As battles over voting rights continue to be a major issue throughout the United States, Jamie Capuzza looks back at the story of Ohio—the fifth state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment— and its key role in the national women’s suffrage movement. From 1850 through 1920, Ohio’s contributions were significant: Ohioans were the first to petition a government for women’s enfranchisement, they formed the nation’s first state-level women’s rights organization, and Ohio hosted two of the earliest national women’s rights conventions.

While the taking of hostages by both the Union and the Confederacy was common during the Civil War, it was unique for an individual state government to engage in this practice. The Governor’s Pawns highlights the implementation of a hostage law established by Virginia’s pro-Union government in 1863 and the adoption of that law by the newly formed state of West Virginia. Author Randall Gooden uses genealogical sources to emphasize the personal nature of civilian arrests and hostage-taking and describes the impact on the communities and individuals left scarred by this practice. Readers are taken into the state and national capitol buildings, army camps, jails and military prisons, hospitals, and graveyards that accompanied the tit-for-tat style of pointedly personal warfare.

Drawing on C. S. Lewis’s essays, sermons, and fiction, The Lion’s Country offers a comprehensive exploration of Lewis’s understanding of reality—important, Charlie W. Starr argues, to more fully understand Lewis’s writing but also to challenge and inform our own thought about what constitutes the Real.