A Politician Turned General offers a critical examination of the turbulent early political career and the controversial military service of Stephen Augustus Hurlbut, an Illinois Whig, Republican politician, and Northern political general who rose to distinction as a prominent member of the Union high command in the West during the Civil War.
Politicians, the Press, and Propaganda represents the most recent and most extensive research on Alfred Harmsworth (Lord Northcliffe), one of the “press lords” who influenced British politics and policy during the First World War. Thompson’s is the only study to deal with Northcliffe and the inseparable quality of his public and political career from his journalism. Politicians, the Press, and Propaganda addresses a wide range of topics—the Great War, journalism, propaganda, censorship, the use and misuse of power, his preoccupation with America, and Northcliffe’s influence on David Lloyd George—and will appeal to those interested in the history of modern journalism as well as twentieth-century British history.
Anuta, a small Polynesian community in the eastern Solomon Islands, has had minimal contact with outside cultural forces. Even at the start of the 21st century, it remains one of the most traditional and isolated islands in the insular Pacific. In Polynesian Oral Traditions, Richard Feinberg offers a window into this fascinating and relatively unfamiliar culture through a collection of Anutan historical narratives, including indigenous texts and English translations.
This richly illustrated book explores the theory and technique used by Anutans in construction, use, and handling of their craft; the navigational skills still employed in interisland voyaging; and their culturally patterned attitudes toward the ocean and travel on the high seas. Further, the discussion is set within the context of social relations, values, and the Anutan’s own symbolic definitions of the world in which they live.
Spanning oceans and continents, language and the imagination, the unfathomable distances between people and their desires, Allison Davis’s Poppy Seeds creates an “immaculate atlas.” Here language is “broken. . . against the margin of the sea,” and a word is a thing that can be “wash[ed] away.” Here the body is both a lesson and a place with an edge you can drive to. The book “longs[s] for as long as Ohio rivers.” Tangled between worlds and languages both old and new, our deepest emotions search for their roots, hoping to find a place to call home.
As editor and executive editor of the Ravenna-Kent Record-Courier, Loris C. Troyer has been a pivotal figure in Portage County, Ohio, for over sixty years. Since retiring, he has written a weekly historical column entitled “Portage Pathways” on topics ranging from historical landmarks and events to eminent or interesting people to politics, society, and the value of recording local history. This book collects over 140 of his most memorable essays, illustrated with historical photographs.
When David Hunter Strother, also known by his pen name Porte Crayon, arrived as U.S. consul general in Mexico City in 1879, Mexico and its society, only a decade removed from French occupation, were initially struggling with questions of national order and stability, with maintenance of independence, and with all aspects of modernization. Achieving these goals without sacrificing its patrimony to imperialistic powers, which had capital to invest, proved to be difficult for Mexico and pushed the nation’s quest for stability into another dictatorship. Strother was present at the beginning of U.S. involvement with this phase of Mexico’s evolution under President Porfirio Diaz.
This history of Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation paints a gritty portrait of the successes and failures of the American steel industry. The 131-year life of this “American Business” is presented from its origins as one of the many struggling iron makers in the mid-19th century through its leadership in technological innovation and progressive worker/management relations in the early 20th century to its demise in 1984. J & L Steel, however, was more than just the management styles of the Jones & Laughlin families. From the beginning, its workers were intensely loyal and creative, and Portraits in Steel portrays the sometimes stormy relationship between iron and steel workers and management.
Albin Ludwig was furious. He had caught his wife, Cecilia, with other men before; now, after secretly following Cecilia one evening in 1906, Albin was overcome with suspicion. Albin and Cecilia quarreled that night and again the next day. Prosecutors later claimed that the final quarrel ended when Albin knocked Cecilia unconscious with a wooden potato masher, doused her with a flammable liquid, lit her on fire, and left her to burn to death.
With text by coauthors Gary Meszaros and Guy L. Denny and striking photographs by Meszaros, The Prairie Peninsula examines the many prairie types, floristic composition, and animals that are part of this ecosystem. It took only 50 years for 150 million acres of tallgrass prairie to disappear under the steel plow, transforming the Prairie Peninsula into fields of corn and wheat. Today, only a few thousand acres of this endangered ecosystem remain in small parcels, some just a few acres each. The second half of the 19th century brought the mass slaughter of prairie wildlife. By 1900, like the prairie they roamed, the plains bison, gray wolf, and eastern elk became extirpated east of the Mississippi River.
