Summer 2009 Traces Ready

The summer 2009 issue of the Indiana Historical Society Press's popular history magazine Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History will be in members' mailboxes soon.

The issue features two articles exploring the 1940 presidential campaign of Hoosier Wendell Willkie. Conrad C. Lane, Ball State University emeritus professor, remembers Willkie's famous visit to his hometown of Elwood to formally accept the Republican presidential nomination. Lane, who was nine years old at the time, tried to attend Willkie's speech with his mother, but the heat on that oppressive August day was too much.

In addition, Edward Allan Brawley, professor emeritus of social work at Arizona State University, examines the role former Socialist Party stalwart Robert Hunter played in advising Willkie during the candidate's effort to stop incumbent President Franklin D. Roosevelt from winning a third term in office.

Other articles in the quarterly magazine include a look at the role the Thirty-fourth Indiana Volunteer Infantry Regiment played in the Battle of Pamito Ranch, the last engagement of the Civil War; a history of private toll roads in Indiana; and African American art in the collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

Traces is an award-winning popular history magazine published quarterly as a benefit of membership in the IHS. Conceived as a means of bringing to the public good narrative and analytical history about Indiana in its broader contexts of region and nation, the magazine since 1989 has explored the lives of artists, writers, politicians, performers, soldiers, entrepreneurs, homemakers, reformers, and naturalists.