front cover of Affectionately Yours
Affectionately Yours
The Civil War Home-Front Letters of the Ovid Butler Family
Barbara Butler Davis
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2004
In the American Civil War missives from relatives to soldiers relating the details of what was occurring in the villages and towns unscarred by the conflict were rare. Edited by Barbara Butler Davis, Affectionately Yours: The Civil War Home-Front Letters of the Ovid Butler Family includes transcriptions of sixty-five holograph letters written from 1863 to 1865 to their son Scot. The letters are housed in the collection of the Irvington Historical Society and relate a fascinating social history of the Indianapolis community during the Civil War. The book also includes a foreword by Civil War historian Alan T. Nolan.
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America's Deadliest Twister
The Tri-State Tornado of 1925
Geoff Partlow
Southern Illinois University Press, 2014

Winner, ISHS Certificate of Excellence, 2015

Disaster relief as we know it did not exist when the deadliest tornado in U.S. history gouged a path from southeast Missouri through southern Illinois and into southwestern Indiana. The tri-state tornado of 1925 hugged the ground for 219 miles, generated wind speeds in excess of 300 miles per hour, and killed 695 people. Drawing on survivor interviews, public records, and newspaper archives, America’s Deadliest Twister offers a detailed account of the storm, but more important, it describes life in the region at that time as well as the tornado’s lasting cultural impact, especially on southern Illinois.

Author Geoff Partlow follows the storm from town to town, introducing us to the people most affected by the tornado, including the African American population of southern Illinois. Their narratives, along with the stories of the heroes who led recovery efforts in the years following, add a hometown perspective to the account of the storm itself.

In the discussion of the aftermath of the tornado, Partlow examines the lasting social and economic scars in the area, but he also looks at some of the technological firsts associated with this devastating tragedy. Partlow shows how relief efforts in the region began to change the way people throughout the nation thought about disaster relief, which led to the unified responses we are familiar with today.
 

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Bean Blossom
The Brown County Jamboree and Bill Monroe's Bluegrass Festivals
Thomas A. Adler
University of Illinois Press, 2011
Bean Blossom, Indiana--near Brown County State Park and the artist-colony town of Nashville, Indiana--is home to the annual Bean Blossom Bluegrass Festival, founded in 1967 by Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass. Widely recognized as the oldest continuously running bluegrass music festival in the world, this June festival's roots run back to late 1951, when Monroe purchased the Brown County Jamboree, a live weekly country music show presented between April and November each year. Over the years, Monroe's festival featured the top performers in bluegrass music, including Jimmy Martin, Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs, the Goins Brothers, the Stanley Brothers, and many more.
 
Thomas A. Adler's history of Bean Blossom traces the long and colorful life of the Brown County Jamboree and Bill Monroe's Bluegrass Festival. Adler discusses the development of bluegrass music, the many personalities involved in the bluegrass music scene, the interplay of local, regional, and national interests, and the meaning of this venue to the music's many performers--both professional and amateur--and its legions of fans.
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Big Sister
Feminism, Conservatism, and Conspiracy in the Heartland
Erin M. Kempker
University of Illinois Press, 2018
The mid-Seventies represented a watershed era for feminism. A historic National Women's Conference convened in Houston in 1977. The Equal Rights Amendment inched toward passage. Conservative women in the Midwest, however, saw an event like the International Year of the Woman not as a celebration, but as part of a conspiracy that would lead to radicalism and one-world government. Erin M. Kempker delves into how conspiracy theories affected--and undermined--second wave feminism in the Midwest. Focusing on Indiana, Kempker views this phenomenon within the larger history of right-wing fears of subversion during the Cold War. Feminists and conservative women each believed they spoke in women's best interests. Though baffled by the conservative dread of "collectivism," feminists compromised by trimming radicals from their ranks. Conservative women, meanwhile, proved adept at applying old fears to new targets. Kemper's analysis places the women's opposing viewpoints side by side to unlock the differences that separated the groups, explain one to the other, and reveal feminism's fate in the Midwest.
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The Blue Guide to Indiana
Michael Martone
University of Alabama Press, 2001
An ersatz travel book for the Hoosier State

The master of the nearly true is back with The Blue Guide to Indiana, an ersatz travel book for the Hoosier State. Michael Martone, whose trademark is the blurring of the lines between fact and fiction, has created an Indiana that almost is, a landscape marked by Lover's Lane franchises and pharmaceutical drug theme parks. Visit the Trans-Indiana Mayonnaise Pipeline and the Field of Lightbulbs. Learn about Our Lady of the Big Hair and Feet or the history of the License Plate Insurrection of 1979. Let Martone guide you through every inch of the amazing state that is home to the Hoosier Infidelity Resort Area, the National Monument for Those Killed by Tornadoes in Trailer Parks and Mobile Home Courts, and the Annual Eyeless Fish Fry. All your questions will be answered, including many you never thought to ask (like: "What's a good recipe for Pork Cake?").
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Boundary Conditions
Macrobotanical Remains and the Oliver Phase of Central Indiana, A.D. 1200-1450
Leslie L. Bush
University of Alabama Press, 2004

Prehistoric plant use in the Late Woodland Period of central Indiana

This book explores the extent to which foodways, an important marker of group identity, can be recognized in charred macrobotanical remains from archaeological sites. From analysis of mere bits of burned plants we can discern what ancient people chose to eat, and how they cooked it, stored it, and preserved it.

Leslie Bush compares archaeobotanical remains from 13 Oliver Phase sites in Indiana to other late prehistoric sites through correspondence analysis. The Oliver area is adjacent to the territories of three of the largest and best-known archaeological cultures of the region—Mississippian, Fort Ancient, and Oneota—so findings about Oliver foodways have implications for studies of migration, ethnogenesis, social risk, and culture contact. Historical records of three Native American tribes (Shawnee, Miami, and Huron) are also examined for potential insights into Oliver foodways.

The study determines that people who inhabited central Indiana during late prehistoric times had a distinctive signature of plant use that separates them from other archaeological groups, not just in space and time but also in ideas about appropriate uses of plants. The uniqueness of the Oliver botanical pattern is found to lie in the choice of particular crops, the intensity of growing versus gathering, and the use of a large number of wild resources.

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Cafe Indiana
A Guide to Indiana’s Down-Home Cafes
Joanne Raetz Stuttgen
University of Wisconsin Press, 2007
Cafe Indiana is both a guide to Indiana’s hometown mom-and-pop restaurants and a reclamation and celebration of small-town Midwest culture. The hungry diner looking for adventure and authenticity can use Cafe Indiana simply as a guide to the state’s quintessential eats: the best fiddlers, macaroni and cheese, soup beans, and beef Manhattan. But Stuttgen also captures the spirit of the locals, bringing to life the people whose stories give the book—and the food—its soul.
     Over plates of chicken and noodles, fried bologna sandwiches, and sugar cream pie, folks are crafting community at the Main Street eatery. In Cafe Indiana, Hoosiers and out-of-staters alike are invited to pull out a chair and sit a spell.
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Cafe Indiana Cookbook
Joanne Raetz Stuttgen
University of Wisconsin Press, 2010

Joanne Raetz Stuttgen’s cafe guides showcase popular regional diner traditions. In her companion book Cafe Indiana she introduces travelers to the state’s top mom-and-pop restaurants. Now, Cafe Indiana Cookbook allows you to whip up local cafe classics yourself. Breakfast dishes range from Swiss Mennonite eier datch (egg pancakes) to biscuits and gravy; entree highlights include chicken with noodles (or with dumplings) and the iconic Hoosier breaded pork tenderloin sandwich. For dessert, try such Indiana favorites as apple dapple cake or rhubarb, coconut cream, or sugar cream pie . All 130 recipes have been kitchen-tested by Jolene Ketzenberger, food writer for the Indianapolis Star.
    Cafe Indiana Cookbook reveals the favorite recipes of Indiana’s Main Street eateries, including some rescued for publication before a diner’s sad closure, and documents old-fashioned delicacies now fading from the culinary landscape—like southern Indiana’s fried brain sandwiches.

Finalist, Cookbook, Midwest Book Awards
 

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Campaign Crossroads
Presidential Politics in Indiana from Lincoln to Obama
Andrew E. Stoner
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2017
Campaign Crossroads looks back over the varied, sometimes important, sometimes irrelevant, but always interesting presidential campaign cycles in Indiana’s history. By taking in the influences of technology, transportation and communication itself, we see an evolution in the political process that is not only altogether Hoosier, but also altogether American in its quality and importance. Using a narrative approach with a mix of primary and secondary sources, the work examines not only the rhetoric of presidents and presidential hopefuls, but also the nature of campaigns and their impact on Indiana communities. While Indiana enjoyed the position of being a battleground state for the better part of a century from the 1870s until the 1960s, it has also been ignored, dismissed, and has on occasion created unexpected political drama.
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The Carter Journals
Time Travels in Early U.S. History
Shane Phipps
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2014
When fourteen-year-old Cody Carter’s grandfather gives him a box of dusty leather journals written by their Carter ancestors, even the history-loving Cody could not have predicted the adventure he was about to take. Journal by journal, Cody is physically transported back in time to experience the lives of Carters on the frontier in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Indiana as the family moved ever westward in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He hunts with Daniel Boone, huddles in a frontier fort under siege, makes friends with Native Americans in the Indiana Territory, operates a lock on the Whitewater Canal, hides slaves on the Underground Railroad, and experiences defeat at the Battle of Corydon. Ultimately, Cody confronts the difficult questions of war, westward expansion, and slavery while living the history of everyday people. Written by an eighth-grade history teacher determined to bring the past to life for his students, The Carter Journals reminds us that history is all around us---and that we daily make history of our own.
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Dune Country
A Hiker'S Guide To The Indiana Dunes
Glenda Daniel
Ohio University Press, 1984
One of our nation’s newest parks stretches along Lake Michigan across 14 miles of windswept beach between Gary and Michigan City in Northern Indiana. Dune Country explains for the first time in terms everyone can understand why the plant and animal succession and the rich variety of natural habitats there are so unique. Now Daniel has added a section on the geology of the area so that hikers will be able to identify formations that can be seen on a field trip.

In this revised edition, Daniel also includes guides to the 15 miles of new trails added to the National Lake Shore, which cover a variety of terrains—the dunes along the lake and inland along rivers, old dunes and marshlands. This new edition now has more than 75 drawings as well as maps and guides to over 45 miles of hiking trails in both the National Lake Shore and Indiana Dunes State Park.
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Early Indiana Trails and Surveys
George R. Wilson
Indiana Historical Society Press, 1986

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Everybody's History
Indiana's Lincoln Inquiry and the Quest to Reclaim a President's Past
Keith A. Erekson
University of Massachusetts Press, 2012
Revered by the public, respected by scholars, and imitated by politicians, Abraham Lincoln remains influential more than two hundred years after his birth. His memory has inspired books, monuments, and museums and also sparked controversies, rivalries, and forgeries. That so many people have been interested in Lincoln for so long makes him an ideal subject for exploring why history matters to ordinary Americans as well as to academic specialists.

In Everybody's History, Keith A. Erekson focuses on the Southwestern Indiana Historical Society—an organization composed of lawyers, historians, collectors, genealogists, teachers, college presidents, and newspaper editors—who joined together during the 1920s and 1930s to recover a part of Lincoln's life his biographers had long ignored: the years from age seven to twenty-one when he lived on the Indiana frontier. Participants in the "Lincoln Inquiry," as it was commonly known, researched old records, interviewed aging witnesses, hosted pageants, built a historical village, and presented their findings in public and in print. Along the way they defended their methods and findings against competitors in the fields of public history and civic commemoration, and rescued some of Indiana's own history by correcting a forgotten chapter of Lincoln's.

Everybody's History traces the development of popular interest in Lincoln to uncover the story of an extensive network of nonprofessional historians who contested old authorities and advanced new interpretations. In so doing, the book invites all who are interested in the past to see history as both vital to public life and meaningful to everybody.
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Faith and Fury
Eli Farmer on the Frontier, 1794–1881
Riley B. Case
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2018
Some of America’s political and social identity today can be traced to the early frontier. After 1801 religion exploded across settlements in the Old Northwest and Kentucky. Not only were souls saved through camp meetings, but regular people also began applying the words “equal” and “independent” to themselves. The life of Eli P. Farmer, a circuit-riding preacher, politician, farmer, and businessman, is instructive. His autobiography includes accounts of Native Americans, brawls, flatboats, settlers, and revival meetings. Setting his story within the context of the Second Great Awakening, author Riley B. Case shows how Farmer’s life personified this religious movement, which gave birth to American evangelicalism, as well as values that would become idyllic to many Americans: self-sufficiency and individualism.
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Family Practice Stories
Memories, Reflections, and Stories of Hoosier Family Doctors of the Mid-Twentieth Century
Richard Feldman
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2013
An initiative of the Indiana Academy of Family Physicians and the Indiana Academy of Family Physicians Foundation, Family Practice Stories is a collection of tales told by, and about, Hoosier family doctors practicing in the middle of the twentieth century. The stories celebrate that time in America considered to be the golden age of generalism in medicine---a time that conjures up Norman Rockwell’s familiar archetypal images of the country family doctor and a time when the art of healing was at its zenith.
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For Duty and Destiny
The Life and Civil War Diary of William Taylor Stott, Hoosier Soldier and Educator
Lloyd A. Hunter
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2011
William Taylor Stott was a native Hoosier and an 1861 graduate of Franklin College, who later became the president who took the college from virtual bankruptcy in 1872 to its place as a leading liberal arts institution in Indiana. The story of Franklin College is the story of W. T. Stott, yet his influence was not confined to the school’s parameters. Stott was an inspirational and intellectual force in the Indiana Baptist community, and a foremost champion of small denominational colleges and of higher education in general. He also fought in the Eighteenth Indiana Volunteer Infantry during the Civil War, rising from private to captain by 1863. Stott’s diary reveals a soldier who was also a scholar.
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Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad
The Geography of Resistance
Cheryl Janifer LaRoche
University of Illinois Press, 2013
This enlightening study employs the tools of archaeology to uncover a new historical perspective on the Underground Railroad. Unlike previous histories of the Underground Railroad, which have focused on frightened fugitive slaves and their benevolent abolitionist accomplices, Cheryl LaRoche focuses instead on free African American communities, the crucial help they provided to individuals fleeing slavery, and the terrain where those flights to freedom occurred.
 
This study foregrounds several small, rural hamlets on the treacherous southern edge of the free North in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. LaRoche demonstrates how landscape features such as waterways, iron forges, and caves played a key role in the conduct and effectiveness of the Underground Railroad. Rich in oral histories, maps, memoirs, and archaeological investigations, this examination of the "geography of resistance" tells the new powerful and inspiring story of African Americans ensuring their own liberation in the midst of oppression.
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The Geography of Hate
The Great Migration through Small-Town America
Jennifer Sdunzik
University of Illinois Press, 2023
The uncomfortable truths that shaped small communities in the midwest

During the Great Migration, Black Americans sought new lives in midwestern small towns only to confront the pervasive efforts of white residents determined to maintain their area’s preferred cultural and racial identity. Jennifer Sdunzik explores this widespread phenomenon by examining how it played out in one midwestern community. Sdunzik merges state and communal histories, interviews and analyses of population data, and spatial and ethnographic materials to create a rich public history that reclaims Black contributions and history. She also explores the conscious and unconscious white actions that all but erased Black Americans--and the terror and exclusion used against them--from the history of many midwestern communities.

An innovative challenge to myth and perceived wisdom, The Geography of Hate reveals the socioeconomic, political, and cultural forces that prevailed in midwestern towns and helps explain the systemic racism and endemic nativism that remain entrenched in American life.

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Giant Steps
Suffragettes and Soldiers
Mary Blair Immel
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2017
As Giant Steps opens, thirteen-year-old Bernie Epperson of Lafayette, Indiana, is wrestling with double standards placed on her compared with her brothers. Soon her cousin awakens her to all the unfair restrictions women face, and Bernie becomes a suffragette. Meanwhile, World War I begins. Her family is devastated when her brothers become soldiers, and Bernie must decide how to help the war effort and continue to fight for women’s rights. While this story is fictional, the details of the suffrage movement and the war efforts of ordinary Americans are true. Middle and high school students will relate to Bernie and her brothers’ dilemmas a century ago because they also face making decisions in a turbulent world while sifting through contradictory news and changing wisdom.
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Hanna's Town
A Little World We Have Lost
W. William Wimberly II
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2010
In late autumn 1902 a macabre scene unfolded at the original burial ground of Wabash, which had been called both the Old Cemetery and Hanna's Cemetery. The task at hand was the disinterment of four bodies. The newest of the four graves held whatever might be left of the corpse of Colonel Hugh Hanna who, more than any other single citizen, was the founding father and civic icon of the prosperous and picturesque community. This book tells the story of a town that rose from the wilderness, one with a bustling economy, a sense of community, civic pride, broad economic connections, architectural achievements, and various other cultural pretensions.
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The History of Indiana Law
David J. Bodenhamer
Ohio University Press, 2006

Long regarded as a center for middle-American values, Indiana is also a cultural crossroads that has produced a rich and complex legal and constitutional heritage. The History of Indiana Law traces this history through a series of expert articles by identifying the themes that mark the state’s legal development and establish its place within the broader context of the Midwest and nation.

The History of Indiana Law explores the ways in which the state’s legal culture responded to—and at times resisted—the influence of national legal developments, including the tortured history of race relations in Indiana. Legal issues addressed by the contributors include the Indiana constitutional tradition, civil liberties, race, women’s rights, family law, welfare and the poor, education, crime and punishment, juvenile justice, the role of courts and judiciary, and landmark cases. The essays describe how Indiana law has adapted to the needs of an increasingly complex society.

The History of Indiana Law is an indispensable reference and invaluable first source to learn about law and society in Indiana during almost two centuries of statehood.

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Home Before the Raven Caws
Richard Feldman
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2012
In 1903 Alaska governor John Brady collected fifteen old totem poles for preservation at Stika National Historical Park, creating one of the most famous collections of totem poles in the world. One pole became separated, and its fate remained a mystery for nearly ninety years. This revised edition of Home before the Raven Caws unravels the mystery of that missing pole from the Brady collection. The old Alaskan pole found its way to Indiana over a hundred years ago. A new version of the pole stands today at the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis. The first portion of the book serves as a general primer of the history and cultural significance, identification, carving, and raising of totem poles.
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Hoosier Public Enemy
A Life of John Dillinger
John Beineke
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2014
During the bleak days of the Great Depression, news of economic hardship often took a backseat to articles on the exploits of an outlaw from Indiana—John Dillinger. For a period of fourteen months during 1933 and 1934 Dillinger became the most famous bandit in American history, and no criminal since has matched him for his celebrity and notoriety. Dillinger won public attention not only for his robberies, but his many escapes from the law. The escapes he made from jails or “tight spots,” when it seemed law officials had him cornered, became the stuff of legends. While the public would never admit that they wanted the “bad guy” to win, many could not help but root for the man who appeared to be an underdog. Although his crime wave took place in the last century, the name Dillinger has never left the public imagination
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Hoosiers and the American Story
James H. Madison and Lee Ann Sandweiss
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2014
A supplemental textbook for middle and high school students, Hoosiers and the American Story provides intimate views of individuals and places in Indiana set within themes from American history. During the frontier days when Americans battled with and exiled native peoples from the East, Indiana was on the leading edge of America’s westward expansion. As waves of immigrants swept across the Appalachians and eastern waterways, Indiana became established as both a crossroads and as a vital part of Middle America. Indiana’s stories illuminate the history of American agriculture, wars, industrialization, ethnic conflicts, technological improvements, political battles, transportation networks, economic shifts, social welfare initiatives, and more. In so doing, they elucidate large national issues so that students can relate personally to the ideas and events that comprise American history. At the same time, the stories shed light on what it means to be a Hoosier, today and in the past.
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The House of the Singing Winds
The Life and Work of T. C. Steele
Rachel Berenson Perry
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2016
First published in 1966, this account of the life and work of T.C. Steele, one of Indiana's most renowned artists, has become a much-sought-after classic. For this reissue, sixty-two of the book's seventy-six illustrations, including all ten color plates, have been newly photographed and reproduced according to the highest modern standards. The text, unchanged from the first edition, includes a brief biography by the painter's grandson, Theodore L. Steele; a poetic memoir of Steele's last Brown County years by Selma N. Steele; and an appreciation of Steele's work by art historian Wilbur D. Peat.
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In Contempt
Defending Free Speech, Defeating HUAC
Ed Yellin and Jean Fagan Yellin
University of Michigan Press, 2022
“YOU ARE HEREBY COMMANDED to be and appear before the Committee on Un-American Activities of the House of Representatives of the United States, or a duly appointed subcommittee thereof, on February 10 (Monday), 1958, at ten o’clock a.m. at City Council Chambers, City Hall, Gary, Indiana, then and there to testify touching matters of inquiry committed to said committee, and not to depart without leave of said committee.”

So began a decade of hardship for Ed and Jean Yellin and their three young children as the repressive weight of the U.S. government, caught up in the throes of McCarthyism, crashed down upon their careers, their daily household budget, and their relationships to colleagues, neighbors, and their country. In Contempt is a faithful, factual testament to the enduring quality of patriotic dissent in our evolving democracy—and a loving reconstruction of what it meant to be labeled “unAmerican” for defending the Constitution.
 
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Indiana 1816-1850
The Pioneer Era
Donald F. Carmony
Indiana Historical Society Press, 1998
In Indiana 1816–1850: The Pioneer Era (vol. 2, History of Indiana Series), author Donald F. Carmony explores the political, economic, agricultural, and educational developments in the early years of the nineteenth state. Carmony's book also describes how and why Indiana developed as it did during its formative years and its role as a member of the United States. The book includes a bibliography, notes, and index.
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Indiana
A History
Howard H. Peckham
University of Illinois Press, 1978
For much of Indiana's history, its distinctiveness has lain in its typicality. It has embodied–-and continues to embody-–values and behavior that are specifically American. In the late eighteenth century Indiana was the heart of the Old Northwest, a vast area conceived as a preserve where independent farmers and their families could live free from the shadow of slavery. 

During the Civil War, the state found itself divided, with Indianans' allegiances split between Southern partisans and zealous Yankees. Throughout this period, the workshops and farms of Indiana continued to provide the growing nation with food and other necessities. Countless small towns prospered; Indianapolis grew, and Gary, on the southern shore of Lake Michigan, became synonymous with steel production, symbolizing the industrial might of America. Readers all over the country embraced the writings of Indianans such as James Whitcomb Riley and Booth Tarkington, while Indiana's painters disseminated iconic and idyllic images of America. 

This comprehensive history traces the history of the Hoosier state, revealing its most significant contributions to the nation as a whole, while also exploring the unique character of its land and people. Howard H. Peckham relates recent changes in Indiana as a variety of ethnic and racial groups have come seeking a share in the good life, enriching and redefining this ever-changing state for the new millennium.
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Indiana in the Civil War Era, 1850-1880
Emma Lou Thornbrough
Indiana Historical Society Press, 1965
In Indiana in the Civil War Era, 1850–1880 (vol. 3, History of Indiana Series), author Emma Lou Thornbrough deals with the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Thornbrough utilized scholarly writing as well as examined basic source materials, both published and unpublished, to present a balanced account of life in Indiana during the Civil War era, with attention given to political, economic, social, and cultural developments. The book includes a bibliography, notes, and index.
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Indiana in Transition
The Emergence of an Industrial Commonwealth, 1880-1920
Clifton J. Phillips
Indiana Historical Society Press, 1968
In Indiana in Transition: The Emergence of an Industrial Commonwealth, 1880–1920 (vol. 4, History of Indiana Series), author Clifton J. Phillips covers the period during which Indiana underwent political, economic, and social changes that furthered its evolution from a primarily rural-agricultural society to a predominantly urban-industrial commonwealth. The book includes a bibliography, notes, and index.
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Indiana Out Loud
Dan Carpenter on the Heartland Beat
Dan Carpenter
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2013
Since 1976, Dan Carpenter’s writing has appeared in the pages of the Indianapolis Star as a police reporter, book critic, and renowned op-ed columnist. In writing for the state’s largest newspaper, Carpenter has covered the life and times of some notable Hoosiers, as well as serving as a voice for the disadvantaged, sometimes exasperating the Star’s readership in central Indiana as the newspaper’s “house liberal.” Indiana Out Loud is a collection of the best of Carpenter’s work since 1993 and includes timely and engaging examinations of the lives of such intriguing people as wrestling announcer Sam Menacker, survivor of the James Jones People’s Temple massacre Catherine Hyacinth Thrash, Indianapolis African American leader Charles “Snookie” Hendricks, Atlas Grocery impresario Sid Maurer, and coaches James “Doc” Counsilman and Ray Crowe. The book also includes a healthy dose of literary figures, politicians, historians, knaves, crooks, and fools.
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Indiana Political Heroes
Geoff Paddock
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2008
Politics has always played an important role in Indiana, and the state itself at one time furnished candidates for national office for an assortment of American political parties. From 1840, when Whig William Henry Harrison captured the White House with his “Tippecanoe and Tyler too” campaign, to 1940, when Wendell Willkie won the Republican presidential nomination and challenged incumbent President Franklin D. Roosevelt's try for a third term in office, approximately 60 percent of the elections had Hoosiers on a party’s national ticket. Indiana Political Heroes features essays on eight Hoosier politicians who have made a difference in Indiana and in the nation’s capital.
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Indiana Quakers Confront the Civil War
Jacquelyn S. Nelson
Indiana Historical Society Press, 1991
When members of the Society of Friends, or Quakers, first arrived in antebellum Indiana, they could not have envisioned the struggle which would engulf the nation when the American Civil War began in 1861. Juxtaposed with its stand against slavery a second tenet of the Society's creed--adherence to peace--also challenged the unity of Friends when the dreaded conflict erupted. Indiana Quakers Confront the Civil War chronicles for the first time the military activities of Indiana Quakers during America's bloodiest war and explores the motivation behind the abandonment, at least temporarily, of their long-standing testimony against war.
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Indiana to 1816
The Colonial Period
John D. Barnhart
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2016
In Indiana to 1816: The Colonial Period (vol. 1, History of Indiana Series), authors John D. Barnhart and Dorothy L. Riker present Indiana's past from its prehistory through the advance to statehood. Topics covered include the French and British presence, the American Revolution, and the territorial days. Reprinted in 1999, the book includes a bibliography, notes, and index.
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Indianapolis
A City of Immigrants
M. Teresa Baer
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2012
The booklet opens with the Delaware Indians prior to 1818. White Americans quickly replaced the natives. Germanic people arrived during the mid-nineteenth century. African American indentured servants and free blacks migrated to Indianapolis. After the Civil War, southern blacks poured into the city. Fleeing war and political unrest, thousands of eastern and southern Europeans came to Indianapolis. Anti-immigration laws slowed immigration until World War II. Afterward, the city welcomed students and professionals from Asia and the Middle East and refugees from war-torn countries such as Vietnam and poor countries such as Mexico. Today, immigrants make Indianapolis more diverse and culturally rich than ever before.
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Indiana's 200
The People Who Shaped the Hoosier State
Linda C. Gugin
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2015
Part of the Indiana Historical Society's commemoration of the nineteenth state's bicentennial, Indiana's 200: The People Who Shaped the Hoosier State recognizes the people who made enduring contributions to Indiana in its 200-year history. Written by historians, scholars, biographers, and independent researchers, the biographical essays in this book will enhance the public's knowledge and appreciation of those who made a difference in the lives of Hoosiers, the country, and even the world. Subjects profiled in the book include individuals from all fields of endeavor: law, politics, art, music, entertainment, literature, sports, education, business/industry, religion, science/invention/technology, as well as "the notorious."
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Indiana’s War
The Civil War in Documents
Richard F. Nation
Ohio University Press, 2009

Indiana’s War is a primary source collection featuring the writings of Indiana’s citizens during the Civil War era. Using private letters, official records, newspaper articles, and other original sources, the volume presents the varied experiences of Indiana’s participants in the war both on the battlefield and on the home front. Starting in the 1850s, the documents show the sharp political divisions over issues such as slavery, race, and secession in Indiana, divisions that boiled over into extraordinary strife and violence in the state during the rebellion. This conflict touched all levels and members of society, including men, women, and children, whites and African Americans, native-born citizens and immigrants, farmers and city and town dwellers.

Collecting the writings of Indiana’s peoples on a wide range of issues, chapters focus on the politics of race prior to the war, the secession crisis, war fever in 1861, the experiences of soldiers at the front, homefront hardships, political conflict between partisan foes and civil and military authorities, reactions to the Emancipation Proclamation, and antiwar dissent, violence, and conspiracy.

Indiana’s War is an excellent accompanying primary source text for undergraduate and graduate courses on the American Civil War. It documents the experiences of Indiana’s citizens, from the African American soldier to the antiwar dissenter, from the prewar politician to the postwar veteran, from the battle-scarred soldier to the impoverished soldier’s wife, all showing the harsh realities of the war.

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Justices of the Indiana Supreme Court
Linda C. Gugin and James E. St. Clair
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2010
From its inception in 1816 until 2010, 105 Hoosiers have been members of the Indiana Supreme Court. In this multiauthor volume, edited by Linda C. Gugin and James E. St. Clair, authors explore the lives of each justice, unearthing not only standard biographical information but also personal stories that offer additional insight into their lives and times.
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The Kimberlins Go to War
A Union Family in Copperhead Country
Michael B. Murphy
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2016
As July 7, 1861, dawned, war was in the air in Lexington, Indiana. The county seat of Scott County was abuzz with the latest news of the southern rebellion. The _Madison Daily and Evening Courier_ told of skirmishes between Federal troops and “secesh” forces at Harpers Ferry and Falling Waters, Virginia. Closer to home, word had come that William A. Sanderson had organized a new outfit, the Twenty-Third Indiana, and was recruiting throughout the Second Congressional District for men to join the regiment. Although Scott County had been rife with sympathy and support for the South, answering the call to serve the Union cause from the county were Jacob T. Kimberlin, a twenty-one-year-old farmhand; his older brother, John J.; and his cousins, William H. H. Kimberlin, Benjamin F. Kimberlin, and James Stark. These five young men could not have known at the time that none of them would ever again see their homes. They only knew that the Kimberlins were going to war. This is the story of the Kimberlin family that sent thirty-three fathers and sons, brothers and cousins, to fight for the Union during the Civil War. Ten family members were killed, wounded, or died of battlefield disease, a 30 percent casualty rate that is unmatched in recorded Scott County history. Of the 134 known deaths of Scott County soldiers, ten were members of the Kimberlin clan. Their feelings about the war come from forty letters to and from the battlefield that have survived to this day. The book examines such questions as: Were they fighting to save the Union or to free the slaves? How did they express grief over the loss of a brother? Did they keep up with their business and the women at home? And what did they think about “secesh” neighbors in southern Indiana who tried to undermine the Union?
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L. S. Ayres and Company
The Store at the Crossroads of America
Kenneth L. Turchi
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2012
In 1872 Lyman Ayres acquired a controlling interest in the Trade Place, a dry-goods store in Indianapolis. Two years later, he bought out his partners and renamed the establishment L. S. Ayres and Company. For the next century, Ayres was as much a part of Indianapolis as Monument Circle or the Indianapolis 500. Generations of midwestern families visited the vast store to shop, to see the animated Christmas windows, and, of course to visit Santa Claus and enjoy lunch in the Tea Room. But Ayres was more than just a department store. At its helm across three generations was a team of visionary retailers who took the store from its early silk-and-calico days to a diversified company with interests in specialty stores and discount stores (before Target and Wal-Mart). At the same time, Ayres never lost sight of its commitment to women’s fashion that gave the store the same cachet as its larger competitors in New York and Chicago.
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A Leaf of Voices
Stories of the American Civil War in the Words of Those Who Lived and Died, 1861-65
Jennifer McSpadden
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2014
During the American Civil the Wabash Intelligencer and the Wabash Plain Dealer frequently printed letters from Wabash County men serving in the Union army. The letter writers are a remarkable cast of characters: young and old, soldiers, doctors, ministers, officers, enlisted men, newspaper men, and a fifteen-year-old printers’ devil who enlisted as a drummer boy. These are not stories of generals or battle strategies; they are the stories of the ordinary soldiers and their everyday lives. They describe long tiring marches across state after state, crossing almost impossible terrain, facing shortages of rations and supplies, enduring extremes of weather where they froze one day and sweltered the next, and encountering guerrillas that harried the wagon trains. The correspondents wrote of walking over the bodies of fallen comrades and foes alike, of mules and their wagons sinking into muddy roads that became like quicksand, of shipwrecks, and of former slaves.
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Lincoln in Indiana
Brian R. Dirck
Southern Illinois University Press, 2017
Abraham Lincoln, born in Kentucky in 1809, moved with his parents, Thomas and Nancy Lincoln, and his older sister, Sarah, to the Pigeon Creek area of southern Indiana in 1816. There Lincoln spent more than a quarter of his life. It was in Indiana that he developed a complicated and often troubled relationship with his father, exhibited his now-famous penchant for self-education, and formed a restless ambition to rise above his origins. Although some questions about these years are unanswerable due to a scarcity of reliable sources, Brian R. Dirck’s fascinating account of Lincoln’s boyhood sets what is known about the relationships, values, and environment that fundamentally shaped Lincoln’s character within the context of frontier and farm life in early nineteenth-century midwestern America.
 
Lincoln in Indiana tells the story of Lincoln’s life in Indiana, from his family’s arrival to their departure. Dirck explains the Lincoln family’s ancestry and how they and their relatives came to settle near Pigeon Creek. He shows how frontier families like the Lincolns created complex farms out of wooded areas, fashioned rough livelihoods, and developed tight-knit communities in the unforgiving Indiana wilderness. With evocative prose, he describes the youthful Lincoln’s relationship with members of his immediate and extended family. Dirck illuminates Thomas Lincoln by setting him into his era, revealing the concept of frontier manhood, and showing the increasingly strained relationship between father and son. He illustrates how pioneer women faced difficulties as he explores Nancy Lincoln’s work and her death from milk sickness; how Lincoln’s stepmother, Sarah Bush, fit into the family; and how Lincoln’s sister died in childbirth. Dirck examines Abraham’s education and reading habits, showing how a farming community could see him as lazy for preferring book learning over farmwork. While explaining how he was both similar to and different from his peers, Dirck includes stories of Lincoln’s occasional rash behavior toward those who offended him. As Lincoln grew up, his ambitions led him away from the family farm, and Dirck tells how Lincoln chafed at his father’s restrictions, why the Lincolns decided to leave Indiana in 1830, and how Lincoln eventually broke away from his family.
 
In a triumph of research, Dirck cuts through the myths about Lincoln’s early life, and along the way he explores the social, cultural, and economic issues of early nineteenth-century Indiana. The result is a realistic portrait of the youthful Lincoln set against the backdrop of American frontier culture.
 
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Love amid the Turmoil
The Civil War Letters of William and Mary Vermilion
Donald C. Elder, III
University of Iowa Press, 2003

William Vermilion (1830-1894) served as a captain in Company F of the 36th Iowa Infantry from October 1862 until September 1865. Although he was a physician in Iconium in south central Iowa at the start of the war, after it ended he became a noted lawyer in nearby Centerville; he was also a state senator from 1869 to 1872. Mary Vermilion (1831-1883) was a schoolteacher who grew up in Indiana; she and William married in 1858. In this volume historian Donald Elder provides a careful selection from the hundreds of supportive, informative, and heart-wrenching letters that they wrote each other during the war—the most complete collection of letters exchanged between a husband and a wife during the Civil War.

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The Loyal West
Civil War and Reunion in Middle America
Matthew E. Stanley
University of Illinois Press, 2017
A free region deeply influenced by southern mores, the Lower Middle West represented a true cultural and political median in Civil War–era America. Here grew a Unionism steeped in the mythology of the Loyal West--a myth rooted in regional and racial animosities and the belief that westerners had won the war.

Matthew E. Stanley's intimate study explores the Civil War, Reconstruction, and sectional reunion in this bellwether region. Using the lives of area soldiers and officers as a lens, Stanley reveals a place and a strain of collective memory that was anti-rebel, anti-eastern, and anti-black in its attitudes--one that came to be at the forefront of the northern retreat from Reconstruction and toward white reunion. The Lower Middle West's embrace of black exclusion laws, origination of the Copperhead movement, backlash against liberalizing war measures, and rejection of Reconstruction were all pivotal to broader American politics. And the region's legacies of white supremacy--from racialized labor violence to sundown towns to lynching--found malignant expression nationwide, intersecting with how Loyal Westerners remembered the war.

A daring challenge to traditional narratives of section and commemoration, The Loyal West taps into a powerful and fascinating wellspring of Civil War identity and memory.

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Majoritarian Cities
Policy Making and Inequality in Urban Politics
Neil Kraus
University of Michigan Press, 2013

Neil Kraus evaluates both the influence of public opinion on local policy-making and the extent to which public policy addresses economic and social inequalities. Drawing on several years of fieldwork and multiple sources of data, including surveys and polls; initiatives, referenda, and election results; government documents; focus groups; interviews; and a wide assortment of secondary sources, Kraus presents case studies of two Midwestern cities, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Gary, Indiana. Specifically, he focuses on several major policy decisions in recent decades concerning education, law enforcement, and affordable housing in Minneapolis; and education and riverboat casino development in Gary.

Kraus finds that, on these issues, local officials frequently take action that reflects public opinion, yet the resulting policies often fail to meet the needs of the disadvantaged or ameliorate the effects of concentrated poverty. In light of citizens’ current attitudes, he concludes that if patterns of inequality are to be more effectively addressed, scholars and policymakers must transform the debate about the causes and effects of inequality in urban and metropolitan settings.

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Making a Mass Institution
Indianapolis and the American High School
Kyle P. Steele
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Making a Mass Institution describes how Indianapolis, Indiana created a divided and unjust system of high schools over the course of the twentieth century, one that effectively sorted students geographically, economically, and racially. Like most U.S. cities, Indianapolis began its secondary system with a singular, decidedly academic high school, but ended the 1960s with multiple high schools with numerous paths to graduation. Some of the schools were academic, others vocational, and others still for what was eventually called “life adjustment.” This system mirrored the multiple forces of mass society that surrounded it, as it became more bureaucratic, more focused on identifying and organizing students based on perceived abilities, and more anxious about teaching conformity to middle-class values. By highlighting the experiences of the students themselves and the formation of a distinct, school-centered youth culture, Kyle P. Steele argues that high school, as it evolved into a mass institution, was never fully the domain of policy elites, school boards and administrators, or students, but a complicated and ever-changing contested meeting place of all three.
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Meredith Nicholson
A Writing Life
Ralph D. Gray
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2007
Meredith Nicholson stands as the most Hoosier of all Indiana writers, serving as an outspoken advocate for his state. Indiana literary historian Arthur S. Shumaker called Nicholson the “most rabid” of Indiana’s major authors. In addition to writing such national best-sellers as Zelda Dameron and The House of a Thousand Candles, his best-known work, Nicholson won praise as an insightful essayist, with his work published in such national magazines as the Saturday Evening Post and Atlantic Monthly. "His inherent belief in democracy and democratic values, and his unapologetic patriotism permeate his essays," notes Gray, "some of which excoriated the Ku Klux Klan and upheld the rights and virtues of women, attitudes not always popular at the time."
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The Miami Indians of Indiana
A Persistent People, 1654-1994
Stewart Rafert
Indiana Historical Society Press, 1996
Now scattered in small communities in northern Indiana, the Eastern Miami Indians, once a well-known tribe, have lived in undeserved obscurity since the 1840s. In recent years they have become more visible as they have sought restoration of treaty rights and have revitalized their culture. The post-removal history of the Indiana Miami tribe is a rich texture of social, legal, and economic history, much enhanced by folklore and a rich series of photographic images. In The Miami Indians of Indiana: A Persistent People, 1654–1994, Rafert explores the history and culture of the Miami Indians.
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Mothering Inner-City Children
The Early School Years
Katherine Brown Rosier
Rutgers University Press, 2000

There are few groups more stereotyped and demonized than "welfare mothers," particularly low-income, African American women raising children in the inner city. But what are the day-to-day stories behind the stereotypes? How do African American mothers (both single women and those living with a partner) in poor families handle their roles as parents? What support networks do they rely on to help raise their children? How do their personal histories affect their parenting styles?

Sociologist Katherine Brown Rosier spent three years interviewing and observing Indianapolis mothers as their children made the transition from a Head Start program to kindergarten and through second grade, analyzing the families in their homes, schools, and other social settings. She brings forth the voices of the mothers, children, and their teachers, providing a multifaceted picture of how low-income African American families cope with the daily pressures and responsibilities of child rearing.

Rosier also examines how larger socio-economic factors influence these families' specific circumstances and histories. What child-rearing strategies do these mothers employ, she asks, to promote a smooth transition into school despite complex discontinuities among their homes, schools, and communities? How are these strategies viewed and supported or impeded by teachers, family, friends, and neighbors?

Until now, most research on poor African American families has focused so intently on the problems confronted by this seemingly homogenous group that the routine practices of every day life have been ignored. In this unique project, Rosier allows the families' individual experiences and thoughts to contribute to and complicate current research.

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Muncie, India(na)
Middletown and Asian America
Himanee Gupta-Carlson
University of Illinois Press, 2018
Muncie, Indiana, remains the epitome of an American town. Yet scholars built the image of so-called typical communities across the United States on an illusion. Their decades of studies ignored the racial, ethnic, and religious diversity and tensions woven into the American communities that Muncie supposedly embodied. Himanee Gupta-Carlson puts forth an essential question: what do nonwhites, non-Christians, and/or non-natives mean when they call themselves American? A daughter in one of Muncie's first Indian American families, Gupta-Carlson merges personal experience, the life histories of others, and critical analysis to explore the answers. Her stories of members of Muncie's South Asian communities unearth the silences imposed by past studies while challenging the body of scholarship in fundamental ways. At the same time, Gupta-Carlson shares personal memories and experiences that illuminate her place within the historical, political, and socio-cultural currents she engages in her work. It also reveals how that work informs and transforms her as a scholar and a person. As meditative as it is insightful, Muncie, India(na) invites readers to feel the truth of the fascinating stories behind one woman's revised portrait of an American community.
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Murder in Their Hearts
The Fall Creek Massacre
David Thomas Murphy
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2010
In March 1824 a group of angry and intoxicated settlers brutally murdered nine Indians camped along a tributary of Fall Creek. The carnage was recounted in lurid detail in the contemporary press, and the events that followed sparked a national sensation. Murder in Their Hearts: The Fall Creek Massacre tells that, although violence between settlers and Native Americans was not unusual during the early nineteenth century, in this particular incident the white men responsible for the murders were singled out and hunted down, brought to trial, convicted by a jury of their neighbors, and, for the first time under American law, sentenced to death and executed for the murder of Native Americans.
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Native American Place Names of Indiana
Michael McCafferty
University of Illinois Press, 2007

A linguistic history of Native American place-names in Indiana

In tracing the roots of Indiana place names, Michael McCafferty focuses on those created and used by local Native Americans. Drawing from exciting new sources that include three Illinois dictionaries from the eighteenth century, the author documents the language used to describe landmarks essential to fur traders in Les Pays d’en Haut and settlers of the Old Northwest territory. Impeccably researched, this study details who created each name, as well as when, where, how and why they were used. The result is a detailed linguistic history of lakes, streams, cities, counties, and other Indiana names. Each entry includes native language forms, translations, and pronunciation guides, offering fresh historical insight into the state of Indiana.

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The Native Americans
Elizabeth Glenn and Stewart Rafert
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2009
In the second volume of the IHS Press’s Peopling Indiana Series, anthropologist Elizabeth Glenn and ethnohistorian Stewart Rafert put readers in touch with the first people to inhabit the Hoosier state, exploring what it meant historically to be an Indian in this land and discussing the resurgence of native life in the state today. Many natives either assimilated into white culture or hid their Indian identity. World War II dramatically changed this scenario when Native Americans served in the U.S. military and on the home front. Afterward, Indians from many tribal lineages flocked to Indiana to find work. Along with Indiana's Miami and Potawatomi, they are creating a diverse Indian culture that enriches the lives of all Hoosiers.
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The New Politics of Pornography
Donald Alexander Downs
University of Chicago Press, 1989
Fresh empirical evidence of pornography's negative effects and the resurgence of feminist and conservative critiques have caused local, state, and federal officials to reassess the pornography issue. In The New Politics of Pornography, Donald Alexander Downs explores the contemporary antipornography movement and addresses difficult questions about the limits of free speech. Drawing on official transcripts and extensive interviews, Downs recreates and analyzes landmark cases in Minneapolis and Indianapolis. He argues persuasively that both conservative and liberal camps are often characterized by extreme intolerance which hampers open policy debate and may ultimately threaten our modern doctrine of free speech. Downs concludes with a balanced and nuanced discussion of what First Amendment protections pornography should be afforded. This provocative and interdisciplinary work will interest students of political science, women's studies, civil liberties, and constitutional law.
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Paint and Canvas
A Life of T. C. Steele
Rachel Berenson Perry
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2011
At the age of fourteen, a young man in Waveland, Indiana, had taken over the family farm after the death of his father. Now responsible for taking care of his widowed mother and supporting his four brothers, he took up the reins on the plow to begin preparing the field for planting. Family legend has it that the young farmer, Theodore Clement Steele, tied “colored ribbons to the handles of the plow so that he could watch the ribbons in the wind and the effect that they had on the [surrounding] colors.” Recognizing Steele’s passion for art, his mother supported his choice to make his living as an artist. T. C. Steele, the eighth volume in the Indiana Historical Society Press’s youth biography series, traces the path of Steele’s career as an artist from his early studies in Germany to his determination to paint what he knew best, the Indiana landscape. Steele, along with fellow artists William Forsyth, Otto Stark, Richard Gruelle, and J. Ottis Adams, became a member of the renowned Hoosier Group and became a leader in the development of Midwestern art.
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The People's Choice
Congressman Jim Jontz of Indiana
Ray Boomhower
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2012
This first-ever biography of Congressman Jim Jontz examines his remarkable long-shot political career and lifetime involvement in local, state, and national environmental issues. As a liberal Democrat (he preferred the terms progressive or populist) usually running in conservative districts, Jontz had political pundits predicting his defeat in every election only to see him celebrating another victory with his happy supporters, always clad in a scruffy plaid jacket with a hood from high school that he wore for good luck. “I always hope for the best and fight for the worst,” said Jontz. He won five terms as state representative for the Twentieth District (Benton, Newton, Warren, and White Counties), served two years in the Indiana Senate, and captured three terms in the U.S. Congress representing the sprawling Fifth Congressional District in northwestern Indiana that stretched from Lake County in the north to Grant County in the south. Jontz told a reporter that his political career had always “been based on my willingness and role as a spokesman for the average citizen.” In his career Jontz also led an unsuccessful campaign to stop the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement with the Citizens Trade Campaign, helped protect the Endangered Species Act when it was under attack in the 1990s as director of the Endangered Species Coalition, campaigned to save old-growth forests as executive director of the Western Ancient Forest Campaign, and tried to foster progressive causes as president of the Americans for Democratic Action.
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Pickin’ Cotton on the Way to Church
The Life and Work of Father Boniface Hardin, OSB
Nancy Van Note Chism
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2019
Pickin’ Cotton on the Way to Church highlights the life of Father Boniface Hardin, a Benedictine monk. James Dwight Randolph (Randy) Hardin was born on November 18, 1933, in Bardstown, Kentucky, educated in Catholic schools in Kentucky, and thirteen years old when he asked to become a priest. Excluded from the seminaries in Kentucky because of his race, he enrolled in Saint Meinrad Seminary in Spencer County, Indiana, which had just started accepting black students. After six years of study he took his vows as monk and was given the name Boniface. He was ordained a priest in 1959 and attained a graduate degree in 1963. In 1965 Father Hardin accepted the position of associate pastor at Holy Angels Catholic Church, a predominately black parish in Indianapolis. Father Hardin was a social activist who spoke out against poverty, segregation, police brutality, and fought against the construction of an interstate highway that would adversely affect the black community. Such actions were considered inappropriate for a priest and the Archbishop of Indianapolis removed him from his position at Holy Angels. Although reinstated due to public outcries, Father Hardin soon left Holy Angels, and, along with Sister Jane Shilling, opened the Martin Center, where they could advocate full time for the poor and disenfranchised through a series of programs and services. Realizing the correlation between education and career advancement, Father Boniface and Sister Jane founded Martin University, the only predominately African American institution of higher learning in Indiana. The university continues to play a unique role in the community, with a special focus on educational opportunities to those who have been too often discounted, discouraged, and disregarded by society. Although Father Hardin was widely known in Indiana during his lifetime, accumulating many awards and honors, it is important to document his life and work for posterity. It is hoped that this volume will provide an overview of his story and lay the foundation for other scholarly efforts.
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Pottery and Chronology at Angel
Sherri Hilgeman
University of Alabama Press, 2000

By analyzing the pottery found at a well-known archaeological site, Hilgeman constructs the long-awaited timeline for the rise and decline of this ancient society.

Located near present-day Evansville, Indiana, the Angel site is one of the important archaeological towns associated with prehistoric Mississippian society. More than two million artifacts were collected from this site during excavations from 1939 to 1989, but, until now, no systematic survey of the pottery sherds had been conducted. This volume, documenting the first in-depth analysis of Angel site pottery, also provides scholars of Mississippian culture with a chronology of this important site.

Angel is generally thought to have been occupied from before A.D. 1200 to 1450, but scholars have been forced to treat this period as one chronological unit without any sense of the growth and decline of the society that occupied it. Using radiocarbon assays and an analysis of its morphological and stylistic attributes of pottery, Sherri Hilgeman is able to divide the occupation of Angel into a series of recognizable stages. She then correlates those stages with similar ones at other archaeological excavations—especially nearby Kincaid—making it possible to compare Angel society with other native cultures of the lower Ohio Valley. Through this important contribution to native pottery studies, Hilgeman opens a window into the lifeways of prehistoric Angel society and places that society in the larger context of Mississippian culture.

 


 

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The Quiet Hero
A Life of Ryan White
Nelson Price
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2015
In 1985 the eyes of the world turned to the Hoosier State and the attempt by a thirteen-year-old Kokomo, Indiana, teenager to do what seemed to be a simple task—join his fellow classmates at Western Middle School in Russiaville, the school to which his Kokomo neighborhood was assigned. The teenager, Ryan White, however, had been diagnosed with Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome from contaminated blood-based products used to treat his hemophilia. “It was my decision,” White said, “to live a normal life, go to school, be with friends, and enjoying day to day activities. It was not going to be easy.” White's words were an understatement, to say the least. His wish to return to school was met with panic by parents and some school officials. The controversy about White and the quiet courage he and his mother, Jeanne, displayed in their battle to have him join his classmates is explored in the eleventh volume in the Indiana Historical Society Press’s Youth Biography Series. The Quiet Hero is written by Nelson Price, who wrote about White’s odyssey during his days as a reporter and columnist for the Indianapolis News. Price goes behind the scenes and brings to light stories and individuals who might have been lost in the media spotlight. After a nine-month court battle, White won the right to return to school, but with concessions. These were not enough for parents of twenty children, who responded by starting their own school. At school, White became the target of slurs and lies, and his locker was vandalized. Although the White family received support from citizens and celebrities around the world, particularly rock singer Elton John, the situation grew so controversial in Kokomo that they moved to Cicero, Indiana—a community that greeted them much differently. In Price’s book, White, who succumbed to his disease in 1990, comes across as a normal teenager who met an impossible situation with uncommon grace, courage, and wisdom. “It was difficult at times, to handle; but I tried to ignore the injustice, because I knew the people were wrong,” White said. “My family and I held no hatred for those people because we realized they were victims of their own ignorance.”
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Riders for God
The Story of a Christian Motorcycle Gang
Rich Remsberg
University of Illinois Press, 2000
Riders for God takes us into a world generally inaccessible to outsiders, one situated at the crossroads of two seemingly incongruous realms: motorcycle gangs and Spirit-filled Christianity.
 
Founded by a former biker and located in southern Indiana, the Unchained Gang is a group of former outlaw bikers, ex-convicts, and recovering addicts who are now born-again Christians. Although they have given up drugs, alcohol, tobacco, and violence they have kept their motorcycles--which they consider to be anointed--and use them as tools in their witness of the word of God as they understand it. The Unchained Gang is an outreach ministry, going into prisons and jails, biker rallies, and other places where people on the fringe are often ignored by other churches and the rest of society.
 
Combining powerful photographic images with gang members' first-person testimonies, Rich Remsberg shows the ironic juxtaposition of tattoos, leather vests, and the iconography of the biker world with the Christian practices of Bible study, speaking in tongues, and praying at an altar. He explores the lives of men and women who have redirected the extreme nature of their former ways.
 
Through their own powerful stories, they explain how the addictions and uncontrollable violence that once shaped their lives have given way to dramatic worship and zealous ministry.
 
An afterword by Colleen McDannell situates the Unchained Gang's
interpretation of Christian living in the larger constellation of pentecostal, born-again, fundamentalist, and mainstream churches.
 
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Road Trip
A Pocket History of Indiana
Andrea Neal
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2016
The bicentennial of Indiana's statehood in 2016 is the perfect time for Hoosiers of all stripes to hit the road and visit sites that speak to the nineteenth state's character. In her book, Andrea Neal has selected the top 100 events/historical figures in Indiana history, some well known like George Rogers Clark, and others obscured by time or memory such as the visit of Marquis de Lafayette to southern Indiana. These highly readable essays and the photographs that accompany them feature a tourist site or landmark that in some way brings the subject to life. This will enable interested Hoosiers to travel the entire state to experience history firsthand. Related activities and sites include nature hikes, museums, markers, monuments, and memorials. The sites appear in chronological order, beginning with the impact of the Ice Age on Indiana and ending with the legacy of the bicentennial itself.
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Shadow of Shiloh
Major General Lew Wallace in the Civil War
Gail Stephens
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2010
Thirty-two years after the battle of Shiloh, Lew Wallace returned to the battlefield, mapping the route of his April 1862 march. Ulysses S. Grant, Wallace's commander at Shiloh, expected Wallace and his Third Division to arrive early in the afternoon of April 6. Wallace and his men, however, did not arrive until nightfall, and in the aftermath of the bloodbath of Shiloh Grant attributed Wallace's late arrival to a failure to obey orders. By mapping the route of his march and proving how and where he had actually been that day, the sixty-seven-year-old Wallace hoped to remove the stigma of "Shiloh and its slanders." That did not happen. Shiloh still defines Wallace's military reputation, overshadowing the rest of his stellar military career and making it easy to forget that in April 1862 he was a rising military star, the youngest major general in the Union army. Wallace was devoted to the Union, but he was also pursuing glory, fame, and honor when he volunteered to serve in April 1861. In Shadow of Shiloh: Major General Lew Wallace in the Civil War, author Gail Stephens specifically addresses Wallace's military career and its place in the larger context of Civil War military history.
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Speed Capital
Indianapolis Auto Racing and the Making of Modern America
Brian M. Ingrassia
University of Illinois Press, 2024
How a speedway became a legendary sports site and sparked America’s car culture

The 1909 opening of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway marked a foundational moment in the history of automotive racing. Events at the famed track and others like it also helped launch America’s love affair with cars and an embrace of road systems that transformed cities and shrank perceptions of space.

Brian Ingrassia tells the story of the legendary oval’s early decades. This story revolves around Speedway cofounder and visionary businessman Carl Graham Fisher, whose leadership in the building of the transcontinental Lincoln Highway and the iconic Dixie Highway had an enormous impact on American mobility. Ingrassia looks at the Speedway’s history as a testing ground for cars and airplanes, its multiple close brushes with demolition, and the process by which racing became an essential part of the Golden Age of Sports. At the same time, he explores how the track’s past reveals the potent links between sports capitalism and the selling of nostalgia, tradition, and racing legends.

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A Study of the Glacial Kame Culture in Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana
Wilbur M. Cunningham
University of Michigan Press, 1948
In this book, Wilbur Cunningham presents data on artifacts from eleven sites in the Midwest, with a focus on the Burch site in Berrien County, Michigan. Rare shell gorgets in the shape of sandals (called sandal-sole gorgets) were found at all of the sites. Includes 10 plates. Appendix by James B. Griffin.
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There I Grew Up
Remembering Abraham Lincoln's Indiana Youth
William E. Bartelt
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2008
In 1859 Abraham Lincoln covered his Indiana years in one paragraph and two sentences of a written autobiographical statement that included the following: "We reached our new home about the time the State came into the union. It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals in the woods. There I grew up." William E. Bartelt uses annotation and primary source material to tell the history of Lincoln's Indiana years by those who were there. The book reveals, through the words of those who knew him, Lincoln's humor, compassion, oratorical skills and thirst for knowledge, and it provides an overview of Lincoln's Indiana experiences, his family, the community where the Lincolns settled and southern Indiana from 1816 to 1830.
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Thomas Taggart
Public Servant, Political Boss, 1856-1929
James Phillip Fadely
Indiana Historical Society Press, 1997

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Two-Moon Journey
The Potawatomi Trail of Death
Peggy King Anderson
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2018
Two Moon Journey tells the story of a young Potawatomi Indian named Simu-quah and her family and friends who were forced from their village at Twin Lakes, near Rochester, Indiana, where they had lived for generations, to beyond the Mississippi River in Kansas. Historically the journey is known as the Potawatomi Trail of Death. Like the real Potawatomi, Simu-quah would live forever with the vision of her home and the rest of the Twin Lakes village being burnt to the ground by the soldiers as she took her first steps to a distant and frightening westward land. She experiences the heat and exhaustion of endless days of walking; helps nurse sick children and the elderly in a covered wagon that was ill-smelling, hot, and airless; sleeps beside strange streams and caves—and turns from hating the soldiers to seeing them as people. In Kansas, as she planted corn seeds she had saved from her Indiana home, she turns away from the bitterness of removal and finds forgiveness, the first step in the journey of her new life in Kansas.
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"We Must Be Fearless"
The Woman Suffrage Movement in Indiana
Anita Morgan
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2020
Commemorating the centennial of women receiving the right to vote in the United States in 1920, "We Must Be Fearless": The Woman Suffrage Movement in Indiana by historian Anita Morgan examines the struggles and triumphs of a myriad of Hoosier women-black and white, rich and poor, urban and rural-who banded together to seek equal rights with men at the ballot box. The story of the Indiana women's suffrage movement can be divided into three stages. The first began with the first woman's rights association meeting in 1851 and ended in 1869. Hoosier women held yearly meetings and agreed upon basic goals that included not only suffrage, but also equal pay for equal work, changes to married women's property laws, and greater employment opportunities and access to the professions. Most members of this early group put their efforts aside during the Civil War to devote their time to nursing and other war work. The exception to this was Lizzie Bunnell, who published The Mayflower from her home in Peru, Indiana. Bunnell's bi-monthly newspaper supported both the Union and woman's rights and is believed to be the only woman's rights newspaper published during the war. Following the Civil War, the fight for woman's rights resumed, but with a new, almost singular focus on suffrage. This second phase of woman's suffrage work in Indiana began in 1869 when the Indiana Woman's Rights Association reformed with a new name-the Indiana Woman's Suffrage Association. The association aligned itself with Lucy Stone's American Woman Suffrage Association, a national group that focused more on gaining the vote and less on social issues than the National Woman Suffrage Association led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. The Indianapolis-based Equal Suffrage Society joined the fight in 1878. The combined power of these groups pushed the Indiana General Assembly to the brink of woman suffrage in 1881-83, but in the end the fear that women would vote as one in favor of temperance legislation got in the way of the passage of the state woman's suffrage amendment. The final phase of the suffrage movement in Indiana started with the 1890s as many Hoosier women worked with national women's groups or worked on local and state progressive reforms aside from or in addition to their work on suffrage. After sporadic failed attempts to push through suffrage in this era, the joint efforts of the Woman's Franchise League and the nonpartisan Legislative Council of Indiana Women, combined with a strong and growing acceptance of woman's suffrage at the national level (in part as a result of women's work during World War I), once again pushed Indiana to the brink of woman's suffrage. The Indiana legislature passed the Woman's Suffrage Act of 1917, which gave women partial suffrage in the November elections that year and passed the first reading of the Beardsley Full Suffrage Amendment. This meant that Indiana women would achieve full suffrage in 1919 if the amendment also passed that legislative session. As women across the state registered to vote, William Knight filed suit against women voting and he won. Hoosier women did not get to vote in the elections that November and had to wait for passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to gain full voting rights.
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front cover of What Middletown Read
What Middletown Read
Print Culture in an American Small City
Frank Felsenstein
University of Massachusetts Press, 2015
The discovery of a large cache of circulation records from the Muncie, Indiana, Public Library in 2003 offers unprecedented detail about American reading behavior at the turn of the twentieth century. Frank Felsenstein and James J. Connolly have mined these records to produce an in-depth account of print culture in Muncie, the city featured in the famed "Middletown" studies conducted by Robert and Helen Lynd almost a century ago. Using the data assembled and made public through the What Middletown Read Database (www.bsu.edu/libraries/wmr), a celebrated new resource the authors helped launch, Felsenstein and Connolly analyze the borrowing choices and reading culture of social groups and individuals.

What Middletown Read is much more than a statistical study. Felsenstein and Connolly dig into diaries, meeting minutes, newspaper reports, and local histories to trace the library's development in relation to the city's cosmopolitan aspirations, to profile individual readers, and to explore such topics as the relationship between children's reading and their schooling and what books were discussed by local women's clubs. The authors situate borrowing patterns and reading behavior within the contexts of a rapidly growing, culturally ambitious small city, an evolving public library, an expanding market for print, and the broad social changes that accompanied industrialization in the United States. The result is a rich, revealing portrait of the place of reading in an emblematic American community.
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