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Nora Wendl’s audacious work of creative nonfiction explodes the sex-and-real-estate myth surrounding the Edith Farnsworth House and its two central figures. An eminent physician and woman of letters, Farnsworth left a rich trove of correspondence, memoirs, and photographs that Wendl uses to reconstruct her voice. Farnsworth’s memories and experiences alternate with Wendl’s thoughts on topics like misogyny and professional ambition to fashion a lyrical examination of love, loneliness, beauty, and the search for the divine.

Eloquent and confessional, Almost Nothing restores Edith Farnsworth to her place in architectural history and the masterpiece that bears her name.

Notable shipwrecks of Lake Michigan throughout a century of enterprise, industry, heroism, and disaster on the Great Lakes

The Great Lakes are graveyards of a vast number of shipwrecks (30,000 by some estimates), and Lake Michigan has more than the other four lakes combined. The stories of those wrecks tell the history of that mighty lake in its endless, mercurial challenge to human endeavor.

Surveying the wreckage throughout the decades, from the fiery end of the twin propeller–driven Phoenix in 1847 to the failure of the Anna Minch to outrun the infamous 1940 Armistice Day storm, Michael Schumacher charts the course of shipping disasters great and small on Lake Michigan. He illuminates the details of maritime weather and shipcraft, the lives devoted to and lost on the water, and the mistakes and monumental failures that led to these ships’ watery ends.

Schumacher’s deft storytelling, drawing from deep research and comprehensive knowledge, brings forth the vivid details of the last minutes of these doomed ships, along with the circumstances surrounding their voyages. Here are tragic tales like that of the Eastland, the deadliest shipwreck in Great Lakes history, lost while docked in the Chicago River; the Rouse Simmons, a wooden schooner loaded with Christmas trees; the train ferry Milwaukee and the Wisconsin, a package freighter, gone within one week of each other in October 1929; and the passenger vessel the Lady Elgin, a devastating loss met with incredible heroism.

Liberally illustrated with historical photographs, the stories of these shipwrecks, spanning a full century of commercial traffic on Lake Michigan, document the myriad forms of bravery and misfortune that mark our encounters with the Great Lakes.

In this significant recovery project, Elizabeth Schroeder Schlabach investigates the institutions and streetscapes of Black Chicago that fueled an entire literary and artistic movement. She argues that African American authors and artists--such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, painter Archibald Motley, and many others--viewed and presented black reality from a specific geographic vantage point: the view along the streets of Bronzeville. Schlabach explores how the particular rhythms and scenes of daily life in Bronzeville locations, such as the State Street "Stroll" district or the bustling intersection of 47th Street and South Parkway, figured into the creative works and experiences of the artists and writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance. She also covers in detail the South Side Community Art Center and the South Side Writers' Group, two institutions of art and literature that engendered a unique aesthetic consciousness and political ideology for which the Black Chicago Renaissance would garner much fame.

Life in Bronzeville also involved economic hardship and social injustice, themes that resonated throughout the flourishing arts scene. Schlabach explores Bronzeville's harsh living conditions, exemplified in the cramped one-bedroom kitchenette apartments that housed many of the migrants drawn to the city's promises of opportunity and freedom. Many struggled with the precariousness of urban life, and Schlabach shows how the once vibrant neighborhood eventually succumbed to the pressures of segregation and economic disparity. Providing a virtual tour South Side African American urban life at street level, Along the Streets of Bronzeville charts the complex interplay and intersection of race, geography, and cultural criticism during the Black Chicago Renaissance's rise and fall.

How the best intentions of African socialism became the useful tools of capitalism.

In the mid-twentieth century, skilled labor was seen as the key to national development. For newly independent African countries, this posed a formidable challenge: to build thriving economies, they needed to rapidly educate workers. As it turns out, that wasn’t their only obstacle.

Ambition and Adjustment reveals how responses to this human capital problem from the political left and right converged in unlikely ways to block Africa’s postcolonial progress. Focusing on nation-building projects in Zambia and Tanzania, Priya Lal recounts how the first generations of Africa’s professional class faced pressures on all sides—from foreign planners prioritizing economic growth and from local socialists decrying higher education and professionalization as wasteful and elitist. When African development stalled, international institutions like the World Bank took up parts of both approaches, justifying structural adjustment programs that defunded African universities and hospitals in the name of social equity. Indeed, Lal shows that neoliberal austerity in the 1990s was packaged in Africa’s socialist narratives from the 1960s.

By unearthing this forgotten history, Ambition and Adjustment upends traditional accounts of postcolonial development, exposing how socialism and capitalism both conflicted and overlapped to shape Africa’s trajectory since independence.

In Ambition, Competition, and Electoral Reform, Jamie L. Carson and Jason M. Roberts present an original study of U.S. congressional elections and electoral institutions for 1872-1944 from a contemporary political science perspective. Using data on late nineteenth and early twentieth century congressional elections, the authors test the applicability in a historical context of modern political science theories, assess the effects of institutional reforms, and identify the factors that shape the competitiveness of elections. They present several key findings: the strategic politicians theory is applicable in an era without candidate-centered campaigns; there was an incumbency advantage prior to the full development of candidate-centered campaigns; institutional reforms have had a significant effect on elections; and the degree of electoral competition frequently correlates with elected officials' responsiveness to citizens.

In this work, Sean Dettman traces an observable correlation over the course of late summer 1940 between the bombings of London and other UK cities and the changing attitude of the American people towards adopting a moderate pro-aid position, and argues that these processes were aided by pro-aid US journalists who deployed a positive Blitz narrative centered on themes of resilience, courage, and fortitude. This shift in US public opinion allowed the Roosevelt Administration and pro-aid pressure groups to advance conversations in Washington towards aiding Britain, even at the risk of war.

Dettman also argues that this shift in opinion was caused by fear that a Nazi victory would threaten US national security and the American way of life, rather than an interest in expanding pro-democratic structures and institutions in Britain. 

Whereas the vast body of literature examining US public opinion during the ‘Great Debate’ reduces the Blitz narrative to a minor cause, America and the Blitz demonstrates how the Blitz narrative influenced domestic conversations regarding US national security and the American way of life. The author reveals that when the events and themes of the Blitz come into dialogue with conversations about US aid to Britain and national security, the traditional narrative changes.

America and the Blitz offers a new framework for understanding the ‘Great Debate,’ revealing the relationship between US journalists’ Blitz narrative and its effect on US public opinion towards aiding Britain and the ascendancy of American global power.

Between the two world wars, American publishing entered a “golden age” characterized by an explosion of new publishers, authors, audiences, distribution strategies, and marketing techniques. The period was distinguished by a diverse literary culture, ranging from modern cultural rebels to working-class laborers, political radicals, and progressive housewives. In America the Middlebrow, Jaime Harker focuses on one neglected mode of authorship in the interwar period—women's middlebrow authorship and its intersection with progressive politics. 

With the rise of middlebrow institutions and readers came the need for the creation of the new category of authorship. Harker contends that these new writers appropriated and adapted a larger tradition of women's activism and literary activity to their own needs and practices. Like sentimental women writers and readers of the 1850s, these authors saw fiction as a means of reforming and transforming society. Like their Progressive Era forebears, they replaced religious icons with nationalistic images of progress and pragmatic ideology. In the interwar period, this mode of authorship was informed by Deweyan pragmatist aesthetics, which insisted that art provided vicarious experience that could help create humane, democratic societies.

Drawing on letters from publishers, editors, agents, and authors, America the Middlebrow traces four key moments in this distinctive culture of letters through the careers of Dorothy Canfield, Jessie Fauset, Pearl Buck, and Josephine Herbst. Both an exploration of a virtually invisible culture of letters and a challenge to monolithic paradigms of modernism, the book offers fresh insight into the ongoing tradition of political domestic fiction that flourished between the wars.

The author of more than twenty books and a revered contributor to numerous national publications, Charles Bowden (1945–2014) used his keen storyteller’s eye to reveal both the dark underbelly and the glorious determination of humanity, particularly in the borderlands between the United States and Mexico. In America’s Most Alarming Writer, key figures in his life—including his editors, collaborators, and other writers—deliver a literary wake for the man who inspired them throughout his forty-year career.

Part revelation, part critical assessment, the fifty essays in this collection span the decades from Bowden’s rise as an investigative journalist through his years as a singular voice of unflinching honesty about natural history, climate change, globalization, drugs, and violence. As the Chicago Tribune noted, “Bowden wrote with the intensity of Joan Didion, the voracious hunger of Henry Miller, the feral intelligence and irony of Hunter Thompson, and the wit and outrage of Edward Abbey.” An evocative complement to The Charles Bowden Reader, the essays and photographs in this homage brilliantly capture the spirit of a great writer with a quintessentially American vision. Bowden is the best writer you’ve (n)ever read.