Long before the fashion industry formally addressed questions of sustainability and advocated for “slow fashion,” William and Elizabeth Phelps, a husband-and-wife design duo, were already working to create handcrafted leathergoods and functional women’s sportswear that could be worn for decades. Active from the 1940s to the late 1960s, Phelps Associates quickly won acclaim and found commercial success, attracting a broad clientele and becoming known for quality, utility, and craftsmanship.

In Peace and Security in Kenya: The USAID Approach, Galeeb Kachra examines the involvement of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in Kenya following the post-election violence in late 2007 and early 2008 that left the country on the brink of civil war. Through USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives, Kachra oversaw the Kenya Transition Initiative, which helped Kenyans establish a renewed judiciary, implement a new constitution, and grapple with longstanding land issues. As a country central to American foreign policy in Africa, Kachra argues, efforts to foster peace, reconciliation, and democratic political reform there had real benefits to US security objectives.

The Deep Blue of Neptune is a striking, meditative collection of poems by Terry Belew, which reminds readers of the necessity of empathy in the midst of uncertain and unsettling times. Set against a rural backdrop, Belew’s poems reside in the everyday—driving on gravel backroads, roaming the aisles of Walmart, and doomscrolling on a smart phone—to highlight the contradictory qualities of existence.

On July 3, 1915, John Pierpont Morgan Jr., one of the most famous names in finance, was entertaining guests at his Long Island estate when the doorbell rang. An armed man forced his way inside.

The Man Who Shot J. P. Morgan is a riveting tale of false identities, radical political beliefs, and ambitious criminal schemes set during the tumultuous time shortly before the United States entered World War I.

Deadbeats, Dead Balls, and the 1914 Boston Braves chronicles the team’s misfortune, meteoric rise through the 1914 season, and audacious World Series run against the overwhelmingly dominant Philadelphia Athletics. Hall of Fame umpire Bill Klem, a mainstay in the game for over 70 years, called the Braves “the most spirited team he ever saw”—but would their spirit be enough against one of the most powerful teams ever put together?

In this thoughtfully researched and beautifully written study, Danielle St. Hilaire argues that we can find frameworks for understanding the intersection of emotion, ethics, and literature that unite modern discourses of aesthetic autonomy with seemingly incompatible ethical theories that have largely fallen out of contemporary discussions regarding the value of literature.

For more than a century, historians have disparaged the men who joined the Union army in the later days of the Civil War—when higher bounty payments and the conditional draft were in effect—as unpatriotic mercenaries who made poor soldiers and contributed little to the Union victory. However, as Edwin P. Rutan II explains, historians have relied on the accounts of 1861 and 1862 veterans who resented these new recruits who had not yet suffered the hardships of war, and they were jealous of the higher bounties those recruits received. The result, he argues, is a long-standing mischaracterization of the service of 750,000 Union soldiers.

Holding the Political Center in Illinois charts the political trajectory of Illinois from the introduction of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 through the firing on Fort Sumter in 1861. Throughout, Ian T. Iverson focuses on political moderation in this era of partisan extremes, one in which the very label of “conservative” was contested. Most often framed through the biography of Abraham Lincoln, the turbulence of antebellum-era and political realignment in Illinois has been widely misunderstood, yet the Prairie State’s geographic, economic, and demographic diversity makes it an especially fascinating microcosm through which to examine the politics of self-identified conservatives leading up to the Civil War.