Revelations captures the spirit of the African American worship experience through arresting images of congregants’ facial expressions and body language, their colorful uniforms and dress, and the solemnity of their worship. The images of baptisms, weddings, funerals, Sunday services, and special celebrations are at once serene and exaltant, pensive and inspirational. Revelations honors not only the spiritual dimension of the African American church but the pride and dignity that prevails within the churchgoing family.

In 1999 Cleveland Plain Dealer photographer Michael S. Levy was given an assignment by his editor to provide images for a feature article about research being conducted by members of Cleveland State University’s Center for Sacred Landmarks. Cleveland’s Urban Landscape is the product of that assignment.

“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

Village landmark churches are a unique legacy of the settlement of Ohio’s Western Reserve. The forty 19th century churches in Village Landmark Churches—still found today, although some now serve as solitary sentinels in disappearing villages and communities—were selected because they have significance in one or more of the following dimensions: architecture, history, or their dominant position in their setting.

“Found in these pages is simple profundity, desire unmitigated, the things we wish for each other, the science of absolutes so easy to understand, and so devastating: these poems put complex moments in such a straightforward context that we grasp not simply the words but the full feeling as something we have felt in some kind of similar vocabulary.” —Alberto Ríos, Judge

“Let us once again transform the American continent into a vast crucible of revolutionary ideas and efforts…” urged President John F. Kennedy on March 13, 1961. “Let us once again awaken our American revolution until it guides the struggle of people everywhere—not with an imperialism of force or fear, but the rule of courage and freedom and hope for the future of man.” Similar calls stirred Latin America. In Brazil, it came from left-wing politicians, intellectuals, labor leaders, and students. The revolution on April Fool’s Day, 1964 was not exactly the one the Brazilian Left had sought. Nor was the uncontested military coup the victory of courage and freedom and hope that Kennedy had called for.

Focusing on the overlapping nature of culture and politics, historian Mark A. Lause delves into the world of antebellum bohemians and the newspapermen who surrounded them, including Ada Clare, Henry Clapp, and Charles Pfaff, and explores the origins and influence of bohemianism in 1850s New York. Against the backdrop of the looming Civil War, The Antebellum Crisis and America’s First Bohemians combines solid research with engaging storytelling to offer readers new insights into the forces that shaped events in the prewar years.

A Politician Turned General offers a critical examination of the turbulent early political career and the controversial military service of Stephen Augustus Hurlbut, an Illinois Whig, Republican politician, and Northern political general who rose to distinction as a prominent member of the Union high command in the West during the Civil War.

“Tornado is a book of ravishing and precise beauty. Death, said Wallace Stevens, is the mother of beauty, and so it is here; around the loss of a beloved sister in childhood, Ted Lardner has spun a radiant web of language by which he reveals what does not and cannot die, in the scale of nature above and underground, in the movements of time, and in the ongoing reach of human tenderness that ‘glides through our skins like a wave, lighting it up from inside.’” —Alicia Ostriker

OSS Against the Reich presents the previously unpublished World War II diaries of Colonel David K.E. Bruce, London branch chief of America’s first secret intelligence agency, as he observed the war against Hitler. The entries include eyewitness accounts of D-Day, the rocket attacks on England, and the liberation of Paris. As a top deputy of William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, founder of the Office of Strategic Services, Bruce kept his diary sporadically in 1942 and made daily entries from the invasion of Normandy until the Battle of the Bulge. Bruce had served in World War I and, as Andrew Mellon’s son-in-law, moved easily in the world of corporate and museum boardrooms and New York society. However, World War II gave him a more serious and satisfying purpose in life; the experience of running the OSS’s most important overseas branch confirmed his lifelong interest in foreign service. After the war, in partnership with his second wife, Evangeline, Bruce headed the Marshall Plan in France and was ambassador to Paris, Bonn, and London. He further served as head of negotiations at the Paris peace talks on Vietnam, first American emissary to China and ambassador to NATO.