Using forms as diverse as journal entries, cell phone texts, children’s picture books, and erasure poems, LeMay wrestles with questions of illness, isolation, identity, grief, family, and love because, like so many us, he’s had to live them. He was diagnosed with cancer in 2017 when his first child was a little over a year old. He learned during the worst month of the COVID-19 pandemic that his 80-year-old father, unable to breathe, had been admitted to the emergency room in the middle of the night. Would he live? And if not? In these richly varied essays, LeMay helps us make our way, personally and collectively, through experiences that may be our last, all the while honoring those “firsts”—the first cry, the first word, the first day of school.

The Civil War was a watershed in public awareness of the many health-related issues soldiers faced while living in camps. Sanitarians among civilians and regular army officers attempted to meet those challenges by addressing a range of topics associated with preventive healthcare in the volunteer army. The US Sanitary Commission, a nongovernmental agency sanctioned by the Federal government, created a massive campaign to study conditions in semipermanent camps and advise unit commanders how to avoid unnecessary illness and curb soldier deaths by disease. Commission inspectors, mostly civilian physicians, examined camps from 1861 to early 1864 and filed more than 1,400 reports of their findings.

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.

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.

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.

More Important Than Good Generals is an in-depth study of the Army of the Tennessee’s junior officers—the company and field grade lieutenants, captains, majors, lieutenant colonels, and colonels. While many studies have examined generals and common soldiers, Civil War armies’ “middle management” has been largely ignored.

Though Ernest Hemingway distrusted Hollywood and often found himself in conflict with directors and producers, he frequented theaters and freely acknowledged the art and potential that cinema contained. In turn, the film industry’s interest in his stories has endured for nearly a century. Focusing on the relationship between written and cinematic work, Hemingway and Film brings together diverse literary and film studies scholars to both deepen understanding of Hemingway’s fiction and film adaptations and to provide practical guidance for approaching these topics in the classroom.

To demonstrate how a Union force overpowered Confederate troops in and around Fredericksburg, Erik F. Nelson emphasizes the role of terrain. Previous studies have relied on misleading primary sources that have left the campaign—and the Union’s larger victory—misunderstood. Moreover, the former battlegrounds near Fredericksburg have been altered by new roads and neighborhoods, further complicating study.

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.