A tributary of the Ohio River and significant commercial route in the nineteenth century, the Muskingum River in southeastern Ohio presents a remarkable case study of how Americans have managed their waterways. In Taming the Muskingum, esteemed scholar Emory Kemp traces this history, emphasizing the engineering and construction aspects of river navigation and the fourteen related flood control dams built under the direction of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Kemp’s study ranges from early settlement and navigation of the uncontrolled Muskingum to the state-of-the-art engineering projects undertaken during the New Deal to more recent conservation and recreation uses. llustrated with drawings, photographs, and maps showing many aspects of the dam and reservoir system as well as the Muskingum slackwater navigation, Taming the Muskingum is a rich evocation of a navigation system that is today recognized as a national Historical Civil Engineering Landmark. 

When chef Matt Rapposelli left the National Park Service to attend culinary school in New England, he was moving from one passion to another. What later brought those passions together was a job in the Hocking Hills, southeast Ohio’s stunning, wild landscape, where the restaurants he helmed—at Hocking Hills Lodge and Lake Hope Lodge—gained a resounding reputation for classic dishes that, driven by the regional vernacular and the natural seasonal abundance of Appalachia, were impeccably fresh and flavorful.

A Taste of the Hocking Hills intermingles delicious recipes with striking photographs of a region to which thousands trek each year. Rapposelli presents dishes by the season, noting the specialties that appear on his menus in a given time of year. Whether enjoying a winter evening or a summer morning, cooks will be able to bring a bit of the Hocking Hills home.

James Thurber’s Columbus was not today’s Columbus—or even yesterday’s. It was a Columbus he both knew and created, a place perched on the fringe of reality and the fringe of his imagination. It is the place Bob Hunter revisits in Thurberville, a book where the author separates truth from fiction and identifies what parts of the famous humorist’s hometown of 180,000 exist in the burgeoning metro area of more than two million today.
Thurber’s Columbus was a wild and crazy place, a city full of fascinating and sometimes peculiar characters, many in his own family. Because of the widespread popularity of his stories, that was also the Columbus that many of his readers around the world came to know.
Thurberville chronicles those characters and explores that world. But it also examines the real city where Thurber struggled and then blossomed as a college student, worked as a newspaper reporter and a press agent, and achieved international fame as a humorist and cartoonist after he left town, in part by writing about the subjects he left behind.
Much of Thurber’s best work was cultivated by experiences Thurber had in Columbus and in his dealings with family, friends, teachers, and acquaintances there. They are worth a revisit and, in some cases, an introduction.
 

In 2001, a Swedenborgian minister found a set of seven magnificent stained-glass windows stored in old crates in a barn in rural Pennsylvania. Their story illuminates a fascinating facet of American art history as well as an important set of spiritual teachings.

In 1902, a Swedenborgian church in Glendale, Ohio, commissioned the seven windows as a gift for their sister church in Cincinnati. Each window depicts an angel that represents one of the seven churches described in the book of Revelation. The windows were designed and created in the studios of Louis Comfort Tiffany, and they reflect not only the rich symbolism found in the Bible, but Tiffany’s hallmark color and brilliance. Tiffany’s love of revealing angels in stained glass shines through in every panel.

After their original home was torn down in 1964, the windows were put into storage, only to be rediscovered and painstakingly restored years later. Now a traveling exhibition, the seven angels have been given a new life as shining examples of Tiffany’s art and as a focus for spiritual reflection and meditation.

Tiffany’s Swedenborgian Angels guides the reader not only through the history of the windows, but the spiritual meaning of each one, weaving Swedenborg’s teachings with the luminous imagery of the angels themselves. If you have seen the exhibition, the book allows you to revisit the windows again any time; if you have not, it is a powerful introduction to a vivid piece of spiritual history.

The late archaic and early woodland peoples lived in the Ohio region between 5,000 and 2,000 years ago. This was a time of transition, when hunters and gatherers began to grow native seed crops, establish more permanent settlements, and develop complex forms of ritual and ceremonialism, sometimes involving burial mound construction.

The focused archaeological studies described in Transitions: Archaic and Early Woodland Research in the Ohio Country shed light on this important episode in human cultural development. The authors describe important archaeological sites such as the rich Late Archaic settlements of southwestern Ohio and the early Adena Dominion Land Company enclosure in Franklin County. They present detailed accounts of Native American behavior, such as the use of smoking pipes by Adena societies and a reconstruction of mound use and ritual.

Transitions is the result of a comprehensive, long-term study focusing on particular areas of Ohio with the most up-to-date and detailed treatment of Ohio’s native cultures during this important time of change. This book will be of great value to students and other readers who wish to go beyond the general and often dated treatments of Ohio archaeology currently available.

The Treatment is the story of one tragedy of medical research that stretched over eleven years and affected the lives of hundreds of people in an Ohio city. Thirty years ago the author, then an assistant professor of English, acquired a large set of little-known medical papers at her university. These documents told a grotesque story. Cancer patients coming to the public hospital on her campus were being swept into secret experiments for the U.S. military; they were being irradiated over their whole bodies as if they were soldiers in nuclear war. Of the ninety women and men exposed to this treatment, twenty-one died within a month of their radiations.
Martha Stephens’s report on these deaths led to the halting of the tests, but local papers did not print her charges, and for many years people in Cincinnati had no way of knowing that lethal experiments had taken place there. In 1994 other military tests were brought to light, and a yellowed copy of Stephens’s original report was delivered to a television newsroom. In Ohio, major publicity ensued—at long last—and reached around the world. Stephens uncovered the names of the victims, and a legal action was filed against thirteen researchers and their institutions. A federal judge compared the deeds of the doctors to the medical crimes of the Nazis during World War II and refused to dismiss the researchers from the suit. After many bitter disputes in court, they agreed to settle the case with the families of those they had afflicted. In 1999 a memorial plaque was raised in a yard of the hospital.
Who were these doctors and why had they done as they did? Who were the people whose lives they took? Who was the reporter who could not forget the story, the young attorney who first developed the case, the judge who issued the historic ruling against the doctors? This is Stephens’s moving account of all that transpired in these lives and her own during this epic battle between medicine and human rights.