When photographer Gary Harwood first stepped onto the K. W. Zellers family farm in Hartville, Ohio, to take pictures of the Mexican migrant workers there, he did not expect to find such a strong, tightly knit community. Over the next five years he used his camera to study the lives and work of these migrants in their northeastern Ohio home. His artful photography captures the migrants’ portraits and movingly conveys their great pride in work and family, their struggles and joys.

Growing Up With Clemente is a personal history of the hardscrabble life of Pittsburgh’s South Side during the city’s post–World War II renaissance. It is also the intimate story of an American boy who played baseball on the city’s dilapidated playgrounds and rooted for his beloved sports teams while growing up and struggling in Pittsburgh’s blue-collar neighborhoods. Though among the worst professional teams in the 1950s, the Pirates and Steelers still inspired the working-class dream of a life beyond the steel mills. And in the midst of it all was the towering, isolated figure of Roberto Clemente. Clemente would eventually become a symbol of pride, loyalty, courage, and sacrifice for a city that had initially rejected him and for a young boy who spent his youth looking for a hero but had to grow up before understanding Clemente’s greatness.

Guerrilla Daughter is a memoir of this family’s extraordinary struggle to survive the Japanese occupation of Mindanao from the spring of 1942 until the end of the war in September 1945. The men in the family fought as guerrilla soldiers in the island’s resistance movement, while Holmes, her mother, and her older sister were left to their own resources to evade the Japanese, who had been given orders to execute Americans. The Hansen women, faced with immediate death if found and suffering from hunger, disease, and barely tolerable living conditions, hid out in the Philippine jungle and remote villages to remain just ahead of the growing Japanese presence and avoid capture.

Founded in 1871 by a group of entrepreneurs from Cleveland, Akron, and Canton, the Valley Railway paralleled the Cuyahoga River Valley, stretching from southeast Cleveland to Akron and then on to Canton and Valley Junction in Tuscarawas County. The Railway filled a need in the region by providing an important passenger rail link among the three cities and provided direct access to the coal fields in Stark and Tuscarawas Counties, supplying coal for Cleveland’s iron mills and other growing industries. The Railway began operation in 1880, continued service until 1962, and was revived in the early 1970s.

The townsfolk of Logan, Ohio, a mined-out area of the Appalachian foothills, cheered as an innocent man was convicted and sent to death row. The occasion was the conviction of Dale N. Johnston. His trial ended nothing; the tragedies had just begun. What really happened on that bitter cold day in January 1984 was the total collapse of the local criminal justice system.

All students of the Civil War are indebted to Frank Haskell for his classic description of the battle of Gettysburg. A lieutenant on the staff of John Gibbon, Haskell stood at the focus of the Confederate assault on July 3, 1863. He wrote of the battle in a letter to his brother. When it came to light after the war it became and remains probably the most read and repeated account of Civil War combat written by a participant. It captures wholly the terrible fascination that the Civil War—and Gettysburg—holds for all Americans.

“Everywhere we have been since beginning/Is Mapped in the memory somewhere,’ writes Susan Neale at the outset of this ambitiously conceived and enormously satisfying collection of poems. Here is a poet who wants nothing less than to know the past. Her fields of study are the history of light and darkness, of language and other ways of saying, of reality and dream, and, especially, of women and men as they move toward one another and away in their seismic, often cataclysmic dancing, a continental rift and drift originating in a long-ago state of innocence and wholeness Neal calls ‘the heart’s Pangaea.’ In this debut collection sure to attract wide attention, Susan Neale gives us richly detailed maps leading to discoveries about where we human beings have been, where we are, and where in the world, together and apart, we’re bound.”—David Citino

What is it like to be a student nurse washing the feet of a dying patient? To be a newly graduated nurse, in charge of the Intensive Care Unit for the first time, who wonders if her mistake might have cost a life? Or to be an experienced nurse who, by her presence and care, holds a patient to this world? Poet and nurse practitioner Cortney Davis answers these questions by examining her own experiences and through them reveals a glimpse into the minds and hearts of those who care for us when we are at our most vulnerable. The Heart’s Truth offers the joys, frustrations, fears, and miraculous moments that nurses, new and experienced, face every day.

Did the Mad Butcher of Cleveland also strike in Pennsylvania?

From 1934 to 1938, Cleveland, Ohio, was racked by a classic battle between good and evil. On one side was the city’s safety director, Eliot Ness. On the other was a nameless phantom dubbed the “Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run,” who littered the inner city with the remains of decapitated and dismembered corpses. Never caught or even officially identified, the Butcher simply faded into history, leaving behind a frightening legend that both haunts and fascinates Cleveland to this day. In 2001 the Kent State University Press published James Jessen Badal’s In the Wake of the Butcher: Cleveland’s Torso Murders, the first serious, book-length treatment of this dark chapter in true crime history. Though Murder Has No Tongue: The Lost Victim of Cleveland’s Mad Butcher—a detailed study of the arrest and mysterious death of Frank Dolezal, the only man ever charged in the killings—followed in 2010.

Individuals and communities have historically reinforced values and shaped society in ways that best fit their own objectives. This exciting new study reevaluates the crucial interaction between religious, ethnic-, racial, -gender-, and class-based values and ideals and giving. It explores the nature and meaning if giving in urban America by examining the African American and Italian populations of Cleveland.