Over the past thirty years, rural health care in the United States has changed dramatically. The stereotypical white-haired doctor with his black bag of instruments and his predominantly white, small-town clientele has imploded: the global age has reached rural America. Independently owned clinics have given way to a massive system of hospitals; new technology now brings specialists right to the patient’s bedside; and an increasingly diverse clientele has sparked the need for doctors and nurses with an equally diverse assortment of skills.

Cradles of Conscience is a collection of essays that relate the circumstances of the founding of 40 of these independent colleges and universities, recounts the history of each since its inception, and discusses how each has coped with modernization and how the pressures of the past 25 years have forced them to publicly evaluate and reassess their identities and missions.

This innovative study investigates how Japan grew from an economically limited country to the threshold of industrial power. The author describes Japanese economic development in the 1950s as one of the major achievements of the Eisenhower administration. In her admirably-clear account of this chapter in U.S.-Japanese relations, Sayuri Shimizu incorporates Japanese as well as American sources. In the process she explains how and why the United States became so intractably involved in Southeast Asia. Not least, she tells an ironic and instructive story of how the United States helped build an economy that later it so bitterly resented.

More than 175 years after his death, Senator Thomas Morris has remained one of the few early national champions of political and constitutional antislavery without a biography devoted to him. In this first expansive study of Morris’s life and contributions, David C. Crago persuasively argues that historians have wrongly marginalized Morris’s role in the early antislavery movement.

Richly illustrated with the work of well-known Cleveland-area artists and architects, past and present, Creative Essence explores the region’s tradition, beginning with the “Cleveland School” of artists that was active and influential during the first half of the twentieth century. It moves on to examine the changes that occurred in the last half of the century and the development of the visual arts in northeast Ohio. Creative Essence is an important resource for understanding the significant role the visual arts play in our cities and societies and how they contribute to the region’s quality of life. For those interested in regional history and for students of art history and the visual arts, this will be especially valuable.

In Creatures of Change, Carolyn V. Platt examines two hundred years of wildlife in Ohio. Over a hundred color photos by Gary Meszaros complement the text. Written in an accessible style, the book will appeal to anyone with an interest in Ohio’s wildlife, but it will also be a valuable reference for specialists.

The “deadlines” were boundaries prisoners had to stay within or risk being shot. Just as a prisoner would take the daring challenge in “crossing the deadline” to attempt escape, Crossing the Deadlines crosses those boundaries of old scholarship by taking on bold initiatives with new methodologies, filling a void in the current scholarship of Civil War prison historiography, which usually does not go beyond discussing policy, prison history and environmental and social themes. Due to its eclectic mix of contributors—from academic and public historians to anthropologists currently excavating at specific stockade sites—the collection appeals to a variety of scholarly and popular audiences. Readers will discover how the Civil War incarceration narrative has advanced to include environmental, cultural, social, religious, retaliatory, racial, archaeological, and memory approaches.

Cultural Variability in Context, a collection of papers presented at the 54th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in April 1989, documents and explains the varied settlement and subsistence practices found in the prehistoric mid-Ohio Valley during the Woodland Period, ca. 1000 B.C.-A.D. 1000. The prehistoric societies of the mid-Ohio Valley played an important part in the development of the social complexity that characterized the Woodland period in eastern North America. Ohio Valley Adena and Ohio Hopewell ceremonialism occupy prominent positions in current interpretations of the period, as they have for many years. This volume focuses on underlying settlement and subsistence relationships, and is especially concerned with assessing time/space variability within the period and its ultimate influence on broader, inter-regional issues.

Stretching between Cleveland and Akron in heavily urban northeastern Ohio, Cuyahoga Valley National Park has been called a “Green-Shrouded Miracle,” preserving precious green space and offering a retreat to more than two million visitors each year. It is a refuge for native plants and wildlife and provides routes of discovery for visitors. The winding Cuyahoga River gives way to deep forests, rolling hills, and open farmlands.

The Danse Macabre of Women is a 15th-century French poem found in a lavishly illuminated late medieval manuscript. The only Dance of Death devoted entirely to women, it was written by an anonymous author and subsequently expanded by several poet/editors. In this version, one of the later productions, 36 women are called in the midst of their bustling daily lives to join the eternal Dance of Death. Young and old, rich and poor, widow, matron, and child—each is the focus of two short poelms written in the form of a dialogue (Death calls and the victim replies) and accompanied by an illumination (or a miniature).