“They Have Left Us Here to Die” is an edited and annotated version of the diary Sergeant Adair kept of his seven months as a prisoner of war. The diary provides vivid descriptions of each of the five camps as well as insightful observations about the culture of captivity. Adair notes with disdain the decision of some Union prisoners to take the oath of allegiance to the Confederacy in exchange for their freedom and covers the mock presidential election of 1864 held at Camp Lawton, where he and his fellow inmates were forced to cast votes for either Lincoln or McClellan. But most significantly, Adair reflects on the breakdown of the prisoner exchange system between the North and South, especially the roles played by the Lincoln administration and the Northern home front. As a white soldier serving with African Americans, Adair also makes revealing observations about the influence of race on the experience of captivity.

This We Know succinctly documents the facts that fill out the chronology of events of the four fateful days that ended with members of the Ohio National Guard killing Kent State students Sandra Scheuer, Jeffrey Miller, Allison Krause, and William Schroeder and wounding nine others. It gathers well-established information from recorded accounts, from the time events happened through what has been learned since.

Though Murder Has No Tongue tells the story of Frank Dolezal, the only man actually arrested and charged with the infamous “Torso Murders” in Cleveland, Ohio, during the late 1930s. Dolezal, a fifty-two-year-old Slav immigrant, came to the attention of sheriff ’s investigators because of his reputation as a strange man who possessed a stockpile of butcher knives. According to rumors, he threatened imagined transgressors and had a penchant for frequenting bars in the seedy neighborhood where the dismembered bodies of victims had been discovered. Dolezal was arrested in July 1939 and never saw freedom again.

Three Days at Gettysburg contains essays from noted Civil War historians on leadership during the battle. The contributors to this volume believe there is room for scholarship that revisits the sources on which earlier accounts have been based and challenges prevailing interpretations of key officers’ performances. They have trained their investigative lens on some obvious and some relatively neglected figures, with an eye toward illuminating not only what happened at Gettysburg but also the nature of command at different levels.

Charles J. Mills, the scion of a wealthy, prominent Boston family, experienced a privileged upbringing and was educated at Harvard University. When the Civil War began, Mills, like many of his college classmates, sought to secure a commission in the army. After a year of unsuccessful attempts, Mills was appointed second lieutenant in the Second Massachusetts Infantry in August 1862; however, he was seriously wounded at Antietam a month later. Following a nearly yearlong recovery, Mills eventually reentered the service as a staff officer, although he remained physically disabled for the rest of his life. He was initially with the Ninth Corps during the Overland and Petersburg Campaigns and later at the Second Corps headquarters.

During the Great Depression, photographer Allen Eugene Cole posted a sign in front of his studio in Cleveland’s Central neighborhood: Somebody, Somewhere, Wants Your Photograph. An entrepreneurial businessman with a keen ability to market his images of Cleveland’s black experience, Cole was deeply immersed in civic life.

Ohio can be a land of weather extremes. There are droughts followed by flood, arctic cold and soaring heat in one year, a Christmas warmed to 70 degrees and a Christmas white with thirty inches of snow. Ice jams on the Sandusky River and tornadoes across its southern counties, wind storms in Cleveland and floods in the Ohio River Valley inspire Ohioans to “remember when.” Thomas and Jeanne Schmidlin, native Ohioans, have brought together data from government records, scientific studies, memoirs, diaries, and newspapers in the first comprehensive book on Ohio weather. They highlight 200 weather events from 1790 to the present—extremes of rain, snow, storms, and temperature. Anecdotal, often first person, accounts are enhanced by statistics, photographs, and maps. They describe the place of weather in popular history and folklore and how forces of nature compelled the construction of extensive flood control and weather warning systems in Ohio. Thunder in the Heartland will be of interest to climatologist, cultural historians, and all who live the weather of the Oho Country.

These letters to “Michal,” Williams endearing name for his wife, from “Serge,” a moniker by which his most intimate friends addressed him, are more than just a collection of love letters—they are significant for what they tell us about the man, for the light they throw on his work, and for the way they show Williams in the context of his literary contemporaries (C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Dorothy L. Sayers, Christopher Fry, and Edith Sitwell). In fact, Williams felt that T. S. Eliot and C. S. Lewis were the only two people other than his wife to whom he could talk seriously about important matters.

The antislavery movement entered an important new phase when William Lloyd Garrison began publishing the Liberator in 1831—a phase marked by massive petition campaigns, the extraordinary mobilization of female activists, and the creation of organizations such as the American Anti-Slavery Society. While the period from 1831 to 1865 is known as the heyday of radical abolitionism, the work of Garrison’s predecessors in Massachusetts was critical in laying the foundation for antebellum abolitionism. To Plead Our Own Cause explores the significant contributions of African Americans in the Bay State to both local and nationwide antislavery activity before 1831 and demonstrates that their efforts represent nothing less than the beginning of organized abolitionist activity in America.

Focusing on the themes of enchantment and loss in the fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien, this unique study incorporates elements of developmental psychology to explore both Tolkien’s life and art, deepening our understanding of the interrelationship between his biography and writing.