Albert Borowitz provides a guide to “fact-based crime literature” focusing on two principal groups of works: non-fictional accounts of crimes and criminal trials, including essays, monographs, journalism, editions of court transcripts, prison histories, and criminal and police biographies and memoirs; and works of imaginative literature, such as novels, stories, or stage works, based on or inspired by actual crimes or criminals. Blood and Ink, with forewords by Jacques Barzun and true-crime writer/historian Jonathan Goodman, will prove to be an invaluable resource to true-crime aficionados as well as to students and scholars of literature, cultural studies, and social history.

“Something spiritual, as well as actual, is broken in the world Joe Bonomo offers us, in this his first sustained collection. His response to what he is left with is to remake what he can in figures of comprehension and compassion. The size of his world is local and familiar, but that hardly prevents him from reaching into the silence or achieving, in finely-tuned language, his epiphanies. This is honest and lovely writing.”—Stanley Plumly

This new study reveals that the nineteen stories that comprised the original Tales of Soldiers and Civilians consist of carefully developed and interrelated meanings and themes that can only be fully understood by examining the complex circumstances of their original productions. By considering each of the nineteen tales in the order in which they were first published and by drawing heavily on contemporary related materials, Blume re-creates much of the original milieu into which Bierce carefully placed his short stories. Blume systematically examines many of Bierce’s editing flaws, exposing that Bierce’s decisions often weakened the original literary merits of his stories. Ultimately this story reveals, tale by tale and layer by layer, that the nineteen stories included in Bierce’s 1892 collection were masterpieces of fiction, destined to become classics. Historians and Civil War enthusiasts, as well as literary scholars, will welcome this new study.

This illustrated guide to the architecture of Oberlin, Ohio, mixes the remarkable social history of college and town with architectural commentary about one hundred thirty-two buildings built between 1837 and 1977. The result is a unique record of the ways in which the people of one Midwestern college town organized and housed their lives over the past one hundred fifty years, from the layout of the village square in 1833 to distinguished samples from the work of such twentieth-century architects as Cass Gilbert, Frank Lloyd Wright, Wallace Harrison, Minoru Yamasaki, Hugh Stubbins and Robert Venturi.

In Union and Emancipation, seven leading historians offer new perspectives on the issues of race and politics in American Society from the antebellum era to the aftermath of Reconstruction. The authors, all trained by Richard H. Sewell at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, address two major themes; the politics of sectional conflict prior to the Civil War, illuminated through ideological and institutional inquiry; and the central importance of race, slavery, and emancipation in shaping American political culture and social memory.

Ripperology—a sometimes obsessive interest in studying the crimes of Jack the Ripper—is a subject of timeless interest that has suffered from confusion, exaggeration, and hyperbole for over a century. Jack the Ripper was probably the first serial killer to appear in a large metropolis at a time when the general populace was literate and the press was a force for social change. The press was also partly responsible for creating many myths surrounding the Ripper.

“Kat Snider Blackbird gives us all these in her intense and passionate poems. She is a woman—and Woman—in love, in lust, and deeply in life. In her work, women will see themselves on all levels of being and men will at last be allowed to penetrate the mysteries of the women they love.”—Grace Butcher

The Romance of History is a collection of articles and essays which reflects the varied professional interests of eminent diplomatic historian Lawrence S. Kaplan. The collection is drawn largely from Kaplan’s former students—accomplished scholars in their own right—but also features senior colleagues.

The Libyan Arena examines Anglo-American plans for North African decolonization and focuses specifically on the events preceding the UN discussions that led to the creation of the modern Libyan state. Based primarily on sources at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and newly opened files at the Public Record Office in Kew, England, this study represents the most accurate and comprehensive account to date of the CFM’s work in North Africa. Students of 20th-cebntury U.S.-British diplomatic history, post-World War II African and Middle Eastern history, transnational policymaking, decolonization, and the early cold war era will find much of interest here.

The May 4 episode has been recounted many times, in many ways. The events of the succeeding years, particularly as they affected the community in which they happened, are less well documented. As event and as symbol, Kent State/May 4 means many things to many people. This unique collection of essays and personal interviews presents a broad spectrum of these viewpoints in recounting the events of May 4 and those of the aftermath years. The result is a composite history from the perspectives of many of those who lived it, a reflection of the differing ideological stances and life experiences characteristic of that tumultuous era in American history.