In this provocative and vigorously argued interdisciplinary study of the development of institutional censorship, Clare Spark explores the complexities of 20th-century American cultural politics through the protagonists of the Melville Revival. She investigates closely the history of the Revival and its key critics, who manipulated Melville’s life and writings in the service of their own particular social and political agendas. Although often boldly conjectural and speculative, Spark’s assertions are based on her meticulous and thorough exploration of either newly opened or previously unexplored archival materials of leading Melville scholars.

Hunting the Unicorn is the first treatment to discuss the entire body of Pitter’s verse. It will appeal to scholars and general readers as it places Pitter into the overall context of twentieth-century British poetry and portrays a rather modest, hardworking woman who also “witnessed” the world through the lens of a gifted poet.

After creeping out of bed on a frigid January night in 1832, teenage farmhand Abraham Prescott took up an ax and thrashed his sleeping employers to the brink of death. He later explained that he’d attacked Sally and Chauncey Cochran in his sleep. The Cochrans eventually recovered but—to the astonishment of their neighbors—kept Prescott on, somehow accepting his strange story.

When schoolchildren from Kent, Ohio, and Florence, Italy, were invited to express their thoughts about “Where I’m From” in poetry, the connections that emerged between these students from different continents were remarkable. Their responses to this prompt—“lo vengo da” in Italian—demonstrate the underlying importance of home, families, the natural world, and the creative identities that children harbor within them.

“When the wire man in love with the boiled wool woman imagines himself making love with her under the emerald tree and then making her a mouth, is he desiring to make for her a mouth, or to make of her a mouth? Such questions charge Karen Schubert’s off-kilter worlds with a force less like gravity than like Brownian movement: the poems in I Left My Wings on a Chair don’t orbit, they careen.”—H. L. Hix

“Karen Schubert’s latest collection, I Left My Wings on a Chair, reminds me why I love prose poetry. These are beautiful prose poems; each one is a gem; each one is sublime, witty, and surprising. It’s as if she has taken the world that we see and experience every day and given it back again, refreshed, alive, and shimmering. Reading her poems reminds me of reading William Stafford and Naomi Shihab Nye, poets who let you see the mystical and the absurd in the everyday, who make you feel a little better about being alive.” —Nin Andrews

In this lively memoir, William B. Saxbe narrates his life’s journey from his youth in a small Ohio town to his military career during World War II and Korea and through his career as a public servant in Ohio, in Washington, D.C., and overseas. He regales readers with stories about hopping a freight train when he was in the sixth grade, insights on being elected to the United States Senate, commentary on serving as Nixon’s attorney general at the height of the Watergate scandal, and descriptions of life as the U.S. ambassador to India.

This is the first full-length biography of Ida Saxton McKinley (1847– 1907), the wife of William McKinley, president of the United States from 1897 to his assassination in 1901. Long demeaned by history because she suffered from epilepsy—which the society of her era mistakenly believed to border on mental illness—Ida McKinley was an exceptional woman who exerted a strong influence on her husband’s political decisions.

Over the last 150 years, steel production played a vital role in the shaping of our nation. This was especially true in Youngstown, Ohio, a part of what is now often referred to as “the Rust Belt.” In their prime, however, the Youngstown mills ran along 25 miles of the Mahoning River and employed tens of thousands of people. All of that changed in September 1977 when the LTV Corporation announced that it was closing its Youngstown Works. Youngstown today struggles for its survival.

On June 2, 1854, crowds lined the streets of Boston, hissing and shouting at federal authorities as they escorted the fugitive slave Anthony Burns to the ship that would return him to his slaveholders in Virginia. Days earlier, handbills had littered the streets decrying Burns’s arrest, and abolitionists, intent on freeing Burns, had attacked with a battering ram the courthouse in which he was detained, leaving one dead, several wounded, and thirteen in custody. In the end it would take federal officials nearly 2,000 troops and $40,000 to send Burns back to Virginia. No fugitive slave would be captured in Boston again.

Gomez-Jefferson captures the growing concern of the Black middle-class with civil rights and its persistent attempts to confront problems with tactics less confrontational than those of the sixties and seventies. More than a biography, In Darkness with God is a history of Black life during the early part of the century and a chronicle of the political and religious struggles of the first autonomous Black church in the United States.