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.

In Charles Williams: Alchemy and Integration, Gavin Ashenden explores both the history behind the myths and metaphysics Williams was to make his own and the hermetic culture that influenced him. He examines and interprets its expressions in Williams’s novels, poetry, and the development of his ideas and relates these elements to Williams’s unpublished letters to his platonic lover, Celia, written toward the end of his life. Since one of the foremost ideas in Williams’s work is the interdependence or coinherence of both our humanity and the creation, understanding the extent to which he lived and achieved this in his own life is important. Williams’s private correspondence with Celia is of particular interest both for its own sake, since it was previously unknown, and for the insight it offers into his personality and muse.

Born in 1911 to an unconventional, free-spirited artist mother and an eminent paleontologist father, Margaret Matthew chose a career as an artist specializing in restorations of extinct animals. She began her career at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City drawing fossil bones, and there she met her husband, the noted paleontologist Edwin (Ned) Colbert. Charming the Bones portrays Margaret’s life as the wife of a famous man and the mother of five sons and, later in her life, as a respected restoration artist, illustrator, and sculptor.

The stories in Chekhov’s Doctors are powerful portraits of doctors in their everyday lives, struggling with their own personal problems as well as trying to serve their patients. The fifth volume in the acclaimed Literature and Medicine Series, Chekhov’s Doctors will serve as a rich text for professional health care educators as well as for general readers.

Warren Brown’s team history of the Chicago White Sox originally appeared in 1952 as part of the celebrated series of major league team histories published by G. P. Putnam. With their colorful prose and delightful narratives, the Putnam books have been described as the Cadillac of team histories and have become prized collectibles for baseball readers and historians.

The American Revolution gave birth to a nation, forever changed the course of political thought, and shattered and transformed the lives of the citizens of the new republic. An iconic figure of the Old Northwest, governor, Indian fighter, general in the War of 1812, and ultimately president, William Henry Harrison was one such citizen. The son of a rich Virginia planter, Harrison saw his family mansion burned and his relatives scattered. In the war’s aftermath, he rejected his inherited beliefs about slavery, religion, and authority, and made an idealistic commitment to serve the United States.

Strikes affect entire communities, and in the end they need the communities’ support to succeed. This was exemplified in the legendary 1937 sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan, when strikers occupied the GM plants. The striking workers needed food; they also needed information and advance warning on what management might be up to. The Women’s Emergency Brigade, formed during the Flint strike, proved indispensable to the union effort more than once. Genora Johnson Dollinger helped create the Women’s Emergency Brigade and became one of the strike’s leaders. She and her followers waded into the fray against the Flint police, the Pinkertons, and local officials sympathetic to GM, helping to achieve victory for the United Auto Workers and generating the first contract ever signed between GM and the UAW.

Here are ten murder cases of “the old-fashioned sort”—evoking a nostalgia more obviously associated with fiction—that all took place during the festive period from mid-December to Twelfth Night between 1811 and 1933. In The Christmas Murders, Jonathan Goodman has collected stories as fascinating and compulsively readable as one would expect from a writer described by Jacques Barzun as “the greatest living master of true-crime literature” and by Julian Symons as “the premier investigator of crimes past.”

With the first Christmas tree in American history, the creation of the candy cane as a Christmas icon, and the production of one of the most popular Christmas gifts of all time, the Etch A Sketch, Ohio can boast of a remarkable seasonal heritage. Christmas Stories from Ohio documents this heritage in fiction and memoir and celebrates the many moods of yuletide in the Buckeye State. With selections from some of Ohio’s most highly regarded classic and contemporary authors, including Kay Boyle, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes, and James Thurber, these tales span the generations, offering readers unique geographical, historical, and cultural perspectives on winter holiday traditions. The selections explore time-honored themes of Christmas: family, compassion, wonder, and the human desire for connections and reconnections. Their charm and wit recall the fun of Christmases past, while still looking to the yuletide magic yet to happen.

The Cincinnati Reds chronicles each season from the organization’s early years, most notably the 1882 American Association pennant and the 1919 and 1940 National League pennants and World Series championships, including the infamous Chicago White Sox scandal. Allen retells many of the early Reds stories likely forgotten or unknown by today’s fans. This book is as thorough as it is absorbing and will be enjoyed by those interested in the early days of America’s favorite pasttime.