A hard-edged mixture of hilarious and heartbreaking memories, Tully’s autobiographical Shanty Irish digs deep into the soil of his native Ohio to show what life was like in the late nineteenth century for a poor Irish-American family. Within the covers of this acclaimed work, we meet the author’s father, also named Jim Tully, “a gorilla built” ditchdigger whose stooped shoulders carry “the inherited burdens of a thousand dead Irish peasants.” We meet his mother, Biddy, a “woman of imagination” who “had all the moods of April.” We meet his uncle, ruthless John Lawler, who was tried, convicted, and sentenced to fifteen years in the Ohio penitentiary for stealing horses. And we meet his grandfather, Old Hughie Tully, “born with the gift of words”—“capable of turning death into an Irish wake and pouring liquor down the throat of the corpse.”

The Shared Witness of C. S. Lewis and Austin Farrer explores a number of areas that demonstrate the ways in which Lewis and Farrer both intersected and influenced each other’s thought. Both insisted that myth prepared the heart for a sense of divine glory and even had a place in the Christian scriptures.

Lester Goran’s first book of short stories, Tales from the Irish Club, was chosen by the New York Times Book Review as a “Notable Book of the Year 1996.” This second collection also centers around a group of men and women in an Irish-American enclave in Pittsburgh, primarily during the years surrounding World War II, but extending at times into the eighties. With evocative settings and narratives ranging from the supernatural to the humorous, from bawdy hilarity to richly detailed realism, Goran creates once more his world of poignant and magical times and places within the mundane affairs of ordinary men and women. With his mastery of language and images he shows again what Paul West has termed “the lunatic sadness of things.”

Marszalek traces the roots of Sherman’s hostility toward the press and details his attempts to muzzle reporters during the Civil War, culminating in Sherman’s exclusion of all reporters from his famous March to the Sea. Despite the passage of over a century, the question of press rights in wartime situations is very much today what it was during the Civil War. Marszalek finds a recurring movement toward repression of the press, with Sherman’s attitudes and practices only one of the most obvious examples. He also finds that press rights during wartime have often been governed by reactions to specific circumstances rather than treated as a constitutional issue.

Euclid Avenue, which runs through the heart of downtown Cleveland, was for 60 years one of the finest residential streets of any city in 19th century America. Showplace of America is the fascinating account of the rise and fall of this elegant promenade, including portrayals of the eminent architects who created its opulent residences and colorful details about the lives of the wealthy people who occupied them.

This work takes the reader from the city’s first professional theatrical presentation in 1820, through the heyday of vaudeville, to the grand reopening of the newly renovated Allen Theater in 1999 and the return of touring Broadway shows to Cleveland. In 1820 Cleveland was able to draw a visit from a troupe of professional actors. With no theater in which to perform, the troupe made do with Mowrey’s Tavern on Public Square.

Quakers Alice and Staughton Lynd worked in Central America and Israel, where they championed the rights of Palestinian Arabs living in the West Bank. They took up the cause of prisoners’ rights following the April 1993 Lucasville, Ohio, prison uprising—the longest such rebellion in American history—working to improve the living conditions of the five inmates who were convicted of leading the rebellion. Together with Jules Lobel of the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Lynds filed suit on behalf of death row inmates who were kept in solitary confinement in Ohio’s prisons. Their lawsuit contributed to a landmark decision that improved living conditions for inmates in solitary confinement and established that prisoners have due process rights that have to be observed before they can be sent to solitary confinement.

A Singing Ambivalence is a comprehensive examination of the ways in which nine immigrant groups—Irish, Germans, Scandinavians, Eastern European Jews, Italians, Poles, Hungarians, Chinese, and Mexicans—responded to their new lives in the United States through music. Each group’s songs reveal an abiding concern over leaving their loved ones and homeland and an anxiety about adjusting to a new society. But accompanying these disturbing feelings was an excitement about the possibilities of becoming wealthy and about looking forward to a democratic and free society.

There is an unusually rich photographic record of the community and its people as well as many descriptions and comments by writers who wished to share their impressions of the Old World town. Today a restored village with a ten-museum complex operated by the Ohio Historical Society, Zoar has consciously maintained its German roots. Zoar continues to attract the curious individual, the traveler, the day-tripper, and the magazine and newspaper writers of the day.

The poems in Sister Tongue explore negative spaces—the distance between twin sisters, between lovers, between Farsi and English, between the poet’s upbringing in California and her family in Iran. This space between vibrates with loss and longing, arcing with tension. Farnaz Fatemi’s poetry delves into the intricacies of the relational space between people, the depth of ancestral roots, and the visceral memories that shimmer beyond the reach of words.