This study traces the shaping presence of cultural interactions, arguing that American literature has become a hybridization of Eastern and Western literary traditions. Cultural exchanges between the East and West began in the early decades of the nineteenth century as American transcendentalists explored Eastern philosophies and arts. Hakutani examines this influence through the works of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. He further demonstrates the East-West exchange through discussions of the interactions by modernists such as Yone Noguchi, Yeats, Pound, Camus, and Kerouac.

Finally, he argues that African American literature, represented by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and James Emanuel, is postmodern. Their works exhibit their concerted efforts to abolish marginality and extend referentiality, exemplifying the postmodern East-West crossroads of cultures. A fuller understanding of their work is gained by situating them within this cultural conversation. The writings of Wright, for example, take on their full significance only when they are read, not as part of a national literature, but as an index to an evolving literature of cultural exchanges.

This chronicle of life along the Current and Jacks Fork rivers in the Missouri Ozarks has been called "required reading for everyone interested in the future of America."  First published in 1958, it remains unsurpassed as an example of one man's love for the land and rivers around him and of a way of life all too much in danger of being lost to us.

The rivers described in Stars Upstream were designated by Congress in 1964 as the Ozark National Scenic Riverways, creating America's first national river.  Granting of national park status has changed the area in many ways--the river system is now heavily used for recreational purposes--yet the concerns presented by Hall about the dangers of commercialism, exploitation, and pollution are still very much with us.  Stars Upstream has played an invaluable role in promoting wise use of these rivers and should be read by everyone interested in preserving America's streams and wildlands as a national heritage.

Deep River uncovers the layers of history—both personal and regional—that have accumulated on a river-bottom farm in west-central Missouri. This land was part of a late frontier, passed over, then developed through the middle of the last century as the author's father and uncle cleared a portion of it and established their farm.

Hamilton traces the generations of Native Americans, frontiersmen, settlers, and farmers who lived on and alongside the bottomland over the past two centuries. It was a region fought over by Union militia and Confederate bushwhackers, as well as by their respective armies; an area that invited speculation and the establishment of several small towns, both before and after the Civil War; land on which the Missouri Indians made their long last stand, less as a military force than as a settlement and civilization; land that attracted French explorers, the first Europeans to encounter the Missouris and their relatives, the Ioways, Otoes, and Osage, a century before Lewis and Clark. It is land with a long history of occupation and use, extending millennia before the Missouris. Most recently it was briefly and intensively receptive to farming before being restored in large part as state-managed wetlands.

Deep River is composed of four sections, each exploring aspects of the farm and its neighborhood. While the family story remains central to each, slavery and the Civil War in the nineteenth century and Native American history in the centuries before that become major themes as well. The resulting portrait is both personal memoir and informal history, brought up from layers of time, the compound of which forms an emblematic American story.

In Epic of the Dispossessed, Robert D. Hamner offers an insightful, well-researched analysis of Omeros, the masterful epic poem by 1992 Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott. Rich and various, Omeros is an innovative extension of the epic tradition. Despite Walcott's insistence that he violates the formulaþhe notes his autobiographical presence in the poem and the absence of classical heroic figures and epic battlesþthe poem incorporates fragments of all the definitive characteristics of the genre. Hamner establishes that through its self-reflexive textuality, Omeros complements the time-honored tradition of the epic by giving voice to the marginalized peoples of the New World.

Hamner briefly explains his perception of the epic tradition and its viability in contemporary literature. He examines Walcott's writing career and traces his development of devices, themes, techniques, and a narrative style essential to epic poetry. Although Walcott could not have fully anticipated Omeros, a retrospective view of his writing reveals the consistent accumulation of the skills and broad scope required for such an undertaking. Hamner attempts also to show that Walcott has incorporated into his personal style not only the more obvious aspects of his formal education but also uniquely West Indian cultural material and forms of expression.

Hamner describes Omeros as an epic of the dispossessed because each of its protagonists is a castaway in one sense or another. Regardless of whether their ancestry is traced to the classical Mediterranean, Europe, Africa, or confined to the Americas, they are transplanted individuals whose separate quests all center on the fundamental human need to strike roots in a place where one belongs.

Walcott's vivid, lyrical verse is visually compelling and aurally appealing. He is, however, a richly complex, allusive writer dealing with a wide range of profound human problems. Given the exciting climate of postcolonial and postmodern criticism, Walcott offers students and scholars unparalleled opportunities for challenging, creatively interpretive insights. Epic of the Dispossessed will be a valuable companion to the work that may prove to be Walcott's crowning achievement. The fresh and original Omeros stands on its own merits; nevertheless, it deserves to be examined in light of both Western tradition and its Caribbean context.

Although the polis, or city-state, defined the essence of classical Greek civilization, evidence of its most basic characteristics is woefully inadequate. Now a leading scholar in the evaluation of data from the ancient world sheds new light on how those units were constituted.

Mary McLeod Bethune was a significant figure in American political history. She devoted her life to advancing equal social, economic, and political rights for blacks. She distinguished herself by creating lasting institutions that trained black women for visible and expanding public leadership roles. Few have been as effective in the development of women’s leadership for group advancement. Despite her accomplishments, the means, techniques, and actions Bethune employed in fighting for equality have been widely misinterpreted.

A forgotten account, written in the immediate aftermath of World War II, which vividly portrays the valor, sacrifice, suffering, and liberation of the defenders of Bataan and Corregidor through the eyes of one survivor.

The personal memoir of Colonel David L. Hardee, first drafted at sea from April-May 1945 following his liberation from Japanese captivity, is a thorough treatment of his time in the Philippines. A career infantry officer, Hardee fought during the Battle of Bataan as executive officer of the Provisional Air Corps Regiment. Captured in April 1942 after the American surrender on Bataan, Hardee survived the Bataan Death March and proceeded to endure a series of squalid prison camps. A debilitating hernia left Hardee too ill to travel to Japan in 1944, making him one of the few lieutenant colonels to remain in the Philippines and subsequently survive the war. As a primary account written almost immediately after his liberation, Hardee’s memoir is fresh, vivid, and devoid of decades of faded memories or contemporary influences associated with memoirs written years after an experience. This once-forgotten memoir has been carefully edited, illustrated and annotated to unlock the true depths of Hardee’s experience as a soldier, prisoner, and liberated survivor of the Pacific War.

Since the publication of the first edition in 1985, Missouri Government and Politics has been widely acclaimed as an outstanding text. This revised and enlarged edition updates all of the chapters to reflect the changes that have occurred in the state's government during the last decade. Five new chapters have been added on topics previously unaddressed: economic development, energy, and the environment; state policy making in higher education; funding for education in the 1990s; the statewide elected executive officials; and the types of law in Missouri.

The twenty-six chapters are grouped into four main categories: "The Context of Missouri Politics," "State Governmental Framework," "Policies and Policy Making in Missouri," and "Local Government and Politics in Missouri." Helpful additions to the basic text include more than fifty tables and figures, a glossary giving clear definitions of many governmental terms, and a bibliography on Missouri politics and government.

The authors have become experts about Missouri by serving as teachers and researchers in Missouri colleges and universities, as candidates and workers in Missouri political campaigns, and as officeholders and public administrators in Missouri state government. Their collective experience in Missouri politics ensures that this new edition provides the most thorough and comprehensive overview of the structure and inner workings of Missouri's political system.

The "Simple" stories, Langston Hughes's satirical pieces featuring Harlem's Jesse B. Semple, have been lauded as Hughes's greatest contribution to American fiction.  In Not So Simple, Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper provides the first full historical analysis of the Simple stories.

Harper traces the evolution and development of Simple from his 1943 appearance in Hughes's weekly Chicago Defender column through his 1965 farewell in the New York Post. Drawing on correspondence and manuscripts of the stories, Harper explores the development of the Simple collections, from Simple Speaks His Mind (1950) to Simple's Uncle Sam (1965), providing fresh and provocative perspectives on both Hughes and the characters who populate his stories.

Harper discusses the nature of Simple, Harlem's "everyman", and the way in which Hughes used his character both to teach fellow Harlem residents about their connection to world events and to give black literature a hero whose "day-after-day heroism" would exemplify greatness. She explores the psychological, sociological, and literary meanings behind the Simple stories, and suggests ways in which the stories illustrate lessons of American history and political science. She also examines the roles played by women in these humorously ironic fictions. Ultimately, Hughes's attitudes as an author are measured against the views of other prominent African American writers.

Demonstrating the richness and complexity of this Langston Hughes character and the Harlem he inhabited. Not So Simple makes an important contribution to the study of American literature.

Centering around the life and times of the revered American sportswriter Grantland Rice (1880-1954), How You Played the Game takes us back to those magical days of sporting tales and mythic heroes. Through Rice's eyes we behold such sports as bicycle racing, boxing, golf, baseball, football, and tennis as they were played before 1950. We witness ups and downs in the careers of such legendary figures as Christy Mathewson, Jack Dempsey, Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Jim Thorpe, Red Grange, Bobby Jones, Bill Tilden, Notre Dame's Four Horsemen, Gene Tunney, and Babe Didrikson--all of whom Rice helped become household names.

Grantland Rice was a remarkably gifted and honorable sportswriter. From his early days in Nashville and Atlanta, to his famed years in New York, Rice was acknowledged by all for his uncanny grasp of the ins and outs of a dozen sports, as well as his personal friendship with hundreds of sportsmen and sportswomen. As a pioneer in American sportswriting, Rice helped establish and dignify the profession, sitting shoulder to shoulder in press boxes around the nation with the likes of Ring Lardner, Damon Runyon, Heywood Broun, and Red Smith.

Besides being a first-rate reporter, Rice was also a columnist, poet, magazine and book writer, film producer, family man, war veteran, fund-raiser, and skillful golfer. His personal accomplishments over a half century as an advocate for sports and good sportsmanship are astounding by any standard. What truly set Rice apart from so many of his peers, however, was the idea behind his sports reporting and writing. He believed that good sportsmanship was capable of lifting individuals, societies, and even nations to remarkable heights of moral and social action.

More than just a biography of Grantland Rice, How You Played the Game is about the rise of American sports and the early days of those who created the art and craft of sportswriting. Exploring the life of a man who perfectly blended journalism and sporting culture, this book is sure to appeal to all, sports lovers or not.

Author Walt Harrington, award-winning writer for the Washington Post Magazine, lifts the masks of celebrity and obscurity to reveal the lives of some singular men and women--from actress Kelly McGillis to nocturnal satanist Anton LaVey.

Delving into the everyday lives of real, everyday people, Walt Harrington skillfully draws the reader into an intimate relationship with the men and women profiled in this powerful collection of stories--people like V. I. Smith, a homicide detective; Deane Guy, a stock car racer; Jackie Jordan, a social worker in family services; and Sheri D'Amato, a girls' soccer coach.

Originally appearing in the Washington Post Magazine, these stories, which capture a cross section of Americans, stand out in the field of journalism because of the unique way in which Walt Harrington uses unheralded, individual lives to elaborate on the great human issues of the day. In "Mothers and Daughters" three generations of women discuss how society affected the choices they made and who they became. "The Mystery of Goodness" follows a Harvard-educated lawyer who handles death-row cases for very little money because he feels the system is unfair to African Americans. In "To Have and Have Not" a young couple with two small children struggle to make ends meet. Harrington describes in detail the creation of a poem by Rita Dove, then United States Poet Laureate, in "The Shape of Her Dreaming."

Harrington has adeptly combined sociology and journalism into beautiful prose. As "literary journalism," the stories employ scene, dialogue, and physical description within a narrative framework. At the same time, they also adhere to all the traditional journalistic standards of accuracy, fairness, and balance. As a result, At the Heart of It represents a subgenre that is rarely practiced and seldom understood even within the profession of journalism.

All of these stories are snapshots, pieces of everyday life in America that are intended to be a mirror held to the lives of readers. These are not stories about which you can remain neutral; even the most casual readers will be moved by the glimpses Walt Harrington provides us of ourselves.

One day in the dentist's office journalist Walt Harrington heard a casual racist joke that left him enraged. Married to a black woman, Harrington is the father of two biracial children. His experience in the dentist's office made him realize not only that the joke was about his own children but also that he really knew very little about what it was like to be a black person in America.

After this rude awakening, Harrington set off on a twenty- five-thousand-mile journey through black America, talking with scores of black and white people along the way, including an old sharecropper, a city police chief, a jazz trumpeter, a convicted murderer, a welfare mother, and a corporate mogul. In Crossings, winner of the Gustavus Myers Award for the Study of Human Rights, he relates what he learned as he listened.

The long reign of Kansas City political boss Thomas J. Pendergast came to an end in 1939, after an investigation led by Special Agent Rudolph Hartmann of the U.S. Department of the Treasury resulted in Pendergast's conviction for income tax evasion. In 1942, Hartmann's account was submitted to Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., in whose papers it remained for the past fifty-six years unbeknownst to historians. While researching the relations between Pendergast and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Robert H. Ferrell came across Hartmann's landmark report—the only firsthand account of the investigation that brought down the greatest political machine of its time, possibly one of the greatest in all of American history.

Reading like a "whodunit," The Kansas City Investigation traces Pendergast's political career from its beginnings to its end. As one of America's major city bosses, Pendergast was at the height of his influence in 1935-1936 when his power reached not merely to every ward and precinct in Kansas City but also to the statehouse in Jefferson City and Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. It was during this time that the boss took a massive bribe—$315,000—from 137 national fire insurance companies operating within Missouri, opening him to attack by his enemies.

Early in 1938, an official in the Washington headquarters of the Bureau of Internal Revenue, a former Missourian, quit his job to accept private employment, but not without first tipping off a reporter from the Kansas City Star about Pendergast's bribe. The reporter immediately phoned Lloyd C. Stark, the governor of Missouri and a known enemy of Pendergast. Stark then went to Washington to inform President Roosevelt. Although the president had been a supporter of Pendergast, he now considered Stark a more important political ally. Roosevelt asked the Treasury Department to investigate Pendergast's income taxes. The intelligence unit of the Treasury Department put Hartmann, its best operative, on the case. Within a year, after the most minute of inquiries into checkbooks, serial numbers on currency, a safe-deposit box, and a telegraphed transfer of $10,000, Hartmann and his agents found enough evidence to convict Boss Tom.

More than a simple account of what the Roosevelt administration did to cause the collapse of the Pendergast machine, The Kansas City Investigation takes the reader through the ups and downs, twists and turns, of this intriguing investigation, all from an insider's perspective. More important, Hartmann's report provides historians and readers alike the opportunity to evaluate the machine era in American political history—an era that, according to the investigation, "proved the old axiom that `truth is stranger than fiction.'"

      At the turn of the twentieth century, the Kansas City Star was a trust-busting newspaper acclaimed for its crusading progressive spirit; fifty years later it was a busted trust, targeted in the most important antitrust action ever brought against an American daily. Now Harry Haskell tells the tale of the Star’s rise and decline against the richly textured backdrop of Kansas City—the story of how a newspaper and a city grew together and ultimately grew apart.

Boss-Busters and Sin Hounds takes readers into the city room and executive offices of one of the most respected American newspapers, whose influence extended beyond its own community to international affairs. Re-creating life at the Star from the inside, the book traces the shifting fortunes of a great newspaper and the compelling “power of purpose” it exerted from the birth of the progressive movement in the 1880s to the 1950s.

            This fascinating tale—with underlying themes of sin and redemption, high-minded ideals and gutter politics—is populated by a cast of larger-than-life characters, ranging from power brokers to presidents and including such Kansas City notables as Tom Pendergast, J. C. Nichols, and Frank Walsh. But at heart this is the story of three men with contrasting personalities and agendas who shaped the newspaper over more than three-quarters of a century: William Rockhill Nelson, among the last of the great “personal” editors from journalism’s golden age; the scholarly Henry J. Haskell, who led the Star to its peak of influence in the 1930s and ’40s; and Roy A. Roberts, who went on to combine the roles of newspaper publisher and political kingmaker.

Along the way, Haskell recounts such milestones as the Star’s role in the City Beautiful movement that helped transform America’s urban centers; the nation’s entry into two global wars; a bold but ill-starred experiment in employee ownership; and the paper’s on-again, off-again battle with Boss Pendergast’s legendary political machine. And he brings into focus issues that remain timely today, from social and political reform to the very role of newspapers in a democracy, while also drawing parallels with recent American history—disillusionment with liberalism, the hijacking of the GOP by the far right, America’s go-it-alone attitude—that are as alarming as they are instructive. 

As Haskell shows, the evolution of American journalism from crusading newspapers to pawns of corporate culture was already under way in the early 1900s and was substantially complete by midcentury. Boss-Busters and Sin Hounds chronicles the glory days of an illustrious newspaper as it opens new windows on a city’s history.

An introductory military history of the American Civil War, Shades of Blue and Gray places the 1861-1865 conflict within the broad context of evolving warfare. Emphasizing technology and its significant impact, Hattaway includes valuable material on land and sea mines, minesweepers, hand grenades, automatic weapons, the Confederate submarine, and balloons. The evolution of professionalism in the American military serves as an important connective theme throughout. Hattaway extrapolates from recent works by revisionists William Skelton and Roy Roberts to illustrate convincingly that the development of military professionalism is not entirely a post-Civil War phenomenon.

The author also incorporates into his work important new findings of recent scholars such as Albert Castel (on the Atlanta Campaign), Reid Mitchell (on soldiers' motivation), Mark Grimsley (on "hard war"), Brooks D. Simpson (on Ulysses S. Grant), and Lauren Cook Burgess (on women who served as soldiers, disguised as men). In addition, Hattaway comments on some of the best fiction and nonfiction available in his recommended reading lists, which will both enlighten and motivate readers.

Informative and clearly written, enhanced by graceful prose and colorful anecdotes, Shades of Blue and Gray will appeal to all general readers.

In 1997, John Stanchak, an editor at Cowles Enthusiast Media (now part of Primedia), realized his vision of “a publication that contained the best, most up-to-date scholarship on the [Civil] war, but was edited with the amateur historian in mind,” with the publication of Columbiad: A Quarterly Review of the War between the States. In the four years the journal was published, it strived to lessen the rift between the scholarly world of professional historians and the “popular” history with which the general reader is more familiar. Now, a selection of the essays that best represent the successful balance between “serious scholarship” and a narrative reading style preferred by the educated layman has been collected in The Ongoing Civil War.

In nineteenth-century America, many black women left their homes, their husbands, and their children to spread the Word of God. Descendants of slaves or former “slave girls” themselves, they traveled all over the country, even abroad, preaching to audiences composed of various races, denominations, sexes, and classes, offering their own interpretations of the Bible. When they were denied the pulpit because of their sex, they preached in tents, bush clearings, meeting halls, private homes, and other spaces. They dealt with domestic ideologies that positioned them as subservient in the home, and with racist ideologies that positioned them as naturally inferior to whites. They also faced legalities restricting blacks socially and physically and the socioeconomic reality of often being part of a large body of unskilled laborers.

James G. Blaine was one of the leading national political figures of his day, and probably the most controversial. Intensely partisan, the dominant leader of the Republican Party, and a major shaper of national politics for more than a decade, Blaine is remembered chiefly for his role as architect of the post-Civil War GOP and his two periods as secretary of state. He also was the Republican presidential candidate in the notorious mud-slinging campaign of 1884. His foreign policy was marked by its activism, its focus on Latin America, and its attempt to increase U.S. influence there.

James G. Blaine and Latin America asserts that Latin America lay at the heart of Blaine's foreign policy and his vision for America. David Healy examines seven major issues that collectively defined the secretary of state's methods, goals, and views regarding Latin America and, more broadly, the international role of the United States. Healy places his explorations within the larger context of Blaine's ongoing role as a national party leader, his relations with the presidents under whom he served, and the responses of his predecessors and successors toward the issues at hand in Latin America.

The result is a deeper understanding of Blaine's ambitious vision for his country's international role, his energy and aggressiveness in moving to achieve that vision, and his effective efforts to transmit his worldview to the public. Blaine's emphasis on the importance of Latin America to the United States and his conviction that his country should be a world power influenced a new generation of leaders who, at the end of the century, would go beyond his goals and usher in a new era.

Available for the first time in paperback is the critically acclaimed Working with Truman, a warm and lighthearted memoir of what it was like to work behind the scenes in the White House during Truman's term as president. Focusing on the strengths and weaknesses of those who worked closely with Truman and on the Truman not seen by the public, Hechler provides insight into one of our greatest presidents.

   When an idealistic American named Edmund Stevens arrived in Moscow in 1934, his only goal was to do his part for the advancement of international Communism. His job writing propaganda led to a reporting career and an eventual Pulitzer Prize in 1950 for his uncensored descriptions of Stalin’s purges. This book tells how Stevens became an accidental journalist—and the dean of the Moscow press corps.

            The longest-serving American-born correspondent working from within the Soviet Union, Stevens was passionate about influencing the way his stateside readers thought about Russia’s citizens, government, and social policy. Cheryl Heckler now traces a career that spanned half a century and four continents, focusing on Stevens’s professional work and life from 1934 to 1945 to tell how he set the standards for reporting on Soviet affairs for the Christian Science Monitor.

            Stevens was a keen observer and thoughtful commentator, and his analytical mind was just what the Monitor was looking for in a foreign correspondent. He began his journalism career reporting on the Russo-Finnish War in 1939 and was the Monitor’s first man in the field to cover fighting in World War II. He reported on the Italian invasion of Greece, participated in Churchill’s Moscow meeting with Stalin as a staff translator, and distinguished himself as a correspondent with the British army in North Africa.

Drawing on Stevens’s memoirs—to which she had exclusive access—as well as his articles and correspondence and the unpublished memoirs of his wife, Nina, Heckler traces his growth as a frontline correspondent and interpreter of Russian culture. She paints a picture of a man hardened by experience, who witnessed the brutal crushing of the Iron Guard in 1941 Bucharest and the Kharkov hangings yet who was a failure on his own home front and who left his wife during a difficult pregnancy in order to return to the war zone. Heckler places his memoirs and dispatches within the larger context of events to shed new light on both the public and the private Stevens, portraying a reporter adapting to new roles and circumstances with a skill that journalists today could well emulate.

By exposing the many facets of Stevens’s life and experience, Heckler gives readers a clear understanding of how this accidental journalist was destined to distinguish himself as a war reporter, analyst, and cultural interpreter. An Accidental Journalist is an important contribution to the history of war reporting and international journalism, introducing readers to a man whose inside knowledge of Stalinist Russia was beyond compare as it provides new insight into the Soviet era.

Robert Bechtold Heilman is one of the last survivors of a remarkable generation of American critics that included such literary giants as Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate, and Edmund Wilson, men to whom literary criticism was not a profession or an academic necessity but a calling. In a distinguished career that has spanned nearly six decades, Heilman has influenced generations of scholars and critics through his exquisitely written commentaries on subjects ranging from William Shakespeare to Thomas Hardy.

In The Professor and the Profession, Heilman looks back over his life and times from his perspective as both an academic and an American. Differing in theme and subject matter, the essays included in this collection are ultimately unified by the author himself. Whether the topic is football, Robert Penn Warren, or education, Heilman's generous and intelligent voice emerges on every page. Yet this collection is more than one academic's personal reminiscences; it is a reflection upon American literary history itself.

In the first section of essays, "The Self Displayed," Heilman reveals how he developed from a small-town boy into a distinguished critic and teacher, touching upon his participation in baseball and love of football along the way. "Writers Portrayed" and "Literary Types and Problems Inspected," the following sections, offer his opinions on the past and on the current state of American literary criticism, including personal portraits of such renowned friends as Eric Voegelin, Robert Penn Warren, Theodore Roethke, and Malcolm Cowley. The final section, "Education Examined," is an enlightening inquiry into the development of American universities in the twentieth century.

A fascinating chronicle of a significant academic life, The Professor and the Profession will appeal to a broad array of scholars, from young academics wanting to know where they came from to those of Heilman's generation who can appreciate this personal reminiscence into the world of letters.

  Although some critics of Eric Voegelin’s later work have faulted his failure to deal with the historical Jesus and to address the implications of Christianity for social and political life, the recent publication of Voegelin’s History of Political Ideas has allowed a more complete assessment of his position regarding the Christian political order. This book addresses that criticism through an analysis of Voegelin’s early work.

            In Eric Voegelin and the Problem of Christian Political Order, Jeffrey C. Herndon analyzes the development of Voegelin’s thought regarding the origins of Christianity in the person of Jesus, the development of the church in the works of Paul, and the relationship between an immanent institutional order symbolizing the divine presence and the struggle for social and political order. Focusing on the tension between a spiritual phenomenon based on Pauline faith and the institutionalization of that experience in the church, Herndon offers one of the first examinations of the relationship of the History of Political Ideas to Voegelin’s larger body of work.

            In his wide-ranging study, Herndon explores Voegelin’s examination of the problem of Christian political order from the inception of Christianity through the Great Reformation. He also presents a clarification of Voegelin’s theory of civilizational foundation and of Voegelin’s philosophy of history with regard to Christianity and Western political order.

            Herndon addresses not only the nagging problem in Voegelin scholarship regarding his relationship with the historical Jesus but also the “Pauline compromises with the world” that enabled Christianity to become the instrument by which the West was civilized. He also shows that Voegelin’s interpretation of the historical pressures released by the Great Reformation is important to an understanding of his later work regarding the negative effect of Christian symbols in the creation of ideological disorder.

            Eric Voegelin and the Problem of Christian Political Order clarifies issues in Voegelin studies regarding the intersection between political theory and Christian concerns, addressing the relation of religious experience to the public sphere of political life in the West and helping to explain Voegelin’s contention that the death of the spirit is the price of progress. It offers scholars a perspective heretofore lacking in Voegelin scholarship and a clearer view of Voegelin’s understanding of the Christian dispensation and its influence on the course of Western development, history, and philosophy.

With very few people engaged in agriculture today, it is no surprise that most Americans have little understanding of the challenges that modern farmers face. This book provides readers a glimpse into life on a modern Missouri farm where a variety of grains, grass seed, corn, and cattle are produced. All of the conversations, events, and descriptions are drawn from the author’s experience working alongside and observing this father and son family farm operation during the course of a year.

Farming today is technologically complex and requires a broad set of skills that range from soil conservation, animal husbandry, and mechanics to knowledge of financial markets and computer technology. The focus on skills, in addition to the size of the financial risks, and the number of unexpected challenges along the way provides readers with a new perspective and appreciation for modern farm life.

Before Laura Ingalls Wilder found fame with her Little House books, she made a name for herself with short nonfiction pieces in magazines and newspapers. Read today, these pieces offer insight into her development as a writer and depict farm life in the Ozarks—and also show us a different Laura Ingalls Wilder from the woman we have come to know.

            This volume collects essays by Wilder that originally appeared in the Missouri Ruralist between 1911 and 1924. Building on the initial compilation of these articles under the title Little House in the Ozarks, this revised edition marks a more comprehensive collection by adding forty-two additional Ruralist articles and restoring passages previously omitted from other articles.

            Writing as “Mrs. A. J. Wilder” about modern life in the early twentieth-century Ozarks, Laura lends her advice to women of her generation on such timeless issues as how to be an equal partner with their husbands, how to support the new freedoms they’d won with the right to vote, and how to maintain important family values in their changing world. Yet she also discusses such practical matters as how to raise chickens, save time on household tasks, and set aside time to relax now and then.

            New articles in this edition include “Making the Best of Things,” “Economy in Egg Production,” and “Spic, Span, and Beauty.” “Magic in Plain Foods” reflects her cosmopolitanism and willingness to take advantage of new technologies, while “San Marino Is Small but Mighty” reveals her social-political philosophy and her interest in cooperation and community as well as in individualism and freedom. Mrs. Wilder was firmly committed to living in the present while finding much strength in the values of her past.

            A substantial introduction by Stephen W. Hines places the essays in their biographical and historical context, showing how these pieces present Wilder’s unique perspective on life and politics during the World War I era while commenting on the challenges of surviving and thriving in the rustic Ozark hill country. The former little girl from the little house was entering a new world and wrestling with such issues as motor cars and new “labor-saving” devices, but she still knew how to build a model small farm and how to get the most out of a dollar.

            Together, these essays lend more insight into Wilder than do even her novels and show that, while technology may have improved since she wrote them, the key to the good life hasn’t changed much in almost a century. Laura Ingalls Wilder, Farm Journalist distills the essence of her pioneer heritage and will delight fans of her later work as it sheds new light on a vanished era.

"I never mean (unless some particular circumstance should compel me to it) to possess another slave by purchase; it being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted, by which slavery in this country may be abolished by slow, sure and imperceptible degrees."—George Washington, September 9, 1786

The successful end of the War for Independence in 1783 brought George Washington face-to-face with a fundamental dilemma: how to reconcile the proclaimed ideals of the revolution with the established institution of slavery. So long as black human beings in America could legally be considered the chattel property of whites, the rhetoric of equality and individual freedom was hollow. Progressive voices urged immediate emancipation as the only way to resolve the contradiction; the Southern slave owners, of course, stood firm for the status quo. Washington was caught squarely in the middle.

As a Virginia plantation proprietor and a lifelong slaveholder, Washington had a substantial private stake in the economic slave system of the South. However, in his role as the acknowledged political leader of the country, his overriding concern was the preservation of the Union. If Washington publicly supported emancipation, he would almost certainly have to set an example and take steps to dispose of his Mount Vernon slaves. If he spoke out on the side of slavery, how could he legitimately and conscientiously expect to uphold and defend the humanistic goals and moral imperatives of the new nation as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and embodied in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights? His was a balancing act that became more and more difficult to sustain with the passing years.

Relying primarily on Washington's own words—his correspondence, diaries, and other written records—supplemented by letters, comments, and eyewitness reports of family members, friends, employees, aides, correspondents, colleagues, and visitors to Mount Vernon, together with contemporary newspaper clippings and official documents pertaining to Washington's relationships with African Americans, Fritz Hirschfeld traces Washington's transition from a conventional slaveholder to a lukewarm abolitionist. George Washington and Slavery will be an essential addition to the historiography of eighteenth-century America and of Washington himself.

“The strength of Empire,” wrote Ben Jonson, “is in religion.” In Reforming Empire, Christopher Hodgkins takes Jonson’s dictum as his point of departure, showing how for more than four centuries the Protestant imagination gave the British Empire its main paradigms for dominion and also, ironically, its chief languages of anti-imperial dissent. From Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene to Rudyard Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King,” English literature about empire has turned with strange constancy to themes of worship and idolatry, atrocity and deliverance, slavery and service, conversion, prophecy, apostasy, and doom.

Focusing on the work of the Protestant imagination from the Renaissance origins of English overseas colonization through the modern end of England’s colonial enterprise, Hodgkins organizes his study around three kinds of religious binding—unification, subjugation, and self-restraint. He shows how early modern Protestants like Hakluyt and Spenser reformed the Arthurian chronicles and claimed to inherit Rome’s empire from the Caesars: how Ralegh and later Cromwell imagined a counterconquest of Spanish America, and how Milton’s Satan came to resemble Cortés; how Drake and the fictional Crusoe established their status as worthy colonial masters by refusing to be worshiped as gods; and how seventeenth-century preachers, poets, and colonists moved haltingly toward a racist metaphysics—as Virginia began by celebrating the mixed marriage of Pocahontas but soon imposed the draconian separation of the Color Line.

Yet Hodgkins reveals that Tudor-Stuart times also saw the revival of Augustinian anti-expansionism and the genesis of Protestant imperial guilt. From the start, British Protestant colonialism contained its own opposite: a religion of self-restraint. Though this conscience often was co-opted or conscripted to legitimize conquests and pacify the conquered, it frequently found memorable and even fierce literary expression in writers such as Shakespeare, Daniel, Herbert, Swift, Johnson, Burke, Blake, Austen, Browning, Tennyson, Conrad, Forster, and finally the anti-Protestant Waugh. Written in a lively and accessible style, Reforming Empire will be of interest to all scholars and students of English literature.

In this groundbreaking study, Joyce Hoffmann examines a critical twenty-five-year period in the work of one of the most influential journalists of the twentieth century. Theodore H. White was already a celebrated reporter when Jacqueline Kennedy summoned him for an exclusive interview in the aftermath of her husband's assassination. With her help, White would preserve what the First Lady claimed had been John F. Kennedy's vision of the New Frontier as an incarnation of that wistful, romantic kingdom--Camelot. Over the years, friends and advisers to Kennedy declared that they had never heard the president speak of Camelot. But White's article, which ran in Life magazine, created a myth that still endures in the popular consciousness.

That story was just one of many by Theodore White that had a lasting impact on the nation. As a correspondent for several of the country's most popular magazines, he covered the crucial events of the 1940s, '50s, and '60s. His best-selling book The Making of the President 1960 changed political reporting forever.

A gifted and likable man with a remarkable skill for ingratiating himself with others, White earned the confidence of key political, military, and diplomatic leaders. First in the Far East, later in Europe, and finally in Washington, D.C., he became a confidant and adviser rather than an adversary to the figures he covered for the news, following a pattern set by elite journalists. Even as he played the impartial reporter, White kept secrets in order to maintain access to his important sources, and he occasionally allowed his subjects, including John F. Kennedy and Nelson Rockefeller, to make changes in his work before publication.

Clinging to the illusion of objectivity, White--like other leading journalists in the postwar years--wrote about the world not as it was but as he believed it ought to be. Hoffmann relates the little-known episode in White's career when he intentionally obscured the truth about Chiang Kai-shek's corrupt and inept Nationalist government because he believed that undermining China's cause would be "a disservice to democracy."

No other book so thoroughly documents how a first-rank journalist can become a political insider and distort the news without losing the gloss of impartiality that is supposed to accompany the profession. Impressively researched, skillfully written, Theodore H. White and Journalism as Illusion is an unflinching look at a key figure in the history of American journalism and at the profession itself.

When Martin Hogan began training on a vacant lot to be a soldier, he had no idea that he was about to become part of one of the most famed fighting units of World War I. But soon he and other citizen soldiers from the Irish neighborhoods of New York City were locked in deadly combat with the German army.

            Hogan’s book records his recollections of the 165th Infantry in World War I, a regiment in the famed Rainbow Division. Company K of the Third or Shamrock Battalion had a part in every fight, and those who survived had more wound stripes than  did the soldiers of any other company in the American Expeditionary Forces. Few soldiers saw as much of the war in eighteen months as did young Martin Hogan, and in this stirring account he tells of his experiences with graphic power, humility, and humor.

Hogan depicts World War I at its most human level, with memories of combat in the trenches and on blood-soaked battlefields at St. Mihiel and in the Argonne Forest. His account tells us much about how unprepared for service the United States really was, with the National Guard woefully undersupplied and seriously undertrained. His experiences as a gassed, then wounded, soldier also show the reader a side of war that was far from glorious—in a time before penicillin, when the dangers of gangrene ran high—and his memoir conveys rare insight about conditions in American military hospitals where he found care.

            This insider view of the frontline experience during the Great War, complete with well-known figures such as Chaplain Father Francis Duffy and Colonel “Wild Bill” Donovan, attests that the Rainbow Division “epitomized the best of the best spirit in the world—the American spirit.”

            James Cooke’s new introduction to this edition places that renowned division in historical context. Now that other part-time American soldiers are facing new challenges abroad, Hogan’s account also attests that the National Guard, citizen soldiers who bore the brunt of much decisive fighting, measured up to the highest standards of professional fighting men.

The friendship between Dorothy Thompson and Rose Wilder Lane began in 1920 in the publicity office of the American Red Cross in Paris and continued until Thompson’s death in 1961. Although both women are today remembered primarily for their connections with others —Thompson as the wife of Sinclair Lewis, and Lane as the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the “Little House” books —each was remarkable in her own right.

Both women had a vital engagement with life that led them in fearless pursuit of   experience.  In 1939, Thompson appeared on the cover of Time, which judged her second only to Eleanor Roosevelt among influential women of the day. Typical of Lane were her travels through the mountains of Albania, the deserts of Syria, and Soviet Georgia in the 1920s and her visit as a journalist to Vietnam in 1965 at the age of seventy-eight.

The correspondence of these two talented and articulate women reveals their personal concerns, social ideas, and political/economic philosophies and how they changed over time. Their letters tell the story of the first generation of women to come of age during the twentieth century, as they tried to cope with problems that women still face today. Along with the letters themselves, Holtz has included annotations and footnotes that provide biographical information, as well as explaining personal and topical references.
 

At the age of twenty-five, Primo Levi was sent to Hell. Levi, an Italian chemist from Turin, was one of many swept up in the Holocaust of World War II and sent to die in the German concentration camp in Auschwitz. Of the 650 people transported to the camp in his group, only 15 men and 9 women survived. After Soviet liberation of the camp in 1945, Levi wrote books, essays, short stories, poetry, and a novel, in which he painstakingly described the horrors of his experience at Auschwitz. He also spent the rest of his life struggling with the fact that he was not among those who were killed.

In Primo Levi and the Politics of Survival, Frederic D. Homer looks at Primo Levi's life but, more important, shows him to be a significant political philosopher. In the course of his writings, Levi asked and answered his most haunting question: can someone be brutalized by a terrifying experience and, upon return to "ordinary life," recover from the physical and moral destruction he has suffered? Levi used this question to develop a philosophy positing that although man is no match for life, he can become better prepared to contend with the tragedies in life.

According to Levi, the horrors of the world occur because of the strength of human tendencies, which make relationships between human beings exceedingly fragile. He believed that we are ill-constituted beings who have tendencies toward violence and domination, dividing ourselves into Us and Them, with very shallow loyalties. He also maintained that our only refuge is in education and responsibility, which may counter these tendencies. Homer calls Levi's philosophy "optimistic pessimism."

As Homer demonstrates, Levi took his past experiences into account to determine that goodwill and democratic institutions do not come easily to people. Liberal society is to be earned through discipline and responsibility toward our weaknesses. Levi's answer is "civilized liberalism." To achieve this we must counter some of our most stubborn tendencies.

Homer also explores the impact of Levi's death, an apparent suicide, on the way in which his work and theories have been perceived. While several critics discount Levi's work because of the nature of his death, Homer argues that his death is consistent with his philosophy. A book rich in brutally honest philosophy, Primo Levi and the Politics of Survival compels one to look at serious questions about life, tragedy, optimism, solidarity, violence, and human nature.

Despite the participation of African American women in all aspects of home-front activity during World War II, advertisements, recruitment posters, and newsreels portrayed largely white women as army nurses, defense plant workers, concerned mothers, and steadfast wives. This sea of white faces left for posterity images such as Rosie the Riveter, obscuring the contributions that African American women made to the war effort. In Bitter Fruit, Maureen Honey corrects this distorted picture of women's roles in World War II by collecting photos, essays, fiction, and poetry by and about black women from the four leading African American periodicals of the war period: Negro Digest, The Crisis, Opportunity, and Negro Story.

Mostly appearing for the first time since their original publication, the materials in Bitter Fruit feature black women operating technical machinery, working in army uniforms, entertaining audiences, and pursuing a college education. The articles praise the women's accomplishments as pioneers working toward racial equality; the fiction and poetry depict female characters in roles other than domestic servants and give voice to the bitterness arising from discrimination that many women felt. With these various images, Honey masterfully presents the roots of the postwar civil rights movement and the leading roles black women played in it.

Containing works from eighty writers, this anthology includes forty African American women authors, most of whose work has not been published since the war. Of particular note are poems and short stories anthologized for the first time, including Ann Petry's first story, Octavia Wynbush's last work of fiction, and three poems by Harlem Renaissance writer Georgia Douglas Johnson. Uniting these various writers was their desire to write in the midst of a worldwide military conflict with dramatic potential for ending segregation and opening doors for women at home.

Traditional anthologies of African American literature jump from the Harlem Renaissance to the 1960s with little or no reference to the decades between those periods. Bitter Fruit not only illuminates the literature of these decades but also presents an image of black women as community activists that undercuts gender stereotypes of the era. As Honey concludes in her introduction, "African American women found an empowered voice during the war, one that anticipates the fruit of their wartime effort to break silence, to challenge limits, and to change forever the terms of their lives."

Feast or Famine is the first comprehensive account of food and drink in the winning of the West, describing the sustenance of successive generations of western pioneers. Drawing on journals of settlers and travelers—as well as a lifetime of research on the American West—Reginald Horsman examines more than one hundred years of history, from the first advance of explorers into the Mississippi valley to the movement of ranchers and farmers onto the Great Plains, recording not only the components of their diets but food preparation techniques as well.

Most settlers were able to obtain food beyond the dreams of ordinary Europeans, for whom meat was a luxury. Not only were buffalo, deer, and wild turkey there for the taking, pioneers also gathered greens such as purslane, dandelion, and pigweed—as well as wild fruits, berries, and nuts. They replaced sugar with wild honey or maple syrup, and when they had no tea, they made drinks out of sage, sassafras, and mint. Horsman also reveals the willingness of Indians to convey their knowledge of food to newcomers, sharing salmon in the Pacific Northwest, agricultural crops in the arid Southwest.

Horsman tells how agricultural expansion and transportation opened a veritable cornucopia and how the development of canning soon made it possible for meals to transcend simple frontier foods, with canned oysters and crystallized eggs in airtight cans on merchants’ shelves. He covers food on different regional frontiers, as well as the cuisines of particular groups such as fur traders, soldiers, miners, and Mormons. He also discusses food shortages that resulted from poor preparation, temporary scarcity of game, marginal soil, or simply bad luck. At times, as with the ill-fated Donner Party, pioneers starved.

Engagingly written and meticulously researched, Feast or Famine is a one-of-a-kind look at a subject too long ignored in histories of the West. By revealing the spectrum of frontier fare across years and regions, it shows us that the land of opportunity was often a land of plenty.

In Frontier Doctor, Reginald Horsman provides the first modern, scholarly biography of a colorful backwoods doctor whose pioneering research on human digestion gained him international renown as a physiologist. Before William Beaumont's work, there was still considerable controversy as to the nature of human digestion; his research established beyond a doubt that digestion is a chemical process.

Beaumont received his medical training as an apprentice in a small town in Vermont and served as a surgeon's mate in the War of 1812. After the war, he practiced in Plattsburgh, New York, before making his career as an army surgeon. His chance for fame came in 1822, when he was serving at the lonely post of Fort Mackinac in Michigan Territory. A Canadian voyageur--Alexis St. Martin--was accidentally shot in the stomach at close range, and his wound healed in such a way as to leave a permanent opening. This enabled Beaumont to insert food directly into the stomach, to siphon gastric juice, and to experiment on the process of digestion both inside and outside the stomach.

Because Beaumont had considerable difficulty in persuading St. Martin to stay with him so he could continue his research, his study was carried out sporadically over a number of years. In the early 1830s, with the support of Joseph Lovell, the surgeon general of the army, Beaumont and St. Martin went to the East Coast, where additional experiments were carried out. In 1833, Beaumont published Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice and the Physiology of Digestion, a book based upon his research on St. Martin and the work upon which his reputation primarily rests. His observations revealed more about digestion in the human stomach than had ever before been known, and his work was immediately praised in both the United States and Europe.

After he left the army, Beaumont established a successful private practice in St. Louis, Missouri, where he spent the latter part of his life. Beaumont, a fascinating, argumentative character, was often engaged in public controversy. He was also good friends with several notable men, including the young Robert E. Lee.

Frontier Doctor sheds welcome new light on the state of medicine both inside and outside the army in the early nineteenth century and provides absorbing information on the early experi-ments that set the research into human digestion irrevocably on the right course.

"To perform heroically in a perilous situation is one thing, but I found that, in my case, the real difficulty was in getting myself into a spot where heroism was possible. Nobody on latrine duty ever got the Medal of Honor."

Published in 1903, The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois was a landmark achievement, moving American philosophy beyond the structures of pragmatism and positivism as it addressed new questions about American social and political history. One hundred years later, Du Bois's classic has clearly resonated through twentieth-century thought, offering a critical perspective on the political, social, and economic barriers imposed upon blacks in America.

This important new book is the first collection of essays to examine sustainedly The Souls of Black Folk from a variety of disciplines: aesthetics, art history, classics, communications, history, literature, music, political science, and psychology. The authors establish a call-and-response rhythm as they examine the critical depth of a text that has had a profound influence on African American intellectual history. Implicitly, the essays show how The Souls of Black Folk has influenced teaching practices and suggested alternative ways of teaching that create a pedagogy of inclusion.

The Souls of Black Folk remains a text pivotal in the American understanding of the black experience, and this important collection investigates this masterpiece from fresh directions. Scholars, teachers, and students of American studies and African American studies will find this remarkable work an essential overview of a book that changed the course of American intellectual history.

A union organizer returns to her hometown and her high school sweetheart, only to discover unexpected peril. A middle-aged man walks to meet his wife at work one day and loses her forever. A young writer's stage fright destroys her work and her marriage but offers her a new life. In Blue Money, Susan Hubbard creates a world in which the most ordinary things can be magical, and the most ordinary people can be extraordinary.

"Selling the House" is the enchanting story of Marianne, a young housewife whose life is altered forever by a mysterious stranger. He suddenly appears on her doorstep one morning, offers to buy her home, quotes poetry, and just as suddenly disappears. Marianne soon discovers, however, that the stranger wants more than her house—he wants her. Although she does not accept the man's proposition, Marianne has been changed by it. His words echo throughout her life. "If she sometimes had trouble sleeping, if she spent more time reading poetry or staring out the window . . . well, those were small aberrations in an otherwise quite satisfactory life."

Strangers appear and disappear in Blue Money. Shoes charm and cure. A soiled shirt conjures conscience, and a clean one promises new identity. Hubbard brilliantly weaves these fantastic elements into the fabric of her fiction.

Women's relationships with men—whether they be fathers, lovers, or strangers—are a prominent theme of Hubbard's collection. "What Friends Are For" captures this theme at its most humorous and bizarre in the strange mishaps of two young girls trying to rid their lives of the stepfathers they despise. When their plan fails miserably, the girls are forced to accept the unwanted men, but not without finding brief comfort in the humor of their failure. "Then I start laughing too--a laugh I've never laughed before, like some exotic bird, high and shrill and free—and now [we're] laughing so hard that the voices outside fade away entirely."

Praised by Ploughshares as "an assured storyteller and a complex narrative stylist," Hubbard excels at writing spare yet powerfully evocative prose. Haunting in its suspense and subtle grace, Blue Money celebrates Hubbard's marvelous ability to explore the power of imagination.

Presenting a fascinating overview of medicine in Missouri from the early days of epidemics to present-day technological advances, Quinine and Quarantine approaches the history of medicine as an integral part of the state's development.

Examining the changing environmental risks and diseases that threatened Missouri over the years and the role of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers as prime routes for the spread of diseases and innovations, Loren Humphrey discusses the efforts of citizens, legislators, and health officials confronting various medical challenges. He offers intriguing medical details of the past two centuries interspersed with the stories of significant historical figures and Missourians' personal accounts. He tells of the pioneers' struggles to use natural remedies acquired from Native Americans, the gory and unsanitary attempts to treat early gunshot wounds, and the common afflictions and diseases such as "swamp fever," measles, mumps, consumption, dysentery, smallpox, and typhoid that seemed beyond medicine's effects. Humphrey also discusses the significance of the discovery and reluctant acceptance of the "antifever" breakthrough now famous as quinine, as well as the lessons learned as a result of Civil War medical techniques.

Quinine and Quarantine takes readers on a remarkable journey that concludes in the present, arguably the most exciting and controversial era for medical advances. Humphrey explores new imaging techniques, laparoscopic surgery, and research on ways to overcome bacterial resistance to antibiotics. He challenges the reader to consider such compelling issues as the escalating cost of health care and the threats posed by environmental hazards. He also identifies topics over which Missourians will likely struggle well into the next century, such as transplants, managed care, abortion, and assisted suicide.

Organized chronologically in fifty-year segments and written in language free of jargon, Quinine and Quarantine offers readers a broad historical view of the medical problems and solutions faced by the people of Missouri, preparing them to cope with medical issues of the new millennium.

Celebrated as one of America's frontier heroes, Daniel Boone left a legacy that made the Boone name almost synonymous with frontier settlement. Nathan Boone, the youngest of Daniel's sons, played a vital role in American pioneering, following in much the same steps as his famous father. In Nathan Boone and the American Frontier, R. Douglas Hurt presents for the first time the life of this important frontiersman.

Based on primary collections, newspaper articles, government documents, and secondary sources, this well-crafted biography begins with Nathan's childhood in present-day Kentucky and Virginia and then follows his family's move to Missouri. Hurt traces Boone's early activities as a hunter, trapper, and surveyor, as well as his leadership of a company of rangers during the War of 1812. After the war, Boone returned to survey work. In 1831, he organized another company of rangers for the Black Hawk War and returned to military life, making it his career. The remainder of the book recounts Boone's activities with the army in Iowa and the Indian Territory, where he was the first Boone to gain notice outside Missouri or Kentucky. Even today his work is recognized in the form of state parks, buildings, and place-names.

Although Nathan Boone was an important figure, he lived much of his life in the shadow of his father. R. Douglas Hurt, however, makes a strong case for Nathan's contribution to the larger context of life in the American backcountry, especially the execution of military and Indian policy and the settlement of the frontier.

By recognizing the significant role that Nathan Boone played, Nathan Boone and the American Frontier also provides the recognition due the many unheralded frontiersmen who helped settle the West. Anyone with an interest in the history of Missouri, the frontier, or the Boone name will find this book informative and compelling.