The history of US imperialism remains incomplete without this consideration of long-overlooked nineteenth-century American commercial and whaling ventures in the Indian Ocean.

Yankees in the Indian Ocean shows how nineteenth-century American merchant and whaler activity in the Indian Ocean shaped the imperial future of the United States, influenced the region’s commerce, encouraged illegal slaving, and contributed to environmental degradation. For a brief time, Americans outnumbered other Western visitors to Mauritius, Madagascar, Zanzibar, and the East African littoral. In a relentless search for commodities and provisions, American whaleships landed at islands throughout the ocean and stripped them of resources. Yet Americans failed to develop a permanent foothold in the region and operated instead from a position of weakness relative to other major colonizing powers, thus discouraging the development of American imperial holdings there.

The history of American concerns in the Indian Ocean world remains largely unwritten. Scholars who focus on the region have mostly ignored American involvement, despite arguments for the ocean’s importance in powering global connections during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Historians of the United States likewise have failed to examine the western Indian Ocean because of a preoccupation with US interests in Asia and the Pacific. Failing to understand the scale of American trade in the Indian Ocean has led to a fixation on European commercial strength to the exclusion of other maritime networks. Instead, this book reveals how the people of Madagascar and East Africa helped the United States briefly dominate commerce and whaling.

This book investigates how and why Americans were drawn to the western Indian Ocean years before the United States established a formal overseas empire in the late nineteenth century. Ship logs, sailor journals, and travel narratives reveal how American men transformed foreign land- and seascapes into knowable spaces that confirmed American conceptions of people and natural resources; these sources also provide insight into the complex social and ecological worlds of the Indian Ocean during this critical time.

In her day job as a nurse, Sandy Holston cares for the elderly and the sick, even as she is haunted by her own questionable past and the deaths that marked it. Her true self resides among the mountain trout streams of her Appalachian home, where she wields her fly rod with uncanny accuracy as her life plays out along a tight line between herself and a fish on the other end. But then the Ripshin River threatens to flood. Sandy can no longer deny that dementia has taken hold in James Keefe, her older sometimes-lover. An elusive eastern mountain lion appears. And when a predatory survivalist keeping a solitary camp by the headwaters arrives, he poses the biggest threat of all. His merciless pursuit of the lion brings him ever closer to Sandy, triggering her final, tragic attempt to preserve her connections with Keefe, the headwaters, and all that she has, at last, come to love. In Yellow Stonefly—a rare fly fishing novel with a female protagonist—Tim Poland weaves suspense and introspection into an unforgettable read, at once mournful and bracing.

Scholars have argued for decades over which constitutes the best possible version of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s frequently anthologized story “The Yellow Wall-Paper.”

Most editions have been based on the 1892 New England Magazine publication rather than the handwritten manuscript at Radcliffe College. Publication of the unedited manuscript in 1994 sparked controversy over which of the two was definitive. Since then, scholars have discovered half a dozen parent texts for later twentieth-century printings, including William Dean Howells’s version from 1920 and the 1933 Golden Book version.

While traditional critical editions gather evidence and make an argument for adopting one text as preferable to others,“The Yellow Wall-Paper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Dual-Text Critical Edition, edited by Shawn St. Jean, offers both manuscript and magazine versions, critically edited and printed in parallel for the first time. New significance appears in such facets as the magazine’s accompanying illustrations, its lineation and paragraphing, Gilman’s choice of pronouns, and her original handwritten ending.

This critical edition of “The Yellow Wall-Paper” includes a full and nontraditional apparatus, making it easy for students and scholars to study the more than four hundred variants between the two texts. Four new essays, written especially for this volume, explore the implications of this multitext model.

In this novel of the mestizo, or mixed-blood, Frank Waters completes the Southwestern canvas begun in The Man Who Killed the Deer and People of the Valley. Set in a violent Mexican border town, the story centers on Barby, a tormented mestizo, Guadalupe, the mestiza “percentage-girl,” and Tai-Ling, the serene yogi. Their fates mingle though each remains alone—Barby bound to the brute rages of the night; Guadalupe unconscious of all save the sun of her sexuality; Tai-Ling believing it is possible to transcend completely the flow of life.

Anna Akhmatova lived through pre-revolution Russia, Bolshevism, and Stalinism. Throughout it all, she maintained an elegant, muscular style that could grab a reader by the throat at a moment’s notice. Defined by tragedy and beauty in equal measure, her poems take on romantic frustration and the pull of the sensory, and find power in the mundane. Above all, she believed that a Russian poet could only produce poetry in Russia.

You Will Hear Thunder spans Akhmatova’s very early career into the early 1960s. These poems were written through her bohemian prerevolution days, her many marriages, the terror and privation of life under Stalin, and her later years, during which she saw her work once again recognized by the Soviet state. Intricately observed and unwavering in their emotional immediacy, these strikingly modern poems represent one of the twentieth century’s most powerful voices.

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) was part of that magnificent and in many ways tragic generation of Russian artists which came to first maturity before 1917, and which then had to come to terms with official discouragement and often persecution. As D.M. Thomas points out in his introduction, practically none of her poetry was published between 1923 and 1940. Her poetic range was wide, from the transparent anonymity of “Requiem” to the symphonic complexity of “Poem without a Hero.” She was revered and loved not only by the best of her fellow poets but by the ordinary people of Russia: five thousand mourners, mostly the young, crowded to her requiem mass in a Leningrad church.

You Will Hear Thunder brings together for the first time all D.M. Thomas’s translations of Anna Akhmatova’s poems. They were very highly praised on their separate appearances in 1976 and 1979. John Bayley called them “a mastery achievement,” and said of Thomas that “he has profound reverence and affection for the original;” while Donald David wrote that Thomas’s translation was “The first version to explain to me why Akhmatova was so much esteemed by those great poets, Pasternak and Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva.” It is good to have these powerful, noble and compassionate poems in one set of covers.

A History Book Club Reading Selection

Despite his military achievements and his association with many of the great names of American history, Godfrey Weitzel (1835–1884) is perhaps the least known of all the Union generals. After graduating from West Point, Weitzel, a German immigrant from Cincinnati, was assigned to the Army Corps of Engineers in New Orleans. The secession of Louisiana in 1861, with its key port city of New Orleans, was the first of a long and unlikely series of events that propelled the young Weitzel to the center of many of the Civil War’s key battles and brought him into the orbit of such well-known personages as Lee, Beauregard, Butler, Farragut, Porter, Grant, and Lincoln. Weitzel quickly rose through the ranks and was promoted to brigadier general and, eventually to commander of Twenty-Fifth Corps, the Union Army’s only all-black unit. After fighting in numerous campaigns in Louisiana and Virginia, on April 3, 1865, Weitzel marched his troops into Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, capturing the city for the Union and precipitating the eventual collapse of the Southern states’ rebellion.

G. William Quatman’s minute-by-minute narrative of the fall of Richmond lends new insight into the war’s end, and his keen research into archival sources adds depth and nuance to the events and the personalities that shaped the course of the Civil War.

Women’s writing in Cameroon has so far been dominated by Francophone writers. The short stories in this collection represent the yearnings and vision of an Anglophone woman, who writes both as a Cameroonian and as a woman whose life has been shaped by the minority status her people occupy within the nation-state. The stories in Your Madness, Not Mine are about postcolonial Cameroon, but especially about Cameroonian women, who probe their day-to-day experiences of survival and empowerment as they deal with gender oppression: from patriarchal expectations to the malaise of maldevelopment, unemployment, and the attraction of the West for young Cameroonians. Makuchi has given us powerful portraits of the people of postcolonial Africa in the so-called global village who too often go unseen and unheard.