WILLIAM A. TIDWELL establishes the existence of a Confederate Secret Service and clarifies the Confederate decision making process to show the role played by Jefferson Davis in clandestine operations. While the book focuses on the Confederate Secret Service’s involvement with the Lincoln assassination, the information presented has implications for various other aspects of the Civil War. The most thorough description of the Confederate Secret Service to date, April ’65 provides previously unknown records and traces the development of Confederate doctrine for the conduct of irregular warfare. In addition it describes Confederate motives and activities associated with the development of a major covert effort to promote the creation of a peace party in the North. It shows in detail how the Confederates planned to attack the military command and control in Washington and how they responded to the situation when the wartime attack evolved into a peacetime assassination. One of the most significant pieces of new information is how the Confederates were successful in influencing the history of the assassination.

Notwithstanding the archaeological record amassed over nearly a century, little is understood abut the dynamics that led from the Stone Age to a semblance of formative civilization. This volume attempts to fill this gap in terms of archaeology, biological anthropology, demography, pathology, and paleo-ethnographic interpretation and has vast implications as far as archaic transition throughout eastern North America is concerned.

Hemingway’s short story, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” has secured a place among the greatest works in that genre—the story is widely considered Hemingway’s greatest. To explore the richness of this work, David L. Anderson returns to a somewhat unusual approach, that of archetypal criticism, which allows us to examine the story in more universal, rather than strictly historical, ways.

With the box office successes of movies based on The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, familiarity with J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth is growing. Unfortunately, scholarship dealing with Middle-Earth itself is comparatively rare in Tolkien studies, and students and scholars seeking greater insight have few resources. Similarly, although public concern for the environment is widespread and “going green” has never been trendier, ecocriticism is also an underserved area of literary studies. Arda Inhabited fills a gap in both areas by combining ecocritical and broader postmodern concerns with the growing appreciation for Tolkien’s Middle-Earth.

Since World War II, American historians have traditionally sided with the Loyalist supporters, validating their arguments that the pro-Nationalists were un-American for backing an unpalatable dictator. In Arguing Americanism, author Michael E. Chapman examines the long-overlooked pro-Nationalist argument. Employing new archival sources, Chapman documents a small yet effective network of lobbyists—including engineer turned writer John Eoghan Kelly, publisher Ellery Sedgwick, homemaker Clare Dawes, muralist Hildreth Meière, and philanthropist Anne Morgan—who fought to promote General Franco’s Nationalist Spain and keep the embargo in place.

The five armistices arranged in the fall of 1918 determined the course of diplomatic events for many years. The armistice with Germany, the most important of the five, was really a peace treaty in miniature. Bullitt Lowry, basing his account on a close study of newly available archives in Great Britain, France, and the United States, offers a detailed examination of the process by which what might have been only simple orders to cease fire instead became extensive diplomatic and military instructions to armies and governments. He also assesses the work of the leading figures in the profess, as well as supporting casts of generals, admirals, and diplomatic advisors.

War, armed conflict in general, and military service have likely inspired more textual testimonies than any other human event. Wars shatter every boundary imaginable—from national boundaries to bodily ones—confusing distinctions between social castes as well as between friends and foes, men and women, humans and animals, humans and machines, and even the living and the dead, making it difficult to classify what texts actually fall into the category “military autobiography.”

Arrow Talk makes a significant contribution to the understanding of Melanesian culture and contemporary sociopolitical issues in Papua New Guinea. In a post modern era in which culture has been dismissed by many anthropologists as a reification, this book makes a cogent argument for cultural holism by showing how symbolic, psychological, religious and linguistic factors have combined to shape Melpa responses to the political and economic crises they have had to face in the waning years of the millennium. This analysis also contributes notably to the development of anthropological perspectives on colonial and post colonial historical processes.

Featuring more than 100 photographs taken by Richard W. Burry, Art and History in the Ohio Judicial Center is the first book to celebrate the building’s impressive architectural detail and highlight its 200 Art Deco– and Beaux Arts–style murals, reliefs, and mosaics. Burry tells the story of the public art in the Ohio Judicial Center and provides illuminating historical context, helping the present-day reader to understand the building’s art not only from a contemporary perspective but also through the eyes of those living almost a century ago.

In this thoughtfully researched and beautifully written study, Danielle St. Hilaire argues that we can find frameworks for understanding the intersection of emotion, ethics, and literature that unite modern discourses of aesthetic autonomy with seemingly incompatible ethical theories that have largely fallen out of contemporary discussions regarding the value of literature.