Ray Bradbury spent decades refashioning many of his early pulp and mainstream magazine stories to form the intricate story-cycle tapestries of The Martian Chronicles and Dandelion Wine; other tales were revised or rewritten for such timeless collections as Dark Carnival, The Illustrated Man, The Golden Apples of the Sun, and The October Country. These volumes represent wonderful and enduring fictional masks for the author, but they are not his original masks. The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury series returns to the earliest surviving forms of his oldest published tales, presenting many of them in versions not seen since the 1940s and early 1950s, when the Golden Age of the American magazine began to pass into history.

Though it highlights just one year of writing, this third volume of The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury represents a crucial moment at the midpoint of his first full decade as a professional writer. The original versions of the 1940s stories recovered for The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury, presented in the order in which they were written and first sent off to find life in the magazine market, suggest that Bradbury’s masks didn’t always appeal to his editors. The Volume 3 stories were all written between March 1944 and March 1945, and the surviving letters of this period reveal the private conflict raging between Bradbury’s efforts to define a distinct style and creative vision at home in Los Angeles and the tyranny of genre requirements imposed by the distant pulp publishing world in New York.

James Jessen Badal’s extensive research reveals how the citizens of Collinwood were desperate to find someone to blame. Rumor and suspicion splintered the grieving community. And yet they also rose to the challenge of healing: officials reached out to immigrant families unsure of their rights; city charities, churches, and relief agencies responded with medical help, comfort for the bereaved, and financial support; and fundraising efforts to assist families totaled over $50,000—more than $1 million today.

Placing the bilateral relationship in a global context, this military and diplomatic history examines the importance of ideology, material interests, and power in U.S.-Latin American relations. Historian Bradley Coleman demonstrates how the making of the Colombian-American alliance exemplified hemispheric interconnectedness, a condition of ever-growing importance in the twenty-first century. Employing available Colombian and U.S. archival sources, this book fills a gap in the literature on U.S. relations with less developed countries and provides new research on the origins an development of the U.S–Colombian alliance that will serve as an invaluable resource for scholars of U.S. and Latin American diplomacy.

A 37-minute DVD that tells the story of a young Col. George Perkins returning home to Akron after the Civil War. Using vintage photographs and images of re-enactors, it portrays the effect of the war on Perkins and the social and political changes that occurred nationally and on the homefront.

First published in 1960, The Coming of Fabrizze has been called by the New York Herald Tribune a “comic folklore festival about an Italian American colony in Cleveland, Ohio, back in the 1920s when all the land was a little slaphappy—and no one more so than these transplanted countrymen of the Medicis, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Christopher Columbus… and others whose hearts have belonged to Italia.” More a myth or a legend than a realistic novel or sociological novel, Fabrizze is a celebration of the working class and a heroic tale of an immigrant who succeeds by virtue of hard work and honesty. Author Raymond DeCapite’s characterizations of Italian Americans in Cleveland have been compared to the depictions of Armenian Americans in the early writing of William Saroyan, and Ann Ross of the New York Herald Tribune said that DeCapite’s “greatest achievement is his ability to achieve tenderness without sentimentality.”

Recently and increasingly, literary and philosophical scholars are subscribing to the view that philosophy and literature are allies. However, nearly all of these scholars have concentrated on analyses of Greek philosophers and dramatists as well as English novels and novelists with reference to the nature of a good society and a moral life. The essays presented in A Community of Inquiry explore often-neglected works: classical American philosophy, especially pragmatism, and American literature, particularly the realists and naturalists, and mostly ignored fundamental issues of epistemology and metaphysics.

The U.S. Company of Sappers, Miners, and Pontooniers, which Congress authorized on May 13, 1846, quickly became one of the army’s elite units. During the Mexico City campaign, Company ‘A’ played a significant role in scouting, building fortifications, and setting artillery batteries. Gustavus Woodson Smith, the unit commander and author of the text, describes the training and discipline of the enlisted soldiers. His commentary also provides interesting insights into the early careers of future Civil War generals – Lee, Beauregard, Pemberton, and McClellan. The narrative is also a striking testament to the impact of West Point-trained officers on the course of the war and to the effectiveness of Winfield Scott’s army.

This important study challenges the standard interpretation that Lewis, Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and the other Inklings had little influence on one another’s work, drawing on the latest research in composition studies and the sociology of the creative process. Diana Glyer invites readers into the heart of the group, examining diary entries and personal letters and carefully comparing the rough drafts of their manuscripts with their final, published work.

Funky Winkerbean, a newspaper staple since 1972, is one of the few comic strips that allows its characters to grow and age. As time passes and characters evolve, new and loyal readers alike are reminded that not only does Funky have a future, but the strip has a rich past. What remains a constant is Batiuk’s signature narrative-driven humor. This tenth volume, spanning from 1999 through 2001, embraces the strip’s past while casting an eye to a bright future.