Winfield Scott (1786-1866) was arguably the premier soldier of his era. More than any other, he was responsible for the professionalization of the U.S. Army during his long career (1807-61). He served as general in the War of 1812, commander of the U.S. forces it the final campaign of the war with Mexico, and general in chief at the beginning of the Civil War. Scott was known for his boldness and courage during the War of 1812 and wisdom and caution in his direction of the Mexico campaign. Winfield Scott and the Profession of Arms is a balanced and thorough biography of this long-neglected military figure. Scholars and military historians will welcome its significant contributions to the literature.

More than just a memoir, Brady’s book is an important document from one of the last of his generation, reminding us of the pivotal moments that should not be lost to history. Witnessing the American Century is Captain Brady’s firsthand account of his incredible life, and his memories elucidate America’s role in the most significant world events from the previous century.

Before FM radio and the commanding album rock stations of the 1970s, there was WIXY 1260, a tiny Northeast Ohio AM radio station that became an entertainment powerhouse. Three visionaries assembled a legendary staff of on-air personalities and, with savvy programming and groundbreaking promotions, created WIXY 1260—a station that would become synonymous with 1960s pop culture. A Midwest juggernaut, WIXY aired everything from surf and Motown to country and the British Invasion. Crossing cultural and generational lines in one of the hottest radio markets in the country, it regularly took in more than fifty percent of the Greater Cleveland audience.

At first glance, the 1932 Easter morning murder of Salvatore “Sam” Antonio had all the trademarks of a gang-related murder. Shot five times, stabbed a dozen more, Antonio was left for dead. His body was rolled into a culvert south of Albany, New York. It was only by chance that the mortally wounded Antonio was discovered and brought to the hospital. He died in the emergency room without ever naming his assailant.

The scholarship on women’s experiences in the U.S. Civil War is rich and deep, but much of it remains regionally specific or subsumed in more general treatments of Northern and Southern peoples during the war. In a series of eight paired essays, scholars examine women’s comparable experiences across the regions, focusing particularly on women’s politics, wartime mobilization, emancipation, wartime relief, women and families, religion, reconstruction, and Civil War memory. In each pairing, historians analyze women’s lives, interests, and engagement in public issues and private concerns and think critically about what stories and questions still need attention. Among their questions are:

In an engaging narrative history, the beautifully illustrated Women’s Shoes in America investigates an aspect of American material culture not previously examined and provides a detailed reference for dating women’s footwear. Part One, “A History of Women’s Footwear in America,” discusses the history of the American shoe industry and surveys changing styles of shoes, boots, boudoir slippers, overshoes, and sports shoes. Part Two, “Dating Women’s Shoes, 1795-1930,” a detailed reference for dating surviving shoes, will be of particular use to museums, dealers, collectors, material culture historians, and reenactors. Over four hundred clear and detailed drawings make identification as simple and accurate as possible.

During the summer of 1864 a Union column, commanded by Maj. Gen. Andrew Jackson Smith, set out from Tennessee with a goal that had proven impossible in all prior attempts—to find and defeat the cavalry under the command of Confederate major general Nathan Bedford Forrest. Forrest’s cavalry was the greatest threat to the long supply line feeding Sherman’s armies as they advanced on Atlanta.

Cyrus S. Eaton was born on December 27, 1883, in the quiet Nova Scotian village of Pugwash. He often visited Cleveland, Ohio, spending summer vacations from college with his uncle and was employed in 1905 by his first teacher, John D. Rockefeller Sr., as a clerk and troubleshooter for the East Ohio Gas company, one of the Midwest’s major utilities in which Rockefeller had an interest. Eaton became a U.S. citizen in 1913 and passed away at age ninety-five on May 9, 1979.

Richard Tayson’s second book of poems, The World Underneath, concerns birth, motherhood, explorations of the feminine in a world scarred by war, environmental crisis, and violence. The book’s locus is a series of poems related to a home birth, an event that leads the poems’ speaker to question the place of the individual within the home, the world, and the wider universe. All things connect, as the speaker travels cross-country to the birth then back to where he lives in a multiracial relationship of two men committed to each another. The book’s widest aim is to unite the personal and the universal, the masculine and the feminine, the gay and the non-gay. As they explore the crucial dilemmas of our time, Tayson’s poems probe beneath ordinary experience to discover the ineffable and the difficult-to-say, the space between what we know and what remains distant, unreachable.

Overshadowed by the so-called Good War that followed, the Great War—the First World War—captured the imagination of American writers both while the conflict was underway and during the decades that followed. As these authors struggled and, at times, fought with one another to define the war’s elusive meaning, they produced a body of short fiction astonishing in its range of styles and themes.

Some of the richest of these short stories, originally published in long-forgotten magazines and books, have remained lost—until now. The first collection of its kind, World War I in American Fiction brings together 26 stories to present a fuller picture of the war’s immediate impact on American culture and its subsequent, deeply contested memory. The volume features canonical authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Katherine Anne Porter, and Edith Wharton alongside writers who deserve a wider readership, such as Thomas Boyd, Kay Boyle, Claude McKay, and Laurence Stallings. The stories highlight the lingering effects of the war on veterans, women, and African Americans, and they take the reader from the contested skies over the Western Front to the influenza-ravaged American home front. An extensive introduction places the stories in their historical and literary context.