In this reexamination of Confederate war aims, Joseph L. Harsh analyzes the military policy and grand strategy adopted by Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis in the first two years of the Civil War. Recent critics of Lee have depicted him as a general of tactical brilliance, but one who lacked strategic vision. He has been accused of squandering meager military resources in vain pursuit of decisive victories during his first year in field command. Critics of Davis claim he went too far in adopting a “perimeter” policy which attempted to defend every square mile of Southern territory, scattering Confederate resources too thinly. Harsh argues, to the contrary, that Davis and Lee’s policies allowed the Confederacy to survive longer than it otherwise could have and were the policies best designed to win Southern independence.

The Danse Macabre of Women is a 15th-century French poem found in a lavishly illuminated late medieval manuscript. The only Dance of Death devoted entirely to women, it was written by an anonymous author and subsequently expanded by several poet/editors. In this version, one of the later productions, 36 women are called in the midst of their bustling daily lives to join the eternal Dance of Death. Young and old, rich and poor, widow, matron, and child—each is the focus of two short poelms written in the form of a dialogue (Death calls and the victim replies) and accompanied by an illumination (or a miniature).

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.

A compilation of essays and related commentary delivered at the second annual Kent State University Symposium on Democracy, Media, Profit, and Politics recognizes and considers the fundamental differences that arise when the competitive forces of commerce clash with the demand for the open availability of information in a democratic society.

Containing Coexistence: America, Russia, and the “Finnish Solution,” 1945–1956, is the first full-scale study of Finland’s role in Soviet-American relations during the onset of the cold war. Cold war Finland was an enigma. Defeated by the Soviet Union in World War II, the country appeared ripe for joining the “people’s democracies” in 1945, when the […]

“Kate Hancock’s poems combine intellectual rigor with emotional recklessness like oil and water under special dispensation. This rare ability is a tell-tale sign of a true poet, and the reader who lets these poems have their sure way with him or her will not forget them.”—William Matthews

Small Comforts quietly probes the mysteries of an ordinary life when reviewed at middle age. Essayist Jeff Hammond, a midcareer academic who examines a variety of lifelong obsessions, frustrates any expectation that life’s fogs dissipate as we age. At stake here is the need for those of us who have reached a “certain age” to look at who we have become with courage, honesty, and humor.

In Ohio States: A Twentieth-Century Midwestern, Jeffrey Hammond asserts the quiet mysteries of an ordinary life. More than simply a glimpse of life in the Midwest in the 1950s, this collection of well-crafted, touching narratives finds the author recalling his childhood and youth with a mixture of affection and alarm.

In Spoilsmen in a “Flowery Fairyland,” Jack L. Hammersmith examines in detail the first eleven American ministers to Japan, exploring the information, expectations, and values they took with them and how they shaped U.S. diplomacy with Japan in the late nineteenth century. Of particular interest, he shows that the issue of trade, a dominant contemporary concern, was an ongoing nineteenth-century problem as well.

“The poetry, page after page, is of the kind that keeps the reader on the critical edge, both ecstatic and lucid, both active and illumined. . . . What began in the first part of the book with the evocations of a struggle to unclench a rock-locked fist’ is projected, in the end, on the geography of the continent itself, desolate yet lyrical. Nothing more exotic here than the beauty of utterance set free.”—Stavros Deligiorgis