Three years before Brian Sipe began his magic with the Cleveland Browns, Bill Fitch and his band of Cavaliers brought a buzz to Northeast Ohio basketball that fans had never seen before. Despite a rough start to their 1975–76 season, the Cavaliers rode the shoulders of Akron native Nate Thurmond to the Central Division title. Under his leadership, they qualified for the playoffs. Then in April the Cavs provided fans with a remarkable string of games against the Washington Bullets, winning in incredible fashion three times—twice at The Coliseum in Richfield—en route to a 4–3 series victory in the Eastern Conference Semifinal.

Filling a major gap in the literature, Modernity and National Identity in the United States and East Asia, 1895–1919 is a comprehensive, thought-provoking intellectual history of American, Chinese, and Japanese thinking on modernity, national identity, and internationalism during the early twentieth century. Those with an interest in U.S. foreign relations, women’s and gender history, and U.S.-Asian relations will find this an innovative and fascinating title.

Not a simple, linear administrative history, Modernizing the American War Department is a unique study of the adjustment of nineteenth-century military organizations to the managerial, technological, and policy challenges of a new era. The story unfolds against a backdrop of massive industrial and technological changes, as the country moved from a traditional agricultural and market-based commercial system toward a modern organization utilizing twentieth-century managerial structures and concepts.

Here, in Moments of Truth: A Photo­grapher’s Experience of Kent State 1970, Ruffner not only reproduces a collection of nearly 150 of his photographs—many never before published—but also offers a stirring narrative in which he revisits his work and attempts to further examine these events and his own experience of them. It is, indeed, an intensely personal journey that he invites us to share.

Moods of the Ohio Moons is the product of this subjective method of observation, balanced with scientific knowledge and intended to encourage readers to explore their own individual appreciation and understanding of nature. Twelve essays, one for each month, relate incidents and events—weather, diagnostic events, vegetation and wildlife, agriculture, trends of land use, and the wild harvest—that contribute to the mood of the time. As Gilfillan demonstrates, each month has its mood established primarily by nature and only secondarily by humans.

For more than a decade, Marquette University has honored Frank L. Klement, a longtime member of its history department whose reputation as a historian was established with his “alternative view” of the Civil War, with the annual Frank L. Klement Lectures: Alternative Views of the Sectional Conflict. Lecturers are asked to examine an unexplored aspect of the Civil War or to reinterpret an important theme of the conflict, including, among others, the war’s effect on race and gender, historians’ interest in studying the experiences of representative individuals as well as communities, and the emerging field of memory studies.

“Under and out from under the shadow of death Joanne Lehman writes ‘in the emptiness between one breath and the next.’ Her rural Ohio land-scape is animated with rough and mild weather, red wing blackbirds, hayfields, woodlands, and the sweet and sometimes too-tight lips and rhythms of sectarian life. These poems speak simply, and their mourning, memory, and healing are a balm for times when a little bit of quiet would do us all a world of good. This is a fine first book—as meditative, wise, and joyful as it is bound to local life on our turning earth.”—Julia Kasdorf

Author William H. Hildebrand takes readers on an exhilarating and illuminating ride through Kent State University’s ten decades: from its beginning under its visionary founder John Edward McGilvrey to the hardships of the Great Depression; through the post–World War II boom years and the tumultuous sixties culminating in the May 4, 1970, tragedy; from the university’s struggle to regain its bearings during the decade-long aftermath, to its restoration and academic resurgence in the eighties and nineties; and into the emerging opportunities and challenges of the new millennium.

Like Susan Griffin’s A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War, Alex Vernon’s most succinctly bred explores war by exploring around war, by operating in the margins. Vernon records his ongoing relationship with war and soldiering—from growing up in late Cold War 1980s middle America to attending West Point, going to and returning from the first Gulf War, and watching, as a writer and academic, the coming of the second Iraq war. Not merely a collection of essays, this book has a trajectory, and the chapters, appearing in rough chronological order, loop in and out of one another. It is not a narrow autobiography that attempts to account only for the writer’s life; it uses that life to illuminate the lives of its readers, to tell us about the time and place in which we find ourselves.

During World War II, the United States maintained two secret interrogation camps in violation of the Geneva Convention—one just south of Washington, D.C., and the other near San Francisco. German POWs who passed through these camps briefed their fellow prisoners, warning them of turncoats who were helping the enemy—the United States—pry secrets from them. One of these turncoats, Werner Drechsler, was betrayed and murdered by those he spied on.