New Releases · 
Democracy in Session
A History of the Ohio General Assembly
For more than 200 years no institution has been more important to the development of the American democratic polity than the state legislature, yet no political institution has been so neglected by historians.…
Blood and Capital
The Paramilitarization of Colombia
In Blood and Capital: The Paramilitarization of Colombia, Jasmin Hristov examines the complexities, dynamics, and contradictions of present-day armed conflict in Colombia. She conducts an in-depth inquiry into the restructuring of the state’s coercive apparatus and the phenomenon of paramilitarism by looking at its military, political, and legal dimensions.…
Catching Stories
A Practical Guide to Oral History
By Donna M. DeBlasio, Charles F. Ganzert, David H. Mould, Stephen H. Paschen and Howard L. Sacks
In neighborhoods, schools, community centers, and workplaces, people are using oral history to capture and collect the kinds of stories that the history books and the media tend to overlook: stories of personal struggle and hope, of war and peace, of family and friends, of beliefs, traditions, and values—the stories of our lives.…
Miami University, 1809–2009
Bicentennial Perspectives
Edited by Curtis W. Ellison
From its start in the nineteenth century as a small midwestern college to its transformation into a twenty-first-century international university, Miami University has stood for two centuries as a model of public higher education.…
Outside the Ordinary
Contemporary Art in Glass, Wood, and Ceramics from the Wolf Collection
Edited by Amy Miller Dehan
One of the premier private collections of contemporary craft, the Nancy and David Wolf Collection features outstanding creations by the foremost artists working in craft media today, including Howard Ben Tré, Dale Chihuly, William Morris, Wendell Castle, David Ellsworth, Virginia Dotson, Michael Lucero, Michelle Holzapfel, Theman Statom, Ginny Ruffner, Akio Takamori, and Betty Woodman.…
Incidental Architect
William Thornton and the Cultural Life of Early Washington, D.C., 1794–1828
While the majority of scholarship on early Washington focuses on its political and physical development, in Incidental Architect Gordon S. Brown describes the intellectual and social scene of the 1790s and early 1800s through the lives of a prominent couple whose cultural aspirations served as both model and mirror for the city’s own.…
On Poets and Poetry
William Pritchard’s collection of essays and reviews on poets and poetry ranges from Dryden and Milton through the major American and British poets of the last century. One of them, Philip Larkin, answered and interviewer’s question about what he had learned from his study of other poets by snapping back, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, one doesn’t study poets! You read them, and think: That’s marvelous; how is it done?” Although Pritchard has been talking with student about poets for more than fifty years, his practice in writing has Larkin’s question in mind: how to describe convincingly the way it’s done, the “marvelous” creations of Tennyson, Hardy, Yeats, Robert Lowell, or Larkin himself.…
Wanted—Correspondence
Women’s Letters to a Union Soldier
Edited by Nancy L. Rhoades and Lucy E. Bailey
This unique collection of more than 150 letters written to an Ohio serviceman during the American Civil War offers glimpses of women’s lives as they waited, worked, and wrote from the Ohio home front.…
Making Words Matter
The Agency of Colonial and Postcolonial Literature
By Ambreen Hai
Why should Salman Rushdie describe his truth telling as an act of swallowing impure “haram” flesh from which the blood has not been drained? Why should Rudyard Kipling cast Kim, the imperial child–agent, as a body/text written upon and damaged by empire? Why should E.…
Twelve Best Books by African Women
Critical Readings
By Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi and Tuzyline Jita Allan
In 2002, at the annual Zimbabwe International Book Fair, twelve literary books by African women were included for the first time in the category of “Africa’s 100 Best Books of the Twentieth Century.…
