a glimpse into the minds and hearts of those who care for us when we are at our most vulnerable. The Heart’s Truth offers the joys, frustrations, fears, and miraculous moments that nurses, new and experienced, face every day.

Did the Mad Butcher of Cleveland also strike in Pennsylvania?

From 1934 to 1938, Cleveland, Ohio, was racked by a classic battle between good and evil. On one side was the city’s safety director, Eliot Ness. On the other was a nameless phantom dubbed the “Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run,” who littered the inner city with the remains of decapitated and dismembered corpses. Never caught or even officially identified, the Butcher simply faded into history, leaving behind a frightening legend that both haunts and fascinates Cleveland to this day. In 2001 the Kent State University Press published James Jessen Badal’s In the Wake of the Butcher: Cleveland’s Torso Murders, the first serious, book-length treatment of this dark chapter in true crime history. Though Murder Has No Tongue: The Lost Victim of Cleveland’s Mad Butcher—a detailed study of the arrest and mysterious death of Frank Dolezal, the only man ever charged in the killings—followed in 2010.

Individuals and communities have historically reinforced values and shaped society in ways that best fit their own objectives. This exciting new study reevaluates the crucial interaction between religious, ethnic-, racial, -gender-, and class-based values and ideals and giving. It explores the nature and meaning if giving in urban America by examining the African American and Italian populations of Cleveland.

Though Ernest Hemingway distrusted Hollywood and often found himself in conflict with directors and producers, he frequented theaters and freely acknowledged the art and potential that cinema contained. In turn, the film industry’s interest in his stories has endured for nearly a century. Focusing on the relationship between written and cinematic work, Hemingway and Film brings together diverse literary and film studies scholars to both deepen understanding of Hemingway’s fiction and film adaptations and to provide practical guidance for approaching these topics in the classroom.

In Hemingway and French Writers, Ben Stoltzfus illuminates the connections between Hemingway and the most important French intellectuals, such as Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, André Gide, Jacques Lacan, Jean-Paul Sartre, Henry de Montherlant, André Malraux, and Albert Camus. A distinguished scholar of both French literature and Hemingway studies, Stoltzfus compares Hemingway’s major works in chronological order, from The Sun Also Rises to The Old Man and the Sea, with novels by French writers. While it is widely known that France influenced Hemingway’s writing, Hemingway also had an immense impact on French writers. Over the years, American and French novelists enriched each other’s works with new styles and untried techniques. In this comparative analysis, Stoltzfus discusses the complexities of Hemingway’s craft, the controlled skill, narrative economy, and stylistic clarity that the French, drawn to his emphasis on action, labeled “le style américain.”

Ernest Hemingway casts a long shadow in literature—reaching beyond his status as a giant of 20th-century fiction and a Nobel Prize winner—extending even into comic books. Appearing variously with Superman, Mickey Mouse, Captain Marvel, and Cerebus, he has even battled fascists alongside Wolverine in Spain and teamed up with Shade to battle adversaries in the Area of Madness.