In Corpsmen: Letters from Korea, the Chappell twins gathered together their letters to chronicle their experiences as medical corpsmen in the First Marine Division during the Korean War. From boot camp to Bethesda Naval Hospital and on the Fleet Marine Force training and eventually the front line, and then in Indochina, the brothers kept in contact with their family in Ohio, offering firsthand narratives of their adventures.

In Cosmographical Glasses Constance Relihan examines the ways in which sixteenth-century English texts—traveler’s reports, ethnographic studies, and geographic guides—provide the foundation for how fictional prose of the period envisions the locations in which its tales are set. Relihan suggests that this nonfictional discourse becomes central to how the fictional prose of the period imagines cultural identity, fictional purpose, and gender identity.

The Cost of Freedom: Voicing a Movement after Kent State 1970 is a multi-genre collection describing the May 4, 1970, shootings at Kent State University, the aftermath, and the impact on wider calls for peace and justice. Fifty years after the National Guard killed four unarmed students, Susan J. Erenrich has gathered moving stories of violence, peace, and reflection, demonstrating the continued resonance of the events and the need for sustained discussion. This anthology includes poetry, personal narratives, photographs, songs, and testimonies—some written by eyewitnesses to the day of the shootings—as well as speeches from recent commemoration events and items related to the designation of the site on the National Register of Historic Places in 2016.

Over the past thirty years, rural health care in the United States has changed dramatically. The stereotypical white-haired doctor with his black bag of instruments and his predominantly white, small-town clientele has imploded: the global age has reached rural America. Independently owned clinics have given way to a massive system of hospitals; new technology now brings specialists right to the patient’s bedside; and an increasingly diverse clientele has sparked the need for doctors and nurses with an equally diverse assortment of skills.

Cradles of Conscience is a collection of essays that relate the circumstances of the founding of 40 of these independent colleges and universities, recounts the history of each since its inception, and discusses how each has coped with modernization and how the pressures of the past 25 years have forced them to publicly evaluate and reassess their identities and missions.

This innovative study investigates how Japan grew from an economically limited country to the threshold of industrial power. The author describes Japanese economic development in the 1950s as one of the major achievements of the Eisenhower administration. In her admirably-clear account of this chapter in U.S.-Japanese relations, Sayuri Shimizu incorporates Japanese as well as American sources. In the process she explains how and why the United States became so intractably involved in Southeast Asia. Not least, she tells an ironic and instructive story of how the United States helped build an economy that later it so bitterly resented.

More than 175 years after his death, Senator Thomas Morris has remained one of the few early national champions of political and constitutional antislavery without a biography devoted to him. In this first expansive study of Morris’s life and contributions, David C. Crago persuasively argues that historians have wrongly marginalized Morris’s role in the early antislavery movement.

Richly illustrated with the work of well-known Cleveland-area artists and architects, past and present, Creative Essence explores the region’s tradition, beginning with the “Cleveland School” of artists that was active and influential during the first half of the twentieth century. It moves on to examine the changes that occurred in the last half of the century and the development of the visual arts in northeast Ohio. Creative Essence is an important resource for understanding the significant role the visual arts play in our cities and societies and how they contribute to the region’s quality of life. For those interested in regional history and for students of art history and the visual arts, this will be especially valuable.

In Creatures of Change, Carolyn V. Platt examines two hundred years of wildlife in Ohio. Over a hundred color photos by Gary Meszaros complement the text. Written in an accessible style, the book will appeal to anyone with an interest in Ohio’s wildlife, but it will also be a valuable reference for specialists.

The “deadlines” were boundaries prisoners had to stay within or risk being shot. Just as a prisoner would take the daring challenge in “crossing the deadline” to attempt escape, Crossing the Deadlines crosses those boundaries of old scholarship by taking on bold initiatives with new methodologies, filling a void in the current scholarship of Civil War prison historiography, which usually does not go beyond discussing policy, prison history and environmental and social themes. Due to its eclectic mix of contributors—from academic and public historians to anthropologists currently excavating at specific stockade sites—the collection appeals to a variety of scholarly and popular audiences. Readers will discover how the Civil War incarceration narrative has advanced to include environmental, cultural, social, religious, retaliatory, racial, archaeological, and memory approaches.