Articulating the search for a cohesive American identity, Matthew Cooperman’s poetry attends to the slippery question of place: its history in personal and cultural memory and its tenuous constitution as family, nature, love, and community. Cooperman uses the metaphor of travel to invoke the necessary motion and distance required to look back at one’s past.
In A Surgeon’s Civil War, the educated and articulate Holt describes camp life, army politics, and the medical difficulties that he and his colleagues experienced. His reminiscences and letters provide an insider’s look at medicine as practiced on the battlefield and offer occasional glimpses of the efficacy of Surgeon General William A. Hammond’s reforms as they affected Holt’s regiment. He also comments on other subjects, including slavery and national events. Holt served until October 17, 1864 when ill health forced him to resign.
Jacob Jennings Brown may well be the most successful—yet forgotten—general of his time. Born into a Pennsylvania Quaker family on the eve of the American Revolution, Brown worked as a Quaker schoolteacher and surveyor and was a pioneer settler of northern New York before serving in the U.S. Army during the War of 1812, eventually rising to the highest command. Early in the war he commanded the militia defending 200 miles of the New York—Canadian border. His successful defense of the Lake Ontario naval base at Sackets Harbor in 1813 was rewarded with a regular army commission as brigadier general. He won more battles against British regular troops than any general in American history, and he was respected by his superiors, his subordinates, and the enemy.
In one of her escapades as a reporter for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, the renowned Nellie Bly feigned insanity in 1889 and slipped, undercover, behind the grim walls of Blackwell’s Island mental asylum. She emerged ten days later with a vivid tale about life in a madhouse. Her asylum articles merged sympathy and sensationalism, highlighting a developing professional identity—that of the American newspaperwoman.
Tabernacles in the Wilderness discusses the work of the United States Christian Commission (USCC), a civilian relief agency established by northern evangelical Protestants to minister to Union troops during the American Civil War. USCC workers saw in the Civil War not only a wrathful judgment from God for the sins of the nation but an unparalleled opportunity to save the souls of US citizens and perfect the nation. Thus, the workers set about proselytizing and distributing material aid to Union soldiers with undaunted and righteous zeal.
Complementing Confederate Tide Rising, which covers the origins of the Maryland campaign, Taken at the Flood is a detailed account of the military campaign itself. It focuses on military policy and strategy and the context necessary to understand that strategy. A fair appraisal of the campaign requires a full appraisal of the circumstances under which the two commanders, Robert E. Lee and George B. McClellan, labored. Harsh attempts to discover what they believed their responsibilities were and what they tried to accomplish; to evaluate the human and logistical resources at their disposal; and to determine what they knew and when the learned it.
Tales from the Irish Club contains 11 wry accounts of an enclave of Irish Americans in Pittsburgh during and after World War II. In this first collection of short stories by Lester Goran are the often comic, sometimes tragic tales of Jack Lanahan, the transcendental artist who carves nothing but wooden roosters; Long Conall O’Brien, haunted by the ghosts of prostitutes he has known world-wide; Mrs. Pauline Conlon, famous as the woman who outlives three husbands—until she meets Sailor Kiernan; and the night an image of the Madonna appears on the wall of Local No. 9 of the Ancient Order of Hibernians.
This revised edition of Ambrose Bierce’s 1892 collection of “Soldiers” and “Civilians” tales fills a void in American literature. A veteran of the Civil War and a journalist known for his integrity and biting satire, Ambrose Bierce was also a lively short-story writer of considerable depth and power. As San Francisco’s most famous journalist during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Bierce was hired by William Randolph Hearst to write a column for San Francisco Examiner, where his “Soldiers” and “Civilians” tales first appeared during the late 1880s.
Created to supplement May 4th Voices, a play based on the 1970 tragedy, A Teacher’s Resource Book for May 4th Voices: Kent State, 1970 explains how real teachers in real classrooms have adapted the play to use in various pedagogical situations and levels of instruction. It offers lesson plans and background material for students and teachers, describing the national mood in 1970, the events in Southeast Asia that heightened tensions on U.S. campuses, and the culture of antiwar dissent both nationally and within the community of Kent, Ohio.
Ernest Hemingway’s place in American letters seems guaranteed: a winner of Nobel and Pulitzer prizes, Hemingway has long been a fixture in high school and college curricula. Just as influential as his famed economy of style and unflappable heroes, however, is his public persona. Hemingway helped create an image of a masculine ideal: sportsman, brawler, hard drinker, serial monogamist, and world traveler. Yet his iconicity has also worked against him. Because Hemingway is often dismissed by students and scholars alike for his perceived misogyny, instructors might find themselves wondering how to handle the impossibly over-determined author or even if they should include him on their syllabi at all.
