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Lives of Fort de Chartres
Commandants, Soldiers, and Civilians in French Illinois, 1720–1770
David MacDonald
Southern Illinois University Press, 2016
Winner, ISHS Annual Award for a Scholarly Publication, 2017

Fort de Chartres, built in 1719-1720 in the heart of what would become the American Midwest, embodied French colonial power for half a century. Lives of Fort de Chartres, by David MacDonald, details the French colonial experience in Illinois from 1720 to 1770 through vivid depictions of the places, people, and events around the fort and its neighboring villages.
 
In the first section, MacDonald explores the fascinating history of French Illinois and the role of Fort de Chartres in this history, focusing on native peoples, settlers, slaves, soldiers, villages, trade routes, military administration, and the decline of French rule in Illinois. The second section profiles the fort’s twelve distinctive and often colorful commandants, who also served as administrative heads of French Illinois. These men’s strong personalities served them well when dealing simultaneously with troops, civilians, and Indians and their multifaceted cultures. In the third section, MacDonald presents ten thought-provoking biographies of people whose lives intersected with Fort de Chartres in various ways, from a Kaskaskia Indian woman known as “the Mother of French Illinois” to an ill-fated chicken thief and a European aristocrat. Subjects treated in the book include French–Native American relations, the fur trade, early Illinois agriculture, and tensions among different religious orders. Together, the biographies and historical narrative in the volume illuminate the challenges that shaped the French colonies in America.
 
The site of Fort de Chartres, recognized as a National Historic Landmark in 1966, still exists today as a testament to the ways in which French, British, Spanish, and American histories have intertwined. Both informative and entertaining, Lives of Fort de Chartres contributes to a more complete understanding of the French colonial experience in the Midwest and portrays a vital and vigorous community well worth our appreciation.
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Kaskaskia
The Lost Capital of Illinois
David MacDonald
Southern Illinois University Press, 2019
This first comprehensive account of the Illinois village of Kaskaskia covers more than two hundred years in the vast and compelling history of the state. David MacDonald and Raine Waters explore Illinois’s first capital in great detail, from its foundation in 1703 to its destruction by the Mississippi River in the latter part of the nineteenth century, as well as everything in between: successes, setbacks, and the lives of the people who inhabited the space.
 
At the outset the Kaskaskia tribe, along with Jesuit missionaries and French traders, settled near the confluence of the Kaskaskia and Mississippi rivers, about sixty miles south of modern-day St. Louis. The town quickly became the largest French town and most prosperous settlement in the Illinois Country. After French control ended, Kaskaskia suffered under corrupt British and then inept American rule. In the 1790s the town revived and became the territorial capital, and in 1818 it became the first state capital. Along the way Kaskaskia was beset by disasters: crop failures, earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, epidemics, and the loss of the capital-city title to Vandalia. Likewise, human activity and industry eroded the river’s banks, causing the river to change course and eventually wash away the settlement. All that remains of the state’s first capital today is a village several miles from the original site.
 
MacDonald and Waters focus on the town’s growth, struggles, prosperity, decline, and obliteration, providing an overview of its domestic architecture to reveal how its residents lived. Debunking the notion of a folklore tradition about a curse on the town, the authors instead trace those stories to late nineteenth-century journalistic inventions. The result is a vibrant, heavily illustrated, and highly readable history of Kaskaskia that sheds light on the entire early history of Illinois.
 
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Professional Academic Writing in the Humanities and Social Sciences
Susan Peck MacDonald
Southern Illinois University Press, 1994

In Professional Academic Writing in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Susan Peck MacDonald tackles important and often controversial contemporary questions regarding the rhetoric of inquiry, the social construction of knowledge, and the professionalization of the academy. MacDonald argues that the academy has devoted more effort to analyzing theory and method than to analyzing its own texts. Professional texts need further attention because they not only create but are also shaped by the knowledge that is special to each discipline. Her assumption is that knowledge-making is the distinctive activity of the academy at the professional level; for that reason, it is important to examine differences in the ways the professional texts of subdisciplinary communities focus on and consolidate knowledge within their fields.

Throughout the book, MacDonald stresses her conviction that academics need to do a better job of explaining their text-making axioms, clarifying their expectations of students at all levels, and monitoring their own professional practices. MacDonald’s proposals for both textual and sentence-level analysis will help academic professionals better understand how they might improve communication within their professional communities and with their students.

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Missouri's Silver Age
Silversmiths of the 1800s
Norman Mack
Southern Illinois University Press, 2005

The result of nearly two decades of intensive research by Norman Mack and his late wife, Beatrice Davidow Mack, Missouri’s Silver Age: Silversmiths of the 1800s is a comprehensive directory of nineteenth-century Missouri silversmiths, their works, and their identifying makers’ marks. Illustrated with over one hundred photographs, this exceptional reference for historians and silver collectors showcases the Macks’ three-hundred-piece collection of Missouri silver, which includes a representative sample by nearly every known Missouri silversmith and is housed at the Missouri Historical Society in St. Louis.

Featuring more than a hundred detailed biographies of the artisans and apprentices who created handmade silver in St. Louis and Missouri during the nineteenth century, Missouri’s Silver Age also contains extensive photographs of makers’ touchmarks and of the pieces themselves, which include bowls, dishes, spoons, and ladles, as well as other household utensils and decorative items. Arranged alphabetically, the biographies reveal all known details of the business activities and locations of the silversmiths. Collectively, the entries and the illustrations shed light on the growth of enterprise in Missouri, show the impact of the individual on the developing frontier economies of the Midwest, and reveal how the production, acquisition, and possession of material goods reflected the culture and values of Americans during the 1800s.

Mack provides a brief but thorough history of silversmithing in America for novice collectors and historians, detailing the various methods used in making silver and the range of styles that were popular, providing insight into the methods of training apprentices, and explaining the effects of mechanization on the trade. Augmenting this volume are an appendix by Jo Ann Griffin on how to care for old silver, a map of the silversmiths’ primary locations, and a helpful alphabetical appendix of the silversmiths that includes illustrations of their touchmarks.

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The Lead Mine Men
The Enduring 45th Illinois Volunteer Infantry
Thomas B. Mack
Southern Illinois University Press, 2023

The regiment that never ran

To destroy Confederate infrastructure, avenge the horrors of slavery, and shorten the war, the 45th Illinois Volunteer Infantry imposed the pillaging of hard-war philosophy upon Confederate lands. This comprehensive and engaging narrative explores the Civil War ordeals and triumphs of the “Lead Mine men” who hailed from eleven counties in northern Illinois. Thomas B. Mack uncovers the history on this unit of resilient midwesterners and how they brought hard-war to the Confederacy in 1862, earlier than other historians have previously suggested. 

During their service the regiment compiled an exceptional record. The 45th fought under General Ulysses S. Grant in the war’s western theater, earning honors at Vicksburg and in Tennessee. The men later reenlisted as veterans and served in General William T. Sherman’s Atlanta, Savannah, and Carolina campaigns. Mack considers the soldiers’ community, discipline, and faith in Providence during their service in the Union Army of the Tennessee and how, despite the unit’s high casualties, they upheld the lowest rate of desertion due to their fervent patriotism.

Throughout The Lead Mine Men, Mack’s focus remains on the soldiers—their extensive training in Galena and Chicago and their time in camp and in combat. He follows their experiences from recruitment to their celebratory march in the 1865 Grand Review to their postwar lives in which many struggled to adjust, receive their government pensions, and protect the unit’s legacy. In this book, Mack broadens our understanding of the Union soldiers who saved their republic and ended slavery within its borders. 

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Entertaining History
The Civil War in Literature, Film, and Song
Chris Mackowski
Southern Illinois University Press, 2020
Popular media can spark the national consciousness in a way that captures people’s attention, interests them in history, and inspires them to visit battlefields, museums, and historic sites. This lively collection of essays and feature stories celebrates the novels, popular histories, magazines, movies, television shows, photography, and songs that have enticed Americans to learn more about our most dramatic historical era.

From Ulysses S. Grant’s Memoirs to Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, from Roots to Ken Burns’s The Civil War, from “Dixie” to “Ashokan Farewell,” and from Civil War photography to the Gettysburg Cyclorama, trendy and well-loved depictions of the Civil War are the subjects of twenty contributors who tell how they and the general public have been influenced by them. Sarah Kay Bierle examines the eternal appeal of Gone with the Wind and asks how it is that a protagonist who so opposed the war has become such a figurehead for it. H. R. Gordon talks with New York Times–bestselling novelist Jeff Shaara to discuss the power of storytelling. Paul Ashdown explores ColdMountain’s value as a portrait of the war as national upheaval, and Kevin Pawlak traces a shift in cinema’s depiction of slavery epitomized by 12 Years a Slave. Tony Horwitz revisits his iconic Confederates in the Attic twenty years later.

The contributors’ fresh analysis articulates a shared passion for history’s representation in the popular media. The variety of voices and topics in this collection coalesces into a fascinating discussion of some of the most popular texts in the genres. In keeping with the innovative nature of this series, web-exclusive material extends the conversation beyond the book.

 
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Turning Points of the American Civil War
Chris Mackowski
Southern Illinois University Press, 2017
Contributors to this collection, public historians with experience at Civil War battle sites, examine key shifts in the Civil War and the context surrounding them to show that many chains of events caused the course of the war to change: the Federal defeats at First Bull Run and Ball’s Bluff, the wounding of Joseph Johnston at Seven Pines and the Confederate victory at Chancellorsville, the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, the Federal victory at Vicksburg, Grant’s decision to move on to Richmond rather than retreat from the Wilderness, the naming of John B. Hood as commander of the Army of Tennessee, and the 1864 presidential election. In their conclusion, the editors suggest that the assassination of Abraham Lincoln might have been the war’s final turning point. 
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20 Day Trips in and around the Shawnee National Forest
Larry P. Mahan
Southern Illinois University Press, 2013

One of the unique and most scenic treasures in the Midwest, the Shawnee National Forest spans more than 279,000 acres deep in southern Illinois. The natural beauty, stunning vistas, and diverse flora and fauna of this picturesque region invite exploration by all who love nature. This easy-to-use guidebook highlights 20 exciting day or weekend trips within and near the Shawnee National Forest, making it easy to take advantage of the forest’s myriad opportunities for outdoor recreational activity.  

Intended for those without extensive hiking or camping experience, the guide provides all of the information necessary to safely and proficiently explore all the forest has to offer. Entertaining narratives describe each journey in vivid detail, offering advice on needed supplies, pointing out shortcuts, and spotlighting not-to-miss views. Entries also include thorough directions, GPS coordinates, trail difficulty ratings, landform descriptions, exact distances between points, and a list of available facilities at each location. 

From biking and bird watching to hiking, horseback riding, and rock climbing, the Shawnee National Forest is home to an abundance of possibilities for outdoor fun. With this practical guide in hand, adventure seekers and nature lovers alike can make the most of southern Illinois’s own natural treasure.

Best Travel Guide of the Year by Booklist, 2013

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Dark Alphabet
Jennifer Maier
Southern Illinois University Press, 2006
In works whose subjects range from the religious to the carnal, the whimsical to the foreboding,Jennifer Maier’s debut collection of poems,Dark Alphabet, explores the everyday mysteries of our common experience with humor, lucidity, and an unblinking yet compassionate eye. Whether occasioned by a song overheard on the car radio, a packet of risqué postcards from the 1920's, a conversation with a dead parent, or the behavior of ducks in mating season, each poem sets off on a journey that ranges far from its origins, arriving with the reader in a clearing at dusk, in a place of wise good humor and somber grace.
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The Voice of the Mother
Embedded Maternal Narratives in Twentieth-Century Women's Autobiographies
Jo Ellen Malin
Southern Illinois University Press, 2000

Every woman autobiographer is a daughter who writes and establishes her identity through her autobiographical narrative. In The Voice of the Mother, Jo Malin argues that many twentieth-century autobiographies by women contain an intertext, an embedded narrative, which is a biography of the writer/daughter’s mother.

Analyzing this narrative practice, Malin examines ten texts by women who seem particularly compelled to tell their mothers’ stories: Virginia Woolf, Sara Suleri, Kim Chernin, Drusilla Modjeska, Joan Nestle, Carolyn Steedman, Dorothy Allison, Adrienne Rich, Cherríe Moraga, and Audre Lorde. Each author is, in fact, able to write her own autobiography only by using a narrative form that contains her mother’s story at its core. These texts raise interesting questions about autobiography as a genre and about a feminist writing practice that resists and subverts the dominant literary tradition.

Malin theorizes a hybrid form of autobiographical narrative containing an embedded narrative of the mother. The textual relationship between the two narratives is unique among texts in the auto/biographical canon. This alternative narrative practice—in which the daughter attempts to talk both to her mother and about her—is equally an autobiography and a biography rather than one or the other. The technique is marked by a breakdown of subject/object categories as well as auto/biographical dichotomies of genre. Each text contains a “self” that is more plural than singular, yet neither.

            

In addition to being a theoretical and textual analysis, Malin’s book is also a mother-daughter autobiography and biography itself. She shares her own story and her mother’s story as a way to connect directly with readers and as a way to bridge the gap between theory and practice.

            

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From Knights to Pioneers
One German Family in Westphalia and Missouri
Anita M. Mallinckrodt
Southern Illinois University Press, 1994

Anita M. Mallinckrodt traces the 750-year history of the Mallinckrodt family from its earliest documented beginnings in thirteenth-century Westphalia (in the Dortmund area) through immigration to Missouri in 1831 and beyond.

In part 1, Mallinckrodt tells the story of some of her family’s leading personalities in order to explicate the history and society of medieval and early modern Germany: the life and times of knight Ludwig (c. 1241) and crusader Gerd (c. 1450–1504); the 1451 and 1492 adventures of the mercenary knight Hermann and his son Wilhelm; the 1594 feuding of the noble brothers Dietrich and Hermann, which led to a double murder; the liberal Dortmund publisher Arnold’s struggles in the early 1800s to establish freedom of the press and to free Westphalian farmers from serfdom; and the wealthy, aristocratic Sister Pauline (b. 1817), founder of the Sisters of Charity and recently beatified for her efforts on behalf of the poor and blind children of her day.

In parts 2 and 3, Mallinckrodt focuses on the first of her forebears to immigrate to the New World—Julius and Emil in 1831, followed by Conrad, Hermann, August, Helene, Sophie, and Luise in 1838—and their immediate families and descendants in Missouri. These early pioneers cleared the forests, built schools and churches, supported German-language periodicals, and founded social and cultural organizations that would benefit later waves of immigrants. In the 1860s, they participated in their adopted country’s Civil War and held strong views toward slavery and the Union. Mallinckrodt ends her family’s history with the deaths of the Dortmund pioneers in the 1890s.

But From Knights to Pioneers is much more than a single family’s history. The experiences Mallinckrodt relates reflect those of many German families who left their mark on centuries of history and of many midwestern families transplanted from the Old World. Especially interesting is the continuity between the old and new ways of life—entries on genealogical tables need not end with the comment "immigrated to the USA," for immigrants often wrote notable chapters of family history that deserve recognition in their old homelands. Similarly, knowledge of pre-immigration history is essential for those Americans whose traditions surely did not begin, as oral history often suggests, with the fact that "great-grandfather arrived in the Midwest from Germany in 1831." Thus the purpose of this book is to set a family’s immigration chapter against its European background, without passing judgment on the cultural influence of outstanding individuals in the United States or of German immigration per se.

Drawing on her extensive research in both Europe and the United States, Mallinckrodt presents an exceptionally detailed picture of the social and political contexts of each of her subjects. The richness of her exposition of both the Old World background and the lives of the immigrants to the New World offers important insights into aspects of European and American history.

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The Science Fiction of Kris Neville
Barry N. Malzberg
Southern Illinois University Press, 1984

Other stories in this anthology are “Old Man Henderson,” “The Hunter,” “Underground Movement,” “The Forest of Zil,” and “From the Government Printing Office.”

In most of the stories Neville writes of loneliness, isolation, alienation, intol­erance of anything or anyone different, and of insanity created by the pressures of living. Along with madness of various kinds, his stories explore the essence of human nature and individuals interact­ing with one another as well as with so­ciety. As Malzberg notes, Neville, unlike many science fiction writers, was a se­rious author interested in “Big ideas.”

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The Science Fiction of Mark Clifton
Barry N. Malzberg
Southern Illinois University Press, 1980

This collection of the best short stories of Mark Clifton makes these fine tales readily available for the first time in two decades.

Winner with Frank Riley of the 1955 Hugo Award for They’d Rather Be Right,Clifton has for a variety of reasons unrelated to the quality of his writing all but disappeared from the aware­ness of today’s science fiction audience. Never a prolific writer he had published only about twenty-five short stories before his death in 1963.But with those stories and his three novels he irrevocably altered the course of contemporary science fiction.

Almost single-handedly he introduced the full range of psy­chological insights to the commonly occurring themes of the genre—alien invasion, expanding technology, revolution against political theocracy, and space exploration and coloniza­tion—to ever more truthfully portray how humanity would react to a future that could be either mindless or intellectually stunning.

With his first published story, “What Have I Done?” Clifton initiated the theme of a starkly realistic world in which, at its best, humanity is inalterably vile—a theme that became an in­extricable part of all his subsequent works. In his later works Clifton occasionally clothed his bitter indictment in the garb of comedy.

The stories collected here include “What Have I Done?” “Star, Bright,” “Crazy Joey,” “What Thin Partitions,” “Sense from Thought Divide,” “How Allied,” “Remembrance and Re­flection,” “Hide! Hide! Witch!” “Clerical Error,” “What Now, Little Man?” and “Hang Head, Vandal!”

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American Fish and Wildlife Policy
The Human Dimension
William R Mangun
Southern Illinois University Press, 1992

These eleven original essays by leading wildlife management and public policy scholars deal with policy issues, management perspectives, and the public attitudes about wildlife that shape the world of the wildlife manager.

Part 1 contains William R. Mangun’s introductory essay "Fish and Wildlife Policy Issues" and Daniel J. Decker et al.’s "Toward a Comprehensive Paradigm of Wildlife."

Ann H. Harvey’s "Interagency Conflict and Coordination in Wildlife Management," Philip S. Cook and Ted T. Cable’s "Developing Policy for Public Access to Private Land," and Debra A. Rose’s "Implementing Endangered Species Policy" make up part 2.

Part 3 consists of Cliff Hamilton’s "Pursuing a New Paradigm in Funding State Fish and Wildlife Programs" and Trellis G. Green’s "Use of Economics in Federal and State Fishery Allocation Decisions."

The fourth part includes James J. Kennedy and Jack Ward Thomas’s "Exit, Voice, and Loyalty of Wildlife Biologists in Public Natural Resource/Environmental Agencies"; Jean C. Mangun et al.’s "Nonconsumptive Wildlife-Associated Recreation in the United States"; and Barbara A. Knuth’s "Natural Resource Hazards: Managing to Protect People from the Resource."

In part 5, Joseph F. Coates looks to the future in "Public Policy Actors and Futures."

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Marketing to Moviegoers
A Handbook of Strategies and Tactics, Second Edition
Robert Marich
Southern Illinois University Press, 2009

While Hollywood executives spend millions of dollars making movies, even more money is poured into selling those films to the public. In the second edition of his comprehensive guidebook, Marketing to Moviegoers, veteran film and TV journalist Robert Marich plumbs the depths of the strategies and tactics used by studios to market their films to consumers. Packed with real life examples and useful data, this new edition blends practical, up-to-date information with theory to clearly explain all aspects of promoting motion pictures.

Marketing to Moviegoers: A Handbook of Strategies and Tactics takes readers carefully through all of the key components of film marketing. From creative strategy, market research, and advertising to publicity, product placement, and distribution to theaters, Marich's book covers everything film professionals need to know to mount a successful marketing campaign. Each chapter contains a wealth of useful information—including the historical background of the business, sample market research documents and advertising budgets, comments from successful industry insiders, and over thirty-five tables—and offers intriguing insight into the strategies of modern promotion.

Most other film marketing books focus mainly on marketing by independent distributors, but Marich specifically outlines the marketing methods of the six major Hollywood studios, which are notoriously secretive about these methods, while also detailing the marketing plans of the independent and foreign film sectors. In addition, he examines in depth the effectiveness of both new and old media, especially the ways in which the advent of the Internet has both helped and hindered the movie marketing process.

While many books have been written on the business-to-business aspect of film promotion, Marich's volume is one of the few that focuses on the methods used to sell motion pictures to those who truly make or break a film's success—the public.

This essential reference contains detailed examples, more than twenty illustrations, and a comprehensive glossary of marketing terms. A highly navigable handbook that breaks down a complicated process into manageable strategies in an easy-to-read style, Marketing to Moviegoers is a must for all film professionals and filmmaking students.

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Marketing to Moviegoers
A Handbook of Strategies and Tactics, Third Edition
Robert Marich
Southern Illinois University Press, 2013

While Hollywood executives spend millions of dollars making movies, even more money is poured into selling those films to the public. In the third edition of his comprehensive guidebook, Marketing to Moviegoers: A Handbook of Strategies and Tactics, veteran film and TV journalist Robert Marich plumbs the depths of the methods used by studios to market their films to consumers. Updates to the third edition include a chapter on marketing movies using digital media; an insightful discussion of the use of music in film trailers; new and expanded materials on marketing targeted toward affinity groups and awards; fresh analysis of booking contracts between theaters and distributors; a brief history of indie film marketing; and explorations of the overlooked potential of the drive-in theater and the revival of third-party-financed movie campaigns.

               While many books have been written on the business-to-business aspect of film promotion, Marich’s volume is one of the few that focuses on the techniques used to sell motion pictures to those in a position to truly make or break a film—the public. A highly navigable handbook that breaks down a complicated process into manageable strategies in an easy-to-read style, Marketing to Moviegoers is a must for all professionals and students in today’s rapidly evolving film industry.

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The Archaeology of Slavery
A Comparative Approach to Captivity and Coercion
Lydia Wilson Marshall
Southern Illinois University Press, 2014

Plantation sites, especially those in the southeastern United States, have long dominated the archaeological study of slavery. These antebellum estates, however, are not representative of the range of geographic locations and time periods in which slavery has occurred. As archaeologists have begun to investigate slavery in more diverse settings, the need for a broader interpretive framework is now clear.

The Archaeology of Slavery: A Comparative Approach to Captivity and Coercion, edited by Lydia Wilson Marshall, develops an interregional and cross-temporal framework for the interpretation of slavery. Contributors consider how to define slavery, identify it in the archaeological record, and study it as a diachronic process from enslavement to emancipation and beyond.

Essays cover the potential material representations of slavery, slave owners’ strategies of coercion and enslaved people’s methods of resisting this coercion, and the legacies of slavery as confronted by formerly enslaved people and their descendants. Among the peoples, sites, and periods examined are a late nineteenth-century Chinese laborer population in Carlin, Nevada; a castle slave habitation at San Domingo and a more elite trading center at nearby Juffure in the Gambia; two eighteenth-century plantations in Dominica; Benin’s Hueda Kingdom in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; plantations in Zanzibar; and three fugitive slave sites on Mauritius—an underground lava tunnel, a mountain, and a karst cave.

This essay collection seeks to analyze slavery as a process organized by larger economic and social forces with effects that can be both durable and wide-ranging. It presents a comparative approach that significantly enriches our understanding of slavery.

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Response to Reform
Composition and the Professionalization of Teaching
Margaret Marshall
Southern Illinois University Press, 2003

Response to Reform: Composition and the Professionalization of Teaching critiques the politics of labor and gender biases inherent in the composition workplace that prevent literacy teachers from attaining professional status and respect. Scrutinizing the relationship between scholarship and teaching, Margaret J. Marshall calls for a reconceptualization of what it means to prepare for and enter the field of composition instruction.

            

Interrogating the approach the education system takes to certify teachers without actually “professionalizing” their careers, Marshall contends that these programs rely on outdated rhetorics of labor that only widen the gap between teaching and other professional jobs. Such attempts to re-educate literacy teachers exploit and marginalize their work, and thus prevent them from claiming the status of academic professionals. In providing an overview of the history of and language used to literacy instruction, she also points out that while women are overrepresented in composition instruction, they are underrepresented in tenure track and administrative positions.

To correct and combat these inequities, Marshall advocates an alternate alignment of power structures and rhetorical choices. In a wide-ranging survey that sheds new light on the composition workplace as well as higher education at large, Response to Reform: Composition and the Professionalization of Teaching boldly asks us to do away with the reductive language we inherit from the past that characterize teaching and professionalization, as well as our customary responses to public criticism of education. The result is a new articulation of composition as a meritorious profession.  

 

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The Best Writings of Ulysses S. Grant
John F. Marszalek
Southern Illinois University Press, 2015

Famous for his military acumen and for his part in saving the Union during the American Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant also remains known for his two-volume memoirs, considered among the greatest military memoirs ever written. Grant’s other writings, however, have not received the same acclaim, even though they show the same literary skill. Originally published in the thirty-two volumes of The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, the letters and speeches are the major source of information about Grant’s life and era and have played a key role in elevating his reputation to that of the leading general of the Civil War and the first of the modern presidents. In this collection, editor John F. Marszalek presents excerpts from Grant’s  most insightful and skillfully composed writings and provides perspective through introductory comments tying each piece to the next. The result is a fascinating overview of Grant’s life and career.

In sixteen chronological chapters, selections from Grant’s letters and other writings reveal his personal thoughts on the major events of his momentous life, including the start of the Civil War, the capture of Vicksburg, Lincoln’s reelection, Lee’s surrender, his terms as president, the Panic of 1873, and his bouts of mouth and throat cancer. Throughout, Grant’s prose reveals clearly the power of his words and his ability to present them well. Although some historians have maligned his presidency as one of the most corrupt periods in American history, these writings reinforce Grant’s greatness as a general, demonstrate the importance of his presidency, and show him to be one of the driving forces of the nineteenth century.

With this compendium, Marszalek not only celebrates the literary talent of one of America’s greatest military figures but also vindicates an individual who, for so long, has been unfairly denigrated. A concise reference for students of American history and Civil War enthusiasts as well as a valuable introduction for those who are new to Grant’s writings, this volume provides intriguing insight into one of the nineteenth century’s most important Americans.

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Lincoln and the Military
John F. Marszalek
Southern Illinois University Press, 2014

When Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the United States in 1860, he came into office with practically no experience in military strategy and tactics. Consequently, at the start of the Civil War, he depended on leading military men to teach him how to manage warfare. As the war continued and Lincoln matured as a military leader, however, he no longer relied on the advice of others and became the major military mind of the war. In this brief overview of Lincoln’s military actions and relationships during the war, John F. Marszalek traces the sixteenth president’s evolution from a nonmilitary politician into the commander in chief who won the Civil War, demonstrating why Lincoln remains America’s greatest military president.

As tensions erupted into conflict in 1861, Lincoln turned to his generals, including Winfield Scott, George B. McClellan, and Henry W. Halleck, for guidance in running the war. These men were products of the traditional philosophy of war, which taught that armies alone wage war and the way to win was to maneuver masses of forces against fractions of the enemy at the key point in the strategic area. As Marszalek shows, Lincoln listened at first, and made mistakes along the way, but he increasingly came to realize that these military men should no longer direct him. He developed a different philosophy of war, one that advocated attacks on all parts of the enemy line and war between not just armies but also societies. Warfare had changed, and now the generals had to learn from their commander in chief. It was only when Ulysses S. Grant became commanding general, Marszalek explains, that Lincoln had a leader who agreed with his approach to war. Implementation of this new philosophy, he shows, won the war for the Union forces.

Tying the necessity of emancipation to preservation of the Union, Marszalek considers the many presidential matters Lincoln had to face in order to manage the war effectively and demonstrates how Lincoln’s determination, humility, sense of humor, analytical ability, and knack for quickly learning important information proved instrumental in his military success. Based primarily on Lincoln’s own words, this succinct volume offers an easily-accessible window into a critical period in the life of Abraham Lincoln and the history of the nation.

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Sherman
A Soldier's Passion for Order
John F. Marszalek
Southern Illinois University Press, 1993

Sherman: A Soldier’s Passion for Order is the premier biography of William Tecumseh Sherman, the Civil War commander known for his “destructive war” policy against Confederates and as a consummate soldier. This updated edition of John F. Marszalek’s award-winning book presents the general as a complicated man who, fearing anarchy, searched for the order that he hoped would make his life a success.

Sherman was profoundly influenced by the death of his father and his subsequent relationship with the powerful Whig politician Thomas Ewing and his family. Although the Ewings treated Sherman as one of their own, the young Sherman was determined to make it on his own. He graduated from West Point and moved on to service at military posts throughout the South. This volume traces Sherman’s involvement in the Mexican War in the late 1840s, his years battling prospectors and deserting soldiers in gold-rush California, and his 1850 marriage to his foster sister, Ellen. Later he moved to Louisiana, and, after the state seceded, Sherman returned to the North to fight for the Union.

Sherman covers the general’s early Civil War assignments in Kentucky and Missouri and his battles against former Southern friends there, the battle at Shiloh, and his rise to become second only to Grant among the Union leadership. Sherman’s famed use of destructive war, controversial then and now, is examined in detail. The destruction of property, he believed, would convince the Confederates that surrender was their best option, and Sherman’s successful strategy became the stuff of legend.

This definitive biography, which includes forty-six illustrations, effectively refutes misconceptions surrounding the controversial Union general and presents Sherman the man, not the myth.

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A Place Called Appomattox
William Marvel
Southern Illinois University Press, 2007

In A Place Called Appomattox, William Marvel turns his extensive Civil War scholarship toward Appomattox County, Virginia, and the village of Appomattox Court House, which became synonymous with the end of the Civil War when Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant there in 1865.  Marvel presents a formidably researched and elegantly written analysis of the county from 1848 to 1877, using it as a microcosm of Southern attitudes, class issues, and shifting cultural mores that shaped the Civil War and its denouement.

With an eye toward correcting cultural myths and enriching the historical record, Marvel analyzes the rise and fall of the village and county from 1848 to 1877, detailing the domestic economic and social vicissitudes of the village, and setting the stage for the flight of Lee’s Army toward Appomattox and the climactic surrender that still resonates today.

Now available for the first time in paperback, A Place Called Appomattox reveals a new view of the Civil War, tackling some of the thorniest issues often overlooked by the nostalgic exaggerations and historical misconceptions that surround Lee’s surrender.

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Illinois Trails & Traces
Portraits and Stories along the State’s Historic Routes
Gary Marx
Southern Illinois University Press, 2022
WINNER, 2023 Illinois State Historical Society Superior Achievement Award in “Books, Other”!
FINALIST, 2023 Society of Midland Authors Award in Adult Nonfiction!

Exploring Illinois history through the paths we travel


Illinois Trails & Traces partners the deft writing of Gary Marx with vivid photography by Daniel Overturf to illuminate ever evolving patterns of travel and settlement. Taking the reader on a journey down early buffalo traces and Native American trails, this book shows how these paths evolved into wagon roads and paved highways. Marx and Overturf explore historic routes ranging from Route 66 to the Underground Railroad, all the way back to post-Ice Age animal migration trails followed by Paleo-Indian people. The authors also examine how rivers, canals, and railroads spurred the rapid rise of Illinois as a modern state.

Marx and Overturf bring history into the present by including over forty photographic portraits and written profiles of individuals who live along these routes today. Many of the people you will meet on these pages work to preserve and honor the history of these passages. Others profiled here embody the spirit of the old roads and provide a vivid link between past and present. Through this journey, we discover that we’ve all been traveling the same road all along.
 
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Until Antietam
The Life and Letters of Major General Israel B. Richardson, U.S. Army
Jack C. Mason
Southern Illinois University Press, 2009

While researching this book, Jack C. Mason made the kind of discovery that historians dream of. He found more than one hundred unpublished and unknown letters from Union general Israel B. Richardson to his family, written from his time as a West Point cadet until the day before his fatal wounding at the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest day in American history. Using these freshly uncovered primary sources as well as extensive research in secondary materials, Mason has written the first-ever biography of Israel Bush Richardson.

Mason traces Richardson’s growth as a soldier through his experiences and the guidance of his superiors, and then as a leader whose style reflected the actions of the former commanders he respected. Though he was a disciplinarian, Richardson took a relaxed attitude toward military rules, earning him the affection of his men. Unfortunately, his military career was cut short just as high-ranking officials began to recognize his aggressive leadership. He was mortally wounded while leading his men at Antietam and died on November 3, 1862.

Until Antietam brings to life a talented and fearless Civil War infantry leader. Richardson’s story, placed within the context of nineteenth-century warfare, exemplifies how one soldier’s life influenced his commanders, his men, and the army as a whole.

Winner of the Army Historical Foundation 2009 Distinguished Book Award

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Glidermen of Neptune
The American D-Day Glider Attack
Charles J Masters
Southern Illinois University Press, 1995

Although the word gliderman does not appear in the dictionary, a brave group of World War II soldiers known as glidermen flew into combat inside unarmed and unarmored canvas-covered gliders known as "flying coffins."

Charles J. Masters points out that because World War II was the first truly mechanized and armored global conflict, the role of the glidermen and their combat gliders was at best anachronistic. Fighter planes exceeded speeds of 400 miles per hour and were heavily armed with multiple machine guns. Dogfights had taken on new dimensions, eclipsing the tactics, speed, and firepower first evidenced by the fragile biplanes of World War I. Tanks achieved a lethal efficiency barely dreamed of even five years before the war. An array of weaponry never seen in any previous military engagement confronted the combat soldier during World War II.And yet there were gliders. And glidermen.

Masters tells of these men and of their fragile aircraft in a war of mechanized chaos. In copious detail, he describes the gliders and the Americans who boarded them during the American D-Day glider attack, a mission that was part of the overall cross-channel plan code-named "Operation Neptune." The son of a gliderman with the 82nd Airborne Division, Masters had unique access to the surviving glidermen and comrades of his father. During the course of his research, he located and interviewed 106 of the men who had flown the D-Day mission in gliders. As an insider—in a sense almost a member of the family and fraternity of glider-men—Masters was cordially received by the members of the American airborne divisions that participated in D-Day, many of whom told him stories they had seldom told their own friends and families. Often harrowing and always riveting, the stories these men told an eager listener and researcher are very much a part of this narrative.

Masters has also assembled the finest existing collection of photographs of the American D-Day glider attack. These photographs—many of which have never before been published—provide a spectacular photographic record of a little-known aspect of this war. In fact, because of the short military history of the American combat glider, most readers, including veterans of World War II, will not have seen one of these "flying coffins," even at a distance. These photographs afford the opportunity to actually examine the inside of the combat gliders used on D-Day, to observe the glidermen in action, and to witness the often tragic consequences of the glider attack.

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Governor Henry Horner, Chicago Politics, and the Great Depression
Charles J Masters
Southern Illinois University Press, 2007
Many have never heard of Governor Henry Horner of Illinois, yet his story is remarkable. Governor Henry Horner, Chicago Politics, and the Great Depression focuses on Horner’s career in law and politics from 1915 to 1940, while examining the economic and political dynamics of Illinois during the darkest period in American history. This principled governor managed to maintain his political integrity in a climate where honesty was a liability, says author Charles J. Masters, but the few historians who include Horner in their narratives offer contradictory and dismissive characterizations of him. Masters corrects the public record and reintroduces Horner to political lore as a man who brazenly fought both the Chicago Democratic machine that worked to plot his downfall and Roosevelt’s White House to steadfastly do right by the people of Illinois.
In this first book-length treatment of Horner in over thirty-five years, Masters traces the politician’s career, the history and politics of Chicago, and the effects of the Great Depression in Illinois. The volume details Horner’s life as a lawyer, probate judge, and two-term Democratic governor of Illinois. Horner’s relationships with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and such political players as Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna, “Bathhouse” John Coughlin, and Chicago mayors Carter Harrison, Anton Cermak, and Ed Kelly are set against a backdrop of assassination, political sniping, court-packing schemes, Prohibition, and the New Deal.
Governor Henry Horner, Chicago Politics, and the Great Depression examines the governor’s management of the political and economic challenges of the state when millions of Americans were jobless, homeless, and hungry. The severely divergent economic and political positions of the state’s northern industrial and southern agrarian interests made the period even darker. Masters shows how Horner stemmed foreclosures, dealt with bank closings, placated unpaid teachers, soothed massive labor unrest, fed the hungry, and confronted the ever-present threat of revolution. While Hitler’s Germany was spreading Nazism throughout Europe, some Americans were questioning the fundamental order of their own political system, suggesting that socialism, communism, or Nazism could offer a better way. Masters addresses how Horner, Illinois’ first Jewish governor, dealt with these challenges to the U.S. political system.
A story long absent from the historical record, GovernorHenry Horner, Chicago Politics, and the Great Depression offers a portrait of the man, his style of governance, his successes, and his failures. The volume, with eight illustrations, effectively reevaluates Horner’s historical reputation and role in Illinois politics in the midst of the worst economic depression in our nation’s history.
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The New Star Chamber and Other Essays
Annotated Edition
Edgar Lee Masters
Southern Illinois University Press, 2023
Tracing the troubled roots of American capitalism and imperialism
 
Coedited by noted Masters scholar, Jason Stacy, and his class, “Editing History,” this annotated edition of Edgar Lee Masters’s The New Star Chamber and Other Essays reappears at a perilous time in US history, when large corporations and overseas conflicts once again threaten the integrity of American rights and liberties, and the United States still finds itself beholden to corporate power and the legacy of imperial hubris. In speaking to his times, Masters also speaks to ours.
 
These thirteen essays lay bare the political ideology that informed Spoon River Anthology. Masters argues that the dangerous imperialism championed by then-President Theodore Roosevelt was rooted in the Constitution itself. By debating the ethics of the Philippine-American War, criticizing Hamiltonian centralization of government, and extolling the virtues of Jeffersonian individualism, Masters elucidates the ways in which America had strayed from its constitutional morals and from democracy itself. The result is a compelling critique of corporate capitalism and burgeoning American imperialism, as well as an exemplary source for understanding its complicated author in the midst of his transformation from urban lawyer to poet of rural America.
 
In print again for the first time since 1904, this edition includes an introduction and historical annotations throughout. Edited and annotated by students at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, and designed and illustrated by students at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, this volume traces economic and political pathologies to the origins of the American republic. The New Star Chamber and Other Essays is as vital now as it was over 100 years ago.
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The Neurotransmitter Revolution
Serotonin, Social Behavior, and the Law
Roger D. Masters
Southern Illinois University Press, 1993

Extraordinary advances in neurochemistry are both transforming our understanding of human nature and creating an urgent problem. Much is now known about the ways that neurotransmitters influence normal social behavior, mental illness, and deviance. What are these discoveries about the workings of the human brain? How can they best be integrated into our legal system?

These explosive issues are best understood by focusing on a single neurotransmitter like serotonin, which is associated with such diverse behaviors as dominance and leadership, seasonal depression, suicide, alcoholism, impulsive homicide, and arson. This book brings together revised papers from a conference on this theme organized by the Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research, supplemented with articles by leading scholars who did not attend. Contributors include psychiatrists, neurologists, social scientists, and legal scholars.

The Neurotransmitter Revolution presents a unique survey of the scientific and legal implications of research on the way serotonin combines with other factors to shape human behavior. The findings are quite different from what might have been expected even a decade ago.

The neurochemistry of behavior is not the same thing as genetic determinism. On the contrary, the activity of serotonin varies from one individual to another for many reasons, including the individual’s life experience, social status, personality, and diet. And there are a number of major neurotransmitter systems, each of which interacts with the other. Behavior, culture, and the social environment can influence neurochemistry along with inheritance. Nature and nurture interact—and these interactions can be understood from a vigorously scientific point of view.

The fact that our actions are heavily influenced by neurotransmitters like serotonin is bound to be disquieting. A sophisticated understanding of law and human social behavior will be needed if our society is to respond adequately to these rapid advances in our knowledge. This book is an essential step in that direction, providing the first comprehensive survey of the biochemical, social, and legal considerations arising from research on the behavioral effects of serotonin and related neurotransmitters.

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Readings from Classical Rhetoric
Patricia P. Matsen
Southern Illinois University Press, 1990

Here, for the first time in one volume, are all the extant writings focusing on rhetoric that were composed before the fall of Rome.

This unique anthology of primary texts in classical rhetoric contains the work of 24 ancient writers from Homer through St. Augustine, including Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, Tacitus, and Longinus.

Along with many widely recognized translations, special features include the first English translations of works by Theon and Nicolaus, as well as new translations of two works by important sophists, Gorgias’ encomium on Helen and Alcidamas’ essay on composition.

The writers are grouped chronologically into historical periods, allowing the reader to understand the scope and significance of rhetoric in antiquity. Introductions are included to each period, as well as to each writer, with writers’ biographies, major works, and salient features of excerpts.

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French and Indians of Illinois River
Nehemiah Matson
Southern Illinois University Press, 2001

Complex and paradoxical, Nehemiah Matson (1816–1873) celebrated the occupation of the Middle West by European pioneers even as he labored to preserve the memory of the natives these pioneers replaced. He perpetuated the memory of the Indians who were driven out of the territory, but he nevertheless accumulated wealth selling their land to the pioneers. Rodney O. Davis notes in his new foreword to this book that Matson combined the attributes of a scholar with those of a salesman and promoter.

Matson settled in Princeton, Illinois, in 1836. He left behind a library partially endowed by him, named for him, and finally completed in 1913. According to Davis, however, Matson’s other legacy, “of equal significance in his own eyes, consisted of the five books he authored on northern Illinois and Illinois River history and cartography, volumes based not only on conscientious scholarship but also on both Indian and white reminiscence and on local folklore.”

Matson’s historical writings are valuable even when he deals with well-known events because his personal perspective makes his observations unique. Without the stories and reminiscences he collected, much valuable information would have been lost, especially since many of his informants, both Indian and European, were illiterate. Because his informants often told conflicting stories, Matson admitted that “harmonizing all conflicting accounts . . . has not been a success.”

Although Matson’s sources may not always have agreed, and sometimes his heart may have overruled his head and colored his accounts, he was a conscientious and committed author. “Obviously,” Davis explains, “this book must be evaluated as what it is, a piece of colorful local history, romantically anchored in legend yet rooted also in invaluable research and produced by a dedicated amateur whose standards were high. . . . French and Indians of Illinois River is a model of its type, indeed a minor classic.”

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Appropriate[Ing] Dress
Women's Rhetorical Style in Nineteenth-Century America
Carol Mattingly
Southern Illinois University Press, 2002

Carol Mattingly examines the importance of dress and appearance for nineteenth-century women speakers and explores how women appropriated gendered conceptions of dress and appearance to define the struggle for representation and power that is rhetoric. Although crucial to women’s effectiveness as speakers, Mattingly notes, appearance has been ignored because it was taken for granted by men.

Because women rarely spoke in public before the nineteenth century, no guidelines existed regarding appropriate dress when they began to speak to audiences. Dress evoked immediate images of gender, an essential consideration for women speakers because of its strong association with place, locating women in the domestic sphere and creating a primary image that women speakers would work with—and against—throughout the century. Opposition to conspicuous change for women often necessitated the subtle transfer of comforting images when women sought to inhabit traditionally masculine spaces. The most successful women speakers carefully negotiated expectations by highlighting some conventions even as they broke others.

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Secret Habits
Catholic Literacy Education for Women in the Early Nineteenth Century
Carol Mattingly
Southern Illinois University Press, 2016
Literacy historians have credited the Protestant mandate to read scripture, as well as Protestant schools, for advances in American literacy. This belief, however, has overshadowed other important efforts and led to an incomplete understanding of our literacy history. In Secret Habits: Catholic Literacy Education for Women in the Early Nineteenth Century, Carol Mattingly restores the work of Catholic nuns and sisters to its rightful place in literacy studies.

Mattingly shows that despite widespread fears and opposition, including attacks by vaunted northeastern Protestant pioneers of literacy, Catholic women nonetheless became important educators of women in many areas of America. They founded convents, convent academies, and schools; developed their own curricula and pedagogies; and persisted in their efforts in the face of significant prejudices. The convents faced sharp opposition from Protestant educators, who often played on anti-Catholic fears to gain support for their own schools. Using a performative rhetoric of good works that emphasized civic involvement, Catholic women were able to educate large numbers of women and expand opportunities for literacy instruction.

A needed corrective to studies that have focused solely on efforts by Protestant educators, Mattingly’s work offers new insights into early nineteenth-century women’s literacy, demonstrating that literacy education was more religiously and geographically diverse than previously recognized. 
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Water Drops from Women Writers
A Temperance Reader
Carol Mattingly
Southern Illinois University Press, 2001

The temperance movement was the largest single organizing force for women in American history, uniting and empowering women seeking to enact social change. By the end of the century, more than two hundred thousand women had become members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), and numerous others belonged to smaller temperance organizations. Despite the impact of the movement, its literature has been largely neglected.

In this collection of nineteen temperance tales, Carol Mattingly has recovered and revalued previously unavailable writing by women. Mattingly’s introduction provides a context for these stories, locating the pieces within the temperance movement as well as within larger issues in women’s studies.

The temperance movement was essential to women’s awareness of and efforts to change gender inequalities in the United States during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In their fiction, temperance writers protested physical and emotional abuse at the hands of men, argued for women’s rights, addressed legal concerns, such as divorce and child custody, and denounced gender-biased decisions affecting the care and rights of children. Temperance fiction by women broadens our understanding of the connections between women’s rights and temperance, while shedding light on women’s thinking and behavior in the nineteenth century.

Water Drops from Women Writers features biographical sketches of each writer as well as thirteen illustrations.
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Well-Tempered Women
Nineteenth-Century Temperance Rhetoric
Carol Mattingly
Southern Illinois University Press, 2000

In this richly illustrated study, Carol Mattingly examines the rhetoric of the temperance movement, the largest political movement of women in the nineteenth century.

Tapping previously unexplored sources, Mattingly uncovers new voices and different perspectives, thus greatly expanding our knowledge of temperance women in particular and of nineteenth-century women and women's rhetoric in general. Her scope is broad: she looks at temperance fiction, newspaper accounts of meetings and speeches, autobiographical and biographical accounts, and minutes of national and state temperance meetings.

The women's temperance movement was first and foremost an effort by women to improve the lives of women. Twentieth-centuty scholars often dismiss temperance women as conservative and complicit in their own oppression. As Mattingly demonstrate, however, the opposite is true: temperance women made purposeful rhetorical choices in their efforts to improve the lives of women. They carefully considered the life circumstances of all women and sought to raise consciousness and achieve reform in an effective manner. And they were effective, gaining legal, political, and social improvements for women as they became the most influential and most successful group of women reformers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Mattingly finds that, for a large number of women who were unhappy with their status in the nineteenth century, the temperance movement provided an avenue for change. Examining the choices these women made in their efforts to better conditions for women, Mattingly looks first at oral rhetoric among nineteenth-century temperance women. She examines the early temperance speeches of activists like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who later chose to concentrate their effort in the suffrage organizations, and those who continued to work on behalf of women primarily through the temperance topic, such as Amelia Bloomer and Clarina Howard Nichols. Finally, she examines the rhetoric of members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union—the largest organization of women in the nineteenth century.

Mattingly then turns to the rhetoric from perspectives outside those of mainstream, middle-class women. She focuses on racial conflicts and alliances as an increasingly diverse membership threatened the unity and harmony in the WCTU. Her primary source for this discussion is contemporary newspaper accounts of temperance speeches.

Fiction by temperance writers also proves to be a fertile source for Mattingly's investigation. Insisting on greater equality between men and women, this fiction candidly portrayed injustice toward women. Through the temperance issue, Mattingly discovers, women could broach otherwise clandestine topics openly. She also finds that many of the concerns of nineteenth-century temperance women are remarkably similar to concerns of today’s feminists.

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Charles Olson's Reading
A Biography
Ralph Maud
Southern Illinois University Press, 1996

In this narrative account of the life and work of Charles Olson, Ralph Maud focuses on what the poet read as a basis for understanding the work he produced.

To an extraordinary degree, Olson’s reading and life were coextensive, according to Maud, who notes that Olson saw his written output over his lifetime as a total cosmology. An individual who rarely traveled, this major American poet explored the world and its history as well as the furthest reaches of the thought of his day through books.

Maud builds upon George Butterick’s annotated listing of Olson’s library, bought by the University of Connecticut after the poet’s death in 1970. The present volume, however, adds categories of books Butterick deliberately omitted: Olson’s childhood books and poetry by his own contemporaries.

Linking Olson’s books to his intellectual and poetic development at each stage of his career, Maud reveals such little-known but important connections as the contracted book project "Operation Red, White and Black" and Olson’s plan for the long poem "West"—two unrealized projects much later shaped into The Maximus Poems.

Maud also outlines the surprisingly multiple role of the painter Corrado Cagli, who brought home to Olson the significance of the Holocaust and introduced him both to the Tarot and to the theories of non-Euclidean geometry that Olson variously incorporated into his poems and essays. In discussing Olson’s relationship to Ezra Pound, Maud defines in some detail what Olson gained from Pound and what he repudiated.

Maud refutes the notion that Olson’s intellectual and creative powers declined during the last years of his life, demonstrating that during these years Olson developed his Jungian interest, his attention to early Greek thought, and a new concern for Northern mythology.

This chronicle of Olson’s reading from childhood to deathbed constitutes a critical biography of the larger-than-life author of Call Me Ishmael and The Maximus Poems. No modern poet is more revealed in his sources than Olson. Maud’s comprehensive and complete study provides a basis for new and fresh modes of thinking about Olson’s great achievement.

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Cumberland Blood
Champ Ferguson's Civil War
Thomas D. Mays
Southern Illinois University Press, 2008

By the end of the Civil War, Champ Ferguson had become a notorious criminal whose likeness covered the front pages of Harper’s Weekly, Leslie’s Illustrated, and other newspapers across the country. His crime? Using the war as an excuse to steal, plunder, and murder Union civilians and soldiers.

Cumberland Blood: Champ Ferguson’s Civil War offers insights into Ferguson's lawless brutality and a lesser-known aspect of the Civil War, the bitter guerrilla conflict in the Appalachian highlands, extending from the Carolinas through Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia. This compelling volume delves into the violent story of Champ Ferguson, who acted independently of the Confederate army in a personal war that eventually garnered the censure of Confederate officials.

Author Thomas D. Mays traces Ferguson's life in the Cumberland highlands of southern Kentucky, where—even before the Civil War began—he had a reputation as a vicious killer.

Ferguson, a rising slave owner, sided with the Confederacy while many of his neighbors and family members took up arms for the Union. For Ferguson and others in the highlands, the war would not be decided on the distant fields of Shiloh or Gettysburg: it would be local—and personal.

Cumberland Blood describes how Unionists drove Ferguson from his home in Kentucky into Tennessee, where he banded together with other like-minded Southerners to drive the Unionists from the region. Northern sympathizers responded, and a full-scale guerrilla war erupted along the border in 1862. Mays notes that Ferguson's status in the army was never clear, and he skillfully details how raiders picked up Ferguson's gang to work as guides and scouts. In 1864, Ferguson and his gang were incorporated into the Confederate army, but the rogue soldier continued operating as an outlaw, murdering captured Union prisoners after the Battle of Saltville, Virginia.

Cumberland Blood, enhanced by twenty-one illustrations, is an illuminating assessment of one of the Civil War's most ruthless men.

Ferguson's arrest, trial, and execution after the war captured the attention of the nation in

1865, but his story has been largely forgotten. Cumberland Blood: Champ Ferguson's Civil War returns the story of Ferguson's private civil war to its place in history.

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The Black Struggle for Public Schooling in Nineteenth-Century Illinois
Robert L. McCaul
Southern Illinois University Press, 1987

In the pre-Civil War and Civil War periods the Illinois black code deprived blacks of suffrage and court rights, and the Illinois Free Schools Act kept most black children out of public schooling. But, as McCaul documents, they did not sit idly by. They applied the concepts of “bargaining power” (rewarding, punishing, and dialectical) and the American ideal of “community” to participate in winning two major victories during this era.

By the use of dialectical power, exerted mainly via John Jones’ tract, The Black Laws of Illinois, they helped secure the repeal of the state’s black code; by means of punishing power, mainly through boycotts and ‘‘invasions,’’ they exerted pressures that brought a cancellation of the Chicago public school policy of racial segregation.

McCaul makes clear that the blacks’ struggle for school rights is but one of a number of such struggles waged by disadvantaged groups (women, senior citizens, ethnics, and immigrants). He postulates a “stage’’ pattern for the history of the black struggle—a pattern of efforts by federal and state courts to change laws and constitutions, followed by efforts to entice, force, or persuade local authorities to comply with the laws and constitutional articles and with the decrees of the courts.

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Onward to Chicago
Freedom Seekers and the Underground Railroad in Northeastern Illinois
Larry A. McClellan
Southern Illinois University Press, 2023
WINNER, 2023 Underground Railroad Free Press Hortense Simmons Memorial Prize for the Advancement of Knowledge!

Uncovering stories of the freedom network in northeastern Illinois

Decades before the Civil War, Illinois’s status as a free state beckoned enslaved people, particularly those in Kentucky and Missouri, to cross porous river borders and travel toward new lives. While traditional histories of the Underground Railroad in Illinois start in 1839, and focus largely on the romanticized tales of white men, Larry A. McClellan reframes the story, not only introducing readers to earlier freedom seekers, but also illustrating that those who bravely aided them were Black and white, men and women. McClellan features dozens of individuals who made dangerous journeys to reach freedom as well as residents in Chicago and across northeastern Illinois who made a deliberate choice to break the law to help.

Onward to Chicago charts the evolution of the northeastern Illinois freedom network and shows how, despite its small Black community, Chicago emerged as a point of refuge. The 1848 completion of the I & M Canal and later the Chicago to Detroit train system created more opportunities for Black men, women, and children to escape slavery. From eluding authorities to confronting kidnapping bands working out of St. Louis and southern Illinois, these stories of valor are inherently personal. Through deep research into local sources, McClellan presents the engrossing, entwined journeys of freedom seekers and the activists in Chicagoland who supported them.

McClellan includes specific freedom seeker journey stories and introduces Black and white activists who provided aid in a range of communities along particular routes. This narrative highlights how significant biracial collaboration led to friendships as Black and white abolitionists worked together to provide support for freedom seekers traveling through the area and ultimately to combat slavery in the United States.
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Gorgias and the New Sophistic Rhetoric
Bruce McComiskey
Southern Illinois University Press, 2002

In Gorgias and the New Sophistic Rhetoric, Bruce McComiskey achieves three rhetorical goals: he treats a single sophist's rhetorical technê (art) in the context of the intellectual upheavals of fifth-century bce Greece, thus avoiding the problem of generalizing about a disparate group of individuals; he argues that we must abandon Platonic assumptions regarding the sophists in general and Gorgias in particular, opting instead for a holistic reading of the Gorgianic fragments; and he reexamines the practice of appropriating sophistic doctrines, particularly those of Gorgias, in light of the new interpretation of Gorgianic rhetoric offered in this book.

In the first two chapters, McComiskey deals with a misconception based on selective and Platonic readings of the extant fragments: that Gorgias's rhetorical technê involves the deceptive practice of manipulating public opinion. This popular and ultimately misleading interpretation of Gorgianic doctrines has been the basis for many neosophistic appropriations. The final three chapters deal with the nature and scope of neosophistic rhetoric in light of the non-Platonic and holistic interpretation of Gorgianic rhetoric McComiskey postulates in his opening chapters. He concludes by examining the future of communication studies to discover what roles neosophistic doctrines might play in the twenty-first century.

McComiskey also provides a selective bibliography of scholarship on sophistic rhetoric and philosophy in English since 1900.

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Rhetorical Delivery as Technological Discourse
A Cross-Historical Study
Ben McCorkle
Southern Illinois University Press, 2012

According to Ben McCorkle, the rhetorical canon of delivery—traditionally seen as the aspect of oratory pertaining to vocal tone, inflection, and physical gesture—has undergone a period of renewal within the last few decades to include the array of typefaces, color palettes, graphics, and other design elements used to convey a message to a chosen audience. McCorkle posits that this redefinition, while a noteworthy moment of modern rhetorical theory, is just the latest instance in a historical pattern of interaction between rhetoric and technology. In Rhetorical

Delivery as Technological Discourse: A Cross-Historical Study, McCorkle explores the symbiotic relationship between delivery and technologies of writing and communication. Aiming to enhance historical understanding by demonstrating how changes in writing technology have altered our conception of delivery, McCorkle reveals the ways in which oratory and the tools of written expression have directly affected one another throughout the ages.

To make his argument, the author examines case studies from significant historical moments in the Western  rhetorical tradition. Beginning with the ancient Greeks, McCorkle illustrates how the increasingly literate Greeks developed rhetorical theories intended for oratory that incorporated “writerly” tendencies, diminishing delivery’s once-prime status in the process. Also explored is the near-eradication of rhetorical delivery in the mid-fifteenth century—the period of transition from late manuscript to early print culture—and the implications of the burgeoning

print culture during the nineteenth century.

McCorkle then investigates the declining interest in delivery as technology designed to replace the human voice and gesture became prominent at the beginning of the 1900s. Situating scholarship on delivery within a broader  postmodern structure, he moves on to a discussion of the characteristics of contemporary hypertextual and digital communication and its role in reviving the canon, while also anticipating the future of communication technologies, the likely shifts in attitude toward delivery, and the implications of both on the future of teaching rhetoric.

Rhetorical Delivery as Technological Discourse traces a long-view perspective of rhetorical history to present readers a productive reading of the volatile treatment of delivery alongside the parallel history of writing and communication technologies. This rereading will expand knowledge of the canon by not only offering the most thorough treatment of the history of rhetorical delivery available but also inviting conversation about the reciprocal impacts of rhetorical theory and written communication on each other throughout this history.

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Mary Lincoln Demystified
Frequently Asked Questions about Abraham’s Wife
Donna D. McCreary
Southern Illinois University Press, 2022
WINNER, 2023 Illinois State Historical Society Superior Achievement Award in “Books, Scholarly”!

Answering the most enigmatic questions about Mary Lincoln’s life

After portraying Mary Lincoln in hundreds of performances and giving lectures over a more than thirty-year career, Donna D. McCreary has fielded every imaginable inquiry about the First Lady. Gathered here, readers will find answers to the most frequently asked questions to come from live audiences. This first question-and-answer book arises directly from a public’s enduring curiosity with one the country’s most important historical figures. Decades of conversations with audiences, scholars, and relatives of the Todd family frame McCreary’s intimate and devoted research to offer a new and unique portrait of the most tragic First Lady. 

Though Mary has been portrayed in books and film, McCreary’s book contains information not found elsewhere—details others have overlooked and those that would not fit well into a narrative history—such as lists of Mary’s beaus, servants, and the people the Todd family enslaved; appendixes that present mini-biographies of families and friends; and a uniquely thorough timeline. Mary Lincoln Demystified covers areas in which McCreary’s audiences have expressed the most interest: Mary’s sanity, her family relationships, her views on slavery and African Americans, her personality and habits, and what happened to her possessions and children after she died.

While sympathetic to the woman she portrayed for two decades, McCreary examines both sides of controversial issues and presents the facts with her trademark style and flair. More than a good read, McCreary’s Q&A factbook, based as it is on decades of extensive research in primary and secondary sources, will be the definitive resource for answers about Mary for years to come.
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Before Mark Twain
A Sampler of Old, Old Times on the Mississippi
John Francis McDermott
Southern Illinois University Press, 1998

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Adam Smith
The Rhetoric of Propriety
Stephen J McKenna
Southern Illinois University Press, 2006

front cover of A Decisive Decade
A Decisive Decade
An Insider's View of the Chicago Civil Rights Movement during the 1960s
Robert B McKersie
Southern Illinois University Press, 2013

The deeply personal story of a historic time in Chicago, Robert B. McKersie’s A Decisive Decade follows the unfolding action of the Civil Rights Movement as it played out in the Windy City. McKersie’s participation as a white activist for black rights offers a unique, firsthand viewpoint on the debates, boycotts, marches, and negotiations that would forever change the face of race relations in Chicago and the United States at large.

Described within are McKersie’s intimate observations on events as they developed during his participation in such historic occasions as the impassioned marches for open housing in Chicago; the campaign to end school segregation under Chicago Schools Superintendent Benjamin Willis; Operation Breadbasket’s push to develop economic opportunities for black citizens; and dialogs with corporations to provide more jobs for blacks in Chicago. In addition, McKersie provides up close and personal descriptions of the iconic Civil Rights leaders who spearheaded some of the most formative battles of Chicago’s Civil Rights movement, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Reverend Jesse Jackson, Timuel Black Jr. and W. Alvin Pitcher. The author illumines the tensions experienced by two major institutions in responding to the demands of the civil rights movement: the university and the church. Packed with historical detail and personal anecdotes of these history-making years, A Decisive Decade offers a never-before-seen perspective on one of our nation’s most tumultuous eras. 

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Notes on the Heart
Affective Issues in the Writing Classroom
Susan McLeod
Southern Illinois University Press, 1997

It has long been recognized that affect (that is, the noncognitive aspect of mental activity) plays a large role in writing and in learning to write. According to Susan H. McLeod, however, the model that has been most used for empirical research on the writing process is based on cognitive psychology and does not take into account affective phenomena. Nor does the social constructionist view of the writing process acknowledge the affective realm except in a very general way. To understand the complete picture, McLeod insists, we need to explore how cognitive, affective, and social elements interact as people write.

In this book, McLeod follows a group of students through a semester of writing assignments, tracking the students’ progress and examining the affective elements relevant to their writing. To facilitate future discussion of these phenomena, McLeod also provides suggested definitions for terms in the affective domain.

In a very real sense, this book is the result of a collaboration of three Susans: Susan McLeod, who researched and wrote the book; Sue Hallett, an instructor in Washington State University’s composition program whose classes McLeod observed and who helped provide much of the data; and Susan Parker, a graduate student who observed Hallett’s class and who ran a tutorial connected to that class. To provide a narrative structure, McLeod and her two collaborators have constructed a simulated semester, conflating the year and a half of the study into one semester and creating a class that is a composite drawn from seven classrooms over three semesters.

Although philosophers have had much to say about the affective domain, Notes on the Heart is based for the most part on research from the social sciences. Discussions of pedagogy, while meant to have practical value, are suggestive rather than prescriptive. The goal is to help teachers see their practice in new way.

Teachers will be particularly interested in McLeod’s discussion of teacher affect/effect. This section examines both the issue of the "Pygmalion effect" (students becoming better because the teacher believes they are) and perhaps the more common opposite, the "golem effect" (students becoming less capable because their teachers view them that way).

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Bottom of the Ninth
Great Contemporary Baseball Short Stories
John McNally
Southern Illinois University Press, 2003

Skillfully edited by John McNally, Bottom of the Ninth: Great Contemporary Baseball Short Stories collects nineteen contemporary baseball short stories from a successful mix of well-established writers, lesser-knowns, and a few up-and-comers. These stories are characterized by the same dramatic elements that draw people to the sport itself—the mythologizing of players, the obsessions and romance of the game, the bonds between players and fans, parents and children. From a key play, a missed catch, a chance lost, these are tales of characters facing high stakes and calls to action, metaphorically and literally, in the bottom of the ninth.

[more]

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Lacemakers
Claire McQuerry
Southern Illinois University Press, 2012
In Lacemakers, Claire McQuerry investigates the timeless questions of relationships, of loss and longing, and of environment both natural and manmade. This informal yet haunting collection juxtaposes a myriad of perspectives—public and personal, interior and exterior, sacred and secular—to explore the fathomless mysteries that abound between one human and another. From the metallic hum of the air conditioner to the thrumming of quail wings in the Arizona desert, from the necklace of brake lights on the freeway to the more dangerous and intimate highways of the human heart, McQuerry explores the impact of our environments, both urban and natural, on humankind. Spirituality clashes with modernity in the holiest of places, and we are relentlessly confronted with the irreconcilable otherness of our fellow man. Above all, Lacemakers returns obsessively to separations, offering searing insight into our inability to truly know another person, meditating on the subtle abysses that eternally divide us from others.
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Lincoln and Emancipation
Edna Greene Medford
Southern Illinois University Press, 2015

In this succinct study, Edna Greene Medford examines the ideas and events that shaped President Lincoln’s responses to slavery, following the arc of his ideological development from the beginning of the Civil War, when he aimed to pursue a course of noninterference, to his championing of slavery’s destruction before the conflict ended. Throughout, Medford juxtaposes the president’s motivations for advocating freedom with the aspirations of African Americans themselves, restoring African Americans to the center of the story about the struggle for their own liberation.

Lincoln and African Americans, Medford argues, approached emancipation differently, with the president moving slowly and cautiously in order to save the Union while the enslaved and their supporters pressed more urgently for an end to slavery. Despite the differences, an undeclared partnership existed between the president and slaves that led to both preservation of the Union and freedom for those in bondage. Medford chronicles Lincoln’s transition from advocating gradual abolition to campaigning for immediate emancipation for the majority of the enslaved, a change effected by the military and by the efforts of African Americans. The author argues that many players—including the abolitionists and Radical Republicans, War Democrats, and black men and women—participated in the drama through agitation, military support of the Union, and destruction of the institution from within. Medford also addresses differences in the interpretation of freedom: Lincoln and most Americans defined it as the destruction of slavery, but African Americans understood the term to involve equality and full inclusion into American society. An epilogue considers Lincoln’s death, African American efforts to honor him, and the president’s legacy at home and abroad.

Both enslaved and free black people, Medford demonstrates, were fervent participants in the emancipation effort, showing an eagerness to get on with the business of freedom long before the president or the North did. By including African American voices in the emancipation narrative, this insightful volume offers a fresh and welcome perspective on Lincoln’s America.

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Wright Studies, Volume One
Taliesin, 1911 - 1914
Narciso G. Menocal
Southern Illinois University Press, 1992

This inaugural issue is devoted to studies of Taliesin I. Designed and constructed in 1911 upon Wright’s return to Wisconsin from Europe, Taliesin I burned in August 1914. It thus became the most difficult Wright residence for Wright scholars to examine.

In this volume’s critical essays, Neil Levine offers a view of the different layers of meaning of Taliesin I; Scott Gartner explains the legend of the Welsh bard Taliesin and its meaning for Wright; Anthony Alofsin considers the influence of the playwright Richard Hovey and the feminist Ellen Key on Wright’s and Cheney’s thought of the period; and Narciso G. Menocal suggests that the Gilmore and O’Shea houses in Madison, Wisconsin, are a collective antecedent to Taliesin I.

To conclude the volume, Anthony Alofsin has written what amounts to a catalogue raisonné of the drawings and photographs of Taliesin I. Surprisingly, he finds no photographs of the living area and argues that those that have been published are in fact of Taliesin II.

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The IQ Mythology
Class, Race, Gender, and Inequality
Elaine Mensh
Southern Illinois University Press, 1991

Ever since Alfred Binet carried out a 1904 commission from France’s minister of public instruction to devise a means for deciding which pupils should be sent to what would now be called special education classes, IQ scores have been used to label and track children. Those same scores have been cited as "proof" that different races, classes, and genders are of superior and inferior intelligence.

The Menshes make clear that from the beginning IQ tests have been fundamentally biased. Offered as a means for seeking solutions to social problems, the actual measurements have been used to maintain the status quo. Often the most telling comments are from the test-makers themselves, whether Binet ("little girls weak in orthography are strong in sewing and capable in the instruction concerning housekeeping; and, all things considered, this is more important for their future") or Wigdor and Garner ("naive use of intelligence tests . . . to place children of linguistic or racial minority status in special education programs will not be defensible in court").

Among the disturbing facts that the authors share is that there is mounting political pressure for more tests and testing despite a court trial in which the judge stated that "defendants’ expert witnesses, even those clearly affiliated with the companies that devise and distribute the standardized intelligence tests, agreed, with one exception, that we cannot truly define, much less measure, intelligence." The testing firms have responded to this carefully orchestrated need with new products that extend even to the IQ testing of three-month-old infants. The authors stress that, if the testers prevail, there is little doubt that these and similar tests would be used "ad infinitum to justify superior and inferior education along class and racial lines."

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Grafters and Goo Goos
Corruption and Reform in Chicago
James L. Merriner
Southern Illinois University Press, 2008

Chicago’s reputation for corruption is the basis of local and national folklore and humor. Grafters and Goo Goos: Corruption and Reform in Chicago, 1833–2003 unfolds the city’s notorious history of corruption and the countervailing reform struggles that largely failed to clean it up. More than a regional history of crime in politics, this wide-ranging account of governmental malfeasances traces ongoing public corruption and reform to its nineteenth-century democratic roots. Former Chicago journalist James L. Merriner reveals the battles between corrupt politicos and ardent reformers to be expressions of conflicting class, ethnic, and religious values.

From Chicago’s earliest years in the 1830s, the city welcomed dollar-chasing businessmen and politicians, swiftly followed by reformers who strived to clean up the attendant corruption. Reformers in Chicago were called “goo goos,” a derisive epithet short for “good-government types.” Grafters and Goo Goos contends a certain synergy defined the relationship between corruption and reform. Politicians and reformers often behaved similarly, their separate ambitions merging into a conjoined politics of interdependency wherein the line between heroes and villains grew increasingly faint. The real story, asserts Merriner, has less to do with right against wrong than it does with the ways the cultural backgrounds of politicians and reformers steered their own agendas, animating and defining each other by their opposition.

Drawing on original and archival research, Merriner identifies constants in the struggle between corruption and reform amid a welter of changing social circumstances and customs—decades of alternating war and peace, hardships and prosperity. Three areas of reform and resistance are identified: structural reform of the political system to promote honesty and efficiency, social reform to provide justice to the lower classes, and moral reform to combat vice. “In the matter of corruption and reform, the constants might be stronger than the variables,” writes Merriner in the Preface. “The players, rules, and scorekeepers change, but not the essential game.”

Complemented by eighteen illustrations, Grafters and Goo Goos is rife with shocking and amusing anecdotes and peppered with the personalities of famous muckrakers, bootleggers, mayors, and mobsters. While other studies have profiled infamous Chicago corruption cases and figures such as Al Capone and Richard J. Daley, this is the first to provide an overview appropriate for historians and general readers alike. In examining Chicago’s notorious saga of corruption and reform against a backdrop of social history, Merriner calls attention to our constant problems of both civic and national corruption and contributes to larger discussions about the American experiment of democratic self-government.

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The Man Who Emptied Death Row
Governor George Ryan and the Politics of Crime
James L. Merriner
Southern Illinois University Press, 2008

George H. Ryan, Illinois governor from 1999 to 2003, became nationally known for two significant and very different reasons. The first governor in the United States to clear out his state’s death row and put a moratorium on the death penalty, he was also convicted and sent to prison on corruption charges. The Man Who Emptied Death Row: Governor George Ryan and the Politics of Crime details the career of a man who both enhanced and tarnished the image of the highest office in Illinois and examines the political history and culture that shaped him.

Author James L. Merriner explores the two very different stories of George Ryan: the brave crusader against the death penalty and the petty crook. An extensive analysis of the official record, exclusive interviews, and previously undisclosed incidents in Ryan’s career expose why the governor pardoned or commuted the sentences of all 171 prisoners on Illinois’s death row before leaving office and how he later was convicted of eighteen counts of official corruption.

This biography traces Ryan’s family history and the Illinois political climate that influenced his development as a politician. Although Ryan championed “good-government” initiatives—organ donations, tougher drunken-driving and lobbyist disclosure laws—he never overcame a reputation as a wheeler-dealer, notes Merriner.

Merriner goes beyond Ryan’s life and career to explore the politics of crime, highlighting the successes and failures of the criminal justice system and suggesting how both white-collar fraud and violent crime shape politics. A fascinating story that reveals much about the way Illinois politics works, The Man Who Emptied Death Row will help determine how history will judge Illinois governor George Ryan.

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Mr. Chairman
Power in Dan Rostenkowski's America
James L. Merriner
Southern Illinois University Press, 2002

The story of Dan Rostenkowski’s rise and fall provides one of the keys to how power is sought, won, exercised, and distributed in contemporary America, argues political journalist James L. Merriner.

A literal son of the Chicago political machine, Rostenkowski was installed in politics by his father, Alderman Joseph P. Rostenkowski, and by his mentor, Mayor Richard I. Daley. In his thirty-six year congressional career, he served nine presidents, forming close friendships with many of them. His legislative masterpiece was the 1986 tax reform law. Eight years later, he was indicted on federal charges for misusing tax dollars and campaign funds.

In his dealings with the man who tumbled dramatically from his high position as chair of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee all the way down to a cell in a federal prison in Wisconsin, Merriner finds Rostenkowski candid, straightforward, and authentic— "except when it came to his own finances."

Rostenkowski is not a complex man in need of psychoanalysis on the part of his biographer, and Merriner does not indulge in much of that. Purely, simply, and openly, Rostenkowski wanted power. He wanted wealth. He got both, and Merriner shows us how.

Merriner sees mythic qualities in Rostenkowski, characterizing him as the "tall bold slugger" of Carl Sandburg’s 1916 poem about Chicago. Noting that this master politician climbed to fantastic peaks only to fall hard and fast, Merriner points out that "Rostenkowski’s life ascended from power in the political science sense to tragedy in the classical sense." The Justice Department and the electorate sacrificed Rostenkowski as an embodiment of the excesses of big government. Like the Greek chorus of tragedy, major media reported the scandal to the masses.

Yet Merriner does not strain to make his subject fit a classical mold. He tells instead the "story of a great man who was also a little man, a statesman and a crook, an emotional man, an American original." This was also a man unbeaten by his troubles, a man who emerged from prison unabashed.

This illustrated biography is not authorized by Rostenkowski, who declined Merriner’s interview requests after June 1995. His sources are the public record, previous interviews with Rostenkowski and with many other sources before and after 1995, and his own political acumen gained from decades on the political scene.

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The Body Can Speak
Essays on Creative Movement Education with Emphasis on Dance and Drama
Annelise Mertz
Southern Illinois University Press, 2002

Movement is our first language, our universal language. Expression of body movement is the very basis of life as the nineteen contributors to The Body Can Speak: Essays on Creative Movement Education with Emphasis on Dance and Drama attest. Students use their bodies as an instrument of expression, and movement as medium; this means investigating space, energy, time, and motion in order to gain insight into these basic principles. At the same time they gain essential awareness of the self. Such work stimulates the senses and intellect, and develops a tangible new vision to satisfy the human need for aesthetic and artistic expression.

As editor of this collection, accomplished dancer and artistic director Annelise Mertz provides both an aesthetic appreciation for creative movement education as well as practical pedagogy for incorporating dance and drama into contemporary curriculum. Mertz has assembled here a definitive body of work from fellow artists and former students that speaks to the need to actively promote art as part of education.

The book gives voice to accomplished teachers, actors, dancers, directors, authors, and choreographers who share their experiences while they address creative movement education from preschool through college. Forty-eight photographs add an illuminating visual dimension to this wealth of stimulating ideas. The Body Can Speak provides a balanced and varied mosaic, with each essay offering evidence that creative movement education is vital for human development.

Contributors include Becky Engler-Hicks, Ruth Grauert, Anna Halprin, Joanna G. Harris, Margaret N. H’Doubler, Michael Hoeye, Murray Louis, Annelise Mertz, Jaime Nisenbaum, Carol North, Jeff Rehg, Shirley Ririe, G. Hoffman Soto, Emma D. Sheehy, Harold Taylor, Branislav Tomich, Dorothy M. Vislocky, and Joan J. Woodbury.

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Making the Heartland Quilt
A Geographical History of Settlement and Migration in Early-Nineteenth-Century Illinois
Douglas K. Meyer
Southern Illinois University Press, 2000

In Making the Heartland Quilt, Douglas K. Meyer reconstructs the settlement patterns of thirty-three immigrant groups and confirms the emergence of discrete culture regions and regional way stations. Meyer argues that midcontinental Illinois symbolizes a historic test strip of the diverse population origins that unfolded during the Great Migration. Basing his research on the 1850 U.S. manuscript schedules, Meyer dissects the geographical configurations of twenty-three native and ten foreign-born adult male immigrant groups who peopled Illinois. His historical geographical approach leads to the comprehension of a new and clearer map of settlement and migration history in the state.

 
Meyer finds that both cohesive and mixed immigrant settlements were established. Balkan-like immigrant enclaves or islands were interwoven into evolving local, regional, and national settlement networks. The midcontinental location of Illinois, its water and land linkages, and its lengthy north-south axis enhanced cultural diversity. The barrier effect of Lake Michigan contributed to the convergence and mixing of immigrants. Thus, Meyer demonstrates, Illinois epitomizes midwestern dichotomies: northern versus southern; native-born versus foreign-born; rural versus urban; and agricultural versus manufacturing.
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Del Otro Lado
Literacy and Migration across the U.S.-Mexico Border
Susan V. Meyers
Southern Illinois University Press, 2014

In Del OtroLado: Literacy and Migration across the U.S.-Mexico Border, author Susan V. Meyers draws on her year-long ethnographic study in Mexico and the United States to analyze the literacy practices of Mexican-origin students on both sides of the border.

Meyers begins by taking readers through the historical development of the rural Mexican town of Villachuato. Through a series of case studies spanning the decades between the Mexican Revolution and the modern-day village, Meyers explores the ever-widening gulf between the priorities of students and the ideals of the public education system. As more and more of Villachuato’s families migrate in an effort to find work in the wake of shifting transnational economic policies like NAFTA, the town’s public school teachers find themselves frustrated by spiraling drop-out rates. Meyers discovers that students often consider the current curriculum irrelevant and reject the established value systems of Mexico’s public schools. Meyers debunks the longstanding myth that literacy is tied to economic development, arguing that a “literacy contract” model, in which students participate in public education in exchange for access to increased earning potential, better illustrates the situation in rural Mexico.

Meyers next explores literacy on the other side of the border, traveling to Marshalltown, Iowa, where many former citizens of Villachuato have come to reside because of the availability of jobs for unskilled workers at the huge Swift meat-packing plant there. Here she discovers that Mexican-origin families in the United States often consider education a desirable end in itself rather than a means to an end. She argues that migration has a catalyzing effect on literacy, particularly as Mexican migrant families tend to view education as a desirable form of prestige.

Meyers reveals the history and policies that have shaped the literacy practices of Mexican-origin students, and she raises important questions about not only the obligation of the United States to educate migrant students, but also those students’ educational struggles and ways in which these difficulties can be overcome. This transnational study is essential reading for scholars, students, educators and lawmakers interested in shaping the future of educational policy.

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The Stars Are Back
The St. Louis Cardinals, the Boston Red Sox, and Player Unrest in 1946
Jerome M. Mileur
Southern Illinois University Press, 2013
In 1946, as the aftershocks of World War II still trembled across the globe, America returned to its favorite pastime: baseball. In The Stars Are Back, Jerome M. Mileur offers a fascinating account of this storied season and of the backstage battle that would forever transform the game of professional baseball. Mileur begins with one of the most famous clashes in major league history: the neck-and-neck race to the National League pennant between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Brooklyn Dodgers. As these two iconic teams engaged in a bitter struggle leading to the first-ever playoff to determine the winner of the National League pennant, the Boston Red Sox blazed a trail to the top of the American League to face the Cardinals in the World’s Series, as it was then called.

But while the nation was riveted by the return of its beloved baseball heroes, the game behind the scenes was just as dramatic. As the threat of unionization loomed and the Mexican League continued to lure players away from the United States with lucrative contracts, tensions between players and team owners mounted. The result was a standoff for control of the game that would culminate in the Magna Carta of baseball and the creation of standard contracts for players, ushering in the modern era of baseball.

Set against the backdrop of a country recovering from war, facing the new adversary of Communism, and absorbing the emotional impact of the atomic bomb, The Stars Are Back tells the story of a nation hungry for a return to normalcy and a game poised on the brink of new horizons.

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Textual Carnivals
The Politics of Composition
Susan Miller
Southern Illinois University Press, 1993

This is the first book-length study of the status of composition in English studies and the uneasy relationship between composition and literature. Composition studies and institutional histories of English studies have long needed this kind of clarification of the historical and political contexts of composition teaching, research, and administration.

Susan Miller argues that composition constitutes a major national industry, citing the four million freshman-level students enrolled in such courses each year, the $40 million annual expenditure for textbooks, and the more than $50 million in teacher salaries. But this concrete magnitude is not expressed in political power within departments. Miller calls on her associates in composition to engage in a persistent critique of the social practices and political agenda of the discipline that have been responsible for its institutional marginalization. Drawing on her own long experience as a composition administrator, teacher, and scholar, as well as on a national survey of composition professionals, Miller argues that composition teachers inadvertently continue to foster the negative myth about composition’s place in the English studies hierarchy by assuming an assigned, self-sacrificial cultural identity. Composition has been regarded as subcollegiate, practical, a "how-to," and has been denied intellectual rigor in order to preserve literature’s presentations of quasi-religious textual ideals.

Winner of three major book awards:

The Modern Language Association’s Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize

The Conference on College Composition and Communication’s Outstanding Book Award

The Teachers of Advanced Composition’s W. Ross Winterowd Award

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Trust in Texts
A Different History of Rhetoric
Susan Miller
Southern Illinois University Press, 2008

Trust in Texts: A Different History of Rhetoric challenges the accepted idea of a singular rhetorical tradition poorly maintained from the Athenian Golden Age until the present. Author Susan Miller argues that oratorical rhetoric is but one among many codes that guide the production of texts and proposes that emotion and trust are central to the motives and effects of rhetoric.

This groundbreaking volume makes a case for historical rhetoric as disbursed, formal and informal lessons in persuasion that are codified as crafts that mediate between what is known and unknown in particular rhetorical situations. Traditional, unified histories of rhetoric ignore the extensive historical interactions among discourses—including medicine, drama, lyric poetry, philosophy, oratory, and literary fiction—that have operated from antiquity across cultures that are historically and geographically joined.

Drawing not just on traditional rhetorical works, but also on texts from philosophy and literature, Miller expands the body of works to be considered in the study of rhetoric. As the first book-length study that calls into question the centrality of logos to rhetoric, Trust in Texts will change the way the history of rhetoric is viewed and taught and will be essential to scholars and students of communications, rhetoric, English, classics, and literary studies.

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Rescuing the Subject, 2nd Edition
A Critical Introduction to Rhetoric and the Writer
Susan Miller
Southern Illinois University Press, 2004

When it was first published in 1989, Susan Miller’s Rescuing the Subject: A Critical Introduction to Rhetoric and the Writer established a landmark pedagogical approach to composition based on the importance of the writer and the act of writing in the history of rhetoric. Widely used as an introduction to rhetoric and composition theory for graduate students, the volume was the first winner of the W. Ross Winterowd Award from JAC and is still one of the most frequently cited books in the field.

This first paperback edition includes a new introductory chapter in which Miller addresses changes in the field since the first edition, outlines new research, and surveys positions she no longer supports. A new foreword by Thomas P. Miller assesses the proven impact of Rescuing the Subject on the field of rhetoric and composition.

Situating modern composition theory in the historical context of rhetoric, Miller notes that throughout the eighteenth century, rhetoric referred to oral, not written, discourse. By contrast, her history of rhetoric contends oral and written discourse were related from the beginning. Taking a thematic rather than chronological approach, she shows how actual acts of writing comment on both rhetoric and composition.

Miller also asserts that contemporary composition study is the necessary cultural outcome of changing conditions for producing discourse, describing the history of rhetoric as the gradual and unstable relocation of discourse in conventions that only written language can create. She maintains teachers and historians of rhetoric must recognize that the contemporary writing they analyze and teach demands their attention to a “textual rhetoric” that allows theorizing the writer as always symbolically a student of situated meanings.

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The Selected Writings of John Witherspoon
Thomas P. Miller
Southern Illinois University Press, 1990
Considered the first significant teacher of rhetoric in America, John Witherspoon also introduced Scottish moral philosophy to this country and as president of Princeton University reformed the curriculum to give emphasis to both studies. He was an active pamphleteer on religious and political issues and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Editor Thomas P. Miller argues that Witherspoon’s career exemplifies the Ciceronian ideal, and the eight selections Miller presents from the 1802 American edition of the Works corroborate that claim. This paperback edition includes a new preface by the editor that surveys the scholarship published on Witherspoon over the past twenty-five years and discusses how Miller’s own perspective on Witherspoon has changed during that time.
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Entertaining the Nation
American Drama in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Tice L. Miller
Southern Illinois University Press, 2007

In this survey of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American drama, Tice L. Miller examines American plays written before a canon was established in American dramatic literature and provides analyses central to the culture that produced them. Entertaining the Nation: American Drama in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries evaluates plays in the early years of the republic, reveals shifts in taste from the classical to the contemporary in the 1840s and 1850s, and considers the increasing influence of realism at the end of the nineteenth century.

Miller explores the relationship between American drama and societal issues during this period. While never completely shedding its English roots, says Miller, the American drama addressed issues important on this side of the Atlantic such as egalitarianism, republicanism, immigration, slavery, the West, Wall Street, and the Civil War.

In considering the theme of egalitarianism, the volume notes Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation in 1831 that equality was more important to Americans than liberty. Also addressed is the Yankee character, which became a staple in American comedy for much of the nineteenth century.

Miller analyzes several English plays and notes how David Garrick’s reforms in London were carried over to the colonies. Garrick faced an increasingly middle-class public, offers Miller, and had to make adjustments to plays and to his repertory to draw an audience.

The volumealso looks at the shift in drama that paralleled the one in political power from the aristocrats who founded the nation to Jacksonian democrats. Miller traces how the proliferation of newspapers developed a demand for plays that reflected contemporary society and details how playwrights scrambled to put those symbols of the outside world on stage to appeal to the public. Steamships and trains, slavery and adaptations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and French influences are presented as popular subjects during that time.

Entertaining the Nation effectively outlines the civilizing force of drama in the establishment and development of the nation, ameliorating differences among the various theatergoing classes, and provides a microcosm of the changes on and off the stage in America during these two centuries.

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The Road Story and the Rebel
Moving Through Film, Fiction, and Television
Katie Mills
Southern Illinois University Press, 2006

In The Road Story and the Rebel: Moving Through Film, Fiction, and Television, Beat studies scholar Katie Mills examines how road stories, which have offered declarations of independence to generations of rebellious Americans, have been transformed by media, technology, and social movements. The genre, which includes literature, films, television shows, and several types of digital media, has evolved, says Mills, as each new generation questions its own identity and embraces the thrill of “automobility” (autonomy and mobility) thus providing audiences a means to consider radically altered notions of independence, even as the genre cycles between innovation and commodification.

This cultural history reveals the unique qualities of road stories and follows the evolution from the Beats’ postwar literary adventures to today’s postmodern reality television shows. Tracing the road story as it moves to both LeRoi Jones’s critique of the Beats’ romanticization of blacks as well as to the mainstream in the 1960s with CBS’s Route 66, Mills also documents the rebel subcultures of novelist Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, who used film and LSD as inspiration on a cross-country bus trip, and she examines the sexualization of male mobility and biker mythology in the films Scorpio Rising,The Wild Angels, and Easy Rider. Mills addresses how the filmmakers of the 1970s—Coppola, Scorsese, and Bogdanovich—flourished in New Hollywood with road films that reflected mainstream audiences and how feminists Joan Didion and Betty Friedan subsequently critiqued them. A new generation of women and minority storytellers gain clout and bring genre remapping to the national consciousness, Mills explains, as the road story evolves from such novels as Song of Solomon to films like Thelma and Louise and television’s Road Rules 2.

The Road Story and the Rebel, which includes twenty illustrations, effectively explores the cultural significance of sixty years of rebellion in film, literature, television, and digital media. Spanning media platforms and marginalized communities, the text offers new interpretations of canonical works and reintroduces forgotten works, revealing the genre to be more political and philosophical than previously understood.

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Tongue Lyre
Tyler Mills
Southern Illinois University Press, 2013

In Tongue Lyre, Tyler Mills weaves together fragments of myth and memory, summoning the works of Ovid, Homer, and James Joyce to spin a story of violence and the female body. Introducing the recurring lyre figure in the collection—a voice to counter the violence—is Ovid’s Philomena, who, while cruelly rendered speechless, nonetheless sets the reader on an eloquent voyage to discover the body through music, art, and language. Other legendary figures making appearances within—Telemachos, Nestor, Cyclops, Circe, and others—are held up as mirrors to reflect the human form as home. In this dynamic collection, the female body and its relationship to the psyche traverse mythic yet hauntingly familiar contemporary settings as each presents not a single narrative but a progressive exploration of our universal emotional experience.

[more]

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The Lives and Times of Bonnie & Clyde
E. R. Milner
Southern Illinois University Press, 2003
Relying on primary sources— oral history interviews, personal memoirs, newspaper articles, official records, diaries, and letters— E. R. Milner cuts through myth and legend to create this startling portrait of the real Bonnie and Clyde.
 
In his prologue, Milner introduces Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, showing them as they drive along a rural Louisiana lane toward the ambush that would put a dramatic end to their turbulent lives of crime. Milner then traces their backgrounds, noting the events that bring the two outlaws together. The ensuing adventures of Bonnie and Clyde featured gun battles, narrow escapes and captures, frequent moves, and, of necessity, several shifts in personnel over a short period of time. It was a life of wild action, betrayal, and sometimes even gallantry. In the abstract, an aura of romance surrounded this violent pair.


Although the mythology surrounding Bonnie and Clyde is charged with drama and fascination, Milner reveals the truth behind the bloody legend, carefully gleaning materials from obscure locally published accounts, previously untapped court records, and archived but unpublished oral history accounts from some sixty victims, neighbors, relatives, and police who were involved in the exploits of the infamous duo. And the truth proves to be sufficiently exciting. Romance aside, the Barrow gang carved a grisly swath through Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri. The string of deaths was long— and real: Akota, Oklahoma, sheriff severely wounded, deputy killed; Sherman, Texas, grocery clerk killed; Temple, Texas, man killed as gang attempts to steal his car; Joplin, Missouri, two officers killed; Alma, Arkansas, police officer killed; Crockette, Texas, prison guard killed; Miami, Oklahoma, police officer killed.



Milner traces this violent path until 23 May 1934, when Bonnie and Clyde die in an ambush. Even dead, they draw crowds and are buried in a circus-like atmosphere. In death they continue to intrigue us in ways few criminals had before or have since.

[more]

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Doctor George
An Account of the Life of a Country Doctor
George T Mitchell
Southern Illinois University Press, 1993

Dr. George T. Mitchell of Marshall, Illinois, shares with humor and compassion stories and reflections about his medical practice of fifty years.

Having grown up in Marshall, Dr. Mitchell writes of his early experiences in midwestern America: basketball rivalries, school-boy pranks, and the traditions passed down through a family of doctors. Dr. Mitchell tells of his brief detour to obtain a degree in mechanical engineering, his decision to pursue a career in medicine, and his medical school experiences at the George Washington School of Medicine before the days of antibiotics and sophisticated medical technology. He vividly describes his subsequent service in World War II as a young surgeon at a military hospital helping injured soldiers resume normal lives while enduring the frustrations and occasional horrors of military life.

After the war, Dr. Mitchell joined his father’s practice in Marshall, where, he observes, he was among sixteen physicians in a rural county with a population of less than twenty thousand people. Within twenty-five years, the number of doctors had dropped to only four. In this memoir Dr. Mitchell conveys his unwillingness to just sit by and watch the health needs of his community increase while medical and other services decline. He, instead, became a community activist, representing rural concerns to the state medical society, organizing the first emergency medical technician teams in the county, masterminding the planning of a regional medical center, campaigning successfully for improved highway safety, and spurring the extension of reliable telephone service throughout his area.

As Dr. Mitchell recounts the house calls, farm accidents, emergency surgeries, and family counseling that comprised the life of this country doctor, he offers the keen insights of a clinician trained to look beyond what others only see.

[more]

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Creating Historical Drama
A Guide for Communities, Theatre Groups, and Playwrights
Christian H. Moe
Southern Illinois University Press, 2005

This guidebook for transforming actual American figures and events into dramatic form has aided many communities and groups in writing, planning, and producing first-rate historical dramas. The new edition of Creating Historical Drama: A Guide for Communities, Theatre Groups, and Playwrights features updated examples of drama and dramatic activities from short indoor productions to large-scale, outdoor historical dramas; new material about funding, economic impact on communities, budgeting, and marketing; and current information on physical theatre development.


Responding to a national interest in dramatizing historical material in a variety of community settings, the volume begins with a discussion on the scope and sources of historical drama, as well as the reasons for historicizing drama. From there, it details the features of biography, pageant, and epic dramas, and takes on important issues such as historical accuracy and dealing with expository material. The handbook then provides assistance in composing drama, leading and organizing the theatre group, organizing the community’s resources, and evaluating the audience and the production site. Twenty-nine illustrations, with sketches by Darwin Payne and Ronald Naverson, augment the discussion.


Written for the nonspecialist and particularly useful to novice playwrights and directors, the volume is equally important for professional historians, educators, and theatre artists. More than a guidebook, Creating Historical Drama convincingly demonstrates that the genre is a beneficial and significant cultural phenomenon that not only educates and entertains, but also has the power to revitalize civic economy and morale.

[more]

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Volker Schlondorff's Cinema
Adaptation, Politics, and the "Movie-Appropriate"
Hans Bernhard Moeller
Southern Illinois University Press, 2002

Volker Schlöndorff’s Cinema: Adaptation, Politics and the “Movie-Appropriate”examines the work of major postwar Germandirector Volker Schlöndorff in historical, economic, and artistic contexts. . In spite of Schlöndorff’s successes with films like The Lost Honor ofKatharina Blum and The Tin Drum, as well as his acclaimed work in the U.S. with Death of a Salesman, Gathering of Old Men and The Handmaid’s Tale, this is the first in-depthcritical study of the filmmaker’s career.

[more]

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Acanthaceae to Myricaceae
Water Willows to Wax Myrtles
Robert H. Mohlenbrock
Southern Illinois University Press, 2008

Veteran botanist, scientific author, and professor Robert H. Mohlenbrock brings the full depth of his expertise and scholarship to his latest book, Acanthaceae to Myricaceae: Water Willows to Wax Myrtles, the third of four volumes in the Aquatic and Standing Water Plants of the Central Midwest series. This easy-to-use illustrated reference guide covers aquatic and standing water plants for the states of Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and Kentucky (excluding the biologically distinct Cumberland Mountain region of eastern Kentucky), from spearmint to wintergreen, from aster to waterwort.

The volume identifies, describes, and organizes species in three groups, including truly aquatic plants, which spend their entire life with their vegetative parts either completely submerged or floating on the water’s surface; emergents, which are usually rooted under water with their vegetative parts standing above the water’s surface; and wetland plants, which live most or all of their lives out of water, but which can live at least three months in water.

Mohlenbrock lists the taxa alphabetically, and within each taxon, he describes the species with the scientific names he deems most appropriate (indicating if his opinion differs from that of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service), common names, identification criteria, line drawings, geographical distribution, habitat description, and official U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wetlands designation as described by the National Wetland Inventory Section in 1988.

Acanthaceae to Myricaceae is an essential reference for state and federal employees who deal with environmental conservation and mitigation issues in aquatic and wetland plants. It is also a useful guide for students and instructors in college and university courses focusing on the identification of aquatic and wetland plants.

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Ferns
Robert H. Mohlenbrock
Southern Illinois University Press, 1999

Perhaps no other group of plants attracts more interest among both professional and amateur botanists than ferns. As early as 1846, when one of the first lists of Illinois plants was published, sixteen species of ferns were already known in the state. The longtime interest of a great many people makes the distribution of ferns better known than that of any other group of plants in Illinois.

This detailed account of ferns and fern-allies was first published in 1967 as the first volume in the series The Illustrated Flora of Illinois. Eminent botanist Robert H. Mohlenbrock has now revised Ferns to include twenty-five additional taxa of ferns that have since been discovered in Illinois. In addition, numerous nomenclatural changes have occurred for plants already known in the state.

The introductory information of Ferns includes discussions of the morphology and life history of the ferns and fern-allies, the taxonomic history of the group in Illinois, and the habitats where they can be found.

The semitechnical keys and descriptions, familiar to the professional botanist, have been simplified for the novice and are accompanied by a glossary and a profuse use of illustrations. A new key has been included for the additional ferns. Two general keys enable the reader to identify the order and the genus of the fern or fern-ally in question. One of these is designed for use with specimens that have sporangia; the other is for use with sterile specimens. The keys are composed of a hierarchy of characteristics for determining the order, family, and genus of any given specimen. Once a genus is ascertained, the reader can apply its key to more than one species of the same genus.

Each species has its own description, statement of habitat and range, Illinois distribution, map, discussion, synonymy, and full-page line illustration showing its diagnostic characteristics.

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Filicineae, Gymnospermae and Other Monocots Excluding Cyperaceae
Ferns, Conifers, and Other Monocots Excluding Sedges
Robert H. Mohlenbrock
Southern Illinois University Press, 2006

The second in a series of four illustrated guides to identifying aquatic and standing water plants in the central Midwest, this convenient reference volume includes descriptions, nomenclature, ecological information, and identification keys to plants in all of the monocot families except sedges—which are covered in the first volume in the series—that are found in Kentucky (except for the Cumberland region), Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, and Nebraska.

Monocots covered in this volume include ferns, conifers, grasses, rushes, orchids, duckweeds, irises, sweet flags, arrowheads, aroids, flowering rushes, pipeworts, frog-bits, arrowgrasses, naiads, pickerelweeds, pondweeds, bur reeds, cattails, and yellow-eyed grasses. Robert H. Mohlenbrock includes three types of plants: submergents, those that spend their entire lives with their vegetative parts either completely submerged or at least floating on the water’s surface; emergents, which are typically rooted underwater with their vegetative parts standing out of water; and a third category of plants that live most of their lives out of water, but which may live in water at least three months a year.

With taxa arranged alphabetically, the volume is well organized and easy to use. In addition, basic synonymy, description, distribution, comments, and line drawings show the habits and distinguishing features for each plant. Habitat and nomenclatural notes are also listed, as are the official wetland designations given by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Filicineae, Gymnospermae, and Other Monocots, Excluding Cyperaceae is a useful standard reference for state and federal employees who deal with both aquatic and wetland plants and environmental conservation and mitigation issues. It is furthermore an essential guide for students and instructors in college and university courses focusing on the identification of aquatic and wetland plants.

[more]

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Flowering Plants
Asteraceae, Part 1
Robert H. Mohlenbrock
Southern Illinois University Press, 2015

This, the first of three volumes on the aster family planned for the Illustrated Flora of Illinois series, recognizes 388 species in 119 genera, as well as 20 hybrids and 73 lesser taxa. In Asteraceae, Part 1, author Robert Mohlenbrock presents new and historic information in a clear and easy-to-read style. The volume provides an easy-to-use key to the genera and species and a complete description and nomenclatural and habitat notes for each plant, including its usefulness, if applicable. New nomenclatural combinations are shown for several species. The precise illustrations and detailed information allow for the identification of some of the most difficult to identify plants in the state—goldenrods, asters, artemisias, and fleabanes, among others. Includes 128 original illustrations by Paul Nelson.

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Flowering Plants
Basswoods to Spurges
Robert H. Mohlenbrock
Southern Illinois University Press, 1982

This is the fourth volume in The Illustrated Flora of Illinois devoted to dicotyledons, or dicot plants. Dicots are the greatest group of flowering plants, exceeding the monocotyle­dons, or monocots. Dicots produce a pair of seed leaves during germination while monocots produce only a single seed leaf.

This volume contains four orders and ten families of dicots. The orders included in this volume are Malvales, Urticales, Rhamnales, and Euphorbiales. Within the Malvales are the families Tiliaceae, Sterculiaceae, and Mal­vaceae. The families Ulmaceae, Moraceae, and Urticaceae comprise the Urticales. Rhamnaceae and Elaeagnaceae make up the Rhamnales. The Euphorbiales include only the Thymelaeceae and the Euphorbiaceae.

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The Flowering Plants
Flowering Rush to Rushes
Robert H. Mohlenbrock
Southern Illinois University Press, 2006

The second edition of Flowering Plants: Flowering Rush to Rushes offers new material, including a preface, seventeen new illustrations of the additional species now known from Illinois, a revised list of illustrations, and an appendix of the additions and changes since 1970 in the identification, classification, and location of the plants included in the first edition. This new edition of the first volume in the multi-volume series of The Illustrated Flora of Illinois—which provides a working reference for the identification and classification of these plant forms in the state—includes flowering rushes, arrowheads, pondweeds, naiads, duckweeds, cattails, bur reeds, spiderworts, and rushes.

In his introduction, Robert H. Mohlenbrock defines terms and procedures used in the identification and classification of this group of flowering plants referred to as monocotyledons—plants that produce upon germination a single cotyledon or seed-leaf and are often identified by their tall, slender, grass-like leaves. He outlines the life histories and morphologies of the representative monocots and illustrates the plants’ habits and frequencies in Illinois.

Geared to the amateur as well as the professional botanist, the volume includes a glossary of definitions and identification keys to classify the plants according to order, family, genus, and species. The identifying characteristics of each descending class are also given in detail. The morphology of each species is outlined along with data on frequency of occurrence, related soil and climate conditions, and history of past collections. Among the 125 illustrations are detailed sketches of the important features of each species and maps indicating the geographical locations of each species in Illinois.

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Flowering Plants
Lilies to Orchids
Robert H. Mohlenbrock
Southern Illinois University Press, 1970

A continuation of “The Illustrated Flora of Illinois” series, this volume features Illinois flowering plants. This series is designed to provide a working reference for the identification and classification of all the plant forms found in the state. This series is the first of its kind, as no other study of this sort has been undertaken in any other state, and as such, is an unparalleled contribution to its field.

In his introduction to this volume, Mr. Mohlenbrock discusses some of the terms and procedures used in the identification and classification of the plants. He outlines the life histories and morphologies of some of the representative monocots, and also illustrates some of their habits and frequencies in Illinois. Since these volumes are meant to be used by the amateur as well as the professional botanist, the methods and terms used in the text are explained. The directions for the use of the various identification keys are given so that even the novice plant lover will be able to identify the species encountered. For the uninitiated, a glossary is provided which gives definitions for all terms that might be unfamiliar.

All necessary aids to identification are included in the text itself. The identification keys make it initially possible to classify the plants according to order, family, genus and finally, species and the identifying characteristics of each descending class are given in detail. The morphology of each species is outlined, along with data on frequency of occurrence, related soil and climate conditions and history of past collections, and history of past collections. An illustration showing the more important features of the species in detail is included with the description, as well as a map indicating its geographical locations in Illinois.

This book will be invaluable to students, teachers and professionals; particularly those who are interested in observing the plants in their natural habitat. Those who use it will find it possible to obtain a broad view of changing plant forms as they relate to soil and climate variations throughout the state. And it will provide a delightful diversion for all who enjoy viewing beautiful forms in nature. A walk through the forest will become an opportunity for discovery and appreciation.

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Flowering Plants
Magnolias to Pitcher Plants
Robert H. Mohlenbrock
Southern Illinois University Press, 1981

This volume, the eighth devoted to flowering plants in the Illus­trated Flora of Illinois series, is the third of several devoted to dicotyledons, which include such well-known plants as roses, peas, mustards, mints, nightshades, milkweeds, and asters. Mohlenbrock here represents four orders (Annonales, Berberidales, Nymphaeales, and Sarraceniales) and fifteen families of plants. As in previous volumes in this series, the common names are those used locally in Illinois. An illustration of each species depicts the distinguishing features and the habitat in Illinois.

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Flowering Plants
Nightshades to Mistletoe
Robert H. Mohlenbrock
Southern Illinois University Press, 1990

This sixth volume of dicots contains three orders and eight families. The orders included are Solanales, Campanulales, and Santalales. Within the Solanales are the families Solanaceae, Convolvulaceae, Cuscutaceae, and Polemoniaceae. The Campanulales contain only the family Campanulaceae. The Santalales include the families Celastraceae, Santalaceae, and Viscaceae. As with each volume in this series Mohlenbrock includes a complete plant description, illustrations showing diagnostic features, distribution maps, and ecological notes.

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Flowering Plants
Willows to Mustards
Robert H. Mohlenbrock
Southern Illinois University Press, 1980

This eighth volume in the comprehen­sive Illustrated Flora of Illinois series is the seventh volume devoted to flowering plants (the eighth volume is devoted to ferns) and the second treating dicotyledons, which include such well-known plants as roses, peas, mustards, mints, nightshades, milkweeds, and asters. The previous volume on dicots, Flower­ing Plants: Hollies to Loasas, was pub­lished in 1978.

In the present volume, Mohlenbrock includes three orders of vascular plants encompassing five families. The orders are Salicales and Tamaricales, of the Salicaceae and Tamaricaceae families, and Capparidales, of the Capparidaceae, Re­sedaceae, and Brassicaceae families. In all, 44 genera and 117species are treat­ed in this volume, each species illustrat­ed in detail.

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Grasses
Bromus to Paspalum, Second Edition
Robert H. Mohlenbrock
Southern Illinois University Press, 2002

Since the publication of the first edition of Grasses: Bromus to Paspalumin 1972, twenty-two additional taxa of grasses have been discovered in Illinois that are properly placed in this volume. In addition, nu­merous nomenclatural changes have occurred for plants previously discovered, and many distributional records have been added. New keys have been pre­pared for each genus where additional species from Illinois are known. For new species, full-page illustra­tions are provided. This second edition updates the status of Illinois grasses. The book features 263 fig­ures from the first edition plus 21 new figures for this edition by Paul W. Nelson.

Genera of grasses included in this work are Aegilops, Agropyron, Agrostis, Aira, Alopecurus, Anthoxanthum, Avena, Beckmannia, Briza, Bromus, Calamagrostis, Cinna, Dactylis, Deschampsia, Elyhordeum, Elymus, Elytrigia, Festuca, Hierochloe, Holcus, Hordeum, Koeleria, Lolium, Milium, Paspalum, Pennisetum, Phalaris, Phleum, Poa, Puccinellia, Sclerochloa, Secale, Sphenopholis, Torreyochloa, Triti­cum, and Vulpia.

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Sedges
Carex
Robert H. Mohlenbrock
Southern Illinois University Press, 2011
Sedges: Carex is the fourteenth vol­ume of the Illustrated Flora of Illinois series and the sixth and last volume devoted to monocots—plants that have a single seed leaf, or coty­ledon, upon germination.
 
Since the volume’s original publica­tion in 1999, thirty-four additional species of plants have been recog­nized in Illinois. Some are discover­ies from recent field work, some are from more thorough searches of herbaria, and others are from differ­ent taxonomic philosophies.
 
For each species of Carex in Illinois, there is a full illustration showing the habit of the plant and close-ups of various vegetative and reproduc­tive structures that are crucial for the identification of the individual species. There is also a complete description of each species as well as a detailed discussion of the no­menclature and habitats. Range maps show the county distribution of each species in Illinois. A new and detailed key is provided for identification of the species.
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Sedges
Cyperus to Scleria
Robert H. Mohlenbrock
Southern Illinois University Press, 2001

This second edition of Sedges: Cyperus to Scleria brings up to date the identification of species of sedges in Illinois (except Carex) since publication of the first edition in 1976.

During the intervening years, several additions to the sedge flora of Illinois have been made, and many new distributional records have been added. Also, a large number of nomenclatural changes have taken place, resulting in several alterations of scientific names. New illustrations have been provided for all of the additions. 

In his introductory material, Robert H. Mohlenbrock discusses the morphology of sedges and the habitats where they can be found. Although the semitechnical keys and descriptions are familiar to experienced botanists, he has simplified them as much as possible to accommodate the novice in sedge identification. He has also included a new key to the sedges and to each genus in which additional species have been added.

For each species, Mohlenbrock has provided a description, statement of habitat and range, Illinois distribution map, discussion, synonymy, and line illustrations showing its diagnostic features. Sedges: Cyperus to Scleria contains 128 illustrations.

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Vascular Flora of Illinois
Robert H. Mohlenbrock
Southern Illinois University Press, 2002
The first flora of Illinois was prepared in 1846 by Dr. Samuel B. Mead, a physician from Augusta, Illinois. Between 1846 and 1963, several people published plant lists and floras for various parts of Illinois. In 1975, Robert H. Mohlenbrock published his first edi­tion of Guide to the Vascular Flora of Illinois, followed by a second expanded and revised edition in 1986.

 

This latest Vascular Flora of Illinois includes over thirty-two hundred species, an increase of almost three hundred since 1986. In addition, for the first time, taxa below the rank of species are recognized and may be identified by keys. Investigating seldom-visited patches of prairies, wetlands, and forested canyons, Mohlenbrock has added several native spe­cies to this flora. And while there has been extensive exploration for plants, Mohlenbrock has also re­searched the herbaria in an attempt to verify previous reports of records of Illinois plants.

 

Because of a reinterpretation of existing genera, the number of genera of Illinois plants has increased markedly. Recent biosystematic techniques have be­gun to substantiate the genera that botanists such as John Kunkel Small, Per Axel Rydberg, and Edmund C. Greene proposed nearly a century ago.

 

The sequence of groups in this book is ferns, coni­fers, and flowering plants, with dicotyledons given before monocotyledons. Within each group, the fami­lies are arranged alphabetically, as are the genera within each family and the species within each genus.

 

For each taxon recognized in this book, Mohlenbrock gives a common name if one is gener­ally used in Illinois. He follows this by an indication of flowering time for flowering plants and of spore-production time for ferns and their relatives. He also provides a habitat statement and a general comment on distribution in Illinois for each taxon. Synonyms for some other scientific names used previously for a taxon appear in italics. This book contains indexes both for common names and for family and genus names.

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Distribution of Illinois Vascular Plants
Robert H. Mohlenbrock
Southern Illinois University Press, 1978
This new distribution list— the first since Winterringer and Evers (1960)— brings up-to-date every vascular plant known to occur in Illinois as a native, naturalized, or escaped species, some 3,001 taxa of vascular plants within the boundaries of the state.
 
There are 251 pages of distribution maps included in this book. The plants are arranged alphabetically by genus, and under each genus alphabetically by species. The nomenclature follows Mohlenbrock, Guide to the Vascular Flora of Illinois (1975).
 
In addition, a list of synonyms applied to Illinois taxa by Fernald (1950), Gleason (1952), and Jones (1963) follows the distribution maps.
 
Finally, in order to gain an under­standing of relationships of the plants in the Illinois flora, all 3,001 taxa are arranged in a phylogenetic sequence at the end of the book.
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Cyperaceae
Sedges
Robert H. Mohlenbrock
Southern Illinois University Press, 2005

The first in a series of four illustrated guides to identifying aquatic and standing water plants in the central Midwest, this convenient reference volume covers the 183 species of Cyperaceae. Robert H. Mohlenbrock includes three types of plants: submergents, those that spend their entire lives with their vegetative parts either completely submerged or at least floating on the water’s surface; emergents, which are typically rooted underwater with their vegetative parts standing out of water; and a third category of plants that live most of their lives out of water, but which may live in water at least three months a year.


Mohlenbrock provides descriptions, illustrations, and ways to identify any plant in the sedge family (Cyperaceae) in the states of Kentucky (except for the Cumberland region), Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, and Nebraska. With taxa arranged alphabetically, the volume is well organized and easy to use. In addition, basic synonymy, description, distribution, comments, and line drawings that show the habits and distinguishing features for each plant. Habitat and nomenclatural notes are also listed, as are the official wetland designations given by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.


Cyperaceae is a useful standard reference for state and federal employees who deal with aquatic and wetland plants and environmental conservation and mitigation issues and an essential guide for students and instructors in college and university courses where the identification of aquatic and wetland plants is emphasized.

[more]

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Flowering Plants
Asteraceae, Part 3
Robert H. Mohlenbrock
Southern Illinois University Press, 2017
Flowering Plants: Asteraceae, Part 3 is the third and final volume in botanist Robert H. Mohlenbrock’s comprehensive sequence of books on the aster family in Illinois. In this volume, Mohlenbrock identifies 128 species in 49 genera with 11 hybrids and 57 lesser taxa. He provides an easy-to-use key to the genera and species and a complete description and nomenclatural and habitat notes for each plant, including its uses, if applicable. The book details the most important features of the species and includes common, locally used names. Synonyms that have been applied to species and lesser taxa in Illinois are given under each species.

In addition, Mohlenbrock has identified the overall range for each species in Illinois, compiled from various sources, including examinations of herbarium material and Mohlenbrock’s own field studies. The overall range for each species is given from the northeastern to the northwestern extremities, south to the southwestern limit, then eastward to the southeastern limit.

As important to amateurs interested in wildflower identification as to professional botanists and land planners, this last volume of Mohlenbrock’s Asteraceae is an essential addition to the esteemed Illustrated Flora of Illinois series.
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Flowering Plants
Pokeweeds, Four-o'clocks, Carpetweeds, Cacti, Purslanes, Goosefoots, Pigweeds, and Pinks
Robert H. Mohlenbrock
Southern Illinois University Press, 2001

Robert H. Mohlenbrock provides a definitive account of the pokeweed, four-o'clock, carpetweed, cactus, purslane, goosefoot, pigweed, and pink families in Illinois.

Flowering Plants: Pokeweeds, Four-o’clocks, Carpetweeds, Cacti, Purslanes, Goosefoots, Pigweeds, and Pinks is the fifteenth volume of the Illustrated Flora of Illinois series and the ninth devoted to dicots, or plants that have two seed-leaves, or cotyledons, upon germination. Each of the 141 plants is beautifully illustrated by Paul W. Nelson.

Nelson shows the full habitat of the plant and close-ups of various vegetative and reproductive structures that are crucial for the identification of individual species. Each illustration includes detailed drawings of the flowers, fruits, and seeds of the plant covered. Mohlenbrock provides a complete description of each species as well as a discussion of the nomenclature and habitats, and his fifty-three years of experience enable him to present little-known diagnostic features for many species. Range maps show the county distribution of each species in Illinois. Mohlenbrock includes a statement giving the overall range of each species in the United States as well as a detailed key for the identification of the species.

Flowering Plants contains many plants whose obscure flower parts make them exceedingly difficult to identify. The close-up illustrations of these parts will aid the user of the book immensely in identification of the species. Included are several species previously unknown in Illinois.

New illustrations, which include detailed drawings of the flowers, fruits, and seeds are presented for each species covered in this book. Mohlenbrock’s fifty-three years of experience enable him to present little-known diagnostic features for many species.
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Grasses
Panicum to Danthonia, Second Edition
Robert H. Mohlenbrock
Southern Illinois University Press, 2001

Since the publication of the first edition of Grasses: Panicum to Danthonia in 1973, twenty additional taxa of grasses have been discovered in Illinois that are properly placed in this volume. In addition, numerous nomenclatural changes have occurred for plants already known from the state, and many distributional records have been added. This second edition updates the status of grasses in Illinois. Paul W. Nelson has provided illustrations for all of the additions.

Because the nature of grass structures is generally so different from that of other flowering plants, a special terminology is applied to them. In his introduction, Robert H. Mohlenbrock cites these terms, with descriptions that make the identification of unknown specimens possible. Mohlenbrock’s division of the grass family into subfamilies and tribes is a major departure from the sequence usually found in most floristic works in North America.

Synonyms that have been applied to species in the northeastern United States are given under each species. A description based primarily on Illinois material covers the more important features of the species. The common names—Paflic Grass, Billion Dollar Grass or Japanese Millett, Thread Love Grass, and Goose Grass—are the ones used locally in the state. The habitat designation and dot maps showing county distribution of each grass are provided only for grasses in Illinois, but the overall range for each species is also given.

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Nelumbonaceae to Vitaceae
Water Lotuses to Grapes
Robert H. Mohlenbrock
Southern Illinois University Press, 2010

In this fourth and final installment in the Aquatic and Standing Water Plants of the Central Midwest series, veteran botanist Robert H. Mohlenbrock identifies aquatic and wetland plants in eight central Midwestern states, which include Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kansas, Kentucky (excluding the Cumberland Mountain region), Missouri, and Nebraska.

Nelumbonaceae to Vitaceae: Water Lotuses to Grapes contains 346 highly informative and technically accurate illustrations as well as ecological information, nomenclature, and keys for plants in the aforementioned families, including white water lily, fireweed, smartweed, mild water pepper, hawthorn, and wild strawberry. Mohlenbrock identifies and describes each plant in concise and readable prose and indicates its usual habitats and the states in which it occurs.

As with previous volumes, Mohlenbrock organizes each species into three groups: truly aquatic plants, which spend their entire life with their vegetative parts either completely submerged or floating on the water’s surface; emergents, which are usually rooted under water with their vegetative parts standing above the water’s surface; and wetland plants, which live most or all of their lives out of water.

With Nelumbonaceae to Vitaceae, Mohlenbrock completes the four-volume series organizing and identifying wetland plants in the central Midwest. The botanical series will aid many, from teachers and students to state and federal employees, focused on conservation efforts and mitigation issues.

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Vascular Flora of Illinois
A Field Guide, Fourth Edition
Robert H. Mohlenbrock
Southern Illinois University Press, 2013

This latest edition of Vascular Flora of Illinois includes over thirty-four hundred species of flora from Illinois, adding more than 250 newly-recognized plants to this definitive collection. Because cataloguing our heritage is foremost in importance among naturalists, this book compiles essential information about plants in Illinois. Mohlenbrock includes all known taxa native to Illinois either at present or in the past and all non-native vascular plants that grow spontaneously and appear able to maintain themselves year after year without cultivation. The sequence of groups in the guide is ferns, coni­fers, and flowering plants, with cotyledons given before monocotyledons. Within each group, the fami­lies are arranged alphabetically, as are the genera within each family and the species within each genus. For each taxon recognized in this book, Mohlenbrock gives us a common name if one is generally used in Illinois. He follows this with an indication of flowering time for flowering plants, and of spore-production time in the case of ferns and their relatives. He also provides a habitat statement and a general comment on distribution in Illinois for each taxon.

Containing information on Illinois flora not available anywhere else, this fourth edition of Vascular Flora of Illinois is essential for ecologists, environmentalists, and land developers. Those interested in wildflower identification will also find this guide helpful.

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Flowering Plants
Asteraceae, Part 2
Robert H. Mohlenbrock
Southern Illinois University Press, 2019
In this second volume on the aster family, botanist Robert H. Mohlenbrock recognizes 133 species in 42 genera, as well as 7 hybrids and 29 lesser taxa. Flowering Plants: Asteraceae, Part 2 provides an easy-to-use key to the genera and species and a complete description and nomenclatural and habitat notes for each plant, including its usefulness, if applicable. The book details the most important features of the species and includes common, locally used names. Synonyms that have been applied to species and lesser taxa in Illinois are given for each species.
 
In addition, Mohlenbrock has identified the overall range for each species in Illinois, compiled from various sources, including examinations of herbarium material and Mohlenbrock’s own field studies. The range is given from the northeastern to the northwestern extremities, south to the southwestern limit, and then eastward to the southeastern limit. 
 
As important to amateurs interested in wildflower identification as to botanists and land planners, this second volume of Mohlenbrock’s Asteraceae is an essential addition to the esteemed Illustrated Flora of Illinois series.
 
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Sedges
Carex
Robert H. Mohlenbrock
Southern Illinois University Press, 1999
Sedges: Carex is the fourteenth volume of the Illustrated Flora of Illinois series and the sixth and last volume devoted to monocots, or plants that have a single seed-leaf, or cotyledon, upon germination. For each of the 159 species of Carex in Illinois, there is a full illustration showing the habit of the plant and close-ups of various vegetative and reproductive structures that are crucial for the identification of the individual species. There is also a complete description of each species as well as a discussion of the nomenclature and habitats. Range maps show the county distribution of each species in Illinois. A detailed key is provided for identification of the species.



Unique in several respects, Carex is by far the most numerous genus of plants in Illinois. Because of the vast number of species, the similarity of many of the species, and the relatively small size of the critical reproductive structures, the members of this genus are extremely confusing to identify. This book, with its detailed descriptions, key, and precise illustrations, should aid the interested person in the identification of these plants.



Since more than three-fourths of the species of Carex in Illinois are inhabitants of wetlands, an understanding of the genus is critical for those working in wetlands. Amateur and professional botanists will find the information extremely valuable, as well as environmental and conservation groups, garden clubs, farm bureaus, home extension groups, scout organizations, and school libraries. Persons working in natural areas programs and in rare and endangered species programs and those working on environmental impact assessments and wildlife management projects will also find the information pertinent.



 

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Flowering Plants
Smartweeds to Hazelnuts
Robert H. Mohlenbrock
Southern Illinois University Press, 2009

Since the publication of the first edition of Smartweeds to Hazelnuts in 1987, thirteen additional species and one hybrid have been discovered in Illinois.  In addition, numerous nomenclatural changes have occurred for plants already known.

This second edition updates the status of the Polygonaceae, Hamamelidaceae, Platanaceae, Fagaceae, Betulaceae, and Corylaceae in Illinois. Each of the newly discovered species has been added and is fully illustrated. Updated nomenclature as well as Illinois distributional data are included for each species. In addition to the fourteen new plant illustrations, the appendix contains new information on the descriptions and the geographical locations of plants in the first edition, and revised identification keys.

Robert H. Mohlenbrock and Paul M. Thomson Jr. have included a complete description, illustrations showing diagnostic features, distribution maps, and ecological notes for each plant included in this volume.

This new edition will be invaluable to scholars of botany as well as laypersons interested in observing plants in their natural habitat.

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A Flora of Southern Illinois
Robert H. Mohlenbrock
Southern Illinois University Press, 1974
This book will be of particular interest to those inter­ested in applied fields of biology, such as conservation, forestry, and wild life. The southern twelve counties of Illinois, a total of 4,355 square miles, comprise the area covered in this book. It is an area in which both northern and southern flora specimens abound. A wide variety of plant species grow in this area, and nearly 200 new plants not formerly identified with this area have been included in the listings.
 
Especially valuable to amateur botanists, the book is an important manual in identifying the plants that make up the native scenery of this region. Seventy-seven illustrations aid in identifying and understanding the plant communities.
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Plant Communities of Southern Illinois
Robert H. Mohlenbrock
Southern Illinois University Press, 1964

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Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina
Noe Montez
Southern Illinois University Press, 2018
Author Noe Montez considers how theatre, as a site of activism, produces memory narratives that change public reception to a government’s transitional justice policies. Drawing on contemporary research in memory studies and transitional justice, Montez examines the Argentine theatre’s responses to the country’s transitional justice policies—truth and reconciliation hearings, trials, amnesties and pardons, and memorial events and spaces—that have taken place in the last decade of the twentieth century and the first two decades of the twenty-first century.
 
Montez explores how the sociohistorical phenomenon of the Teatroxlaidentidad—an annual showcase staged with the support of Argentina’s Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo—acted as a vehicle for drawing attention to the hundreds of children kidnapped from their families during the dictatorship and looks at why the memory narratives regarding the Malvinas Islands (also known as the Falklands) range from ideological appropriations of the islands, to absurdist commentaries about the failed war that signaled the dictatorship’s end, to the islands’ heavily contested status today.
 
Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina explores the vibrant role of theatrical engagement in postdictatorship Argentina, analyzes plays by artists long neglected in English-language articles and books, and explores the practicalities of staging performances in Latin America.
 
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Desiring Voices
Women Sonneteers and Petrarchism
Mary B Moore
Southern Illinois University Press, 2000

“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,” wrote Elizabeth Barrett Browning in her Sonnets from the Portuguese.Desiring Voices: Women Sonneteers and Petrarchism proposes that we attend to the ways that women poets from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries have both echoed and transformed the literary and erotic conventions that strongly influenced their fates as women, wives, and lovers.

Mary B. Moore analyzes and provides context for love sonnet sequences by Italian, French, English, and American women poets in the light of current knowledge concerning attitudes towards women at the time they wrote. Through close readings of the poems combined with theory and criticism about constructs of women, historical events, and biographical contexts, Moore reveals patterns of revision among women poets that shed further light on the poets themselves, on Petrarchism as a convention, and on ideas about women. She focuses on Petrarchan sonnet sequences by women because the poems serve both as works of art and as documents that illuminate the range and limitations of female roles as erotic subjects (agents of speech, action, knowledge, and desire) as well as their more usual roles as erotic objects.

Combining theory with close reading, Moore enhances the value of many generally neglected poems by women. After a thorough discussion of the Petrarchan sonnet tradition, she analyzes the work of Gaspara Stampa, Louise Labé, Lady Mary Wroth, Charlotte Smith, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

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Dialogic Novels of Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge
Robert A. Morace
Southern Illinois University Press, 1989

Morace analyzes the novels of Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge together because they provide a dialogue of conflicting views, styles, and forms of the contemporary novel. This dialogue parallels the views of these two British novelists as critics.

Beginning as realists, as novelists of manners, as writers of campus novels, Bradbury and Lodge explore the possibilities and the limitations of realistic writing. Bradbury and Lodge, however, are not only heirs of English literary tradition. Both are also literary critics with a keen interest in recent critical theories. Morace shows us how the debate between Bradbury and Lodge over the nature and purpose of fiction and criticism has found its way into their novels. The realistic conflicts between civilian and military, English and American, pre- and post-Vatican II values gradually give way to an exploration of the semiotics behind such conflicts.

Morace finds Bradbury’s and Lodge’s works far more open-ended than the "doggedly indeterminate fictions" of many contemporary writers. Using Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism, he identifies the ways in which language and values simultaneously compete with and support one another in their novels.

This first book-length study of Bradbury or Lodge deals with all of their novels, including Changing Places, How Far Can You Go?, and Small World by Lodge, as well as Bradbury’s The History of Man and Rates of Exchange.

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Finding Susan
Molly Hurley Moran
Southern Illinois University Press, 2006

A woman’s heartrending search for her sister

Advancing with the suspense and deft reportage of the true-crime genre and fueled by the poignancy of a literary memoir, Finding Susan is Molly Hurley Moran’s pointed exploration of the disappearance of her sister and her family’s descent into the surreal world of psychics and detectives they once dismissed as the stuff of Lifetime movies.

Susan Hurley Harrison disappeared from upscale Ruxton, Maryland on August 5, 1994. Her body was discovered in the woods of northern Maryland two years later and her death was ruled a homicide. Although Susan’s case drew substantial media attention—including a spot on Unsolved Mysteries—no one, to date, has ever been charged with her murder. In piecing together a mosaic of Susan’s final years, Moran grew to believe her sister was a victim of domestic violence.

An academic by trade, Moran employs a scholar’s precision and razor-sharp feminist analysis in this valiant effort to come to terms with Susan’s life and death and to understand her sister in a way she did not when she was alive. “Finding” Susan refers to both the search for Susan's body and the search for the formative forces of her life.

Mirroring elements of high-profile cases from Laci Peterson to Nicole Brown Simpson, Finding Susan is one woman’s chronicle of loss and remembrance that arrestingly details the helplessness experienced by families of missing persons and calls critical attention to our alarming blindness to domestic abuse. Including appendixes of domestic violence resources, Finding Susan serves as a guide for concerned family members and friends of at-risk women to help identify the warning signs of domestic abuse. Thirty-six illustrations are a powerful complement to the volume.

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Lincoln and the American Founding
Lucas E. Morel
Southern Illinois University Press, 2020
In this persuasive work of intellectual history, Lucas E. Morel argues that the most important influence on Abraham Lincoln’s political thought and practice was what he learned from the leading figures of and documents from the birth of the United States. In this systematic account of those principles, Morel compellingly demonstrates that to know Lincoln well is to understand thoroughly the founding of America.
 
With each chapter describing a particular influence, Morel leads readers from the Founding Father, George Washington; to the founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and Constitution; to the founding compromise over slavery; and finally to a consideration of how the original intentions of the Founding Fathers should be respected in light of experience, progress, and improvements over time. Within these key discussions, Morel shows that without the ideals of the American Revolution, Lincoln’s most famous speeches would be unrecognizable, and the character of the nation would have lost its foundation on the universal principles of human equality, individual liberty, and government by the consent of the governed.
Lincoln thought that the principles of human equality and individual rights could provide common ground for a diverse people to live as one nation and that some old things, such as the political ideals of the American founding, were worth preserving. He urged Americans to be vigilant in maintaining the institutions of self-government and to exercise and safeguard the benefits of freedom for future generations. Morel posits that adopting the way of thinking and speaking Lincoln advocated, based on the country’s founding, could help mend our current polarized discourse and direct the American people to employ their common government on behalf of a truly common good.
 
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What Happened to Christopher
An American Family's Story of Shaken Baby Syndrome
Ann-Janine Morey
Southern Illinois University Press, 1998

A tragedy and a trial placed Ann-Janine Morey in an ideal position to write this wrenching exploration of the havoc wreaked on a family by Shaken Baby Syndrome. As an alternate juror in a 1995 murder trial in Murphysboro, Illinois, she observed a case that has become too common: that of an adult caregiver shaking to death a baby. A seasoned researcher and published scholar, in this book Morey witnesses the court proceedings firsthand, comes to know the families of the toddler intimately, and augments her observations and interviews through research into Shaken Baby Syndrome. The result is an agonizingly human tale supported by the evidence of science, sociology, and criminology.

Morey's What Happened to Christopher memorializes the short life of nineteen-month-old Christopher Attig (1992­–1994). To reveal what Christopher meant to those closest to him, Morey conducts extensive interviews with the child's parents and grand-parents. She also interviews the officials involved in the case to set the scene from a legal and police angle. Gary Lynn Gould, who was convicted of and imprisoned for killing Christopher, did not answer Morey's requests for interviews.

Morey characterizes her investigation as a "story of quiet horror because it takes place in a way and a setting that could be any town and many families." Nonetheless, Morey's narrative skill transforms Christopher into much more than an ordinary child, senselessly slain. He is Christopher, irreplaceable and unique. And by the time she reconstructs Christopher's final days and the aftermath of his murder, Morey has depicted the principals in the case so deftly and imbued them with such humanity that we experience their torment and their hope.

Morey also provides a juror's insight into the trial. By showing what happened to Christopher Attig and by presenting the accumulated findings relative to Shaken Baby Syndrome, she seeks through education to help prevent future deaths like Christopher's.


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