The highly acclaimed Weapons for Victory originally appeared in 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II. Now, in this paperback edition, Robert James Maddox provides a new introduction about the ongoing controversy related to the decision to bomb Hiroshima.

When President Harry Truman authorized the use of atomic weapons against Japan, he did so to end a bloody war that would have been bloodier still had the planned invasion of Japan proved necessary. Revisionists claim that Truman’s real interest was a power play with the Soviet Union and that the Japanese would have surrendered even earlier had the retention of their imperial system been assured. Truman wanted the war to continue, they insist, in order to show off America’s powerful new weapon.

This anthology exposes revisionist fallacies about Truman’s motives, the cost of an invasion, and the question of Japan’s surrender. Essays by prominent military and diplomatic historians reveal the hollowness of revisionist claims, exposing the degree to which these agenda-driven scholars have manipulated the historical record to support their contentions. They show that, although some Japanese businessmen and minor officials indicated a willingness to negotiate peace, no one in a governmental decision-making capacity even suggested surrender. And although casualty estimates for an invasion vary considerably, the more authoritative approximations point to the very bloodbath that Truman sought to avoid.

Volume editor Robert Maddox first examines the writings of revisionist Gar Alperovitz to expose the unscholarly methods Alperovitz employed to support his claims, then distinguished Japanese historian Sadao Asada reveals how difficult it was for his country’s peace faction to prevail even after the bombs had been dropped. Other contributors point to continuing Japanese military buildups, analyze the revisionists’ low casualty estimates for an invasion, reveal manipulations of the Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, and show how even the exhibit commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum hewed to the revisionist line. And a close reading of Tsuyoshi Hasegawa’s acclaimed Racing the Enemy exposes many grave discrepancies between that recent revisionist text and its sources.

The use of atomic bombs against Japan remains one of the most controversial issues in American history. Gathered in a single volume for the first time, these insightful readings take a major step toward settling that controversy by showing how insubstantial Hiroshima revisionism really is—and that sometimes history cannot proceed without decisive action, however regrettable.

Eleanor Roosevelt called her one of the most influential women in America.  Among the earliest and most assertive members of the Book-of-the-Month Club selection committee, Dorothy Canfield Fisher helped define literary taste in America for more than three decades.  She helped shape the careers of such great writers as Pearl Buck, Isak Dinesen, and Richard Wright.  A best-selling author herself, Fisher was also a deeply committed social activist.  In Keeping Fires Night and Day, Mark J. Madigan collects much of Fisher's copious correspondence.   With letters to Willa Cather, W.E.B. Du Bois, Albert Einstein, Robert Frost, Margaret Mead, James Thurber, and E.B. White, he documents Fisher's personal and professional life and career in a way that no biography could.  Set against the American historical and cultural landscape from 1900 to 1958, these letters offer a firsthand account of one of the twentieth century's most remarkable women. 

While Fisher's novels treated such conventional subjects as marriage and domestic life, her own life was anything but conventional.  When her best-selling novels made her the chief breadwinner in her marriage, her husband, John Fisher, quietly assumed the role of secretary and editor of her work.  Fluent in five languages, Dorothy Canfield Fisher founded a Braille press in France and introduced the educational methods of Dr. Maria Montessori to the United States.  She became a pioneering advocate of adult education and served as the first woman on the Vermont Board of Education. 

In letters to friends, fans, and colleagues, Fisher discussed her homelife, her work, and the world around her.  Her passions and concerns-revealed in her correspondence with wit and poignancy-include the "New Woman' and the suffrage movement, racial discrimination and the emergence of the NAACP, the development of the national education system, two world wars, the depression, and the influence of book clubs in the literary market-place.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher "helped twentieth-century American literature to come of age," writes Clifton Fadimon in his Foreward.  Yet lasting recognition has eluded her.  In Keeping Fires Night and Day the distinctive voice of this gifted, intelligent and spirited woman is heard once again.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher, the prolific author of more than forty books, including translations, juveniles, and nonfiction, as well as novels and short-story collections, was one of the most popular and engaging American writers of the first half of the twentieth century. Although her work has been unduly neglected for several decades, it is currently enjoying a revival of critical attention. This colorful collection ranges in subject from New Englanders to the Basques of France to the struggles of African Americans to gain equal rights. Through her stories, many of which received literary awards, Fisher examined the complexities of modern life in the United States and abroad.

In addition to her writing, Fisher had a lifelong involvement in charitable work and social causes--so much so that Eleanor Roosevelt called her one of the most influential women of her time. As one of the earliest and most assertive members of the Book-of-the-Month Club selection committee, Fisher helped define literary taste in America for more than two decades. Mark J. Madigan discusses Fisher's extraordinary life and work in an Introduction and Afterword.

Because of Fisher's rare ability to distinguish enduring concerns from merely topical issues, her work will provide lasting pleasure for generations of readers to come.

  The perils of aging are many, but the debilitating effects of serious illness loom large. In this stirring memoir, readers will discover a man who improved the lives of many arthritis sufferers before himself succumbing to a cruel debilitating disease. The Man behind the Mask tells the story of Thomas Mallory, who was inspired to become a doctor after undergoing surgery for a high school football injury. He went on to become a renowned surgeon and a pioneer in joint replacement. In 2002, his successful career came to an abrupt halt when he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

            Mallory was one of the first surgeons in the United States to see the potential for joint replacement technology, and in this memoir he describes not only the nuances of introducing hip replacement surgery but also the systems that he established to make it a highly successful operation. He tells how he overcame initial resistance to the procedure and became a respected teacher of the technology, training many surgeons who went on to successful careers, lecturing about his procedure around the world, and also seeing VIP patients who journeyed to Ohio just to be operated on by him.

            As a pioneer in this type of operation, Mallory first recognized the value of using prosthetic innovation and development. He became a proponent of modularity in joint replacement surgery, which allowed a surgeon to customize a prosthesis to a patient’s joint in the operating room. His innovations, along with those of Dr. William Head, resulted in the introduction in 1983 of the Mallory-Head Hip System—a technology still in use today and one that has offered relief to thousands of patients.

            Tracing the joys and sorrows of his own career, Mallory dispels the myth that surgeons are emotionally invulnerable and cold. He offers his perspective on the pursuit of medicine as a profession, on the doctor-patient relationship, and on litigious challenges to physicians. He also commends the benefits of family and leisure and the blessing of life in general while offering insight into the management of an incurable disease.

            In our skeptical era, Thomas Mallory is a shining example of a prominent scientist who has maintained his faith in God throughout the highs and lows of life. The Man behind the Mask is an inspiring account for fellow professionals and general readers, as well as for those who have benefited from the procedures he introduced.

When Joan Mandle accepted the position of Director of Women's Studies at Colgate University, she had specific goals in mind—to make the program stronger, more academically rigorous, and publicly open. The program would resist becoming the captive of identity politics and would refuse to allow itself to become marginalized on the campus. It would reach beyond the negative stereotypes of feminism on campus by appealing to and challenging all students and faculty interested in gender issues and social change.

Just as Mandle anticipated, she faced obstacles during the transformation. Among her critics were feminist students and faculty whose views of a successful program directly contradicted Mandle's. While the new director called for outreach, they insisted on isolation. While she set forth a policy of inclusiveness, they sought to maintain an exclusive community. These individuals preferred the former model of the women's studies program, despite its tendency toward separatism.

Can We Wear Our Pearls and Still Be Feminists? explores women's studies from Mandle's perspective as a program director, feminist activist, and scholar. She offers a vivid account of being forced to grapple with fundamental issues of what women's studies is and should be. Her strong commitment to feminism and women's studies does not prevent her from voicing her concerns; instead, it compells her to share the story of her directorship in hopes of shedding light on the strengths and weaknesses, pitfalls and triumphs of women's studies as an academic discipline.

Through her examination of the battles involved in creating an academically significant and ideologically open program, Mandle provides insight into a possible avenue of change for feminism. By showing how the program at Colgate University was able to encourage campuswide discussions on feminism, Mandle demonstrates that women's studies can succeed as an inclusive and rigorous field. This enlightening memoir provides readers with a window on important debates concerning feminism and women in academia.

Distinguished critic and scholar Louis L. Martz refreshingly addresses some of the central concerns in current studies of English poetry from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, exploring the context of religious controversy within which this poetry developed and the relationship of poetry to the visual arts.

In Many Gods and Many Voices distinguished scholar Louis L. Martz addresses works by Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, H. D., and D. H. Lawrence, with brief treatment of the relation of Pound's Cantos to Joyce's Ulysses. In a graceful, lucid style, Martz argues that a prophetic tradition is represented in the Cantos, The Waste Land, Paterson, and H. D.'s Trilogy and Helen in Egypt, along with Lawrence's Plumed Serpent and the second version of Lady Chatterley's Lover. Pound's often- cited view that an epic is a poem that "includes history" does not define epic alone, for the books of biblical prophecy also contain history: the history of Israel's misdeeds and continuous redemption.

On the other hand, Martz suggests that the term prophecy should not be limited to works that foretell the future, arguing that the biblical prophet is concerned primarily with the present. The prophet is a reformer, a denouncer of evil, as well as a seer of possible redemption. He hears "voices" and transmits the message of those voices to his people, in the hope of moving them away from wickedness and toward the ways of truth. According to Martz, such was the mission that inspired Walt Whitman and that Whitman passed on to Pound, Eliot, Williams, and Lawrence. (H. D. found her own sources of inspiration in Greek and Egyptian lore.)

Martz's premise is that biblical prophecy, with its mingling of poetry and prose, its abrupt shifts from violent denunciation to exalted poetry, provides a precedent for the texture of these modernist works that will help readers to appreciate the mingling of "voices" and the complex mixture of elements. Examining their interrelationships and their common themes, Many Gods and Many Voices offers fresh insights into these modern writers.

Six weeks before Pearl Harbor, Keith Mason received a $150 uniform allowance, a pair of silver wings, and his first assignment as a flight instructor: Randolph Field, Texas. Two years later, he was Squadron Officer in the 460th Bomb Group, 15th Air Force in Spinazzola, Italy - flying the harrowing combat missions he dreamed of as a boy in rural Iowa.

As a memoir of one man’s war years, Mason provides insight on the inner workings of serving as an airman during World War II: facing stultifying boredom, stupefying incompetence, paralyzing fear, and stunning success. Details of how crews were selected for combat missions, of the necessity to occasionally break up crews, and of select missions in which Mason was a participant are important additions to the history and literature of this often neglected theater.

Corn, squash, and beans from the Native Americans; barbecue sauces from the Spanish; potatoes and sausages from the Germans: Missouri's foods include a bountiful variety of ingredients. In Food in Missouri: A Cultural Stew, Madeline Matson takes readers on an enticing journey through the history of this state's food, from the hunting and farming methods of the area's earliest inhabitants, through the contributions of the state's substantial African American population, to the fast-food purveyors of the microwave age.

Tracing the history of food preparation, preservation, and marketing, while highlighting the cultural traditions that engendered each change, Matson shows how advances in farming methods, the invention of the electric range, the development of cookbooks, and three waves of immigration have profoundly influenced what Missourians eat today. Along the way, she highlights some of the key people, places, and institutions in Missouri's food history: Irma S. Rombauer, author of Joy of Cooking; Stark Bro's Nurseries and Orchards in Louisiana, Missouri, the largest family-owned fruit-tree nursery in the world and the home of Delicious, Golden Delicious, and Gala apples; St. Louis's Soulard Market, established in 1779 and said to be the oldest public market west of the Mississippi; and Stone Hill Winery, a leader in Hermann's nationally recognized wine- making industry.

By bringing to life the traditions behind the foods we eat every day, Food in Missouri provides a unique perspective on the people who explored and settled the state, showing that Missouri's rich heritage truly is a cultural stew.

The baby is screaming again. My baby. I hoist her off the narrow hotel bed--again--and try to cradle her as I rock my torso back and forth in an uncomfortable straight-backed chair.

This baby does not cradle. She doesn't know how to cuddle, to be soothed in anyone's arms. She howls and arches away, squirms and flops, a sixteen-pound fish out of water. I'm not used to holding babies, and she's not used to be being held, but when I try to put her down, she wails. My arms feel chafed, raw, and my wrists ache from the hours of straining to hang on to her.

Huge tears pool in her eyes. These tears could break my heart. These screams could break my eardrums.

With a newly revised bibliography, A History of Missouri: Volume II, 1820 to 1860 covers the turbulent years of Missouri's adolescence—from statehood to the outset of the Civil War.

Paris, Tightwad, Peculiar, Neosho, Gasconade, Hannibal, Diamond, Quarantine, Zif, and Zig. These are just a few of the names Margot Ford McMillen covers in her lively book on the history of place names in Missouri. The origins behind the names range from humorous to descriptive:

Acheson and Empire offers a compelling reassessment of Dean Acheson's policies toward the former colonial world during his period as secretary of state from 1949 to 1953. John T. McNay argues that Acheson inherited through his own personal history a way of understanding the world that encouraged imperial-style international relationships. This worldview represented a well-developed belief system rooted in his Ulster Protestant heritage that remained consistent throughout his life.

By exploring relationships of the United States with Britain and countries formerly or then controlled by Britain, such as India, Ireland, Iran, and Egypt, McNay shows the significance of Acheson's beliefs. McNay argues that Acheson's support of existing imperial relationships was so steadfast that it often led other nations to perceive that the United States was nothing more than a front for British interests. He believes this approach to foreign policy damaged American relations with emerging countries and misled the British regarding possibilities of an Anglo-American partnership.

Acheson and Empire contends that the widely accepted view of Acheson as a foreign policy realist is misleading and that historians should acknowledge that his affinity for the British Empire went beyond his clothing and mannerisms. McNay maintains that the widely accepted view of Acheson as one of a group of "wise men" who shaped the Cold War world by basing their decisions on cold calculation of American interests should be reconsidered.

Drawing from extensive research in archival sources, including the Truman Library, the National Archives, the Public Record Office in London, and Acheson's personal papers at Yale, Acheson and Empire offers a fresh look at Dean Acheson that runs counter to previous biographies and many histories of the Cold War.

When Henry Grady died in 1957, one obituary called him “America’s top diplomatic soldier” for a critical period of the Cold War, and over a long career he was deeply involved in events that changed our role in the world. Even so, this self-described “soft” cold warrior has been largely overlooked by historians. His memoirs, left to languish with his other papers, are now published for the first time, offering new insight into the origins and implementation of American trade and development policies—and into the tumult that was the Cold War.

A specialist in international economic policy, Grady helped create the system of reciprocal trade established under FDR during the depression. Progressing in his career through his abilities rather than through political connections, he was sent to India during World War II to spark its production for the war effort, then to Italy to help jump-start its economy once German forces were driven out. After the war, he was the first American ambassador to an independent India, then served as ambassador to Greece and Iran—where he was embroiled in the oil industry crisis that eventually led to the CIA’s overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh.

Grady’s memoirs are an intriguing and informative account of early Cold War diplomacy in significant and turbulent regions of the Third World, embellished by his thoughts about the changing nature of American economic policies and his role as a representative of that system abroad. It offers new perspectives on the crisis in Iran in the early 1950s, where Grady was especially critical of Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s support for the remnants of British imperialism in Iran—and paid for his criticism with his job. Editor John McNay’s introduction and comments shed light on Grady’s thinking and his role in the policy-making process.

More than a chronicle of a wide-ranging career—one that reflects the emergence of the United States as the world’s leading economic power—Grady’s memoirs are a trenchant critique of U.S. foreign policy in the first half of the twentieth century. They provide modern readers an opportunity to reconsider the conflict between realism and idealism in foreign relations during the Cold War years.

Bernard Lonergan's ambitious study of human knowledge, based on his theory of consciousness, is among the major achievements of twentieth-century philosophy. He challenges the principles of contemporary intellectual culture by finding norms and standards not in external perceptions or reified concepts, but in the dynamism of consciousness itself.

Lonergan and the Philosophy of Historical Existence explores the implications of Lonergan's approach to the philosophy of history in a number of distinct but related contexts, covering a variety of intellectual disciplines. Each chapter can be read independently, but the series of chapters provides a coherent unfolding of Lonergan's case that the norms of inquiry endure as a standard of human thought and action amid continuous changes and fluctuations in politics, morals, religion, science, and scholarship. The book explains how Lonergan's idea of development follows from his theory of consciousness and how his treatment of human development inevitably focuses on historical development. The central theme of the book is that Lonergan's philosophy of history makes a pronounced distinction between historicity and historicism.

McPartland relates Lonergan's work to existentialist themes and, in the last chapters, to the work of Eric Voegelin. The book addresses the existentialist themes of dread, suffering, guilt, shame, and ressentiment—within overall themes of history, philosophy, and religion. McPartland argues that Lonergan's unique perspective on scientific method, epistemology, metaphysics, and critical theory can illuminate what seem to be the quite alien topics of reason as religious experience, the anxiety of existence, the existential roots of bias, and mythopoesis and mystery. Here there is a remarkable parallel to the philosophy of history of Eric Voegelin. The concluding chapters of the book show how the equivalence of the two philosophies offers a mutually enriching dialogue between Lonergan's critical realism and Voegelin's existential exegesis.

The emergence of photography in the mid-nineteenth century transformed ideas about how the self and nature could be pictured. Although the autobiographical potential of photography seems self-evident today, Sean Meehan takes us back to the birth of the medium when some of America’s preeminent authors began to think about photography’s implications for the representation of identity and the nature of autobiographical writing.

Both photography and autobiography involve a tension between disclosing and concealing their means of production: a chemical process for one, the writing process for the other. Meehan examines how four major authors—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, and Walt Whitman—were well aware of this tension and explored it in their work. By examining the implications of early photography in their writings, he shows how each engaged the new visual medium, how photography mediated their conceptions of self-representation, and how their appropriation of photographic thinking created a new kind of autobiography.

Examining the metonymic nature of photography, Meehan explores how the new medium influenced conceptions of visual and verbal representation. He intertwines these four writers’ reflections on photography—in Emerson’s Representative Men, Thoreau’s journals, Douglass’s narratives of slavery, and Whitman’s Specimen Days—with theories of photography as expounded by its inventors and observers, from Louis Daguerre and William Talbot in Europe to Oliver Wendell Holmes and Marcus Root in America.

As the first book to focus on the emergence of this new visual medium during the American Renaissance, Mediating American Autobiography shows us what photography means for American literature in general and for the genre most closely linked to it in particular. Because the engagement of these writers with photography has been neglected in previous scholarship, Meehan’s work provocatively bridges the study of two media and illuminates an important aspect of American thought and culture at the dawn of the technological era.

By synthesizing Kayser's and Bakhtin's views of the grotesque and Heidegger's philosophy of Being, American Fiction and the Metaphysics of the Grotesque seeks to demonstrate that American fiction from Poe to Pynchon has tried to convey the existential dimension: the pre-individual totality or flow of life, which defines itself against the mind and its linguistic capacity. Dieter Meindl shows how the grotesque, through its self-contradictory nature, has been instrumental in expressing this reality-conception, an antirationalist stance in basic agreement with existential thought. The historical validity of this new metaphysics, which grants precedence to Being--the context of cognition--over the cognizant subject, must be upheld in the face of deconstructive animadversions upon any metaphysics of presence. The notion of decentering the subject, Meindl argues, did not originate with deconstruction.

The existential grotesque confirms the protomodernist character of classic American fiction. Meindl traces its course through a number of well-known texts by Melville, James, Gilman, Anderson, Faulkner, and O'Connor, among others. To convey life conceived as motion, these writers had to capture--that is, immobilize--it in their art: an essentially distortive and, therefore, grotesque device. Melville's "Bartleby," dealing with a mort vivant, is the seminal text in this mode of indirectness. As opposed to the existential grotesque, which grants access to a preverbal realm, the linguistic grotesque of postmodern fiction works on the assumption that all reality is referable to language in a textual universe.

American Fiction and the Metaphysics of the Grotesque will significantly alter our understanding of certain traditions in American literature.

Henry Warner Slocum, a Union major general who was a corps and army commander in the Civil War, served from the first call for troops until he stood with William Tecumseh Sherman to receive Joseph E. Johnston’s surrender after Appomattox. He saw action at Bull Run, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg, and by the end of the war he had taken command of the Army of Georgia, yet historians have largely overlooked this key commander.

            Brian Melton has written the first scholarly account of this important general—the first full-length biography in nearly a century—who as one of Sherman’s most trusted commanders exercised significant influence during the Civil War. Although Slocum is remembered primarily for his lackluster performance at Gettysburg, Melton discloses that there is more to him than current history credits, offering a holistic account of his life to show that his career was much more significant than has been supposed.

            Slocum took on the characteristics of the leaders he served, and Melton reveals how Slocum’s attitudes and tactics changed dramatically between commanders to explain why he proved to be of little help to George McClellan and almost a liability while serving under “Fighting Joe” Hooker and yet was an effective commander under Sherman. Slocum became Sherman’s “left arm” and adapted so thoroughly to his style of generalship that he anticipated the general’s intentions on two important occasions, and Melton contends that Slocum was a much more important contributor to the success of Sherman’s later campaigns than has been acknowledged, becoming at times more aggressive and driving than Sherman himself.

            Melton ultimately considers Slocum’s fate as one of the forgotten generals of the Civil War—brought on largely by his joining the Democratic Party in 1865—and demonstrates why previous simplistic depictions of Slocum miss the mark. By providing the first detailed look at this important second-tier commander, Sherman’s Forgotten General illuminates the influences, events, and individuals of Slocum’s career to show that, while he may not have changed the course of the war, he played a conspicuous and important role in its successful execution that has long deserved to be recognized.

How does a young German who has been a member of the Hitler Youth and has competed in Nazi-organized athletic competitions become, over the span of two years, an eighty-pound, tuberculosis-stricken concentration camp escapee?

In this larger-than-life memoir, Walter Meyer leads readers from one harrowing moment to the next as he recounts his experiences during and after Hitler's reign. As a teenager, Meyer refused to conform to institutional rules. While serving in the Hitler Youth, he rebelled by joining a subversive group that focused its efforts on pranks against the youth organization. During World War II, Meyer was arrested, interrogated, and beaten for stealing shoes, but he received a sentence of one to four years, as opposed to the standard penalty for looting—death.

The sixteen-year-old Meyer's refusal to conform to prison regulations and his foiled escape attempts resulted in solitary confinement on several occasions. His fiery spirit eventually landed him in a Nazi work camp. Unbeknownst to his family, Meyer became a concentration camp prisoner. Transported to Ravensbrueck, he was forced to work under grueling conditions in a quarry. He struggled to reach his daily work quota so he could dine on watery broth and bits of bread. In these subhuman conditions, Meyer developed tuberculosis. Knowing he would soon die in the camp, he again plotted his escape. This time he succeeded.

Upon returning home to Duesseldorf, Meyer despaired at the destruction of his hometown. He lamented the pallor that had spread throughout the town and the country itself. After recovering his health, he regained his youthful lust for adventure. His postwar travels began with his infiltration of the Russian-occupied zone of Germany to retrieve his family's possessions. Meyer then began a whirlwind odyssey, ducking into train cars and stowing away on ships, occasionally landing in jail for traveling without a passport—from France to Spain, Belgium to Holland, and finally to South America--in pursuit of something other than the aftermath of war.

Meyer's memoir gives insight into the climate in Germany during World War II and in the defeated nation after the war. His experience as a non-Jewish survivor of the Nazi concentration camps provides an enlightening and varied perspective to the Holocaust dialogue.

One of the most enduring and prolific American authors of the latter half of the twentieth century, John Updike has long been recognized by critics for his importance as a social commentator. Yet, John Updike and the Cold War is the first work to examine how Updike's views grew out of the defining context of American culture in his time—the Cold War. Quentin Miller argues that because Updike's career began as the Cold War was taking shape in the mid-1950s, the world he creates in his entire literary oeuvre—fiction, poetry, and nonfiction prose—reflects the optimism and the anxiety of that decade.

Miller asserts that Updike's frequent use of Cold War tension as a metaphor for domestic life and as a cultural reality that affects the psychological security of his characters reveals the inherent conflict of his fictional world. Consequently, this conflict helps explain some of the problematic relationships and aimless behavior of Updike's characters, as well as their struggles to attain spiritual meaning.

By examining Updike's entire career in light of the historical events that coincide with it, Miller shows how important the early Cold War mind-set was to Updike's thinking and to the development of his fiction. The changes in Updike's writing after the 1950s confirm the early Cold War era's influence on his ideology and on his celebrated style. By the Cold War's end in the late 1980s, Updike's characters look back fondly to the Eisenhower years, when their national identity seemed so easy to define in contrast to the Soviet Union. This nostalgia begins as early as his writings in the 1960s, when the breakdown of an American consensus disillusions Updike's characters and leaves them yearning for the less divisive 1950s.

While underscoring how essential history is to the study of literature, Miller demonstrates that Updike's writing relies considerably on the growth of the global conflict that defined his time. Cogent and highly readable, John Updike and the Cold War makes an important contribution to Updike scholarship.

This is the first full-length biography of the woman who crusaded tirelessly for women, workers, and children, and became the most celebrated socialist woman from the West.

Based upon extensive research in the papers of President Harry S. Truman and in several journalistic collections, Harry S. Truman and the News Media recounts the story of a once unpopular chief executive who overcame the censure of the news media to ultimately win both the public's and the press's affirmation of his personal and presidential greatness.

Franklin D. Mitchell traces the major contours of journalism during the lifetime and presidency of Truman. Although newspapers and newsmagazines are given the most emphasis, reporters and columnists of the Washington news corps also figure prominently for their role in the president's news conferences and their continuing coverage of Truman and his family. Broadcast journalism's expanding coverage of the president is also explored through chapters dealing with radio and television.

President Truman's advocacy of a liberal Fair Deal for all Americans and a prudent and visible role for the nation in world affairs drew fire from the anti-administration news media, particularly the publishing empire of William Randolph Hearst, the McCormick-Patterson newspapers, the Scripps-Howard chain, and the Time-Life newsmagazines of Henry R. Luce. Despite press opposition and the almost universal prediction of defeat in the 1948 election, Truman was victorious in the greatest miscalled presidential election in journalistic history.

During his full term, Truman's relations with the news media became contentious over such matters as national security in the Cold War, the conduct of the Korean War, and the continuing charges of communism and corruption in the administration. Although Truman's career in politics was based on honesty and the welfare of the people, his early political alliance with Thomas Pendergast, Kansas City's notorious political boss, provided the opportunity for a portion of the press to charge Truman with subservience to Pendergast's own agenda of corrupt government.

The history and the dynamics of the Truman presidency and the American news media, combined with biographical and institutional sketches of key individuals and news organizations, make Harry S. Truman and the News Media a captivating and original investigation of an American president. Well written and researched, this book will be of great value to Truman scholars, journalists, and anyone interested in American history or presidential studies.

A rich body of mythology and literature has grown around the Celtic ritual known as the Feis of Tara or “marriage of sovereignty”—ancient ceremonies in which the future king pledges to care for the land and serve the goddess of sovereignty. Seamus Heaney, whose writing has attracted the overwhelming share of critical attention directed toward contemporary Irish poetry, has engaged this symbolic tradition in some of his most significant—and controversial—work.

Seamus Heaney and the Emblems of Hope explores Heaney’s use of the family of sovereignty motifs and redresses the imbalance of criticism that has overemphasized the theme of sacrifice to the detriment of more optimistic symbols. Moreover, Moloney reviews the development of the marriage motif in Irish poetry from the ninth to the twenty-first centuries with a focus on Heaney’s adaptations from The Frenzy of Sweeney and The Midnight Court and on the work of such poets as Kinsella, Montague, Boland, and Ní Dhomhnaill. Karen Marguerite Moloney examines the central role that Heaney assigns the Feis of Tara in his response to the crisis of Ulster and to the general spiritual bankruptcy of our times, showing in his verse how the relationship of the male lover to the goddess—particularly in her more repugnant guises—serves as prototype for the humility and deference needed to repair the effects of English colonization of Ireland and, by extension, centuries of worldwide patriarchal abuse.

Through close, sustained readings of poems previously overlooked or misinterpreted, such as “Ocean’s Love to Ireland,” “Come to the Bower,” and “Bone Dreams”—poems that Irish feminist critics have deemed flawed and distressingly sexist—Moloney refutes views that have long stood unchallenged. She also considers the direction of Heaney’s more recent poems, which continue to resonate to the twin demands of conscience and artistic integrity.

An impeccably researched and immensely readable work, Seamus Heaney and the Emblems of Hope reveals that Heaney’s poetry offers a reverence for archetypal femininity and Dionysian energy that can counter the sterility and violence of postcolonial Irish life. Moloney shows us that, in the tradition of poets who preceded him, Heaney turns to the marriage of sovereignty to encode a message for our times—and to offer up emblems of hope on behalf of us all.

Although most writers on Nathaniel Hawthorne touch on the importance of Salem, Massachusetts, to his life and career, no detailed study has been published on the powerful heritage bequeathed to him by his ancestors and present to him during his years in that town. In The Salem World of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret B. Moore thoroughly investigates Hawthorne's family, his education before college (about which almost nothing has been known), and Salem's religious and political influences on him. She details what Salem had to offer Hawthorne in the way of entertainment and stimulation, discusses his friends and acquaintances, and examines the significant role of women in his life—particularly Mary Crowninshield Silsbee and Sophia Peabody.

Nathaniel Hawthorne felt a strong attachment to Salem. No matter what he wrote about the town, it was the locale for many of his stories, sketches, a novel, and a fragmentary novel. Salem history haunted him, and Salem people fascinated him. And Salem seems to have a perennial fascination for readers, not just for Hawthorne scholars. New information from primary sources, including letters (many unpublished), diaries, and contemporary newspapers, adds much not previously known about Salem in the early nineteenth century. Moore has found new sources in various manuscript collections, such as the privately owned Felt-White Collection and the Richards and Ashburner Papers in the National Library in Scotland. She also uses extensively the many manuscript collections at the Peabody Essex Museum.

By tracing the effect of Salem on Hawthorne's writing, The Salem World of Nathaniel Hawthorne makes clear that Hawthorne not only was aware of his "own dear native place" but also drew upon it consciously and subconsciously in his work. This book contributes to a better understanding of Hawthorne as man and writer and of Salem's vital part in his life and work.

  Huckleberry Finn dressing as a girl is a famously comic scene in Mark Twain’s novel but hardly out of character—for the author, that is. Twain “troubled gender” in much of his otherwise traditional fiction, depicting children whose sexual identities are switched at birth, tomboys, same-sex married couples, and even a male French painter who impersonates his own fictive sister and becomes engaged to another man.

            This book explores Mark Twain’s extensive use of cross-dressing across his career by exposing the substantial cast of characters who masqueraded as members of the opposite sex or who otherwise defied gender expectations. Linda Morris grounds her study in an understanding of the era’s theatrical cross-dressing and changing mores and even events in the Clemens household. She examines and interprets Twain’s exploration of characters who transgress gendered conventions while tracing the degree to which themes of gender disruption interact with other themes, such as his critique of race, his concern with death in his classic “boys’ books,” and his career-long preoccupation with twins and twinning.

Approaching familiar texts in surprising new ways, Morris reexamines the relationship between Huck and Jim; discusses racial and gender crossing in Pudd’nhead Wilson; and sheds new light on Twain’s difficulty in depicting the most famous cross-dresser in history, Joan of Arc. She also considers a number of his later “transvestite tales” that feature transgressive figures such as Hellfire Hotchkiss, who is hampered by her “misplaced sex.”

            Morris challenges views of Twain that see his work as reinforcing traditional notions of gender along sharply divided lines. She shows that Twain depicts cross-dressing sometimes as comic or absurd, other times as darkly tragic—but that even at his most playful, he contests traditional Victorian notions about the fixity of gender roles.

            Analyzing such characteristics of Twain’s fiction as his fascination with details of clothing and the ever-present element of play, Morris shows us his understanding that gender, like race, is a social construction—and above all a performance. Gender Play in Mark Twain: Cross-Dressing and Transgression broadens our understanding of the writer as it lends rich insight into his works.

Interest in scholarly study of the Ozarks has grown steadily in recent years, and The Ozarks in Missouri History: Discoveries in an American Region will be welcomed by historians and Ozark enthusiasts alike. This lively collection gathers fifteen essays, many of them pioneering efforts in the field, that originally appeared in the Missouri Historical Review, the journal of the State Historical Society.

Repulsed by evil Nazi practices and desiring to create a better world after the devastation of World War II, in 1948 the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Because of the secular imprint of this text, it has faced a series of challenges from the world’s religions, both when it was crafted and in subsequent political and legal struggles.

The book mixes philosophical, legal, and archival arguments to make the point that the language of human rights is a valid one to address the world’s disputes. It updates the rationale used by the early UN visionaries and makes it available to twenty-first-century believers and unbelievers alike. The book shows how the debates that informed the adoption of this pivotal normative international text can be used by scholars to make broad and important policy points.

The final volume in the series focuses on a crossroads in Emerson's life, the year 1832, when he resigned from his ministry at the Second Church of Boston. It includes a new and more accurate text of the single most important of Emerson's sermons, "The Lord's Supper Sermon."  For the first time, this sermon has been transcribed from the manuscript Emerson actualy read from on the occasion of its only delivery.  The sermon was not only pivotal in Emerson's career, it was historically important because of the controversy that ensued over formalism in religion.

Volume 4 presents annotated texts of eight occasional sermons in addition to twenty-seven regular sermons, and an annotated text of relevant portions of the official records of the Second Church of Boston during Emerson's ministry.  The sermons-most appearing in print for the first time-provide a thorough understanding of the evolution of Emerson's thought in the years immediately preceding the 1836 publication of Nature, a treatise of central importance to nineteenth-century American literature.

Transcribed and edited from manuscripts in Harvard's University's Houghton Library, the sermons are presented in a clear text approximating as nearly as possible the original version delivered to Emerson's congregation.  As well as the detailed chronology, explanatory footnotes, and textual endnotes found in previous volumes, this one contains a comprehensive index to the entire four-volume collection.  Such outstanding textual scholarship makes this edition a unique entrance into the spiritual life of a man who so profoundly influenced American thought.

Simone Weil and the Politics of Self-Denial delivers what no other book on Weil has—a comprehensive study of her political thought. In this examination of the development of her thought, Athanasios Moulakis offers a philosophical understanding of politics that reaches beyond current affairs and ideological advocacy.

Simone Weil—philosopher, activist, mystic—unites a profound reflection on the human condition with a consistent and courageous existential and intellectual honesty manifest in the moving testimony of her life and her death. Moulakis examines Weil's political thought as an integral part of a lived philosophy, in which analysis and doctrine are inseparable from the articulation of an intensely personal, ultimately religious experience.

Because it is impossible to distinguish Weil's life from her thought, her writings cannot be understood properly without linking them to her life and character. By situating Weil's political thought within the context of the intellectual climate of her time, Moulakis connects it also to her epistemology, her cosmology, and her personal experience.

Simone Weil and the Politics of Self-Denial presents the unfolding of Weil's philosophical life against the backdrop of the political and social conditions of the last days of the Third French Republic, the Spanish Civil War, and the rise and clash of totalitarian ideologies. The ideological climate of the age—of which Weil herself was not quite free—was indeed the major "obstacle" in the struggle against which she fashioned her critical, intellectual, and moral tools.

Weil has been categorized a number of ways: as a saint and a near convert to Roman Catholicism, as a social critic, or as an analytic philosopher. Moulakis examines all aspects of Weil's thought in the indissoluble unity in which she lived them. This thorough investigation pursues the particular intellectual affiliations and the social and political experiential stimuli of Weil's work while simultaneously teasing out the timeless themes that her own timely analysis was intended to reveal.

In the 1800s, American women were largely restricted to the private sphere. Most had no choice but to spend their lives in the home, marrying in their teens and living only as wives, mothers, and pillars of domesticity. Even as the women’s movement came along midcentury, it focused more on gaining legal and political rights for women than on expanding their career opportunities. So in that time period, in which the options and expectations for women’s professional lives were so limited, it is remarkable that three sisters born in the 1850s, the Owen daughters of Missouri, all achieved success and appreciation in their careers.

In the treacherous swamps of southeast Missouri, a different kind of Civil War was waged.

Meriwether Jeff Thompson was one of the most intriguing but least-known Missouri participants in the Civil War. He and his troops traveled fast and light to harass Union forces, materializing out of the countryside to surprise the enemy and evading the traps set for them by Northern commanders. Early in the war, Union General Ulysses S. Grant gave Thompson the name “Swamp Fox” for his exploits in the Bootheel region. This book now tells his story—an adventure that will be appreciated by readers of all ages. Doris Mueller has produced a meticulously researched account of Thompson’s life, from his Virginia boyhood and early successes to his wartime exploits and postwar life. When the war began, Thompson left his adopted city of St. Joseph—where he had served as mayor—to fight for the Confederacy. He was elected brigadier general in the First Military District of Southeast Missouri and led poorly equipped and loosely trained men in skirmishes and raids, often using guerrilla tactics. He was captured in August 1863. After being released twelve months later in a prisoner exchange, he joined Sterling Price’s ill-fated raid into Missouri. After the war, he was one of the first Southern leaders to seek reinstatement as a U.S. citizen and worked to allay hostilities among fellow Southerners.

Thompson was also known as the “Poet Laureate of the Marshes,” and Mueller includes numerous excerpts from his writings about his experiences. Her account not only provides a wealth of little-known biographical details about this important Missourian but also offers insight into the state’s unique experiences during that bloody era, personalizing events through the life of this brave soldier.

Scorned by the Northern press for impudence, but beloved as a leader by his men, Thompson was courageous in battle, often to the point of recklessness, making him a constant thorn in the side of Union forces; after the war he was an oft-maligned model for reconciliation. Doris Mueller’s recounting of his life is an action-adventure story that will delight readers as it attests to his important role in Missouri’s heritage.

Winston Churchill's visit to Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946, marked the first public recognition of the cold war that was to follow World War II. Churchill delivered his most famous speech, "The Sinews of Peace," which became best known by the phrase he used to describe the cold-war division of Europe, the "iron curtain."

In the United States and Britain, wartime alliances had fostered favorable feelings toward the Soviet Union. By 1946 democratic citizens on both sides of the Atlantic had begun to consider communist Russia a friend. In his speech at Fulton, Churchill exhibited breathtaking flexibility and a clear recognition of the main threat as he reminded the public that true friendship must be reserved for countries sharing a common love of liberty. The "Iron Curtain" speech defined postwar relations with the Soviet Union for citizens of Western democracies. Although it initially provoked intense controversy in the United States and Britain, criticism soon gave way to wide public agreement to oppose Soviet imperialism.

Opening with the full text of the address Churchill delivered in Fulton and concluding with Margaret Thatcher's fiftieth-anniversary address surveying the challenges facing Western democracies in this post-cold war climate, the book brings together essays that reflect on the past fifty years, recognizing Churchill's speech as a carefully conceived herald of the cold war for the Western democracies. These powerful essays offer a fresh appreciation of the speech's political, historical, diplomatic, and rhetorical significance.

 The Victorian era was characterized by great scientific curiosity—as exemplified by the publication of Darwin’s Descent of Man—as well as by new questions regarding the place of women in society. Patricia Murphy now explores the tenuous interplay of gender and science to show how the era’s literature both challenged and reinforced a constrictive role for Victorian women. Focusing on a specific body of literature involving women intensely associated with scientific pursuits, and examining selected noncanonical writings—both fictional and nonfictional representations of scientific women—Murphy demonstrates how these works informed the “Woman Question” by reinforcing or rejecting presumed truths about gender and science.

Drawing from and reworking Gothic conventions, the New Woman version is marshaled during a tumultuous cultural moment of gender anxiety either to defend or revile the complex character. The controversial and compelling figure of the New Woman in fin de siècle British fiction has garnered extensive scholarly attention, but rarely has she been investigated through the lens of the Gothic.

Part I, “The Blurred Boundary,” examines an obfuscated distinction between the New Woman and the prostitute, presented in a stunning breadth and array of writings. Part II, “Reconfigured Conventions,” probes four key aspects of the Gothic, each of which is reshaped to reflect the exigencies of the fin de siècle. In Part III, “Villainous Characters,” the bad father of Romantic fiction is bifurcated into the husband and the mother, both of whom cause great suffering to the protagonist.