Returning to Chicago from France, Taft established a bustling studio and began a twenty-one-year career as an instructor at the Art Institute, succeeded by three decades as head of the Midway Studios at the University of Chicago. This triumphant era included ephemeral sculpture for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition; a prolific turn-of-the-century period marked by the gold-medal-winning The Solitude of the Soul; the 1913 Fountain of the Great Lakes; the 1929 Alma Mater at the University of Illinois; and large-scale projects such as his ambitious program for Chicago's Midway with the monumental Fountain of Time. In addition, the book charts Taft's mentoring of women artists, including the so-called White Rabbits at the World's Fair, many of whom went on to achieve artistic success.

Lavishly illustrated with color images of Taft's most celebrated works, Lorado Taft: The Chicago Years completes the first major study of a great American artist.

The lives built by Black Americans in a pair of summer resort towns

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, northern resort towns were in their heyday as celebrated retreats for America's wealthy. Lord, Please Don't Take Me in August documents the experiences of African Americans in Saratoga Springs, New York, and Newport, Rhode Island--towns that provided a recurring season of expanded employment opportunities, enhanced social life, cosmopolitan experience, and, in a good year, enough money to last through the winter.

Affirming that the decision to live in their tiny resort communities was conscious and deliberate, Myra B. Young Armstead shows how Afro-Saratogians and Afro-Newporters organized their rhythms, their routines, and their communities to create meaningful identities for themselves. Living on streets close to their churches, developing social organizations that promoted their standards of gentility and respectability, and lobbying for wider opportunities, these African Americans actively shaped their lives within the structures and limitations imposed on them.

Armstead situates the resort town between the poles of the rural South and the large industrial cities of the North. She shows how these small northern towns, with their seasonal economic rhythms and domestic wage work, permitted an important continuity between rural and urban lifestyles and a path from rural South to urban North besides the jarring, disruptive journey that often ended in the ghetto.

"Lord, Please Don't Take Me in August" tells a story that is at once American and uniquely African American: a story of economic imperatives and enlarged social aspirations culminating in a season--June, July, and August--that brought Blacks as close as they could get to the American Dream.

For decades, a fog of governmental cover-ups, euphemisms, and societal silence kept the victims the mass incarceration of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II from understanding their experiences. The Japanese American National Museum mounted a critically acclaimed exhibition with the twin goals of educating the general public and encouraging former inmates to come to grips with and tell their own history. 

Combining heartfelt stories with first-rate scholarship, Lost and Found reveals the complexities of a people reclaiming the past. Author/curator Karen L. Ishizuka, a third-generation Japanese American, deftly blends official history with community memory to frame the historical moment of recovery within its cultural legacy. Detailing the interactive strategy that invited visitors to become part of the groundbreaking exhibition, Ishizuka narrates the processes of revelation and reclamation that unfolded as former internees and visitors alike confronted the experience of the camps. She also analyzes how the dual act of recovering—and recovering from—history necessitates private and public mediation between remembering and forgetting, speaking out and remaining silent.

Historically, it has been assumed that war is violence and declarations of war are simply public announcements that serve to initiate combat. Brien Hallett denies both assumptions and claims that war is policy, not violence.

The Lost Art of Declaring War analyzes the crucial differences between combat and war and convincingly argues that the power to "declare" war is in actuality the power to compose a text, draft a document, write a denunciation. Once written, the declaration then serves three functions: to articulate the political purposes of the war, to guide and direct military operations, and to establish the boundary between justified combat and unjustified devastation.

Hallett sounds a clarion call urging the people and their representatives to take up the challenge and write fully reasoned declarations of war. Then, and only then, can a civilized nation like the United States lay claim to being fully democratic, not only in peacetime, but in wartime as well.

Drawing on more than thirty years of scholarship, Tim Brooks identifies key black recording artists and profiles forty audio pioneers. Brooks assesses the careers and recordings of George W. Johnson, Bert Williams, George Walker, Noble Sissle, Eubie Blake, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, W. C. Handy, James Reese Europe, Wilbur Sweatman, Harry T. Burleigh, Roland Hayes, Booker T. Washington, and boxing champion Jack Johnson, plus a host of lesser-known voices. Many of these pioneers struggled to be heard in an era of rampant discrimination. Their stories detail the forces––black and white––that gradually allowed African Americans to enter the mainstream entertainment industry.

Lost Sounds includes Brooks's selected discography of CD reissues and an appendix by Dick Spottswood describing early recordings by black artists in the Caribbean and South America.

Leta E. Miller and Fredric Lieberman take readers into Harrison's rich world of cross-fertilization through an exploration of his outspoken stance on pacifism, gay rights, ecology, and respect for minorities--all major influences on his musical works. Though Harrison was sometimes accused by contemporaries of "cultural appropriation," Miller and Lieberman make it clear why musicians and scholars alike now laud him as an imaginative pioneer for his integration of Asian and Western musics. They also delve into Harrison's work in the development of the percussion ensemble, his use of found and invented instruments, and his explorations of alternative tuning systems. An accompanying compact disc of representative recordings allows readers to examine Harrison's compositions in further detail.

Louis Prima infused the grit and grace of Dixieland jazz with swing and big band sounds, the first whiffs of rock 'n' roll, and a vaudevillian stage presence. Garry Boulard pens the biography of the underrated jazz musician, Las Vegas mainstay, and popular entertainer.

A native of New Orleans, Prima was a Guy Lombardo protégé known as "The Italian Satchmo" who became the country's new jazz sensation at New York's Famous Door in the 1930s. He went on to success as a big band leader before virtually creating the lounge act as a Las Vegas nightclub staple. Employing and later marrying singer Keely Smith, Prima rode high with a series of hit songs and smash albums in the Fifties. But Boulard also looks past the over-the-top stage antics to restore Prima's legacy as an overlooked jazz musician and vocalist, and as a bandleader with an uncanny ability to fuse disparate styles into music that kept audiences cheering and dancing for decades.

Known in his lifetime for a tireless dedication to humanitarian causes, Lowell L. Bennion was also one of the most important theologians and ethicists to emerge in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the twentieth century.

George B. Handley’s intellectual biography delves into Bennion’s thought and extraordinary intellectual life. Rejecting the idea that individual LDS practice might be at odds with lived experience, Bennion insisted the gospel favored the growth of individuals acting and living in the present. He also focused on the need for ongoing secular learning alongside religious practice and advocated for an idea of social morality that encouraged Latter-day Saints to seek out meaningful transformations of character and put their ethical commitments into practice. Handley examines Bennion’s work against the background of a changing institution that once welcomed his common-sense articulation of LDS ideas and values but became discomfited by how his thought cast doubt on the Church’s beliefs about race and other issues.

Matthew E. Stanley's intimate study explores the Civil War, Reconstruction, and sectional reunion in this bellwether region. Using the lives of area soldiers and officers as a lens, Stanley reveals a place and a strain of collective memory that was anti-rebel, anti-eastern, and anti-black in its attitudes--one that came to be at the forefront of the northern retreat from Reconstruction and toward white reunion. The Lower Middle West's embrace of black exclusion laws, origination of the Copperhead movement, backlash against liberalizing war measures, and rejection of Reconstruction were all pivotal to broader American politics. And the region's legacies of white supremacy--from racialized labor violence to sundown towns to lynching--found malignant expression nationwide, intersecting with how Loyal Westerners remembered the war.

A daring challenge to traditional narratives of section and commemoration, The Loyal West taps into a powerful and fascinating wellspring of Civil War identity and memory.

Identifying varied interest groups such as business tycoons, Christian denominations, and Southern Democrats, Goodall demonstrates how countersubversive politics was far from unified: groups often pursued clashing aims while struggling to balance the competing pulls of loyalty to the nation and liberty of thought, speech, and action. Meanwhile, the federal government pursued its own course, which alternately converged with and diverged from the paths followed by private organizations. By the end of World War II, alliances on the left and right had largely consolidated into the form they would keep during the Cold War. Anticommunists on the right worked to rein in the supposedly dictatorial ambitions of the Roosevelt administration, while New Deal liberals divided into several camps: the Popular Front, civil liberties activists, and embryonic Cold Warriors who struggled with how to respond to communist espionage in Washington and communist influence in politics more broadly.

Rigorous in its scholarship yet accessible to a wide audience, Goodall's masterful study shows how opposition to radicalism became a defining ideological question of American life.

Drawing on widely scattered archives, newspaper accounts, and other sources, Lucretia Mott Speaks unearths the essential speeches and remarks from Mott's remarkable career. The editors have chosen selections representing important themes and events in her public life. Extensive annotations provide vibrant context and show Mott's engagement with allies and opponents. The speeches illuminate her passionate belief that her many causes were all intertwined. The result is an authoritative resource, one that enriches our understanding of Mott's views, rhetorical strategies, and still-powerful influence on American society.

Insightful and dramatic, Lured by the American Dream is the untold story of how Filipino servicepersons overcame tradition and hierarchy in their quest for dignity.

Vibrant and strikingly original, Lying in the Middle discovers some of the most potent musical theater taking place in the hoping, beating hearts of Americans.

A groundbreaking study, Lynching in the New South is a classic portrait of the tradition of violence that poisoned American life.