A three-volume guide to the early art and artists of Ohio. It includes coverage of fine art, photography, ornamental penmanship, tombstone carving, china painting, illustrating, cartooning and the execution of panoramas and theatrical scenery.

"The Metropolitan Museum began acquiring American drawings and watercolors in 1880, just ten years after its founding. Since then it has amassed more than 1,500 works executed by American artists during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in watercolor, pastel, chalk, ink, graphite, gouache, and charcoal. This volume documents the draftsmanship of more than 150 known artists before 1835 and that of about 60 unidentified artists of the period. It includes drawings and watercolors by such American masters as John Singleton Copley, John Trumbull, John Vanderlyn, Thomas Cole, Asher Brown Durand, George Inness, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Because the 504 works illustrate such a wide range of media, techniques, and styles, this publication is a veritable history of American drawing from the eighteenth through most of the nineteenth century."--Metropolitan Museum of Art website.

New Perspectives on the History of Gender and Empire, an open access book, extends our understanding of the gendered workings of empires, colonialism and imperialism, taking up recent impulses from gender history, new imperial history and global history. The authors apply new theoretical and methodological approaches to historical case studies around the globe in order to redefine the complex relationship between gender and empire. The chapters deal not only with 'typical' colonial empires like the British Empire, but also with those less well-studied, such as the German, Russian, Italian and U.S. empires. They focus on various imperial formations, from colonies in Africa or Asia to settler colonial settings like Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, to imperial peripheries like the Dodecanese or the Black Sea Steppe. The book deals with key themes such as intimacy, sexuality and female education, as well as exploring new aspects like the complex marriage regimes some empires developed or the so-called 'servant debates'. It also presents several ways in which imperial formations were structured by gender and other categories like race, class, caste, sexuality, religion, and citizenship. Offering new reflections on the intimate and personal aspects of gender in imperial activities and relationships, this is an important volume for students and scholars of gender studies and imperial and colonial history. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollection.com. Open access was funded by Knowledge Unlatched.

A deep dive into the complex history of the Queen City, Cincinnati, Ohio, from after the American Revolution to today. So many colorful stories are lost to time. The last passenger pigeon on earth, Martha, died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. Just outside the city, a young Annie Oakley beat her future husband in a shooting contest. The deadliest maritime disaster in American history was the explosion of the steamboat Sultana, built in the Queen City. The nation's first train robbery occurred in the Cincinnati area, and some clever victims hid jewelry in their hair and bodices. From the Black Brigade's role in protecting the city against Confederate siege to the original 1937 Cincinnati Bengals, author Jeff Suess reveals the triumphs and tribulations of the first major American city founded after the American Revolution.

Best known as the woman who “ran MGM,” Ida R. Koverman (1876–1954) served as talent scout, mentor, executive secretary, and confidant to American movie mogul Louis B. Mayer for twenty-five years. She Damn Near Ran the Studio: The Extraordinary Lives of Ida R. Koverman is the first full account of Koverman’s life and the true story of how she became a formidable politico and a creative powerhouse during Hollywood’s Golden Era. For nearly a century, Koverman’s legacy has largely rested on a mythical narrative while her more fascinating true-life story has remained an enduring mystery—until now. This story begins with Koverman’s early years in Ohio and the sensational national scandal that forced her escape to New York where she created a new identity and became a leader among a community of women. Her second incarnation came in California where she established herself as a hardcore political operative challenging the state’s progressive impulse. During the Roaring Twenties, she was a key architect of the Southland’s conservative female-centric partisan network that refashioned the course of state and national politics and put Herbert Hoover in the White House. As “the political boss of Los Angeles County,” she was the premiere matchmaker in the courtship between Hollywood and national partisan politics, which, as Mayer’s executive secretary, was epitomized by her third incarnation as “one of the most formidable women in Hollywood,” whose unparalleled power emanated from her unique perch inside the executive suite of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Free to adapt her managerial skills and political know-how on behalf of the studio, she quickly drew upon her artistic sensibilities as a talent scout, expanding MGM’s catalog of stars and her own influence on American popular culture. Recognized as “one of the invisible power centers in both MGM and the city of Los Angeles,” she nurtured the city’s burgeoning performing arts by fostering music and musicians and the public financing of them. As the “lioness” of MGM royalty, Ida Koverman was not just a naturalized citizen of the Hollywood kingdom; at times during her long reign, she “damn near ran the studio.”

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History Winner of the Gov. John Andrew Award (Union Club of Boston) An acclaimed, groundbreaking, and “powerful exploration” (Washington Post) of the fate of Union veterans, who won the war but couldn’t bear the peace. For well over a century, traditional Civil War histories have concluded in 1865, with a bitterly won peace and Union soldiers returning triumphantly home. In a landmark work that challenges sterilized portraits accepted for generations, Civil War historian Brian Matthew Jordan creates an entirely new narrative. These veterans— tending rotting wounds, battling alcoholism, campaigning for paltry pensions— tragically realized that they stood as unwelcome reminders to a new America eager to heal, forget, and embrace the freewheeling bounty of the Gilded Age. Mining previously untapped archives, Jordan uncovers anguished letters and diaries, essays by amputees, and gruesome medical reports, all deeply revealing of the American psyche. In the model of twenty-first-century histories like Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering or Maya Jasanoff ’s Liberty’s Exiles that illuminate the plight of the common man, Marching Home makes almost unbearably personal the rage and regret of Union veterans. Their untold stories are critically relevant today.

The Centennial decade was an era of ambivalence, the United States still unresolved about the incomprehensible damage it had wrought over four years of Civil War, and why. Philadelphia’s 1876 Centennial Exhibition -- a spectacular international event celebrating one hundred years of American strength, unity, and freedom -- took place in the immediate wake of this trauma of war and the failures of Reconstruction as a means to restore power and patriotism in the nation’s struggle to rebuild itself. The Unfinished Exhibition, the first comprehensive examination of American art at the Centennial, explains the critical role of visual culture in negotiating memories of the nation’s past that conflicted with the optimism that Exhibition officials promoted. Supporting novel iconographical interpretations with myriad primary source material, author Susanna W. Gold demonstrates how the art galleries and the audiences who visited them addressed the lingering traumas of battle, the uneasy re-unification of North and South, and the persisting racial tensions in the post-Emancipation era. This careful consideration of the visual record exposes the complexities of the war’s impact on Americans and clarifies how the Centennial art exhibition affected a nation still finding its direction at a critical moment in its history.

This is a comprehensive history of immigrants from the historic lands of the Bohemian Crown and its successor states, including Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic, based on the painstaking lifetime research of the author. The reader will find lots of new information in this book that is not available elsewhere. The title of the book comes from a popular song of the famous Czech artistic duo, Voskovec and Werich, who described America in those words when they lived here, reflecting on their love for this country. It covers the period starting soon after the discovery of the New World to date. The emphasis is on the US, although Canada and Latin America are also covered. It covers the arrival and the settlement of the immigrants in various states and regions of America, their harsh beginnings, the establishment of their communities, and their organization. A separate section is devoted to the contributions of notable individuals in different areas of human endeavor, including Bohemians, Moravians, Bohemian Jews, and the Slovaks. These people excelled in just about every facet of human undertaking. Even though a total number of these immigrants were fewer than other ethnic groups, their accomplishments were phenomenal. Nothing like this has ever been published since the time Thomas Capek wrote his classic The Cechs (Bohemians) in America some one hundred years ago.

This book tells the stories of the tender-hearted men who adopted stray cats from the cruel streets of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century New York. Its forty-two profiles introduce us to an array of remarkable men and extraordinary cats, including sports team mascots, artists' muses, and presidential pets.

In December 1885, under the watchful eye of Mark Twain, the publishing firm of Charles L. Webster and Company released the first volume of the Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. With a second volume published in March 1886, Grant's memoirs became a popular sensation. Seeking to capitalize on Grant's success and interest in earlier reminiscences by Joseph E. Johnston, William T. Sherman, and Richard Taylor, other Civil War generals such as George B. McClellan and Philip H. Sheridan soon followed suit. Some hewed more closely to Grant's model than others, and their points of similarity and divergence left readers increasingly fascinated with the history and meaning of the nation's great conflict. The writings also dovetailed with a rising desire to see the full sweep of American history chronicled, as its citizens looked to the start of a new century. Professional historians engaged with the memoirs as an important foundation for this work. In this insightful book, Stephen Cushman considers Civil War generals' memoirs as both historical and literary works, revealing how they remain vital to understanding the interaction of memory, imagination, and the writing of American history. Cushman shows how market forces shaped the production of the memoirs and, therefore, memories of the war itself; how audiences have engaged with the works to create ideas of history that fit with time and circumstance; and what these texts tell us about current conflicts over the history and meanings of the Civil War.