Ohio’s Craft Beers celebrates the variety of craft brewing in Ohio, offers appreciations of its quality, and reports on the renaissance of the brewer’s art throughout the Buckeye State. Beautifully illustrated with color photographs, the book takes readers on a tour of more than 40 of Ohio’s larger and more influential breweries and provides detailed descriptions of most of the others.

Ohio’s Grand Canal concisely details the entire history of the canal system. Author Terry K. Woods chronicles the events leading up to construction, as well as public opinion of the canal system, the modifications made to traditional boat designs, the leasing of the waterways to private companies, and the canals’ legal abandonment in 1929. He also includes a personal look at the 1913 flood through the eyes of a thirteen-year-old boatman who experienced it firsthand. Well written and thoroughly researched, this single-volume history of the Ohio & Erie Canal will be important to educators and to a general audience interested in Ohio history and canals.

Many of Ohio’s historically significant locations have developed a reputation for being haunted. While it might be almost impossible to prove the validity of the paranormal tales that surround them, one thing is clear: ghost stories help to keep history alive. But the questions remain: How did these stories get started? More important, are any of them tied directly to actual historic events? And do any facts support the ghost lore?

This volume collects essays and documents from a wide selection of sources—many now out of print and difficult to locate—to provide a highly readable story of the settlement and development of the “New Connecticut” region of Ohio. Four divisions in the book logically organize the social, economic, and political study of the region: “Conquest and Settlement: Native Americans to New Englanders”; “The Pioneers: Town Building, Society, and the Emergence of an Economy”; “The Transition Years; Slavery, the Civil War, and the Reserve in National Politics, 1850-1880”; and “A Changing Legacy: Industrialism, Ethnicity, and the Age of Reform.” The volume ends in 1920, when the unique features of the Western Reserve of Ohio—the architecture, the landmarks, the New England lifestyle—had largely faded into American history as a result of industrialism, urbanism, and the pressure of a changing ethnic base.

Remembered as the “Great War Governor” who led the state of Indiana during the Civil War, Oliver P. Morton has always been a controversial figure. His supporters praised him as a statesman who helped Abraham Lincoln save the Union, while his critics blasted him as a ruthless tyrant who abused the power of his office. Many of his contemporaries and some historians saw him as a partisan politician and an opportunist who shifted his positions to maintain power. Later generations treated Governor Morton as either a hero or a villain and generally forgot about his postwar career as a Radical Republican leader in the U.S. Senate…

This new collection finds photographer James Jeffery Higgins exploring the fading farms and small towns of the Ohio Valley. Higgins’s photographs capture the beauty and majesty of the landscape and the spirit of the people who remain in a region beset by economic losses. While recording the ever-present signs of hard times, he also captures a powerful sense of place, a victory of the spirit.

For sixty years the journal Civil War History has presented the best original scholarship in the study of America’s greatest struggle. The Kent State University Press is pleased to present this third volume in its multivolume series, reintroducing the most influential of more than 500 articles published in the journal. From military command, strategy, and tactics to political leadership, race, abolitionism, the draft, and women’s issues, and from the war’s causes to its aftermath and Reconstruction, Civil War History has published pioneering and provocative analyses of the determining aspects of the Middle Period.

This debut book of poetry describes the experience of being raised in southern California as a child of Mexican immigrants in the shadow of the borderlands. Just as the borderlands are defined by the desert, so, too, are its inhabitants defined by their families, their culture shaped from the clay of the Sonoran desert and given life by the nourishing water of their ancestors. In these poems, the desert is recognized for what it truly is—a living, breathing body filled with both joy and pain.

In the two decades before the Civil War, free Americans engaged in “history wars” every bit as ferocious as those waged today over the proposed National History Standards or the commemoration at the Smithsonian Institution of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. In One Nation Divided by Slavery, author Michael F. Conlin investigates the different ways antebellum Americans celebrated civic holidays, read the Declaration of Independence, and commemorated Revolutionary War battles, revealing much about their contrasting views of American nationalism.

Primarily known for his postwar exploits, most famously his 1876 defeat at Little Big Horn, George Armstrong Custer is receiving renewed interest for his successful Civil War generalship. He led the Michigan Cavalry Brigade in more than sixty battles and skirmishes. Forming perhaps the finest single cavalry brigade in the war, these horse soldiers repeatedly proved themselves as formidable opponents to the Confederates, earning them the nickname of “Custer’s Wolverines.”