Not a simple, linear administrative history, Modernizing the American War Department is a unique study of the adjustment of nineteenth-century military organizations to the managerial, technological, and policy challenges of a new era. The story unfolds against a backdrop of massive industrial and technological changes, as the country moved from a traditional agricultural and market-based commercial system toward a modern organization utilizing twentieth-century managerial structures and concepts.

The Diplomacy of Pragmatism sets Britain’s role in the formation of NATO, not in the context of orthodox, revisionist or post-revisionist approaches to the Cold War, but in terms of what has become known as “depolarization.” This approach emphasizes the distinctive and leading roles of other countries, apart from the Soviet Union and the United States, in the early Cold War period.

In 1999, Lisa Moore, one of Funky’s friends and a main character, discovered she had breast cancer. Batiuk, unsure about dealing with such a serious subject on the funny pages, decided to go ahead with the story line. He approached the topic with the idea that mixing humor with serious and real themes heightens the reader’s interest. Lisa and husband Les faced the same physical, psychological, and social issues as anyone else dealing with the disease.

Chapman’s memoir, written from memory in 1867 and aided in part by his extensive correspondence with his family, alternately sparkles with humor and wit and bristles with a passionate hatred for Yankees. He recalled his soldiering days with nostalgia, for he suspected those months in the army might have been the high point of his life.

The dispatches from Lord Richard Bickerton Pemell Lyons, Second Baron, British Envoy Extraordinary in Washington, D.C., during the Civil War offer insight into contemporaneous Anglo–American relations. The five-year period covered in these three volumes witnessed the fierce and deadly battles of the war fought both in the North and in the South, the shifting moods of public opinion and patriotic fervor, the changing economic conditions, and the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.

The three volumes of The American Civil War through British Eyes make available important, previously unpublished documents that fill a void for students and scholars of the war. Lyon’s dispatches offer a unique perspective on America during its bitterest test of national unity. Through them the Civil War unfolds not in retrospect but through the eyes of a contemporary observer.

Conrad Wise Chapman (1842-1910) is unique among Civil War artists: he painted and sketched while on duty as a Confederate soldier who served in three theaters of the war. Chapman’s first-hand knowledge is evident in his work. Ben Bassham has written both a critical study of Chapman’s art and a biography, incorporating Chapman’s correspondence and Civil War memoirs.

When Richard Bassett returned from Korea on convalescent leave in 1953, he set down his experiences in training, combat, and captivity. Then he put the memoir away and tried to forget. More than twenty years later, hospitalized for acute Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, he once again faced his personal demons. Expanding the memoir to include his postwar struggles with the U.S. government and his own wounded psyche, the resulting comprehensive account is published here for the first time.

An emergency physician and faculty member at Brown Medical School, Jay Baruch has long been fascinated by how illness can make people strangers to their own bodies, how we all struggle to maintain control as the body decays and life slowly becomes unrecognizable, and how health professionals discover and struggle with the limits of their own competence and compassion. In Fourteen Stories, Baruch doesn’t present a series of clinically based essays but a rich collection of short fiction that gives voice to a variety of people who, faced with difficult moral choices, find themselves making disturbing self-discoveries.

Although much has been written about the Old Northwest territory, The Boundaries between Us fills a void in this historical literature by examining lesser known forms of interaction between Euro-Americans and native peoples and their struggles to gain control of the region and its vast resources. Comprised of eleven original essays, The Boundaries between Us presents unique perspectives on the history and significance of the contest for control of the Old Northwest territory.