Told in his own words, this is the story of Sgt. Thomas W. Smith’s service in the Civil War—the greatest adventure of his life. It is also the story of his regiment, the 6th Pennsylvania Cavalry, known as Rush’s Lancers, named both for the distinctive wooden lances they carried for the first two years of the war and for their first commanding officer, Col. Richard H. Rush. These letters provide rare insight into the workings and daily life of a noncommissioned officer. They are filled with humor and humanity and demonstrate the hardships withstood by the common soldier of the Civil War. The added narrative and annotations assist the reader in identifying the persons and events described and in placing them in the proper historical perspective and context.

Willie Harrell has assembled a collection of essays on Dunbar’s work that builds on the research published over the last two decades. Employing an array of approaches to Dunbar’s poetic creations, these essays closely examine the self-motivated and dynamic effect of his use of dialect, language, rhetorical strategies, and narrative theory to promote racial uplift. They situate Dunbar’s work in relation to the issues of advancement popular during the Reconstruction era and against the racial stereotypes proliferating in the early twentieth century while demonstrating its relevance to contemporary literary studies.

We Were The Ninth is a translation, carefully edited and thoroughly annotated, of an important Civil War regiment. The Ninth Ohio—composed of Ohio Germans mostly from Cincinnati—saw action at Rich Mountain and Carnifex Ferry in West Virginia, Shiloh, Corinth, Perryville, Hoover’s Gap, Nashville, Chattanooga, and Chickamauga.

Wearable prints are not only a decorative art form but also the product of a range of complex industrial processes and an eco- nomically important commodity. But when did textile printing originate, and how can we identify the fabrics, inks, dyes, and printing processes used on surviving historical examples?

In The Weary Boys, Pope refutes this undeserved derision. Under the command of Colonel J. Warren Keifer, a veteran of the Civil War’s Western Theater, the 110th proved their worth many times over. Only fifteen of the 175 volunteer regiments from Ohio that served in the Union Army suffered the loss of more than one hundred men. The 110th was on of these regiments.

Melville has long been regarded as an author of raw genius who knew, or cared, little about the art of the novel, and even harbored hostility toward its conventions. In The Weaver-God, He Weaves, Christopher Sten sets out to correct this widespread view, showing not only what Melville knew about the novelist’s craft but how he appropriated and transformed a whole series of distinct genres: Typee is presented in the context of the popular romance, with its paired themes of sex and violence; Omoo is viewed in the framework of early Spanish and later French examples of the picaresque novel; and Mardi is seen as an instance of the once widely popular genre of the imaginary voyage. Sten also reveals how Melville radically transformed certain existing genres—the epic novel in Moby-Dick and the historical novel in Israel Potter—or forged profound new directions for genres still in their early stages—the psychological novel in Pierre and the experimental novel in the Confidence-Man.

The Websters has the rare distinction of containing both sides of a correspondence between an “Old Army” officer and his socially prominent wife, one that reflects both their private lives and many of the public events of the times and that interweaves their responses to each other’s experiences.

Weeks in This Country is a collection of poems concerned with place. From Turkey to rural Bohemia to Cape Cod, Griffith uses the rich imagery of her travels to evoke both the exotic and the personal. These are poems of observation and poems of meditation. Ultimately, they speak of the longing for connection—among individuals, between cultures, and across history.

This seasoned newspaperman has been soaking up stray facts and vanishing information for more than five decades. Condon’s voracious appetite for facts and a nose for where to find them bring alive this Cleveland history, engaging the reader with his authentic stories, humorous anecdotes, and fond perspective. West of the Cuyahoga fills a gap in the history of Cleveland, Ohio, and reveals the gleanings of a lifetime for a local journalist and raconteur.

When western Virginians separated from the Commonwealth of Virginia to form West Virginia, the distinctive action reflected five decades of deep dissatisfaction with the Commonwealth’s regressive constitution and the governmental procedures that protected slavery. The westerners’ creation of a new state was revolutionary in the context of U. S. statecraft. New constitutional approaches and laws addressed past wrongs and the realities of war. Grave external and internal forces, sometimes armed, opposed West Virginia’s creation and establishment of civil order and state institutions.