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“This book,” the author tells us in his preface, “is intended to be a picture of life on a farm in Southern Ohio in the 1930s.” It is a faithful portrait of farm life as thousands of men and women experienced it from one end of the country to the other and from pioneering times to the present century.

Originally published in 1938 to enthusiastic reviews and commercial success, RFD is the story of one couple’s trials with leaving the comforts of city life for a chance to get back to the land.

From his farm near Chillicothe, Ohio, Charles Allen Smart gives a realistic rendering of what it meant to farm in the 1930s. It is part of the book’s intrinsic honesty that it could not be as good as Walden. Thoreau had worked out a philosophy that suited him and that he was ready to recommend to others. Mr. Smart had no prescription for the general ailments, beyond a belief that creating things is important and that owning, buying, and selling things are unimportant.

What he tells us throughout this unusual book is that for him life on this particular farm, in this particular house, with this particular set-up of friends, neighbors, dogs, sheep, hens, cattle, trees, corn, vegetables, grass, and weather, costs less in human values than life in New York City—or in Chillicothe.

Ohio University Press is especially pleased to reissue this midwestern classic with a new foreword by noted farm writer Gene Logsdon.

RAGBRAI: Everyone Pronounces It Wrong is a celebration, a memoir, an entertainment. The book deals with the first 25 years of the famous bike ride. It describes the genesis of an event that has drawn hundreds of thousands of people to Iowa from all over the world and attempts to explain the ride's continued charm and appeal.

RAGBRAI is different from all other bicycle tours. The others, and there are dozens of cross-state rides held in the United States, attract mostly serious, dedicated cyclists who clench their teeth and ride hard all day. RAGBRAI has its share of these cyclists, but it's more inclusive. It is a huge, week long celebration with dancing in the streets and evening entertainments. It is a love affair between bicycle riders and the people of Iowa. The book captures the essence of all that.

Race is not a subject most people associate with archaeological research. Yet because of archaeologists’ interest in long time-spans they are perfectly positioned to investigate the “naturalness” of racial designations through time.

Race and the Archaeology of Identity brings together twelve of America’s most perceptive and talented historical archaeologists. Their focus is on the recent archaeological record—stretching geographically from Jamaica to northern Michigan; their time frame is from colonial days to the late nineteenth century; and their subjects range from frontier fur traders to Victorian city dwellers. Using textual and archaeological sources, contributors explore such topics as the connections of race to economics, the creation and maintenance of institutionalized poverty, the role of race in structuring and guiding intercultural connections, and the importance of race in creating and defining space.

Contributors explore such topics as the connections of race to economics, the role of race in structuring and guiding intercultural connections, and the importance of race in creating and defining space.

Chester Pierce was born in 1927; by 1952 he was a graduate of the Harvard Medical School. He went on to become president of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology and president of the American Orthopsychiatric Association. He was elected to the Institute of Medicine at the National Academy of Sciences and had an annual research seminar named after him by the National Medical Association.

Founding chair of the Black Psychiatrists of America, Pierce has profoundly affected American psychiatry and the thinking of African American psychiatrists during the last two decades. While recognized for his substantive scholarship on coping with extreme environments such as the South Pole, he is probably best known for his theories regarding how blacks cope with racism in the United States.

In Race and Excellence, Ezra Griffith, also an African American professor of psychiatry, engages Pierce in a dialogue with the goal of clarifying the inter-connection between the personal and the professional in the lives of both black scholars. The text melds the story of Pierce's life and his achievements, with particular attention to his theories about the predictable nature of racist behavior and the responses of oppressed groups. Having earned his doctorate a generation after Pierce, Griffith approaches his conversation with Pierce as a face-to-face meeting between mentor and student. Retelling Pierce's life story ultimately becomes for Griffith an exercise in conceptualizing his own experience. As he writes, “I never just wanted to tell Chet's story; I wanted to work his story out, to measure it, to try it on, to figure out which parts are good for me and other blacks so earnestly seeking heroes.”

Nineteenth-century California was a society in turmoil, with a rapidly growing population, booming mining camps, insufficient or nonexistent law-enforcement personnel, and a large number of ethnic groups with differing attitudes toward law and personal honor. Violence, including murder, was common, and legal responses varied broadly. Available now for the first time in paperback, Race and Homicide in Nineteenth-Century California examines coroners’ inquest reports, court case files, prison registers, and other primary and printed sources to analyze patterns of homicide and the state’s embryonic justice system. Author Clare V. McKanna discovers that the nature of crimes varied with the ethnicity of perpetrators and victims, as did the conduct and results of trials and sentencing patterns. He presents specific case studies and a vivid portrait of an unruly society in flux. Enhanced with testimony from contemporary sources and illustrated with period photographs, this study richly portrays a frontier society where the law was neither omnipotent nor impartial.

In our evolving American political culture, whites and blacks continue to respond very differently to race-based messages and the candidates who use them. Race Appeal examines the use and influence such appeals have on voters in elections for federal office in which one candidate is a member of a minority group.

Charlton McIlwain and Stephen Caliendo use various analysis methods to examine candidates who play the race card in political advertisements. They offer a compelling analysis of the construction of verbal and visual racial appeals and how the news media covers campaigns involving candidates of color.

Combining rigorous analyses with in-depth case studies-including an examination of race-based appeals in the historic 2008 presidential election—Race Appeal is a groundbreaking work that represents the most extensive and thorough treatment of race-based appeals in American political campaigns to date.

Race against Liberalism examines how black worker activism in Detroit shaped the racial politics of the labor movement and the white working class. David M. Lewis-Colman traces the substantive, long-standing disagreements between liberals and the black workers who embraced autonomous race-based action. As he shows, black autoworkers placed themselves at the center of Detroit's working-class politics and sought to forge a kind of working class unity that accommodated their interests as African Americans. The book covers the independent caucuses in the 1940s and the Trade Union Leadership Council in the 1950s; the black power movement and Revolutionary Union Movements of the mid-1960s; and the independent race-based activism of the 1970s that resulted in Coleman Young's 1973 election as the city's first black mayor.

The terrorist attacks against U.S. targets on September 11, 2001, and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, sparked an intense debate about "human rights." According to contributors to this provocative book, the discussion of human rights to date has been far too narrow. They argue that any conversation about human rights in the United States must include equal rights for all residents.
     Essays examine the historical and intellectual context for the modern debate about human rights, the racial implications of the war on terrorism, the intersection of racial oppression, and the national security state. Others look at the Pinkerton detective agency as a forerunner of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the role of Africa in post–World War II American attempts at empire-building, and the role of immigration as a human rights issue.

In this compelling portrait of interracial activism, Mark A. Lause documents the efforts of radical followers of John Brown to construct a triracial portion of the Federal Army of the Frontier. Mobilized and inspired by the idea of a Union that would benefit all, black, Indian, and white soldiers fought side by side, achieving remarkable successes in the field. Against a backdrop of idealism, racism, greed, and the agonies and deprivations of combat, Lause examines links between radicalism and reform, on the one hand, and racialized interactions among blacks, Indians, and whites, on the other.

Lause examines how this multiracial vision of American society developed on the Western frontier. Focusing on the men and women who supported Brown in territorial Kansas, Lause examines the impact of abolitionist sentiment on relations with Indians and the crucial role of nonwhites in the conflict. Through this experience, Indians, blacks, and whites began to see their destinies as interdependent, and Lause discusses the radicalizing impact of this triracial Unionism upon the military course of the war in the upper Trans-Mississippi.

The aftermath of the Civil War destroyed much of the memory of the war in the West, particularly in the Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). The opportunity for an interracial society was quashed by the government's willingness to redefine the lucrative field of Indian exploitation for military and civilian officials and contractors.

Assessing the social interrelations, ramifications, and military impact of nonwhites in the Union forces, Race and Radicalism in the Union Army explores the extent of interracial thought and activity among Americans in this period and greatly expands the historical narrative on the Civil War in the West.

Race in America is a multidisciplinary analysis of race and injustice by some of the nation’s foremost scholar-activists who helped shape the course of the struggle for civil rights during the recent past.  These essays provide a historical retrospective, an assessment of where we are now, and an outline of possibilities for the future.
    The major controversial issues in race relations, in the past and in the present, such as affirmative action, educational segregation, racial practices of labor unions, legal strategies for protest movements, the persistence of racism in American institutions, and the sources of resistance to change are discussed at length by major authorities in their respective fields.
    Many of the most important events in recent American history come alive in these pages as the strategies and programs, the victories and defeats of the civil rights movement are rigorously examined.  A unique aspect of the book is that the human experience of active participants in this rich history is evoked through personal and often poignant accounts, such as those of Kenneth B. Clark, who in a memorable autobiographical essay describes a long life devoted to the pursuit of racial justice, and Patricia J. Williams, who relates the contemporary struggles of African American women to the historical context of slavery and its aftermath.
    As no other book can, this collection provides the basis for the critical insights and historical perspectives that are essential for an understanding of the central issue still confronting American society:  race and racism.