Fifty years after America’s involvement in the Korean War began, Richard E. Mack’s memories of his time spent on the front lines are still strong and clear. In Memoir of a Cold War Soldier, he recalls his service in front-line combat infantry units in Korea and Vietnam as rifle platoon leader, adviser, and battalion commander. His accounts, perceptions, and observations of the military culture are incisive and candid.

Otto kept a journal throughout the war and afterward arranged his reminiscences in a memoir, which he completed around 1890. Captain John Henry Otto was a keen observer, and his memoirs paint a vivid picture of the life of a common soldier and of a line officer at the company level during the Civil War. Memoirs of a Dutch Mudsill will appeal to Civil War enthusiasts and scholars.

In the heyday of Civil War commemoration at the turn of the twentieth century, Mississippi’s Vicksburg National Military Park was considered “the art park of the South.” By 1920, more than 160 portrait statues, busts, and reliefs of Vicksburg’s defenders under Gen. John C. Pemberton and the besieging Union army commanded by Gen. Ulysses S. Grant lined the tour route along the earthworks around the Gibraltar of the Confederacy. Most of the memorial art and architecture was built in the classical revival Beaux-Arts style popular following the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. The federal government, states, and individual patrons commissioned dozens of sculptors and architects to create these enduring structures, marking the historic battlefield and commemorating the men and events involved in the campaign and siege of Vicksburg.

“The poetry, page after page, is of the kind that keeps the reader on the critical edge, both ecstatic and lucid, both active and illumined. . . . What began in the first part of the book with the evocations of a struggle to unclench a rock-locked fist’ is projected, in the end, on the geography of the continent itself, desolate yet lyrical. Nothing more exotic here than the beauty of utterance set free.”—Stavros Deligiorgis

This collection represents an engagement with American history, technology, and cultures. Murphy’s poetry ranges from fairly straightforward narrations of events to experimental pieces using a variety of American-speaking subjects and several angles of vision on cultural creations—Elvis Presley, Holly Golightly, and Elmore James, to name just a few. Formal choices include the interlocking movements of the sestina and the rondau, the ebb and flow of loose blank verse, and the syncopated variety of free verse.

At the time of his death in February 2003 Judah Rubinstein was working on this second edition of Merging Traditions: Jewish Life in Cleveland, which he initially co-wrote with the late Sidney Z. Vincent in 1978. This revised and updated pictorial review of the nearly two-century history of the Jewish community tells the story of Jewish settlement and achievement in Northeast Ohio and continues in the spirit of the original, illuminating the struggles and the successes of one particular immigrant group and providing a valuable perspective on Cleveland’s Jewish community, past and present.

Using key canonical science fiction narratives, Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines examines the intersection of the literary and scientific cultures of the nineteenth century. In this original and refreshing approach to the study of early science fiction, author Martin Willis maintains that science fiction was just as important in defining the culture of the nineteenth century as other critics maintain it was in shaping the twentieth century.

Three years before Brian Sipe began his magic with the Cleveland Browns, Bill Fitch and his band of Cavaliers brought a buzz to Northeast Ohio basketball that fans had never seen before. Despite a rough start to their 1975–76 season, the Cavaliers rode the shoulders of Akron native Nate Thurmond to the Central Division title. Under his leadership, they qualified for the playoffs. Then in April the Cavs provided fans with a remarkable string of games against the Washington Bullets, winning in incredible fashion three times—twice at The Coliseum in Richfield—en route to a 4–3 series victory in the Eastern Conference Semifinal.

Filling a major gap in the literature, Modernity and National Identity in the United States and East Asia, 1895–1919 is a comprehensive, thought-provoking intellectual history of American, Chinese, and Japanese thinking on modernity, national identity, and internationalism during the early twentieth century. Those with an interest in U.S. foreign relations, women’s and gender history, and U.S.-Asian relations will find this an innovative and fascinating title.

Not a simple, linear administrative history, Modernizing the American War Department is a unique study of the adjustment of nineteenth-century military organizations to the managerial, technological, and policy challenges of a new era. The story unfolds against a backdrop of massive industrial and technological changes, as the country moved from a traditional agricultural and market-based commercial system toward a modern organization utilizing twentieth-century managerial structures and concepts.