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The biography of an ambitious Civil War soldier Drawing heavily on primary-source material, The Boy General is the first full-length account of Francis Channing Barlow, one of the most successful combat officers in the Army of the Potomac during the Civil War.Although his clean-shaven, youthful appearance earned him the nickname "the Boy General," his fighting capabilities resulted in frequent promotions and greater responsibilities.Born in October 1834 in Brooklyn, New York, Barlow's professional, military, and political careers were all in the service of his native state. Intelligent, ambitious, and confident, Barlow graduated as valedictorian of the 1855 Harvard class and launched a legal career in New York. When Lincoln sent out a call for volunteers following the bombardment of Fort Sumter, Barlow dropped his practice and entered the U.S. Army as a private.He transformed himself from a privileged young lawyer into one of the most formidable combat leaders produced by either side during the Civil War. Rising from private to major general, Barlow served in most major operations in Virginia and was increasingly entrusted with assignments of crucial importance to the success of Federal arms. He cleared out the deadly sunken road at Antietam, where he was badly wounded, and led a division at Gettysburg, where he suffered another serious wound. He and his men often spearheaded the Army of the Potomac's assaults during Grant's bloody Overland campaign. Following the war, Barlow resumed his law practice and entered the political arena. He served as New York attorney general in 1871 and as Grant's personal representative in the Florida recount following the contentious 1876 election.This book will be welcomed by Civil War historians and buffs alike.

J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and Silmarillion have long been recognized as among the most popular fiction of the twentieth century, and most critical analysis of Tolkien has centered on these novels.  Granted access by the Tolkien estate and the Bodleian Library in Oxford to Tolkien's unpublished writings, Verlyn Flieger uses them here to shed new light on his better known works, revealing a new dimension of his fictive vision and giving added depth of meaning to his writing.Tolkien's concern with time—past and present, real and "faerie"—captures the wonder and peril of travel into other worlds, other times, other modes of consciousness.  Reading his work, we "fall wide asleep" into a dream more real than ordinary waking experience, and emerge with a new perception of the waking world.  Flieger explores Tolkien's use of dream as time-travel in his unfinished stories The Lost Road and The Notion Club Papers as well as in The Lord of the Rings and his shorter fiction and poetry.Analyzing Tolkien's treatment of time and time-travel, Flieger shows that he was not just a mythmaker and writer of escapist fantasy but a man whose relationship to his own century was troubled and critical.  He achieved in his fiction a double perspective of time that enabled him to see in the mirror of the past the clouded reflection of the present.

J. R. R. Tolkien is perhaps best known for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, but it is in The Silmarillion that the true depth of Tolkien's Middle-earth can be understood. The Silmarillion was written before, during, and after Tolkien wrote The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. A collection of stories, it provides information alluded to in Tolkien's better known works and, in doing so, turns The Lord of the Rings into much more than a sequel to The Hobbit, making it instead a continuation of the mythology of Middle-earth. Verlyn Flieger's expanded and updated edition of Splintered Light, a classic study of Tolkien's fiction first published in 1983, examines The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings in light of Owen Barfield's linguistic theory of the fragmentation of meaning. Flieger demonstrates Tolkien's use of Barfield's concept throughout the fiction, showing how his central image of primary light splintered and refracted acts as a metaphor for the languages, peoples, and history of Middle-earth.

Close reading and analysis of Hemingway's most ambitious posthumous novel Published in 1986, Ernest Hemingway's novel The Garden of Eden is a literary landmark. Hemingway periodically worked on the novel from 1946 until his death in 1961, and the result is a complex novel that explores the origins and uses of creativity and grapples with issues of gender, sexuality, and race. Set in the 1920s, a young American writer, David Bourne, and his wife, Catherine, test the heteronormative expectations of their time through nighttime experiments with gender identity and when they both fall in love with the same woman.In Reading Hemingway's The Garden of Eden, Carl P. Eby examines Hemingway's original unrevised manuscript in relation to Scribner's highly edited edition. The product of 30 years of research, this volume is the first to clarify for readers which parts of the original work had been retained, altered, and discarded in the publisher's text. No other treatment of the text has been so thorough in its analysis and annotations. This volume gives the Scribner's edition and the original manuscript equal consideration, helping readers to better understand the relationship between both versions of the novel.Reading Hemingway's The Garden of Eden will be an essential text in Hemingway criticism, offering new, exciting insights into how the book was written, edited, and received by audiences.

A journalist’s passion for cars and boats becomes a story that’s part travelogue, part personal adventure, and part literary explorationIt began with a simple question: was Ernest Hemingway a “car guy”? For journalist Mark Burrell, this initial curiosity turned into a decades-long quest to learn more about Hemingway by finding the people who knew him best in Italy, Cuba, and Key West. With every interview and meeting, more questions arose. Was an old boat at Hemingway’s Cuban estate, Finca Vigía, the real Pilar or a replica? Were Hemingway’s furniture, art, and 9,000-book library still inside the Finca? How did Cubans feel about the American writer, and what role did he have in his community there? Was Hemingway’s son, Patrick, right that losing his hilltop villa after 20 years was the “last straw” that led to his father’s suicide?Through a captivating blend of memoir and personal journalism, Burrell’s explorations reveal a shy, sensitive artist who never recovered from losing Finca Vigía, Havana, Cojimar, and the “good natured people of the northern shore” to the Cold War. As Burrell got to know Patrick and those closest to Ernest Hemingway, he formed a novel view of “the bronze God of Literature,” as he’s known in Cuba. Burrell’s adventures took him from dodging freighters at night in the Gulf Stream to racing vintage cars in Italy, all in pursuit of better understanding a literary giant.

Published in 1937, Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not is that rare example of a novel whose cultural impact far outweighs its critical reputation. Long criticized for its fragmented form, its ham-fisted approach to politics, and its hard-boiled obsession with cojones, this blistering tale of a Florida Straits boat captain named Harry Morgan desperately trying to survive the economic ravages of the Great Depression by running rum and revolutionaries to Havana has fueled tourist industries in Key West and Cuba and has inspired at least three movie adaptations (including a classic cowritten by William Faulkner and starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall).In Reading Hemingway's To Have and Have Not, Kirk Curnutt explicates dozens of topics that arise from this controversial novel's dense, tropical swelter of references and allusions. From Cuban politics to multifarious New Deal "alphabet agencies," from rum running to human smuggling to byways, bars, and brothels, Curnutt delves deeply into the plot's rich textural back- drop. Most important, he reminds us what a very different novel To Have and Have Not would have been had Hemingway not undergone a political change of heart while covering the Spanish Civil War and revised a narrative originally feral in its suspicion of partisans and ideologues at odds with the newfound ideals of activism and intervention that Hemingway felt essential to halting the global rise of fascism.More than any study of the only novel Ernest Hemingway set on American soil, this book reads To Have and Have Not in the peculiar juxtaposition of literary innovation and popular appeal that made Hemingway the world's most famous writer. While valorizing Hemingway's artistry, Curnutt never lets readers forget the visceral thrills of what one movie adaptation called "Hemingway-Hot Adventure."

First published in 1962 as a special edition of Civil War History journal, Civil War Prisons remains the standard on the topic. Editor Hesseltine tackles the historiography of northern and southern prisons during the American Civil War. He attempts to bring closure to the legendary northern myth that the Southern government did its best to “exterminate” Union prisoners by calling the effective northern war propaganda a wartime “psychosis.” Furthermore, the author offers his analysis over the much debated prisoner exchange system, and comes down hard on the North, especially its government and General Ulysses S. Grant, for their questionable approach to this issue.

The definitive biography of America's 20th president, James A. Garfield. Exhaustively researched and skillfully written.Winner of the Ohio Academy of History Award, the Ohioana Book Award in History, and a Choice Outstanding Academic Book of the Year."Garfield's military career, the congressional years, the Presidency, receive thorough attention and evaluation, and one of the delights of this massive biography is that Peskin writes so well … This is a brilliant and skillful portrait of a man of many parts, of the political and social landscape of his time."—Publishers Weekly

A master artist and teacher of metalwork presents a bold new approach to creative expression in metal. Believing that the time has come for the artist to free himself from the functional forms that have dominated the metal smith’s craft—the cup, the box, the pitcher, etc.—Heikki Seppa urges the craftsman to create in terms of pure form, and in this book he shows him how. Two Things are essential. The first is a thorough understanding of the special properties of metal as an artistic medium and an intimate knowledge of techniques for working it. Only when he has mastered the physical means of working with metal can the artist free his imagination for unimpeded creation. Though not addressed to the beginner, Seppa discusses the fundamental techniques of planishing, soldering, and hinging—all the basic means by which metal is shaped. The second is to free the artist from thinking in terms of function, since this limits his concepts of what can be created. Even such traditional forms as the cube, the cone, the cylinder, and the dome have their limitations, and Seppa opens new possibilities by creating a new vocabulary, new terms by which to identify the many shapes metal can take under skilled hands. A major feature of this book is an extensive glossary of these terms, each one illustrated with a sketch by the author. The book is profusely illustrated throughout with the author’s own sketches of the ideas and techniques discussed. It will be of significant value to the accomplished craftsman as well as to teachers and advanced students of this exciting and growing art form. The artistic metal creations of Heikki Seppa have won international acclaim, from his award of master status in silversmithing from the Ministry of Education in his native Finland to numerous exhibits and awards here and abroad. As a teacher of metalsmithing in the School of Fine Arts of Washington University, Mr. Seppa’s work with young artists led to the formulation of the new approach to creativity in metal that he details in this book.

This illustrated guide to the architecture of Oberlin, Ohio, mixes the remarkable social history of college and town with architectural commentary about one hundred thirty-two buildings built between 1837 and 1977.  The result is a unique record of the ways in which the people of one Midwestern college town organized and housed their lives over the past one hundred fifty years, from the layout of the village square in 1833 to distinguished samples from the work of such twentieth-century architects as Cass Gilbert, Frank Lloyd Wright, Wallace Harrison, Minoru Yamasaki, Hugh Stubbins and Robert Venturi. Owing to the plain and austere atmosphere of early Oberlin, much of the village architecture can be appreciated only through a knowledge of the peculiar local past.  In contrast, the college campus offers a vivid record of architectural eclecticism from the 1880s to the present.  This guide to town and college explains the distinction of both.The author, a historian on the faculty of Oberlin College, launched his research for this book fifteen years ago.  It is based on primary evidence drawn from local archives, courthouse records, and the testimony of the buildings themselves.

Kenyon Cox (1856-1919) studied painting in Paris from the fall of 1877 to the fall of 1882. These edited letters, written to his parents in Ohio, describe Cox’s daily routine and explicate French art teaching both in the academic setting of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and in private ateliers, such as those of Emile Carolus-Duran and Rodolphe Julian. The letters are important for insight into this system and into Paris art student life in general. Cox was an academic, committed to learning traditional drawing and composition before establishing his own artistic identity. Most of the students who crowded the ateliers and academics of Paris shared this view, and Cox’s experiences and opinions, often pungently expressed, were thus more typical of this great majority than were those of experimenters such as the impressionists, who were gaining notice while Cox was in Paris. He commented frequently on current fads, fancies, and serious developments in the art world during this transitional period.Cox also described his life and travels outside the academy. These letters are a valuable commentary on the culture of late nineteeth-century Europe. He reported on concerts, operas, plays, paintings, and literature, and the varied kinds of life―the look of the land, towns, buildings, and people―he encountered during his summer travels to the Seine valley, northern Italy, and the artist colony in Grez, south of Paris.Art critics, historians, and collectors of traditional and academic art of this period will find this book the beginnings of the traditionalist view for which Cox later became famous. In addition, the letters are an often moving chapter in the development of an intellectually precocious young man from the American Midwest who was determined to become a painter with ideas as well as skill.

Written over a thirty-year period, the essays included in this volume develop one central theme: the completion of American isolationism in the formative years of the nation. Isolationism, in Kaplan’s view, is not to be taken as economic or cultural independence but as abstention from political or military obligations to Europe, from alliances or from purposeful entanglement in the European balance of power.This study focuses on the assertion that Thomas Jefferson was central to the making of American foreign policy from the Revolution to 1803. But Kaplan’s view is not always supportive of Jefferson. In fact, Kaplan believes the collection has a “Hamiltonian flavor,” although he does not necessarily consider himself a Hamiltonian either.Kaplan is critical of Jefferson and points clearly to the error of his belief that France could be a counterweight to British power. In the short run Hamilton appears more realistic, but in the long run Jefferson’s vision for the country proved wiser and sounder.

The reverberations of the rifle shots that killed four students on May 4, 1970 echoed across the nation and beyond. Nowhere, perhaps, did they echo with more persistence and poignancy than at the place where it happened, the Kent State University campus. For more than ten years the university's name has been a symbol of the Sixties protest movements as the causes of the event were debated, lawsuits embroiled participants and victims, and concerned people struggled for appropriate means for remembrance and commemoration—each issue leading to further, if less violent, arguments, demonstrations and confrontations.The May 4 episode has been recounted many times, in many ways. The events of the succeeding years, particularly as they affected the community in which they happened, are less well documented. As event and as symbol, Kent State/May 4 means many things to many people. This unique collection of essays and personal interviews presents a broad spectrum of these viewpoints in recounting the events of May 4 and those of the aftermath years. The result is a composite history from the perspectives of many of those who lived it, a reflection of the differing ideological stances and life experiences characteristic of that tumultuous era in American history.

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.

Because naturalism seems antithetical to modernism and literary existentialism, slight attention has been given to the existence of a contemporary, or post-World War II, naturalism. Indeed, the very term serves as a synonym for "old fashioned." While understandable, this view has contributed to the misunderstanding, if not neglect, of several American writers who came to prominence in the late 1940s and 1950s. James Jones coined the term "the unfound generation" to describe these writers. The career of Nelson Algren exemplifies this phenomenon.Nelson Algren has always been an enigmatic figure, even at the peak of his career. Algren himself was the source of some of the confusion but he was also the victim of a long continuing critical misperception, that as a disciple of Theodore Dreiser he stressed external reality and social protest. In fact, while he never wavered in his commitment to the "lumpenproletariat", society's outcasts, his vision evolved significantly, especially through his acquaintance with Sartre, Beauvoir, and Celine. Algren's best work reflects his despair over the "absurd" at least as much as his outrage over social and economic injustice.In Confronting the Horror, James R. Giles examines the evolution of Algren's major themes--external oppression and internal anxiety. He discusses Algren's fiction in relation to Maxim Gorky's explanation of the "lower depths" and the works of two contemporary writers, Hubert Selby, Jr., and John Rechy, who combine naturalistic technique with a largely existential, absurdist vision. Giles conclusion is forcefully argued, that Algren's novels are thematically richer and more complex than hitherto regarded and represent the work of an American writer of the first order.

All students of the Civil War are indebted to Frank Haskell for his classic description of the battle of Gettysburg. A lieutenant on the staff of John Gibbon, Haskell stood at the focus of the Confederate assault on July 3, 1863. He wrote of the battle in a letter to his brother. When it came to light after the war it became and remains probably the most read and repeated account of Civil War combat written by a participant. It captures wholly the terrible fascination that the Civil War—and Gettysburg—holds for all Americans. Haskell wrote other letters (thirty-one in this collection) and attained the rank of colonel before he was killed at Cold Harbor on June 3, 1864.This 1989 paperback reprinting of the 1970 edition contains a new preface by Frank L. Byrne.

The conflict between modern and traditional art is one of the best known episodes in American cultural history. The modernists won the war in the sense that their styles and attitudes of mind dominated the discussion and production of new art. But the traditionalists remained strong in the arenas of public opinion and taste. It is a testament to the importance of the ideas involved that the basic issues are not yet settled in the larger cultural world. Kenyon Cox, a painter as well as critic, revealed a devotion to the ideals of a high art tradition, derived in his later years chiefly from admiration for the Italian Renaissance. He knew western art history, surveyed the current art scene in many reviews and analytical essays, and wrote with careful attention to the canons of scholarship. Royal Cortissoz, the art editor of the ""New York Tribune"" for over 50 years, was an appreciator and connoiseur. His belief in ""beauty"" in a well-done and recognizable form left him open to more innovation than was the case with Cox. He was well suited to speak to and for the growing middle class in the Progressive era. The fact that he remained a significant figure in art circles long after his tastes ceased to be dominant, testified to the nature of the audience for whom and to whom he spoke. Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., was the most realistic of these critics in estimating how art appealed in society. He was concerned to see that the arts remained integrated in public esteem and thought. Mather took comfort from history of art, which revealed to him that great works and their creators could survive time and criticism. This sense of historical process let Mather escape the bitterness that so affected Cox, and to a lesser extent Cortissoz, as tastes changed.

Union Army chaplain Henry S. White was shuffled among Confederate prisons from May to September 1864. After his release, he descibed his experiences in 18 letters, published in Zion's Herald , a Methodist newspaper in New England. White's anti-Southern biases are an integral part of the account. He tells his Northern audience that his captors are godless tyrants, that they steal from the POWs and that their armies have only the loosest kind of discipline. Confederate currency is "bogus," Southern women are "saucy," and "impudent" children yell out, "O, see the blue bellies." Yet he also recalls lively political debates between captives and guards, musing that it may not have been prudent to argue with "men who were full of fire and armed to the teeth." Also related are the horrors of incarceration: inadequate water supplies, constant battle with vermin, obsession with the scarce rations. Jervey is professor of history at Radford University in Virginia.

The Cleveland Jewish Orphan Asylum was for fifty years (1868-1918) the home for some 3,500 boys and girls, most of them immigrants from Eastern Europe.  Gary Polster’s study examines the efforts of the more acculturated German Jews of Cleveland to “Americanize” and make good workers of the newcomers, and to teach a Judaism quite removed from the Yiddish culture and religious orthodoxy of Eastern Europe.The dominant figure at the asylum during the formative years was Samuel Wofenstein (1841-1921), a native of Moravia who by the age of 22 had earned both a rabbinical degree and a Ph.D in philosophy.  He became a trustee of the JOA in 1875 and its superintendent in 1878.  For a man who gained a reputation as an authoritarian, his first wish was to free the children from a lock step regimentation, which produced an “institutional type..marked by repression if not atrophy of the impulse to act independent.”  Wolfenstein stressed obedience through persuasion, through religion (Reform Judaism), and moral exhortations.  Students were to be imbued with respect for work through performing useful tasks—the boys in the stables and on the grounds, the girls in the kitchen, the laundry, and the sewing room.The idea of “assimilation” was necessarily paternalistic but many of the German Jews believed that by becoming more “American” and less obviously “Jewish” they would deflect the always present nativism and anti-Semitism.  As for the children, they remained for the most part ambivalent about the orphanage and about Wolfenstein and his successors.  They were taught some useful skills; they were fed and clothed.  Their chief deprivation was of the spirit.Professor Polster brings to his study a sensitivity that complements his grasp of the literature of “asylum” and the social history of turn-of-the-century America.  He has listened well to the aging men and women who once were the children “inside looking out.”

Conflict invariably characterizes the period following any revolution, and post-revolutionary America was no exception. After the unity inspired by opposition to a common enemy dissipates, revolutionary movements generally splinter into different groups that compete with each other for the right to shape the values and structures of the new society.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 deliberate 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.

Charles Williams has achieved considerable reputation for his novels. He has been recognized as a brilliant theologian and a sensitive literary critic. But Williams himself wished most to be remembered as a poet, and trusted his future literary reputation to the two-volume series of poems on the Arthurian theme, ""Taliessin Through Logres"" and ""The Region of the Summer Stars"". Of the first volume Williams wrote: ""The matter and the style require and reward attention. The poems do not so much tell a story or describe a process as express states or principles of experience. The names and incidents of the Arthurian myth are taken as starting-points for investigation and statement on common and profound experiences"". In this first full-length study of these poems, they receive, in both matter and style, the close attention that Williams requested. The emphasis in this study is on the quality of these poems as poetry and only secondarily upon their religious content. Although essentially Christian, they are placed within the context of the multifaceted, many-changing forms of recurring myths. Times they represent one of the few attempts in the twentieth century to encapsulate an age-old ever-recurring ""pattern in the web"" in a brilliant structure that is thoroughly modern.

Fernando Wood was one of the most controversial figures of nineteenth-century America. His fellow New Yorkers either respected or despised him, depending whether they considered his policies beneficial or harmful to their interests. The character revealed herein possessed some admirable qualities; high intelligence, sharp analytic skills, great capacity for hard work, and a clear talent to set his ex3ecutive agenda. But equally evident are Wood's less admirable qualities; ruthless business practices, shoddy personal ethics, corrupt politics, dictatorial tendencies. What emerges is the story of a very complex person: a successful businessman, consummate politician, resourceful three-time may of New York City, and nine-term congressman, beneath which lurked mean and self-destructive tendencies. Take as a whole, Wood's colorful career was a unique microcosm of American history both during and after his lifetime. His business achievements mirrored popular beliefs in upward mobility. And Wood's mayoralty held a promise of revitalizing municipal government, giving it a social conscience, and setting new standards for the future. Despite his shortcomings, Fernando Wood played a major but unappreciated role in the urban and political history of time.