The four decades of French’s professional career are often described as an era that forced homosexuals to be sexually vague and anonymous, especially if they aspired to prominence in their local community. But French’s life and career contradicted that assumption. He never hid his sexuality yet achieved journalistic leadership and unchallenged influence over Cleveland’s social life. Richly illustrated with contemporary news photographs and editorial drawings, Out and About with Winsor French documents the powerful role played by about-town columnists during a raucous episode in the history of American newspapers.

Sure to be the definitive biography for decades to come, Jim Tully: American Writer, Irish Rover, Hollywood Brawler compellingly describes the hardscrabble life of an Irish American storyteller, from his immigrant roots, rural upbringing, and life as a hobo riding the rails to the emergent dream factory of early and Golden Age Hollywood and the fall of his fortunes during the Great Depression. Many saw the dark side of the American dream, but none wrote about it like Jim Tully.

With very little formal education (he did not complete high school), Walcott became special assistant to James Hall, State Paleontologist of New York, and made a fundamental contribution to the study of trilobites by describing their limbs. He joined the new U.S. Geological Survey in 1879 and rose through the ranks to become its director in 1894, a position he held for 13 years. Walcott is known best for having documented in detail the “Cambrian,” the oldest richly fossiliferous rocks in the world. His primary efforts for the U.S. Geological Survey were in keying fossils to the sequence of rocks, and he brought new precision to the biostratigraphy of the older rocks of North America.

Darling Ro and the Benét Women presents a revealing glimpse of social and literary life in New York and Paris during the 1920s. Using a recently released collection of letters from the Benét Collection at Yale University, author Evelyn Helmick Hively extracts captivating anecdotes and impressions about a talented group of writers and impressive feminist figures. Written by Rosemary Carr Benét to her mother, Dr. Rachel Hickey Carr (one of Chicago’s first women physicians), the compilation of letters and short dispatches from Paris provides the focus of the book.

Drawing heavily on primary-source material, The Boy General is the first full-length account of Francis Channing Barlow, one of the most successful combat officers in the Army of the Potomac during the Civil War. Although his clean-shaven, youthful appearance earned him the nickname “the Boy General,” his fighting capabilities resulted in frequent promotions and greater responsibilities. This book will be welcomed by Civil War historians and buffs alike.

The Story of My Life, originally published in Czechoslovakia in 1928, is the engaging and informative autobiography of Frank Vlchek, a Czech immigrant who became a successful businessman in Cleveland, Ohio, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Vlchek’s memoir provides a rare primary source about Czech immigrants. It also offers insight into a self-made man’s life philosophy, illustrates relations between ethnic groups in Cleveland during the 1880s, and demonstrates the assimilation of a late-nineteenth-century immigrant in America. Readers interested in immigration history as well as the history of Cleveland will enjoy this fascinating autobiography.

Like Susan Griffin’s A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War, Alex Vernon’s most succinctly bred explores war by exploring around war, by operating in the margins. Vernon records his ongoing relationship with war and soldiering—from growing up in late Cold War 1980s middle America to attending West Point, going to and returning from the first Gulf War, and watching, as a writer and academic, the coming of the second Iraq war. Not merely a collection of essays, this book has a trajectory, and the chapters, appearing in rough chronological order, loop in and out of one another. It is not a narrow autobiography that attempts to account only for the writer’s life; it uses that life to illuminate the lives of its readers, to tell us about the time and place in which we find ourselves.

This carefully researched and engagingly written political biography marks the first full treatment of Ohio native and politician Martin L. Davey. An important figure on the local, state, and national political scene in the early decades of the twentieth century, Davey served as mayor of Kent, Ohio, was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, and completed two terms as Ohio governor.

This exhaustive study chronicles the life of career army officer John C. Tidball, from action in major Civil War battles to postwar service in the West. Beginning with the first Battle of Bull Run, Tidball, saw action in nearly all the major engagements in the Eastern Theater, including Chancellorsville, Yorktown, Williamsburg, Gettysburg, Antietam, and Petersburg. Using previously unpublished wartime letters and memoirs, Eugene C. Tidball captivates the reader with the story of his most famous relative’s years in service to his country. Tidball’s account extends beyond the Civil War, to include recounting his presence at the Supreme Court’s delivery of the Dred Scott decision; his commanding of the military District of Alaska; his traversing the Southwest in 1853 as a member of the 35th Parallel Pacific Railway Survey; and his service as aide-de-camp to General-in-Chief William Tecumseh Sherman.

Orlando M. Poe chronicles the life of one of the most influential yet underrated and overlooked soldiers during the Civil War. After joining the Union Army in 1861, Poe commanded the 2nd Michigan Infantry in the Peninsula Campaign and led brigades at Second Bull Run and Fredericksburg. He was then sent west and became one of the Union heroes in the defense of Knoxville. Poe served under several of the war’s greatest generals, including George McClellan and William T. Sherman, who appointed him chief engineer to oversee the burning of Atlanta and Sherman’s March to the Sea. Though technically only a captain in the regular army at the war’s end, Poe was one of Sherman’s most valued subordinates, and he was ultimately appointed brevet brigadier general for his bravery and service.