Morrison writes with clarity, wit, and insight, sharing his critiques of the army, West Point, and teaching, along with his assessment of the present status of American life and his attitudes toward the quality and effectiveness of army officer education and training. He analyzes some of the pitfalls and the strengths of preparing U.S. military organizations for service now and in the future, and he furnishes the reader with insights into how history is taught at a typical American college. From Rat Pants to Eagles and Tweeds is a significant contribution to the study of American military history and will be of interest to military officers, military educators and historians, and alumni of the Virginia Military Institute and West Point.

In this expansive anthology, Susan Stagno and Michael Blackie assemble an insightful group of contributors to discuss the ways in which medical professionals can powerfully engage with their students through a variety of literary texts. Examples as diverse as Charles Bukowski, Leo Tolstoy, William Carlos Williams, Sherwood Anderson, Mary Shelley, Stephen King, the comic strip Pearls Before Swine, and the sayings of Buddha will provide both teachers and students a rich cache of stories for discussion and inspiration.

In early 1864, many heavy artillery regiments in the Civil War were garrisoning the Washington defenses, including the Fifteenth New York. At the same time, newly minted Union general in chief Ulysses S. Grant sought to replenish the ranks of the Army of the Potomac, and the Fifteenth became one of the first outfits dispatched to Major General George Meade at Brandy Station.

Drawing on a wealth of previously unmined primary sources, Edward A. Altemos pays tribute to the Fifteenth, other heavy artillery regiments, and the thousands of immigrants who contributed to the Union army’s victory.

Prior to World War II, women were a rarity in the newsrooms of daily papers throughout the country. The assignments given to those few who graced the profession reflected the newspaper culture of the time—society, fashion, and school news. Doris O’Donnell proved the exception. While she began her journalism career with those routine tasks, in short order she broke those barriers and assumed more challenging duties of investigative reporting and covering the crime beat.

The Frontier Republic examines the form these conflicts took in the settlement of the Ohio Country, as thousands of Americans streamed onto the lands west of the Appalachians. These settlers had experienced revolution and migration: now the process of creating new communities and a new state in the Northwest Territory forced them to deliverate on, and define, what these upheavals had accomplished. At issue was the very nature of human society and the role of government in it. Jeffersonian Republican ideals of individual liberty and local sovereignty were at odds with the Federalist vision of a well-ordered society and political control on the national level. Disagreements arose over such topics as rights of squatters, establishment of authority of the national government, the statehood movement, and the location of the new state’s capital. The effects of the Panic of 1819 and the need for internal improvements changed the early focus on individualism to an understanding of Ohio’s place in an interdependent society. Although this first generation of settlers failed to resolve their disputes completely, they ensured that the ideological foundation of nineteenth-century Ohio would be a synthesis of their conflicting revolutionary visions of the future of the United States.

The book states plainly that both its speaker and the speaker’s mother have suffered near-deadly head injuries (“when I woke up in the hospital thirty years after you did,” “my head: / rotting pear”), resulting in loss of memory. However, rather than let a taxonomy like “family curse” sit unquestioned, Green writes toward the fugues (i.e., the condition of having one’s identity questioned) by making a kind of fugue (i.e., interweaving song). Johnathan Culler writes that “the fundamental characteristic of the lyric . . . is not the description and interpretation of a past event, but the iterative and utterable performance of an event in the lyric present, in the special ‘now’ of lyric articulation.” The lyric in Fugue Figure allows the unspeakable past to be uttered in the lyric present, and the form of diptychs and triptychs through the book place disparate lyric utterances together on the same page. While lyric addresses allow the reader to reach toward the speaker’s unknowns, the triptychs and diptychs allow the reader to reach toward the unnamable place between left and right signifiers, both adding to the vital enigma of the poems.

More than 300 poets from around the nation gathered at Kent State University in May 1990 to remember the four students slain and nine others wounded by the Ohio National Guard on May 4, 1970, and the two students shot 10 days later at Jackson State College in Mississippi. A Gathering of Poets presents 147 of their poems, some written especially for the commemoration and published here for the first time, and others selected because of their historical resonance.

The Genealogy of Cities is a compilation of ancient and modern city plans, from 350 BCE to the present, depicting both built and proposed plans. Written in clear and accessible prose, it is illustrated with more than 500 plans drawn at the same scale, a unique feature of this work. It provides a previously unavailable tool for academics and professionals who must grapple with the issue of scale in researching and teaching urban design or when creating new urban spaces. Author Charles P. Graves Jr. created these computer-generated plans to provide a method of understanding models for modern cities while also creating a series of typological diagrams for both historical periods and city fabric. Also included in this volume is a CD containing nearly 1000 plans that will allow the user to print the urban plans at any scale.

General Grant by Matthew Arnold with a Rejoinder by Mark Twain presents conflicting essays and cultures. Matthew Arnold’s 1886 essay on Grant praised the general and his posthumously published Memoirs, but to many Americans its tone seemed patronizing of their hero and country. Grant’s friend and personal benefactor, Mark Twain, delivered a caustic rejoinder to the Army and Navy Club of Connecticut in April 1887. Thus Arnold became a pet prejudice of Twain’s and may have served as an inspiration for A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. In this volume, Twain’s rejoinder is published in a correct text for the first time since the Hartford Courant printed his speech.

In November 1950, United Nations forces in Korea were stopped in their advance toward the Yalu River by Chinese Communist forces and were in danger of being overrun. Vastly outnumbered by enemy forces, the First Marine Division was cut off from its base at Wonson. General Oliver Prince Smith, commander of the First Marine Division, is credited with bringing the division and attached army units to safety, leaving no wounded behind and, in the process, destroying the effectiveness of several Chinese units.