Charles P. Hamblen’s posthumous text provides the first account in more than 25 years of soldiers from the Nutmeg State and their role during the Battle of Gettysburg. Supplemented with numerous photographs of the participants, many of which have never before been published, and detailed maps pinpointing the position of Connecticut’s five regiments during the battle, Connecticut Yankees at Gettysburg offers an original retelling of the greatest battle of the Civil War.

The Eclectic Medical Institute was an American institution in origin, concept, and practice. For nearly a century, EMI was known as the “mecca of eclectic thinking” and the “Mother Institute” of reformed medicine. A Profile of Alternative Medicine recounts the history of eclectic medicine which, along with hydropathy, homeopathy, physiomedicalism, chiropractic, and osteopathy, competed with regular medicine (allopathy) in the nineteenth century.

Between 1836 and 1911, thirteen physio-medical colleges opened, and then closed, their doors. These authentic American schools, founded on a philosophy of so-called Physio-Medicalism, substituted botanical medicines for allopathy’s mineral drugs and promoted the belief that the human body has an inherent “vital force” that can be used to heal. In Kindly Medicine, John Haller offers the first complete history of this high-brow branch of botanical medicine. Physio-Medicalist, along with Thomsonians, Homeopathys, Hydropaths, and Eclectics, represented the earliest wave of medical sectarianism in nineteenth-century America. United in their opposition to the harsh regimens of allopathy, or regular medicine, these sects had their beginnings in the era of Jacksonian democracy and individualism when every man yearned to become his own legislator, minister, and even his own physician. The Physio-Medicals demanded equal rights with regular practitioners to jobs in the army, navy and public institutions and equal representation on the new state licensing and regulatory boards. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, they saw their influence waning as they could no longer match allopathy’s increasing hold on science and on the public’s trust. In this history of the movement, John Haller recounts the events that led to the establishment of Physio-Medicalism and traces the circumstances that brought its slow descent into obscurity.

H. Lark Hall presents the first comprehensive biography of Vernon Louis Parrington (1871-1929). The recipient of the 1928 Pulitzer Prize in history for the first two volumes of his Main Currents in American Thought (3 vols., 1927, 1930), Parrington remains one of the most influential literary and historical scholars of the early 20th century. Parrington was a man in search of a personal myth. He found his self-image successively mirrored in Victorian novels, painting, poetry, Populism, religion, the arts and crafts movement, American literature, and American history. These changes also were reflected in his teaching as a professor of English at the College of Emporia, the University of Oklahoma, and the University of Washington. Published late in his career, Main Currents represented the culmination of his search. Drawing upon previously inaccessible personal papers-including correspondence, diaries, Harvard student course work, Main Currents chapter drafts, and other unpublished writings–Hall traces Parrington’s intellectual development from his midwestern childhood through a midlife engagement with English poet and artist William Morris, then from the radical impact of “the new history” to the tempered postwar reflection of his late career at the University of Washington.

Rich with regional history, this biography of an influential Clevelander will be important reading for students of women’s studies and the history of philanthropy as well as those interested in Ohio’s Western Reserve and its people.

“Reading The Auctioneer Bangs His Gavel, I had the sense of finding a poet I’d been looking for unawares: one who intertwines a survey of human sexuality (and gay sexuality at that) with theological questions; one who tackles ambitious poetic projects without sounding pretentious; one who writes fables using the ordinary materials of daily reality; one who balances the Jewish sources of the Western tradition with its Hellenic counterpart; one who knows how to be serious with the assistance of laughter; one who can tell a story and excerpt his own autobiography as a way of gaining larger perspectives on experience. ‘No things but in ideas,’ seems to be his aesthetic motto, and that has served him well in his goal—to declare that we are free to follow our natures in the pursuit of happiness.”—Alfred Corn

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.

In A Surgeon’s Civil War, the educated and articulate Holt describes camp life, army politics, and the medical difficulties that he and his colleagues experienced. His reminiscences and letters provide an insider’s look at medicine as practiced on the battlefield and offer occasional glimpses of the efficacy of Surgeon General William A. Hammond’s reforms as they affected Holt’s regiment. He also comments on other subjects, including slavery and national events. Holt served until October 17, 1864 when ill health forced him to resign.

A Singing Ambivalence is a comprehensive examination of the ways in which nine immigrant groups—Irish, Germans, Scandinavians, Eastern European Jews, Italians, Poles, Hungarians, Chinese, and Mexicans—responded to their new lives in the United States through music. Each group’s songs reveal an abiding concern over leaving their loved ones and homeland and an anxiety about adjusting to a new society. But accompanying these disturbing feelings was an excitement about the possibilities of becoming wealthy and about looking forward to a democratic and free society.

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.