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Winner of the 2022 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize Fraternal Light: On Painting While Black is a lyric evocation of the life and work of the great African American artist Beauford Delaney. These poems pay homage to Delaney's resilience and ingenuity in the face of profound adversity. Although his work never garnered the acclaim it deserves--and is finally receiving--Delaney was well known and highly respected in African American cultural circles, among bohemian writers and artists based in Greenwich Village from the 1930s to the early 1950s, and in Parisian avant-garde and expatriate enclaves from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. Drawn to Delaney's painting and personal history through her emotional response to his work, especially his portraits, Arlene Keizer has crafted a diasporic ceremony of remembrance for this Black, gay male visionary. Fraternal Light offers back an answering complexity to Delaney's life and work. One form of art calls out; another answers. Keizer's poems make the contours and challenges of Delaney's life visible, which is especially urgent in a world still frequently hostile or indifferent to Black creative brilliance.

Union and Confederate veterans meet at Gettysburg on the 50th anniversary of the battle This June 29-July 4 reunion drew over 55,000 official attendees plus thousands more who descended upon a town of 4,000 during the scorching summer of 1913, with the promise of little more than a cot and two blankets, military fare, and the presence of countless adversaries from a horrific war. Most were revisiting a time and place in their personal history that involved acute physical and emotional trauma. Contrary to popular belief, veterans were not motivated to attend by a desire for reconciliation, nor did the Great Reunion produce a general sense of a reunified country. The reconciliation premise, advanced by several major speeches at the anniversary, lived in rhetoric more than fact. Recent scholarship effectively dismantles this "Reconciliation of 1913" mythos, finding instead that sectionalism and lingering hostilities largely prevailed among veterans and civilians. Flagel examines how individual veterans viewed the reunion, what motivated them to attend, how they acted and reacted once they arrived, and whether these survivors found what they were personally seeking. While politicians and the press characterized the veterans as relics of a national crusade, Flagel focuses on four men who come to the reunion for different and very individual reasons. Flagel's book adds significantly to Gettysburg literature and to Civil War historiography.

A sequel of sorts to his earlier book, Pleasant Valley, this book significantly adds to Louis Bromfield's body of work on agriculture, economics, and the value of home.

Conversations and legal battles surrounding voting rights, once again a topic looming large in the United States, reflect a long history of such debates and suffrage campaigns. The struggle for women's voting rights, in particular, required persistence in the face of defeat, and unbeknownst to most people, Ohio--the fifth state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment--played a key role in the national women's suffrage movement. Covering 70 years of the movement, from 1850 through 1920, Jamie Capuzza demonstrates that the tendency to overlook the contributions of Ohio suffragists dates back to the earliest years of the movement. Ohioans were the first to petition a government for women's enfranchisement, and Ohioans helped build the infrastructure for the movement by forming the nation's first state women's rights organization and by hosting two of the earliest national women's rights conventions. Many of the movement's early leaders were Ohioans, including Frances Barker Gage, a movement leader since the 1850s who was among the first to emphasize the inherent connections between gender and race by linking women's suffrage to African American suffrage; Victoria Claflin Woodhull, a stockbroker, newspaper publisher, and radical activist who was the first woman ever to address the US Congress or to run for the US presidency; and Harriet Taylor Upton, president of the Ohio Women's Suffrage Association longer than any other woman and executive in the National American Woman's Suffrage Association, who hobnobbed with presidents and congressmen. Also among the leadership were African Americans with Ohio connections such as Mary Church Terrell, Frances Harper, Julia Cooper, Hallie Brown, Jane Hunter, Carrie Clifford, and Jewelia Higgins. The Fifth Star describes these determined leaders, their agenda, organizational capacity, and political engagement. Drawing on extensive historical records and primary sources, including suffrage convention proceedings, state senate and house reports, local mainstream and feminist media, and the personal letters and diaries of Ohio reformers, Capuzza details this fight in the context of the national women's rights movement and parallel reform movements like abolitionism and temperance. The Fifth Star is a story of remarkable perseverance and determination in pursuit of the most fundamental right in a democracy, the right to vote.

Black Hair in a White World is an in-depth study of the cultural history, perceptions, and increasing acceptance of Black hair in the broader American society. The essays in this anthology discuss representations and responses to Black hair, including analysis of research findings about marketing messages and depictions of Black hair in popular culture, discussions of workplace discrimination, and stories about the origins of the natural hair movement and how many Black people have learned to embrace and celebrate their natural hair. Beginning with a close analysis of historical and contemporary books, media, and ads, Black Hair in a White World illustrates both positive and negative responses to Black hair. In the second section, Ellington features contributions from diverse scholars and activists who argue that natural Black hair has often explicitly been--and still is--criticized by non-Blacks and Blacks who believe that the natural texture of Black hair is a problem that must be solved and believe that natural Black hair is unacceptable, unprofessional, and unattractive. Authors of the volume's final essays conclude by pushing against this narrative and describing the emergence of the natural hair movement, which has pushed for increased mainstream acceptance of Black hair. Black Hair in a White World is a groundbreaking, serious examination of perceptions of Black hair and makes an important contribution to ongoing discussions about gender, sociology, and self-expression.