Indiana Historical Society Press Blog

Interview with T.C. Steele Author

2012-01-26T07:41:00.002-05:00

Rachel Berenson Perry is the former fines arts curator at the Indiana State Museum. In addition to organizaing art exhibitions at the ISM, she is the author of numerous articles for such publications as the American Art Review, Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History, Outdoor Indiana, and Southwest Art Magazine. Her new IHS Press book Paint and Canvas: A Life of T.C. Steele, examines the career of the famous Hoosier Group artist. Here she answers some questions about her own life and what drew her to write about Steele.

How did you get interested in art?

Like almost any child, I used to draw. I took studio drawing classes while in high school and created various occasional art projects after going out into the world. My interest in art and art history was rekindled when I began to work at the T.C. Steele State Historic Site in 1985.

Had you heard of or known about T.C. Steele before you started work at the House of the Singing Winds in Brown County?

Yes. I visited Steele's Brown County home and studio in the 1960s, before it became more regularly open to the public.

Can you remember the oddest or strangest question you received from a visitor during your time at the historic site?

An illustration of how some people take for granted that the world has always been what they now know is a question one young man asked when I was giving a tour of Steele's studio. He looked at the paintings and asked why Steele had never painted the Monroe Reservoir (which was built in the early 1960s; Steele died in 1926).

In your opinion, just how good an artist was Steele?

There are a myriad of good artists historically and today. Steele was one of the first artists to study abroad, and then return to Indiana to paint our state's subtle landscape. Some say that, if he'd re-located to New York (as did William Merritt Chase), he would have become more nationally known and made a better living. I think some of Steele's best landscapes are as good as any American impressionist painter's.

In doing your research on Steele’s life, did anything you find surprise you?

I think the thing that surprises most people today is how difficult it was for Steele to make ends meet financially. They think that, because his paintings sell for several thousand dollars today, he must have been a rich man.

During my research, the thing that most surprised and delighted me was finding Steele's inked palm prints that were made when he had his fortune told by Nellie Simmons Meier in Indianapolis.

Do you have a favorite Steele painting?

Im drawn to some of the landscapes that he painted in Munich, and one of my favorites is The Birches, a small painting of many vertical tree trunks in muted grays and browns.

What is your next project?

I'm currently working on a biography of Steele's compatriot, William Forsyth, to be published by Indiana University Press in 2013. The Indiana Historical Society holds a large archive of his personal letters that were donated by his granddaughter, Susan Forsyth Selby Sklar.

Biography of T.C. Steele Available

2012-01-24T15:12:00.004-05:00

At the age of fourteen, a young man in Waveland, Indiana, had taken over the family farm after the death of his father. Now responsible for taking care of his widowed motehr and supporting his four brothers, he took up the reins on the plow to begin preparing the field for planting.

Family legend has it that the young farmer, Theodore Clement Steele, tied "colored ribbons to the handles of the plow so that he could watch the ribbons in the wind and the effect they had on the [surrounding] colors." Recognizing Steele's passion for art, his mother supported his choice to make his living as an artist.

Written by author and art historian Rachel Berenson Perry, Paint and Canvas: A Life of T.C. Steele, the eighth volume in the Indiana Historical Society Press's youth biography series, traces the path of Steele's career as an artist from his early studies in Germany to his determination to paint what he knew best, the Indiana landscape. Steele, along with fellow artists William Forsyth, Otto Stark, Richard Gruelle, and J. Ottis Adams, became a member of the renowned Hoosier Group and became a leader in the development of midwestern art. In addition to creating artwork, Steele wrote and gave lectures, served on numerous art juries to select paintings and prizes for national and international exhibitions, and helped organize pioneering art associations and societies.

Though know today primarily for his landscapes, Steele was an accomplished and sought after portrait artist. By the time of his death, he had painted many of Indiana's most prominent citizens, including President Benjamin Harrison, Vice President Charles Fairbanks, Colonel Eli Lilly, James Whitcomb Riley, Catherine Merrill, William Lowe Bryan, and Lyman S. Ayres, among others.

In 1907 Steele and his second wife, Selma Neubacher, moved to Brown County, where they built their home, dubbed the House of the Singing Winds for the aural treats produced as the wind blew through the wires of the screened porches surrounding the house. From 1907 to 1921 the Steeles spent the spring season at their Brown County property and wintered in Indianapolis. In 1922 Steele became artist in residence and an honorary professor at Indiana University.

While working on a painting of a peony arrangement at his Brown County home in May 1926, Steele fell seriously ill. After a trip to a clinic in Terre Haute failed to offer any relief, the Steeles returned to their home on the hill on the Fourth of July. The painted died at eight o'clock in the evening on July 24, 1926. For comfort, Selma recalled something her husband had once said to her during a time of sorrow: "Don't you know there are some things one cannot reason out?"

Perry is the former fines arts curator at the Indiana State Museum. In addition to organizaing art exhibitions at the ISM, she is the author of numerous articles for such publications as the American Art Review, Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History, Outdoor Indiana, and Southwest Art Magazine. Her books include Children from the Hills: The Life and Work of Ada Walter Schulz (1998) and T.C. Steele and the Society of Western Artists, 1896-1914 (2009).

Paint and Canvas is a hardback book and costs $17.95. The book is available from the IHS's Basile History Market.

Harrison Wins Dunn Award

2011-11-15T09:16:00.003-05:00

Jennifer Harrison of Indianapolis will receive the Jacob P. Dunn Jr. Award for the best article to appear in the Indiana Historical Society's popular history magazine Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History. Harrison will be honored as part of the IHS's annual Founders Day Dinner on Monday, December 5.

Harrison won the award for her article “Naturalist Charlie Deam: Forestry and Conservation Pioneer,” which appeared in the magazine’s fall 2010 issue. Her work has also appeared in local, national and online press, including American Demographics, Nation's Business, AAA’s Home and Away, Indianapolis Star, Indianapolis Eye, Archaeology, and others. She has also presented papers at several Midwest history conferences, developed educational material, and contributed to books.

As a writer and historian, Harrison has an abiding interest in American history, ethnic heritage, travel, the outdoors and culture. She holds degrees in journalism and business, and currently studies public history at IUPUI and serves as an intern with the Indiana State Archives. At the archives, Harrison works on the papers of Governor Paul McNutt and educational workshops.

In 2005 Harrison was a Creative Renewal fellow of the Indianapolis Arts Council. In 2010 she received an honorable mention in the Indiana Society of Professional Journalists awards.

IHS Holiday Author Fair December 3

2011-11-07T13:38:00.006-05:00

More than seventy Hoosier authors will gather in downtown Indianapolis from noon to 4 p.m. Saturday, December 3, for the Indiana Historical Society's annual Holiday Author Fair at the Indiana History Center, 450 West Ohio Street, Indianapolis.

Filmmaker Angelo Pizzo, Chef Daniel Orr, and local media personalities Howard Caldwell and Dick Wolfsie will be signing books along with bestselling authors James Alexander Thom and Dark Rain Thom and 2009 Indiana Poet Laureate Norbert Krapf.

There will be speakers throughout the day, holiday music, refreshments, and free gift wrapping.

The schedule of speakers, presented in the Frank and Katrina Basile Theater, are:

12:30 p.m. “Serving Up Indiana”
Student writing contest awards presentation and
readings

1 p.m. Barbara Morrow, author
Nature’s Storyteller: The Life of Gene Stratton-Porter

1:30 p.m. Rita Kohn, editor
Full Steam Ahead: Reflections on the Impact of the
First Steamboat on the Ohio River, 1811-2011

2 p.m. Angelo Pizzo and Gayle Johnson, filmmaker and author
The Making of Hoosiers: How a Small Movie from the
Heartland became one of America’s Favorite Films

2:30 p.m. Chef Daniel Orr, author and chef
Paradise Kitchen: Caribbean Cooking with
Chef Daniel Orr, discussion and samples

3:00 p.m. Jenny Kander and Guest Poets, contributors
And Know This Place: Poetry of Indiana

The Holiday Author Fair is free with admission to the Indiana Experience.

Steamboats on the Ohio

2011-09-28T11:23:00.002-04:00

Full Steam Ahead: Reflections on the Impact of the First Steamboat on the Ohio River, 1811–2011, recently released by the IHS Press, celebrates the epic voyage of the steamboat New Orleans, which departed Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in October 1811. Onboard were Captain Nicholas Roosevelt, his crew, and his pregnant wife, their toddler, and a young maid. The New Orleans steamed to Louisville, Kentucky, and then back up to Cincinnati, Ohio, astounding the passengers it had taken onboard—for it was the first steamboat capable of traveling upriver as well as down.

The New Orleans’s voyage ushered in commerce, hastened immigration, and engendered town building within the Ohio–Mississippi River basin, transforming it from a raw frontier to an economic and social powerhouse.

Edited by Rita Kohn and published with the generous support of the Rivers Institue at Hanover College, Full Steam Ahead is a book of essays on the development of steamboats, Ohio River cities, and river transportation. Written for the general reader by individuals who have been engaged in a variety of river occupations, it is part of a larger project to explore ways the voyage of the New Orleans impacted the United States.

Kohn served as coordinator of the National Endowment for the Humanities-Six States Humanities Councils award-winning Always A River: The Ohio River and the American Experience (1986-1992). She is editor for the University Press of Kentucky Ohio River Series; her books have been published by Indiana University Press, Scarecrow, McFarland, Garland, and Children’s presses, among others. She is senior writer for NUVO Newsweekly.

The paperback book costs $19.95 and is available from the IHS History Market.

A Celebration of Indiana Fairs

2011-07-14T09:38:00.002-04:00

In August 2005 Harold Lee Miller, a nationally known photographer with offices in Indianapolis and New York, started a series of photographs of 4-H participants at the poultry and rabbit barns of the Indiana State Fair. Over the past few years, Miller expanded his project to include people and activity from fairs held in Jackson, Elkhart, Dubois, Delaware, Washington, Owen, Monroe, Knox, Jay, and Marion counties. The photographs in the new Indiana Historical Society Press book Fair Culture: Images from Indiana Fairs, depict people and their horses, sheep, cows, as well as life on the midway and other activities associated with this Hoosier summer pastime.

In addition to Miller’s more than one hundred photographs, the book includes an essay by Gerald Waite exploring the history of fairs from the Middle Ages to modern times, the growth of the institution in Indiana, and what fair culture says about those who participate in this annual ritual of midwestern life. The book also features an introduction by noted Indiana author Philip Gulley.

As Miller notes in the book's preface, “The people in these images are special, in the way that all people are special. . . . Part of what I’m trying to accomplish is to show just how interesting and uncommon each of these individuals really is, whether they know it or not. Each and every human photographed in this book is now part of our recorded American history, and in a hundred years that generation will see our unique presence in a way that we can’t see it now—marvel at our clothes, our faces, and our humanity, and thank us for letting ourselves be living artifacts of our time.”

Miller is a photographer and artist who works in film and with digital cameras. The son of an army officer who traveled the world, Miller has worked as a magazine managing editor in New York, a newspaper reporter, and for the past fifteen years as an advertising photographer. His work has appeared in national publications and advertising campaigns.

Waite is an instructor in the anthropology department at Ball State University, where he received his master’s degree in 1994. His research interests include Vietnam and refugee resettlement; white missionaries on the Navajo reservation; cultural boundaries, exclusion and inclusion; and Midwest settlement, county fairs, and festivals. Waite’s writing has appeared in the Indiana Historical Society’s popular history magazine Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History.

Fair Culture costs $24.95 and is available from the IHS's Basile History Market.

IHS Press Releases Poetry Collection

2011-07-06T12:20:00.003-04:00

Edited by Jenny Kander and C. E. Greer, And Know This Place: Poetry of Indiana, features the work of 116 poets who live or who have lived in the state long enough to acquire a sense of the place. Recently released by the IHS Press, the book is the first collection of Indiana poetry to appear for more than a hundred years, with the last major anthology, Poets and Poetry of Indiana, published in 1900.

The list of poets in this volume include such notable figures from the past as James Whitcomb Riley, William Vaughn Moody, Jessayman West, and Marguerite Young, as well as such modern masters as Etheridge Knight, Mary Ellen Solt, Jared Carter, and Norbert Krapf. In addition, the book has a foreword, “An Extraordinary Legacy,” written by Roger Mitchell, former director of the creative writing program at Indiana University, where he held the Ruth Lilly Poetry Chair.

As Kander and Greer note in the book’s preface: “Our central criterion for selection was quality of the writing, and we chose those poems which cover the spectrum of experience in both place and time, in settings from city streets to wilderness tracks, covering the state from Goshen in the north to Floyd’s Knobs by the Ohio River, and from Gessie on the Illinois line to Cottage Grove a hundred and fifty miles east.”

Kander's poetry has appeared in Flying Island, California Quarterly, Bathtub Gin, Wind, Southern Indiana Review, and Shiver. Her chapbook Taboo was published by Finishing Line Press in 2004. She has compiled and edited two volumes of poetry, The Linen Weave of Bloomington Poets and Celebrating Seventy, both published under Wind’s logo.

Greer’s poems have appeared in Streets Magazine, Flying Island, Wind, and other publications. He has been active with the Bloomington Free Verse Poets, and he coedited, with Kander, Say This of Horses: A Selection of Poems published by the University of Iowa Press in 2007.

And Know This Place costs $24.94 and is available from the IHS's History Market.

Beer Book Wins Gold in Contest

2011-06-28T08:08:00.002-04:00

The Indiana Historical Society Press book Indiana: One Pint at a Time: A Traveler's Guide to Indiana's Breweries won gold, the top prize, in the travel guide category at ForeWord Reviews' 2010 Book of the Year Awards.

At a ceremony during the American Library Association Conference in New Orleans, the 215 Book of the Year Award winners in 60 categories were honored. These books, representing the best independently published books from 2010 were selected by a panel of librarian and bookseller judges.

Written by Douglas A. Wissing, Indiana: One Pint at a Time explores the history and living artisanal culture of the state's long, vibrant brewing tradition. Using regional, ethnic, and commercial lens, the text depicts the early-nineteenth-century origins of Indiana's commercial breweries, through the early-twentieth-century heyday when forty-one Hoosier breweries hustled beer, to the mid-twentieth-century consolidation and decline.

Interview with Stott Author

2011-06-08T14:10:00.009-04:00

Lloyd Hunter is professor emeritus of history and American studies at Franklin College. While at Franklin, he founded and directed the American Studies Program and occupied the Roger D. Branigin Chair of History. His new IHS Press book, For Duty and Destiny: The Life and Civil War Diary of William Taylor Stott, Hoosier Soldier and Educator, explores the career of Stott, a native Hoosier and an 1861 graduate of Franklin College. Stott later became the president who took the college from virtual bankruptcy in 1872to its place as a leading liberal arts institution in Indiana by the turn of the century.

Hunter recently took some time to answer questions about his book.

Do you remember when you first became interested in telling William Stott's story?

My first awareness of William Taylor Stott occurred when I arrived on the Franklin College campus as a "rookie" assistant professor in the fall of 1978--thirty-three years ago! As I was moving into my office on the third floor of Old Main, I learned that the win I was in was 131 years old and that the center wing was called Stott Hall after the longest-term president of the college, William Taylor Stott.

Although my appointment was in the Philosophy and Religion Department, I was really an historian, with an M.A. in history and a Ph.D. in American studies. Right away, I wanted to find out about Franklin College's history and this man Stott. Over the years this led to a series of encounters with Stott in unforseen ways. In 1984, the college's sesquicentennial year, Professor of Music Sam Hicks and I were asked to write a musical drama based on the history of the school. We called it Jubilee III. I wrote the book, Sam composed original music, and the two of us collaborated on lyrics. All along the way, as I compiled the story, I ran into Stott throughout the entire nineteenth and early twentieth century chronicle of the college--a leading student, pioneering faculty member, and, of course, longtime president.

Then, in the 1990s, I joined the Johnson County living-history group, "Telling Our Story," and portrayed Dr. Stott. As Stott, I talked about being the president of Franklin and about having served in the Eighteenth Indiana Volunteer Infantry during the Civil War. I knew enought about Stott's wartime experience to share some of its highlights. But then, on an autumn day in 2001, John Erickson of the college's media relations department told me that he had a Civil War diary I might like to see. When I asked him whose it was, he said, "Dr. Stott's." Amazingly, he did not have to pick me up off the floor! The rest, as they say, is history. The Stott descendants threw their full support behind my efforts to prepare the diary for publication, and it was at that moment that I decided to tell the whole story of William Taylor Stott.

Was there anything about Stott that attracted you to his story?

In some respects, I have already answered that question, namely my interest in this man who played such a formative role in Franklin College's history for such a long time. But as I also discovered as I studied his wider influence, Stott played a prominent role in the growth of the Baptist Church and higher education in Indiana and the "West," as the Midwest was called in those days. Some of his endeavors even had national implications.

I also shared some personal characteristics with Stott that made his life particularly interesting to me. For one thing, like Stott, I am an ordained minister who served churches before shifting my ministry into higher education. I could identify with what I saw in Stott's teaching and administration as sort of pastoral presence. Stott was a Renaissance man with wide interests and teaching capabilities, and such has been my career.

There was a seriousness to Stott, but also a kind of playfulness to which I could groove. And, interestingly, in his last years Stott and his beloved Bel lived at 847 East Jefferson Street in Franklin, and there he died. I lived at 800 East Jefferson Street--many years later, of course--but I would sit on my front porch, look across the street at 847, and think fondly of Will Stott.

Were you surprised by anything you discovered about Stott?
Until I read the diary, I really did not get a full picture of Stott's personality. So his playfulness was a pleasant surprise, and the fact that he liked to play a few practical jokes. This may have been one of the reasons he tended to handle disciplinary matters with students with appropriate judiciousness, but at the same time a sense of understanding; in theological terms, he balanced law with grace.

I also did not know that Stott suffered the rest of his life from the illnesses he contracted during the war. While he was never injured during combat, despite being under heavy fire in multiple battles, the lingering effects of malaria, rheumatism, dysentery, and other ailments occasionally interfered with his work. There was also some pathos in his personal life that often saddened his later years.

How long did it take for you to write the book and what difficulties did you encounter, if any, during your research?

Basically, it took eight years, if you count from the time I heard about the diary. I began by reading the edited, typescript version that had been done by Stott's grandson in the 1940s, but I could not really begin until had the original handwritten manuscript by Stott himself, which the family gave to the Franklin College Library about a year later. My work, of course, was based on the original.

There was no way I could verify the diary information without visting the battlefields and other sites Stott mentioned. So in the fall of 2003 I received a sabbatical leave to travel to these places, supported by a travel grant from the college and funds from my Roger D. Branigin endowed chair. This allowed me to walk where Stott walked at Pea Ridge, Vicksburg, Cedar Creek, and other battle sites, and also to visit excellent research repositories along the way. It also gave me a chance to get stuck in the mud at Port Gibson, lock my keys in my car in pouring rain at Grand Gulf, and have my car hood and trunk lifted during a thorough search at the U.S. Army Military History Institute at Carlisle Barracks because Tom Ridge of Homeland Security would be there that day! Who said history research was dull? Of course, the biggest difficulty was the fact that teaching a full load at a small liberal arts college leaves little time for writing. So, actually, all my writing was done in retirement in Florida between 2005 and 2009.

How well is Stott remembered by Franklin College today?

Frankly, I'm probably the primary reason Stott is remembered at the college today--other than Stott Hall, that is. Even Stott Hall is recognized mostly as part of Old Main. No, Stott is largely ancient history. But I'm hoping that the book will help all of us connected with Franklin remember that, without William Taylor Stott, Franklin College would not be around today. It could well have ended in 1872.

Now, Stott would tell you that it was that handful of ardent believers in Johnson County that year who rallied around the dying school who made it all possible, but they had to find someone to take the helm, and that was Stott. He deserves to be remembered.

Are you working on another project?
Right now, I do not have another writing project in mind. I still have an interest in the Eighteenth and Seventieth Indiana Volunteers, but only because those two units happened to have Franklin College men in them, all of them classmates of Stott, by the way. But that is just an interest, not a writing plan.

I'm thorougly enjoying my retirement--on the links, in the pool, on the bicycle, with my wife and family. I'm also president of my homeowner's association board--a time consuming job I do not recommend, but one that has to be done. I still have a large library with many books I have not yet read. My goal is to read them and donate many to libraries, public and university. I also want to pursue my love of southern literature--Faulkner, Warren, Wolfe--and Russian literature--Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.

IHS Press Author to Give Lunchtime Talk

2011-05-27T08:37:00.002-04:00

Michael Peake, author of the IHS Press book Blood Shed in This War: Civil War Illustrations by Captain Adolph Metzner, 32nd Indiana, will discuss his research into Metzner’s stunning visual diary of sketches, drawings, and watercolors at a free lecture at noon, Tuesday, June 21, as part of the IHS Author Series at the Indiana History Center, 450 West Ohio Street, Indianapolis, Indiana.

Peake's book depicts Metzner's world during his three years of service with the First German, Thirty-second Regiment Indiana Volunteer Infantry campaigning in the Western Theater during the Civil War. Metzner chronicled the day-to-day life of a soldier’s world, at first with humor, and later, with a stark reality of life and death on the battlefield.

A resident of Corydon, Indiana, Peake is an author and historian specializing in Indiana German genealogy and history as related to the American Civil War. Since retiring from federal service in 1996, Peake has devoted his time to researching Union and Confederate German-American military organizations.

Blood Shed in This War costs $34.95 and is available from the IHS's History Market.

Beer Book Finalist in Franklin Awards

2011-05-02T09:33:00.002-04:00

The IHS Press book Indiana: One Pint at a Time by Douglas A. Wissing is a finalist in the regional category of the Independent Book Publishers Association’s annual Benjamin Franklin Awards.

Named in honor of America's most cherished publisher/printer, the Benjamin Franklin Awards recognizes excellence in independent publishing. Publications, grouped by genre are judged on editorial and design merit by top practitioners in each field. The trophies are awarded to the best books in several categories and are presented to the publishers during a gala awards ceremony on the last evening of the Publishing University (just before the opening of Book Expo America).

The other finalists in the regional category are: California Home Landscaping (Creative Homeowner) and A Passion for Tarpon (Wild River Press).

The Benjamin Franklin 2011 Awards presentation ceremony will be held at the Jacob Javits Center, New York, on May 24, 2010.

IHS Press Authors Honored

2011-04-26T07:49:00.004-04:00

Two IHS Press authors received honors at the 32nd annual Society of Professional Journalists Best in Indiana Journalism Awards that were announced on Friday, April 22, at a gala awards banquet in Indianapolis. The awards, presented by the Indiana chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, honored print and broadcast work from 2010.

Ray E. Boomhower, IHS Press senior editor, won first place in the personality profile magazine or special interest publication or periodical for his article in the fall 2010 issue of Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History titled "The People's Choice: Indiana Congressman Jim Jontz." Also in that categroy, Jennifer Harrison received an honorable mention award for her article, also in the fall 2010 issue of Traces, titled "Naturalist Charlie Deam: Forestry and Conservation Pioneer."

Boomhower also received a third place award in the nonficition book category for his IHS Press publication Fighter Pilot: The World War II Career of Alex Vraciu. Ted Evanoff and Abe Aamidor won first place in the book category for their work At the Crossroads: Middle America and the Battle to Save the Car Industry.

Interview with Supreme Court Justices Editors

2011-04-05T14:34:00.002-04:00

Linda Gugin, emeriti professor of political science at Indiana University Southeast, and James E. St. Clair, professor of journalism at IU Southeast, have worked together on numerous books, including a biographies of Sherman Minton and Fred Vinson. Their newest project is the Indiana Historical Society Press book Justices of the Indiana Supreme Court. Gugin and St. Clair took time to answer questions about the book, which includes profiles of the one woman and 105 men who have served on the Indiana Supreme Court.

What prompted you to do a book on all the judges/justices of the Indiana Supreme Court?

After we finished editing the book The Governors of Indiana, we were looking for a new project. We considered doing a book on the justices of the Indiana Supreme Court but then discovered that a somewhat similar work had been published by the Court in the seventies. So we considered a book on U.S. Senators.

At the annual author fair at the Indiana Historical Society in December 2006, Chief Justice Randall Shepard, who wrote an essay in the governors book, asked us what our next project was. He told us he was very interested in having a book on the justices of the Supreme Court. And we confirmed that we could be very interested in editing such a book. He followed up with an email to us and in May of 2007 we met with the Chief Justice and his assistant Elizabeth Osborn to discuss the book. The Chief Justice pledged substantial financial support for the book and assistance in selecting authors.

How did you go about recruiting authors?

Chief Justice Shepard and Elizabeth Osborn were very helpful in our efforts to recruit authors. They identified authors for almost every justice based on their geographic closeness to the subject’s home region or because he or she previously wrote about the justice. The Chief Justice sent a letter in December 2007 to the tentatively identified authors asking their participation in the project. We followed up with letters in January 2008 proposing a subject or subjects for each author and asking them to confirm their willingness to contribute one or more essays.

About 70 percent of the people on the original list that the Chief Justice proposed agreed to participate. We recruited the remaining authors in a variety of ways, including asking colleagues at IU Southeast, inviting some authors who had contributed to the governors book, asking authors who could not participate to recommend someone else, and soliciting suggestions from logical sources in the same home region as the subject. In a few cases people with a strong interest in the subject contacted us to express their interest.

What surprised you most about the book?

LINDA: I was surprised at the strong impact of partisanship on the fates of the justices’ tenure in office and on the opinions they wrote. From 1852, until judicial reform was passed in 1970, justices ran for the office under partisan labels. The electoral success or failure of judicial candidates often depended on the fate of their party. If an election occurred in a banner year for the Republicans it meant that Republican candidates would win and Democratic candidates would lose. Many well qualified incumbent justices lost their seats on the Court because of the standing of their party, and some lesser qualified candidates gained seats for the same reason. Not surprisingly, the partisanship of elections often carried over into their decisions, particularly in cases that involved the powers of the governor or elections.

JIM: Several aspects of the formative years of the 19th century judges I found of particular interest, especially how so many of them, through sheer determination and hard work, rose from very humble beginnings to positions of prominence. The process of becoming lawyers during the early years of statehood was also intriguing. For many, the path to the legal profession came not through attending law schools but rather reading law with an attorney or judge in their community.

One judge, Alvin Hovey, studied law using the same volume of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Law that Abraham Lincoln had used years earlier when he was preparing to enter the profession. It was also of great interest to read some of the issues that came before the Court early in its history, most likely not the kind of cases justices in later years had to decide. For example, the learned judges of yesteryear were asked to pass judgment on cases that involved stealing hogs, a father’s claim of seduction against the suitor of his unwed, adult daughter, and the legality of an establishment charging people to play billiards.

Do you have a favorite justice?

LINDA: There are so many justices from which to choose that it is hard to come up with one favorite. However James A. Emmert, the seventy-ninth justice, is one who comes to mind. He served from 1947 until 1959. He was one of the most colorful justices and a favorite of the Indianapolis press corps. Instead of commuting to his home in Shelbyville he slept in his office on a couch. Those who arrived early at the Statehouse would occasionally see him walking in an upper hallway in his bathrobe. He would also invite some of his newspaper buddies to his office for an afternoon “cup of tea,” which was bourbon and branch water served in china cups.

Emmert had a long running battle over the Court’s budget with a state legislator, the owner of several peony farms, who persuaded the legislature to replace the zinnia with the peony as the Indiana State Flower. Emmert refused to call the legislator by his name and instead referred to him as “that peony growing b-st-d.” Aside from his flamboyant personality, he was known for his intellect and integrity and for several of his opinions that protected individual rights.

There are many humorous stories in the book that will delight readers. One of my favorites is about a prominent New Albany lawyer who admitted he was a “pretty bad kid” growing up. When he was in high school, he stole a set of golf clubs from a fancy car he saw with the trunk open. He proceeded to hit all of the balls out if it and then tried to sell it. He was caught and put in jail. When he was released he was told that the clubs belonged to Dixon Prentice, then a prominent New Albany lawyer, and advised that he should go an apologize to him. Prentice rather than castigating him gave him fifty cents and told him to go get a haircut and not to “do this anymore.” Several years later, when the attorney was at the height of his profession, he was preparing for an oral argument before the Court. He looked up and saw Justice Prentice walk in with the other justices. The lawyer said his hands starting shaking” but that Prentice never brought it up or said anything to him about the incident. However, the lawyer said, “As I recall I lost that case.”

JIM: I especially enjoyed researching and writing about the life and career of Curtis Roll, who served on the Court for two six-year terms, from 1931 to 1943. He declined the opportunity to seek a third term and instead returned to private practice, not as a big bucks corporate attorney but as a small-town counselor handling such grassroots matters for clients as zoning changes, annexation, and board of health rulings. If he saw this work as any less important or less satisfying than his deliberations on the bench, he never expressed it as far I know. I was also impressed that he kept active until the end. In fact, on the evening he collapsed and died, Roll had been speaking during a business meeting at this longtime church.

I have vivid memories of other Supreme Court judges, two in particular because of how tragic their lives ended. Stephen Stevens, the state’s fifth Supreme Court judge, achieved great fame and wealth but a failed investment in a railroad venture not only cost him his fortune but also his sanity. He ended up a pauper in a state mental hospital, a fate somewhat softened by the kind gesture of fellow lawyers who, after learning he had little to wear, collected money to buy him a new suit. John Gillett, esteemed educator, scholar, and jurist, hanged himself after a series of calamities, including the death of his wife, his own failing health, and the decline of his beloved law school. Judge Timothy Howard penned a line to the president of Notre Dame when he sought to return to the faculty that I am especially fond of and reminds me that we were not always a “greed is good” society. As to his salary, Howard wrote, “You would not wish me to have too little & I should not want to have too much.”

Stott Civil War Diary Now Available

2011-04-04T13:24:00.002-04:00

Written by Lloyd Hutner, For Duty and Destiny: The Life and Civil War Diary of William Taylor Stott, Hoosier Soldier and Educator, now available from the Indiana HIstorical Society Press, explores the career of Stott, a native Hoosier and an 1861 graduate of Franklin College. Stott later became the president who took the college from virtual bankruptcy in 1872 to its place as a leading liberal arts institution in Indiana by the turn of the century.

The story of Franklin College is the story of W. T. Stott, yet his influence was not confined to the school’s parameters. Stott was an inspirational and intellectual force in the Indiana Baptist community, and a foremost champion of small denominational colleges and of higher education in general. He also fought in the Eighteenth Indiana Volunteer Infantry during the Civil War, rising from private to captain by 1863.

Stott’s diary reveals a soldier who was also a scholar in camp and on the march, one who took every available moment to read theology, philosophy, great literary works, the classics of ancient Greece and Rome, and a few novels. He was as familiar with Burns and Byron as he was with ramrods and knapsacks.

Hunter is professor emeritus of history and American studies at Franklin College. While at Franklin, he founded and directed the American Studies Program and occupied the Roger D. Branigin Chair of History. Hunter received recognition by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Council for Advancement and Support of Education as the 2003 Outstanding Indiana Professor of the Year.

For Duty and Destiny costs $27.95 and is available from the IHS's History Market.

Civil War Author Wins Award

2011-04-04T13:03:00.004-04:00

Author Gail Stephens has been named the recipient of the 2011 William Henry Seward Award for Excellence in Civil War Biography by the Civil War Forum of Metropolitan New York for her Indiana Historical Society Press book Shadow of Shiloh: Major General Lew Wallace in the Civil War.

The Seward Award carries with it a $2,000 cash reward, as well as an expense-paid trip to New York City, where Stephens will receive the Seward Award, and make a presentation to the Civil War Forum's membership, on Wednesday, July 20, 2011.

Stephens is only the second person to receive the Seward Award. The first person was Joan Waugh for her work U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth, published in 2010 by the University of North Carolina Press.

Stephens is a retired U.S. Department of Defense employee who serves as a volunteer at the Monocacy National Battlefield. She lectures on the Civil War, teaches courses at area colleges, and gives battlefield tours.

IHS Press Books Honored

2011-03-15T07:58:00.002-04:00

Four IHS Press books have been named as finalists in ForeWord Magazine's annual Book of the Year Awards. The finalists and categories they are in are:

Fighter Pilot: The World War II Career of Alex Vraciu by Ray Boomhower, Juvenile, nonfiction

Nature's Storyteller: The Life of Gene Stratton-Porter by Barbara Morrow, Juvenile, nonfiction

Maria's Journey by Ramon Arredondo and Trisha (Hull) Arredondo, Regional

Indiana: One Pint at a Time by Douglas Wissing, Travel Guide

Winners will be determined by a panel of librarians and booksellers selected from ForeWord Magazine's readership. Gold, Silver, and Bronze winners, as well as Editor’s Choice Prizes for fiction and nonfiction will be announced at a special program at the American Library Association Annual Conference in New Orleans this June. The winners of the two Editor's Choice Prizes will be awarded $1,500 each and ForeWord’s Independent Publisher of the Year will also be announced. The ceremony is open to all ALA attendees and exhibiting publishers.

ForeWord's Book of the Year Awards program was created to spotlight distinctive books from independent publishers. What sets the awards apart from others is that final selections are made by real judges--working librarians and booksellers--based on their experiences with patrons and customers.

The magazine's awards process brings readers, librarians, and booksellers together to select their top categories as well as choose the winning titles. Their decisions are based on editorial excellence, professional production, originality of the narrative, author credentials relative to the book, and the value the book adds to its genre.

Indiana Supreme Court Justices Profiled

2011-01-31T08:48:00.002-05:00

From its inception in 1816 until 2010, one woman and 105 men have been members of the Indiana Supreme Court. In Justices of the Indiana Supreme Court a multiauthor volume edited by Linda C. Gugin and James E. St. Clair and featuring an introduction by Chief Justice of the United States John G. Roberts, authors explore the lives of each justice, unearthing not only standard biographical information but also personal stories that offer additional insight into their lives and times. The book was published by the IHS Press in cooperation with the Indiana Supreme Court.

In the early days of Indiana statehood, the men who served on the Court often learned their profession by studying in the office of a trained lawyer and began their career as judges by “riding the circuit.” Over the years, the Court has been home to an eclectic group of justices, including a novelist who attempted to have copies of his work destroyed because the “morals of the book were not suitable for the minds of young people,” a judge whose collection of court cases became known worldwide, two men who served on the Nuremberg proceedings trying Nazi war criminals, and a jurist whose hobbies included photographing the Indianapolis 500.

Today’s Court is quite different from the state’s first Supreme Court established when Indiana joined the Union as the nineteenth state. Through the years the Court has grown from three members to five and what had begun as an appointed body by the governor with “advice and consent” of the Indiana Senate became election of judges by voters thanks to the 1851 Indiana Constitution. In 1970 Hoosier voters approved an amendment to the constitution passed by the Indiana General Assembly that replaced partisan elections with a merit-based system of gubernatorial appointment checked with nonpartisan retention elections.

As the editors note, the 1970 amendment also altered the way the Court selected its chief justice. In its early years, Court members had the authority to pick a chief justice. Later, the position was rotated among the members by the district they represented. Thanks to the amendment, today a Judicial Nominating Commission elects the chief justice, now called the Chief Justice of Indiana, from among the sitting justices. Since 1970 only three men have served as Chief Justice of Indiana—Norman F. Arterburn (1972 to 1974), Richard M. Givan (1974 to 1987), and Randall T. Shepard (1987 to present).

Linda C. Gugin is an emeriti professor of political science at Indiana University Southeast, and James E. St. Clair is professor of journalism at IU Southeast. The two were coeditors of the Indiana Historical Society Press book The Governors of Indiana (2006), and cowrote the books Sherman Minton: New Deal Senator, Cold War Justice and Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson of Kentucky: A Political Biography.

The Justices of the Indiana Supreme Court costs $37.95 and is available from the IHS's History Market.

Interview with Gene Stratton-Porter Biographer

2011-01-31T08:34:00.004-05:00

Barbara Olenyik Morrow is a journalist and author who has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist for editorial writing. She is the author of the new Indiana Historical Society Press youth biography Nature's Storyteller: The Life of Gene Stratton-Porter. Here she talks about writing a book on one of Indiana's most famous authors.

How did you get interested in the life of Gene Stratton-Porter?

In the early 1990s I began researching famous Hoosier authors and poets--research that led me to write From Ben-Hur to Sister Carrie (Guild Press of Indiana, 1995). Of the five writers I profiled in that book, the sole woman was Gene Stratton-Porter, naturalist, nature writer, photographer, and one of the nation’s top-selling novelists in the early twentieth century.

As I delved into Stratton-Porter’s life story back then, I found her to be an extremely compelling figure. For starters, how could I not want to learn more about a middle-class wife and mother who slogged through snake-infested swamplands, waded into rivers, tramped about woods, and climbed trees to more closely observe birds and other wildlife? How could I not be fascinated by a self-taught naturalist who pinned cocoons close to her pillow at night so she would be awakened by the scraping of feet when moths emerged? And how could I not be intrigued by a brash young woman who gave her future husband fair warning: “I think differently from most people; so prepare to be shocked”?

When approached later to write this full-blown account of Stratton-Porter for the IHS Press’s youth biography series, I was pleased to resume my study of this adventuresome, ambitious and altogether appealing Hoosier. At the height of Stratton-Porter’s career, some people claimed she was as influential as President Theodore Roosevelt in igniting public interest in wildlife causes. For that reason alone, I think Hoosiers-–young and old-–owe it to themselves to learn what she had to say about preserving and conserving the nation’s natural resources.

What was the most important resource you used in writing about her life?

I relied heavily on Stratton-Porter’s writings-–her nonfiction books, her numerous magazine articles and columns, and essays she penned for miscellaneous publications, including her introductory essay to a friend’s book. She wrote at length about her childhood, and her descriptions of the family farm and her upbringing are highly detailed. Likewise, her descriptions of her field work are often riveting. I feel a bit queasy--and breathless--nearly every time I read about her trek through “steaming, fetid pools” to discover the baby vulture she eventually named “Little Chicken.”

My research also revealed that Stratton-Porter carefully guarded her privacy and was selective about what she shared for public consumption. To sort fact from fiction, I turned to newspaper accounts and other public records. To better assess her literary output, I read the many reviews written about her books. And to gain a fuller understanding of her personal life, I referred often to The Lady of the Limberlost: The Life and Letters of Gene Stratton-Porter, a reminiscence by her only child Jeannette Porter Meehan.

In doing your research, was there anything that surprised you about her life?

She was extremely hard-working and all about action--rolling up her sleeves, moving about, and getting a job done. She hiked and fished, photographed and painted, oversaw the construction of four homes, started her own film production company, and crawled around on her knees, transplanting hundreds of wildflowers to her Sylvan Lake estate. I often wondered: When did she sit still? And how did she manage to write so many books and articles?

Hers was clearly a productive life. Yet she seems not to have set aside much time for reflection or introspection. I found that to be, if not surprising, rather interesting, given that writers’ thoughts often turn inward. When literary critics attacked her work--and they often did--her reaction typically was to lash back. Nowhere did I find her musing about whether the critics might be right or whether, stylistically, her writing could be improved.

Why do you think her writings were so popular during her lifetime?

She had a real gift for storytelling, and she instinctively knew how to entertain, adding enough plot twists and romance to her fiction to keep readers turning pages. She also preached traditional values, and at a time when America was undergoing dramatic change--namely, urbanization and industrialization--her writings appealed to readers feeling nostalgic for a simpler, more neighborly, less stressful way of life. Beyond that, her nature writings tapped into a wistfulness many Americans were beginning to feel. The nation’s farms were being abandoned and wildlife and wild places were being wiped out to make way for industry. In her writings, she led readers to a place where many had never been or where they wanted to return--to flowering meadows and clean-smelling woods and marshes alive with birdsong.

Do Stratton-Porter’s writings have anything to teach us today?

Yes. Her advocacy for protecting the environment is as timely today as it was a century ago. She understood--intuitively and from years of close contact with wildlife--that people must live in harmony with the natural world and that if we “madly and recklessly” chop down forests, dirty rivers, drain wetlands, destroy vegetation and allow animals to become extinct, we do so at our own peril. The planet is a gift. We are called--as she rightly said--to be nature’s good stewards.

What is your next project?

I always have lots of story ideas rattling around in my head. I love history, and I enjoy making historical figures more accessible to young readers. I haven’t committed to a specific project just yet, though I suspect I will soon. I encourage readers to visit my website for updates.

Youth Biography of Gene Stratton-Porter Released

2011-01-10T09:01:00.002-05:00

As a young girl growing up in the 1860s on a Wabash County, Indiana, farm, Geneva Grace Stratton received a wondrous gift from her father, Mark, who had noticed his daughter’s love for nature and wildlife, especially the larks, cardinals, passenger pigeons, swallows, and hawks that flew overhead. He declared that all birds on the farm belonged to her, and she was to become their protector. “I was the friend and devoted champion of every bird that nested in the garden, on the fences, on the ground, in the bushes, in the dooryard, or in the orchard trees,” she noted years later.

From these early beginnings, Gene Stratton-Porter found a purpose for her life—sharing the outdoors with others through writing and photography and working to conserve nature for the generations to come. By the time she died at age sixty-one, Stratton-Porter was one of the country’s best-known authors, with a following of fifty million readers worldwide and with her novels and nature books selling hundreds of copies a day. Though never a favorite with literary critics, Stratton-Porter was beloved by ordinary Americans, as much for her storytelling skills and advocacy for wildlife as for her independent spirit. Often clad in manly clothes and toting a gun for protection as she trooped through swamps and forests, Stratton-Porter lived life on her own terms and, in the process, helped push back society’s boundaries for women.

Written by Barbara Olenyik Morrow, Nature’s Storyteller: The Life of Gene Stratton-Porter is the seventh volume in the Indiana Historical Society Press’s youth biography series. The book examines Stratton-Porter’s early life exploring the treacherous Limberlost Swamp in northeastern Indiana to her development as an enormously popular writer. Stratton-Porter used her popularity to campaign for conservation, and some claimed she was as influential as President Theodore Roosevelt in igniting public interest in wildlife causes. Prominent scholar and critic William Lyon Phelps observed that Stratton-Porter “led millions of boys and girls into the study of natural objects,” and he even called her “a public institution, like Yellowstone Park.”

Stratton-Porter continued to advocate for wildlife after her move to California, where she became one of Hollywood’s first female producers, turning her nature-themed novels into wholesome family movies. Upon her death from injuries in an automobile accident on December 6, 1924, she was widely mourned by fans of her many books, magazine columns, movies, and photography. She also was saluted by conservationists, grateful for her passionate pleas on behalf of the environment. In a tribute obituary, the Izaak Walton League, a national conservation organization, called on its members to “carry on in the cause for which she worked and in which she believed with every atom of her heart and soul.”

Morrow is a journalist and author who has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist for editorial writing. Her two children’s picture books, A Good Night for Freedom and Mr. Mosquito Put on His Tuxedo, have been praised by reviewers and garnered awards, including one from Friends of American Writers, an organization that honors emerging Midwestern authors. Morrow’s other books include From Ben-Hur to Sister Carrie, in which she profiles five Hoosier writers during Indiana’s golden age of literature. Her first book, Those Cars of Auburn, highlights the rich automotive heritage of Auburn, Indiana, where she lives.

Nature's Storyteller costs $17.95 and is available from the IHS's History Market.

Interview with Civil War Author

2010-12-28T08:41:00.002-05:00

Michael Peake, a resident of Corydon, Indiana, is an author and historian specializing in Indiana German genealogy and history as related to the American Civil War. Since retiring from federal service in 1996, Peake has devoted his time to researching Union and Confederate German-American military organizations.

Peake is the author of the new IHS Press book Blood Shed in this War: Civil War Illustrations by Captain Adolph Metzner, 32nd Indiana. Here he talks about his new book on Metzner's stunning visual diary of sketches, drawings, and watercolors from the Civil War.

How long have you been interested in the Civil War?

My interest in the Civil War evolved from a lifelong passion for military history, and history in general. Since the early 1990s, I have been drawn to Germans in the American Civil War after discovering the nation’s oldest surviving Civil War monument dedicated to casualties of the First German, Thirty-second Regiment Indiana Volunteer Infantry. I had intended only to write a brief article about the condition of the monument, but after learning details of the Thirty-second Indiana, and how little had been done on the regiment's history, I determined to tell the story of the sacrifice offered by these Germans who served to prove themselves worthy of citizenship. My extensive research into Indiana’s first ethnic Civil War infantry regiment is the cornerstone of a project that grew into an investigation of America’s largest ethnic bloc, and the numerous German military organizations that served on both sides during the war.

How did you learn about Metzner and his artwork?

Soon after beginning research into the regiment I developed a detailed genealogical database on all those who served with the Thirty-second Indiana. It was through this venue that I discovered Adolph Metzner’s activities during and after the war. My first encounter with his artwork, in 1994, consisted of a thirteen-image spread in the August 1974 issue ofCivil War Times Illustrated. The article provided limited information on the regiment, the artist, his work and the current owner of the collection. Fortunately, an ad on page 23 of the same issue offered two prints from the collection for sale, and identified Mr. E. Burns Apfeld as living in Rockford, Illinois. Realizing the importance of this art to my project, I attempted to locate Mr. Apfeld only to discover the family had relocated without leaving a forwarding address, and my search for the collection owner came to a frustrating halt.

Several years later, Time/Life published a multi-volume set titled Voices of the Civil War in which seven Metzner images were utilized in two volumes. The picture credits provided Mr. Apfeld’s location as Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and the hunt was on! I managed to contact Mr. Apfeld by phone and during a lengthy conversation I explained what I had in mind, and how important this collection could be to the regiment history. We had an extremely amiable talk, but several months passed, leading me to believe that nothing would come from my effort. One day, out of the blue, a disk arrived by mail from Mr. Apfeld that contained thirty of the Metzner images. I was baffled that no correspondence was included, not even a title on the disk. Undeterred, I immediately set about marrying these images into a booklet with photographs from a second Metzner collection (Adolph G. Metzner Collection, Lot #8751, Library Of Congress) and wrote a condensed history related to those art images. This was accomplished within a week of receiving the disk, and a short time later, I mailed the product back to Mr. Apfeld. My efforts were rewarded by the arrival of a disk containing nearly the entire collection, again accompanied with no correspondence. Mr. Apfled’s faith in me has bound us together in a lasting friendship, and I am honored to tell his ancestor’s story.

What makes Metzner’s work unique?

Any Civil War art created by a soldier is unique in itself and there are numerous extraordinary aspects to Metzner’s artwork. I believe that, foremost, this collection, created in the field by an exceptionally talented soldier, provides a rare view of the terrible struggle men encountered in the Western Theater. When arranged chronologically, Metzner’s work becomes a visual diary of what his regiment experienced during three years of combat in battles from Kentucky to the severe contest for Atlanta. Images from this collection will be important to more than a dozen communities across five states due to the historic content portrayed. Less than 20 percent of Metzner’s art has been utilized in publication, and when it has been used the information provided was limited, or incorrect.

Why do you think the subject of the Civil War still fascinates so many people?

As the Metzner art collection exemplifies, after 150 years there is still fresh and exciting material to be discovered by serious research. As another example, in recent years, Joseph Reinhart of Louisville, Kentucky has uncovered a treasure trove of Civil War material hidden in German-language newspapers that remain largely untranslated. His translations of soldiers’ letters sent home to the editors of these newspapers provide accounts not to be found in any other source. But another reason for this fascination becomes a bit more personal when considering family links that many have to a war that forever marked a nation. During my years of researching the Thirty-second Indiana, I have met dozens of proud regiment descendants who have provided encouragement, support and friendship as I strive to gather their ancestors’ stories.

Are you working on any other projects relating to the Civil War?

Blood Shed In This War was an absolutely necessary sidestep I took away from the larger project of creating the regiment history of the Thirty-second Indiana. The regiment history endeavor spawned several sidebar projects, such as the Metzner book. Those sidebars include what is likely the most extensive genealogical Civil War regiment database in existence and a substantial newspaper history volume of transcribed articles taken from over sixty war-era newspapers printed across the country. Among other projects, I plan to write a final report on the First German, Thirty-second Indiana monument now that the nine year preservation effort to save the nation’s oldest surviving Civil War monument has reached a successful conclusion. After I began researching the Thirty-second Indiana, I set aside two projects I was working on that I intend to return to eventually. One covers two of my ancestors, brothers from Nelson County, Kentucky, who enlisted in the Confederate Ninth Kentucky Infantry at Munfordville, Kentucky in October 1861, while the Thirty-second Indiana was at New Haven, not far from the brothers’ home. The other project relates to the Seventieth Ohio Regiment, a mostly green organization that underwent their baptism at Shiloh under Sherman and served in his command all the way through the March to the Sea. On returning to Cincinnati following the war, the regiment was involved in a steamboat disaster on the Ohio River downstream from Brandenburg, Kentucky resulting in the loss of several veterans killed and injured. I have now expanded my research to cover all ethnic German military organizations serving both sides during the war that I plan on examining in detail on my web site, germanmansons.com, now in development.

19 Stars of Indiana

2010-12-14T10:24:00.002-05:00

The nineteen outstanding contemporary Hoosier men--one for each star in the Indiana state flag--profiled by Michael S. Maurer in his new book 19 Stars of Indiana: Exceptional Hoosier Men, are leaders and pioneers who have excelled in a variety of pursuits, including law, business, philanthropy, government, medicine, music, art, athletics, religion, and education.

The book, pubished in association with IBJ Media, Indianapolis, and the Indiana Historical Society, features the inspiring stories of Hoosiers shot out of a fighter jet, liberating a concentration camp, subject to court martial, knocked cold in front of twenty thousand fans, facing bigotry, and caught in the middle of ethnic slaughter--lives full of excitement, adventure, and achievement.

Maurer served as Secretary of Commerce under Indiana governor Mitch Daniels. Maurer is a regular columnist for the Indianapolis Business Journal and an irregular contributor to the New York Times crossword puzzle. He lives in Carmel, Indiana, with his wife, Janie. The Maurer's have three children and eight grandchildren.

19 Stars of Indiana: Exceptional Hoosier Men costs $24.95 and can be purchased from the IHS's History Market.

Art from a Civil War Soldier

2010-12-13T12:38:00.003-05:00

Captain Adolph G. Metzner’s stunning visual diary of sketches, drawings, and watercolors, published for the first time in the new IHS Press book Blood Shed in This War: Civil War Illustrations by Captain Adolph Metzner, 32nd Indiana by Michael A. Peake, depict his world during three years of service with the First German, Thirty-second Regiment Indiana Volunteer Infantry campaigning in the Western Theater during the Civil War. Metzner chronicled the day-to-day life of a soldier’s world, at first with humor, and later, with a stark reality of life and death on the battlefield.

Metzner was born on August 16, 1834, in a village in the southwestern corner of Baden-Württemberg, Germany, and earned a degree as a prescription pharmacist. In 1856he immigrated to the United States, establishing himself as a druggist in Louisville, Kentucky. Four months after the start of the Civil War, the young druggist traveled to Indianapolis to assist in organizing a German regiment.

Once encamped with the Thirty-second, Metzner immediately began to set his impressions down on paper, recording the regiment’s activity with details as vividly descriptive as any written word and creating a series of caricatures of his associates with a tinge of comical exaggeration likely influenced by the subject. With the initial loss of comrades at the battle of Rowlett’s Station, Kentucky, on December 17, 1861, Metzner’s art changed. From that point on his work showed the turmoil and struggle the men experienced through Shiloh and General Braxton Bragg’s invasion of Kentucky to Stones River, Chickamauga, Chattanooga, and culminating with the move on Atlanta. Humor was fleeting in the later days of war, and Metzner’s work mirrored that fact.

Throughout his service with the regiment, Metzner produced his works on any available material. With his training in pharmaceutical techniques, it is likely that he produced tints from natural materials such as berries and bark when supplies became scarce. After his assignment as a topographical engineer following the battle of Stones River, materials were readily available to the artist, and periods of inactivity gave Metzner ample opportunity to create his works of art.

After being wounded at Chickamauga, Metzner returned to Indianapolis, and his artwork went into storage with the remainder of his war gear. He did, however, create one postwar oil painting. While in the field, Metzner made several sketches of artillery batteries in different operations, and after returning to Indianapolis, he created his last known work, a beautiful 18 1/2 x 23 1/4 oil on canvas that appears to be a culmination of his study of man, horse, and motion. The end result shows the depth of one who has witnessed war, or who has “seen the elephant,” as Civil War veterans called it.

Three years of service resulted in great sacrifice for the Thirty-second Regiment. In September 1861, 905 men left Indianapolis. Three years later, only 281 original enlistees returned to muster out of service, with another 89 mustering out in absentia. Combat claimed the lives of 171 men, including 7 officers. Another 98 died of disease. More than 441 men were wounded, many carrying scars from numerous battles. Some died much later from their wounds, and scores became permanently disabled due to injuries or disease

Peake, a resident of Corydon, Indiana, is an author and historian specializing in Indiana German genealogy and history as related to the American Civil War. Since retiring from federal service in 1996, Peake has devoted his time to researching Union and Confederate German-American military organizations.

Blood Shed in This War costs $34.95 and is available from the IHS's History Market.

Interview with Wabash History Author

2010-12-13T12:22:00.007-05:00

W. William Wimberly II, the author of the new IHS Press book Hanna's Town: A Little World We Have Lost, was well placed to write a history of Wabash, Indiana. Wimberly was raised in the community and it was there that his father served as a minister for thirty years. Here he talks about his experiences with the book,

What inspired your to write Hanna's Town?

1. I grew up from age one in an old, faded-elegant part of Wabash, wondering how such an elaborate town happened, and noting that the past seemed more lavish, more exuberant than its present appearance. 2. As a teen I learned that a small, rather remote, park in town had once been its cemetery and that it was named for a Mr. Hanna who founded Wabash. 3. When I was a junior-year-abroad student in Britain my mother asked me to check up on some remote Scots-Irish ancestors named Hanna: I realized I might have a family connection with Wabash's founder (There is but it's distant)... and yet I still didn't know how Hanna's Town grew into the faded-elegant town that raised me ... so I wrote a book ... and the fact that I had never used my Ph.D. in history helped snag me. Once retired to Wabash I had no excuse.

What was the toughest part of doing your research?

Following my father's advice to "keep the seat of the pants attached to the seat of the chair" while taking notes from the county museum's exensive collection of local newspapers back to 1847. It seemed to take forever.

What about Wabash surprised you the most?

1. The chronically awful condition of streets (dirt, mud, steep): bad surfaces right up to the end of the nineteenth century, and cruelly steep until cut down in the 1860s. 2. The prevelance of prostitution, possibly institgated by the presence of canal hands in the early days, perpetuated later by rail laborers, etc., but also eventually catering to upper crust clients rather openly. 3. The founders' capacity for multi-tasking: managing up to several business enterprises at once, while at the same time being deeply involved in religious, fraternal, political and community-improvement projects.

Is there a personality from the period covered that especially caught your attention?

I usually name Naaman Fletcher, journalist and newspaper publisher. He was incidentally one of the founders of Phi Gamma Delta, before he moved to Wabash. He died too young, but in his brief career he was an untiring candidate for civic improvements: he articulated a bright future for Wabash but he also scolded his readers cuttingly for failure to improve Wabash culturally and structurally more quickly. A secular Old Testament prophet was Naaman Fletcher.

How well does Wabash remember its past?

Not especially well. Many folks know about the US/Native American treaty of 1826; that Hugh Hanna was the founder; that canals and railroads were formative; and that it was the "first electrically lighted city in the world." The knowledge is largely anecdotal and out-of-context, verbal hand-me-down stuff. Interest has been raised by the excellent refounding of the county museum, a showpiece. Of course, now there will be no excuse for not knowing.

Do you plan another book on Wabash?

Not as a sequel to Hanna's Town. A good friend, Pete Jones, has, over his career (history teacher, journalist), already done a huge chunk of the research for the twentieth century. I encourage him to pick up where I left off--and I think he will do it. I have been laying groundwork for another kind of work, more in the memoir/history genre, set mostly in Wabash in the late twentieth century, but what will come of that only time will tell.

Price Wins Dunn Award

2010-12-08T08:52:00.002-05:00

Nelson Price of Indianapolis, Indiana, is the winner of the 2010 Jacob P. Dunn Jr. Award for the best article to appear in the Indiana Historical Society's illustrated history magazine Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History. Price won for his article "Ryan White: Twenty Years Later," which appeared in the magazine's winter 2010 issue.

Price was one of several Hoosiers honored at the Society's Founder's Day dinner on Monday, December 6, at the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana History Center. Pictured here is Price (center) along with Tom Hoback, IHS board of trustee chairman (left), and Ray E. Boomhower, Traces senior editor.

Named for the noted Indiana historian and author, the $500 award honors the article that in the opinion of the Traces editorial board and staff best serves the magazine’s mission. This mission involves presenting thoughtful, research-based articles on Indiana history in an attractive format to a broad audience of readers.

Dunn, who helped revitalize the Society in the 1880s, produced such standard works as the two-volume Greater Indianapolis (1910) and his five-volume Indiana and Indianans (1919). In his remarkable career, Dunn also worked on a variety of Indianapolis newspapers, campaigned to establish free public libraries, endeavored to preserve the language of the Miami Indians, and prospected for minerals in Haiti.

Price is the author of several books, including Indiana Legends: Famous Hoosiers from Johnny Appleseed to David Letterman, Legendary Hoosiers, and Indianapolis Then and Now. A former feature writer and columnist for the Indianapolis Star, he is the host of Hoosier History Live! on WICR-FM (88.7) radio at 11:30 a.m. every Saturday.

History of Wabash, Indiana, Released

2010-12-03T09:59:00.006-05:00

In late autumn 1902 a macabre scene unfolded at the original burial ground of Wabash, Indiana, which had been called both the Old Cemetery and Hanna’s Cemetery. The task at hand was the disinterment of four bodies. The newest of the four graves held whatever might be left of the corpse of Colonel Hugh Hanna who, more than any other single citizen, was the founding father and civic icon of the prospering, rather stunning little city. It might be argued that Hanna’s disinterment was a high-water mark in an outpouring of visible progress, cultural energy, and palpable optimism that his town had experienced during the preceding sixty-seven years.

As author W. William Wimberly II notes in his new IHS Press book Hanna's Town: A Little World We Have Lost, those years ought not to be evaluated nostalgically, however. History emphatically records that Wabash was neither an ideal society by 1902 nor even outstandingly progressive for its time. It continued to display rustic and seedy aspects of its unpolished past. Wabash was still home to racism, gender inequity, crime, prostitution, pollution, and wide (possibly widening) divisions between rich and poor, drunk and sober, labor and management, educated and uneducated.

Although the twentieth century would leach from towns such as Wabash what had once loomed large with them: a sense of communal significance and a pioneer can-do confidence. The opportunity to create a community out of a forest wilderness would be gone. One could no longer simply lay out a plat on uninhabited land, start building infrastructure, hoping to keep up with the demand of those rushing in to live there, and to be engaged mostly in building anew and in adding to, rather than in replacing or restoring what others had left behind. The new century inevitably overwhelmed some of the spirit of the old century: two world wars, the Great Depression, the urbanization of America, and the growth of industry would re-shape the nation. The coming ubiquity of the automobile was part of a travel and communication revolution that tied large regions of the nation together around urban centers. Folks in communities far from city suburbs, as in Wabash, began to believe they were again in the hinterlands of progress rather than the very engine of it, as their nineteenth-century counterparts so often were.

By 1902, before the complications of the new century washed over them, Wabash citizens had reasons to stand tall and proud. A sincere local boosterism was all but a religion. The wilderness had been subdued. In its place was a city of almost palpable optimism, boasting a bustling economy, a sense of community, civic pride, broad economic connections, architectural achievements, and various other cultural pretensions, all of which more than fulfilled any visionary hopes early settlers may have cherished. Many streets at last were paved. By the time its founder was reburied, the town had achieved a kind of apotheosis: progressive, confident, quite possibly gorgeous—Hanna’s town.

Wimberly received a PhD in early American history from Indiana University. He holds degrees from Hanover College and Princeton Theological Seminary. An ordained minister, he served Presbyterian churches in four Hoosier locations: Brazil, Spencer, La Porte, and Fort Wayne. Hanna’s Town is the history of nineteenth-century Wabash, Indiana, where the author was raised and where his father was a minister for thirty years. He is married to Tracy Temple, a Wabash native, and they have two sons. He has been honored with the Sagamore of the Wabash and Hanover College’s Civic Leadership Award.

Hanna's Town costs $24.95 and is available from the IHS's History Market.

"Shadow of Shiloh" Author Talk

2010-11-19T13:33:00.002-05:00

Author Gail Stephens will discuss her new IHS Press book Shadow of Shiloh: Major General Lew Wallace in the Civil War as part of the Indiana Historical Society's free Author Talk series at noon on Monday, November 29. The program will be held in the Multipurpose Room at the Indiana History Center, 450 West Ohio Street, Indianapolis. Stephens will also sign copies of her book, which will be on sale in the IHS's History Market on the first floor.

Interview with Wallace Author

2010-10-25T08:25:00.004-04:00

A retired U.S. Department of Defense employee who serves as a volunteer at the Monocacy National Battlefield, Gail Stephens, author of the new IHS Press book Shadow of Shiloh: Major General Lew Wallace in the Civil War, also lectures on the Civil War, teaches courses at area colleges, and gives battlefield tours. Here she talks about her experiences in writing about Wallace.

What inspired you to write a book about Lew Wallace's Civil War career?

I've been a volunteer at Monocacy National Battlefield, south of Frederick, Maryland, for ten years. On July 9, 1864, at the battle of Monocacy, Wallace, with 6,500 men, half of whom had never fought in a battle, held a veteran Confederate army of 14,000 for an entire day, giving Ulysses S. Grant time to reinforce a vulnerable Washington, D.C, only thirty miles to the south.

I was curious how a man who had accomplished this feat could have been out of field command between the fall of 1862 and March 1864. I was told that he had failed Grant at Shiloh on April 6, 1862, when he arrived too late to fight that day, and that Grant had gotten rid of him. That Wallace should have been so very careless, cowardly, or incompetent was difficult for me to reconcile with the man who fought at Monocacy. I decided to see what answers I could find in the primary sources and this book is the result.

How important were your actual visits to battlefields in writing the book?

Crucial. A battlefield must be seen to be interpreted and ground must be walked in order to understand why officers and men made the decisions they made. In October 2005, with seven other historians, I walked the entire route of Wallace's controversial April 6 march to the battlefield of Shiloh. What we learned that day in terms of the length, difficulty, and timing of the march is key to my conclusions about that controversy.

Just how good a general was Wallace?

I think that the battle of Monocacy and his defense of Cincinnati in September 1862 demonstrate how good he actually was. He understood the importance of terrain because at Monocacy he picked a position, on high bluffs with a river in his front, where he had an edge that would in part make up for his much smaller force. He placed his best troops--the veteran division from Grant's army--where he expected the most fighting, and his green troops along the periphery. He used his one six-gun battery of artillery judiciously to protect a bridge and to provide aid to his veteran division. Most important, he knew how long to fight and when to give it up.

At Cincinnati he showed that he was not only good at fighting but good at organizing. Between September 2 and 10, 1862, with Lieutenant General Edmund Kirby Smith's Confederate army just eighty miles away, he assembled a force of 72,000 volunteers, completed seven miles of fortifications with eight artillery batteries, and armed eighteen steamboats to patrol the Ohio River, a herculean task. On September 10, when Major General Harry Heth's division of 10,000 moved on Cincinnati at Smith's order, Heth judged the city to well defended and retreated. Wallace had good military instincts, was a tough, scrappy fighter, and had a natural ability to lead men and choose where and how he would fight. However, Wallace had a problem with authority, and he was not a team player, fatal qualities in the army.

What was Wallace's greatest service to the Union cause during the war?

Wallace had some great military moments, his afternoon attack at Fort Donelson, which regained the potential Confederate escape route for the Union, his defense of Cincinnati, and his "brilliant little battle of Monocacy," which helped save Washington, DC, but one non-military event may trump those.

In 1864, when Wallace took command of the Middle Department, President Abraham Lincoln told him that he had a most important task--to ensure that slavery was abolished in Maryland by a constitutional process and without excessive military intervention. In previous elections, the Union military had exercised a heavy hand in secession-prone Maryland. The stakes were very high in 1864 when Maryland first prepared to vote on which delegates they would send to a constitutional convention where the key issue was whether to abolish slavery. The state's voters would then be asked whether they approved of the amended constitution. Lincoln desperately wanted one of the border states to abolish slavery via a peaceful constitutional process and demonstrate that democracy was firmly entrenched in the Union. Wallace worked closely with the Unionist governor of Maryland, Augustus Bradford, and local judges of election to ensure that the election was fair and peaceful, so his troops remained in their encampment. It worked. Slavery was abolished in Maryland on November 1, 1864, and Wallace had a 100-gun salute fired from Fort McHenry, the inspiration for "The Star-Spangled Banner." One Marylander wrote Wallace that his name would forever be associated "with a cause more enduring than that of many a stricken field--that of free institutions and their consolidation forever."

Did Wallace every achieve any kind of "peace" about what happened at Shiloh?

I don't think so. Shiloh was widely discussed and even though Grant exonerated him in his memoirs, but even after they were published, the criticism continued. For a man to whom honor was a tangible concept, this criticism was a constant thorn in his side. He fought the charges whenever and wherever he could, but they always pained him.

What is your next project?

I'm writing an essay on the role of national cemeteries in battlefield preservation, more specifically on whether the men who created the national cemeteries on Civil War battlefields like Gettysburg and Shiloh understood that in creating these hallowed places, they were preserving the core of what would become today's national battlefield parks. When that's published, I would like to dig more deeply into the 1864 advance on Washington, D.C., so memorably delayed by Wallace, in particular the reasons behind Robert E. Lee's decision to send an army to seize the Union capital, the reasons why the Union high command was so slow to realize Washington was vulnerable, and the repercussions from the campaign.

Wallace's Civil War Career Explored

2010-10-18T14:06:00.002-04:00

Thirty-two years after the battle of Shiloh Lew Wallace returned to the battlefield, mapping the route of his April 1862 march. Ulysses S. Grant, Wallace’s commander at Shiloh, expected Wallace and his Third Division to arrive early in the afternoon of April 6. Wallace and his men, however, did not arrive until nightfall, and in the aftermath of the bloodbath of Shiloh, Grant attributed Wallace’s late arrival to a failure to obey orders. By mapping the route of his march and proving how and where he had actually been that day, the sixty-seven-year-old Wallace hoped to remove the stigma of “Shiloh and its slanders.” That did not happen. Shiloh still defines Wallace’s military reputation, overshadowing the rest of his stellar military career and making it easy to forget that in April 1862 he was a rising military star, the youngest major general in the Union army.

Wallace was devoted to the Union, but he was also pursuing glory, fame, and honor when he volunteered to serve in April 1861. In Shadow of Shiloh, author Gail Stephens specifically addresses Wallace’s military career and its place in the larger context of Civil War military history. A central issue in the book is the tension between citizen-soldiers and West Pointers that occurred in the officer ranks. The general assumption in current Civil War histories is that the West Pointers were more competent at war than the citizen-soldiers. That was not true in Wallace’s case. He had a talent for battle, which he demonstrated at Fort Donelson, Monocacy, and even Shiloh. But Wallace’s disdain for military rules and protocol and his arrogance, fueled by early promotion, alienated his West Point superiors such as Grant and, especially, Henry Halleck, the general in chief of the Union armies.

Wallace was an extraordinary man—lawyer, politician, general, author, inventor, and adventurer. It is hoped that this book sheds new light on the long-standing issues surrounding Wallace’s Civil War career and puts his great service to the nation in perspective.

Stephens is a retired U.S. Department of Defense employee who serves as a volunteer at the Monocacy National Battlefield. She lectures on the Civil War, teaches courses at area colleges, and gives battlefield tours.

Shadow of Shiloh costs $27.95 and is available from the IHS's History Market.

IHS Press Author Wins Award

2010-10-12T10:05:00.003-04:00

IHS Press author and editor Ray E. Boomhower was named a winner of the 2010 Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Award. Boomhower received the Regional Author award during a gala awards dinner at the Central Library in downtown Indianapolis on Saturday, October 9.

Public nominations were submitted from across the state and eligibility included any published writer who was born in Indiana or has lived in Indiana for at least five years. An eight-member, statewide Award Panel selected the winners in three categories and finalists from the pool of nominated authors:

• National Author - $10,000 prize: a writer with Indiana ties, but whose work is known and read throughout the country. National authors were evaluated on their entire body of work. Winner: Scott Russell Sanders

• Regional Author - $7,500 prize: A writer who is well-known and respected throughout the state of Indiana. Regional authors were evaluated on their entire body of work. Winner: Ray Boomhower; Finalists: Colleen Coble and Andrew Levy

• Emerging Author - $5,000 prize: A writer with only one published book. Emerging authors were evaluated on their single published work. Winner: Greg Schwipps; Finalists: Douglas Light and Micah Ling

In its second year, this award recognizes the contributions of Indiana authors to the literary landscape in Indiana and across the nation. The Award is a program of the Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library Foundation, and is funded by the generosity of The Glick Fund, a fund of Central Indiana Community Foundation.

IHS Press Authors Finalists in Best Books Competition

2010-10-07T08:12:00.003-04:00

IHS Press authors Wes D. Gehring and Elizabeth O'Maley have been named as finalists in the 2010 Best Books of Indiana contest sponsored by the Indiana Center for the Book. The contest was created to honor Indiana's long and illustrious literary heritage and recognize Hoosier authors.

Gehring is a finalist in the nonfiction category for his book Steve McQueen: The Great Escape. O'Maley is a finalist in the children/young adult category for her book By Freedom's Light.

Twelve titles, published between January 1 and December 31, 2009, have been selected as finalists in the 2010 competition. A panel of judges in each of four categories considered all entries and granted awards at their discretion. The winners will be announced on or before Friday, October 15, 2010.

All current and past Best Books entries are available in the Indiana State Library's collections. Two copies of each entry circulate to State Library patrons and are available to most public, school, and academic libraries in Indiana via interlibrary loan. One copy does not circulate and remains in the State Library's collections indefinitely

New Book Outlines Immigrant's Tale

2010-08-06T09:30:00.004-04:00

Born into the Mexican Revolution, Maria Perez entered an arranged marriage at age fourteen to Miguel Arredondo. The couple and their tiny daughter immigrated to the United States in the 1920s, living in a boxcar while Miguel worked for a Texas railroad and eventually settling in East Chicago, Indiana, where Miguel worked for Inland Steel.

Their true story, which is featured in the new IHS Press book Maria's Journey, written by Ramón Arredondo and Trisha (Hull) Arredondo, includes much of early-twentieth-century America: the rise of unions, the plunge into the Great Depression, the patriotism of World War II, and the starkness of McCarthyism. It is flavored by delivery men hawking fruit and ice, street sports, and Saturday matinees that began with newsreels. Immigration status colors every scene, adding to their story deportation and citizenship, generational problems unique to new immigrants, and a miraculous message of hope.

Ramón Arredondo’s career has spanned the fields of law enforcement, administration, public policy, and business. Currently, he serves as a commissioner of the Ports of Indiana. Trisha (Hull) Arredondo began her career as an educator before becoming a successful advocate for health care and education for women, children, and migrants.

Maria's Journey costs $19.95. The paperback book is available from the IHS's History Market.

Interview with Beer Book Author

2010-07-14T13:30:00.003-04:00

A Bloomington-based independent journalist and writer, Douglas A. Wissing, author of the new IHS Press book Indiana: One Pint at a Time; A Traveler's Guide to Indiana's Breweries, brings some family history to his work detailing the history and culture of the Hoosier State's brewing history. Wissing is a descendant of nineteenth-century Indiana-German brewers. In the following interview, Wissing, who has covered the war in Afghanistan, reflects on his experiences writing about Indiana's brewing past and present.

Did you know much about the history of beer in Indiana before you began your research for Indiana: One Pint at a Time?

From growing up in southern Indiana, I had experience with later industrial beers brewed in Evansville, Fort Wayne, and South Bend, and knew about some of the historical breweries dotted around the state, including one called Hack and Simon in my hometown of Vincennes, where there are still some old brewery buildings. But not much beyond that.

When I began research on the book, it was a big shock to eventually figure out that more than 500 breweries have operated in the Hoosier State since the Harmonists began the Indiana brewing tradition in 1816.

Were there any individuals in Indiana’s early beer history that caught your attention?

Some of the pioneer brewers captured my fancy: George Bentel, the German utopianist who was the brewer for the Harmonist communards in New Harmony. He was the first brewer in Indiana, and his house still stands on Brewery Street in New Harmony. It was very cool to track down one of his recipes, which the Brewers of Indiana Guild--today's organization of Hoosier craft brewers--used for their "replicale" for this year. About ten craft brewers around the state brewed Bentel's recipe for a dark lager, so as part of the book kick-off, Hoosiers can drink Indiana's First Beer this summer.

There was another early brewer who was associated with the second New Harmony communal experiment that followed the progressive ideas of Robert Owen. His name was Hew Ainslie, who was an iconoclastic Scottish poet who'd followed his dream to frontier of Indiana. He became a well-regarded brewer in New Albany, while continuing to parse the poesy of his years on the Wabash River.

And of course there was Ezra Boswell, a one-eyed Quaker brewer who opened Indiana's second brewery in Richmond in late 1817. Boswell learned his trade in Great Britain, before migrating to the Quaker town.

Beyond being a brewer and father of eleven children, Boswell was a town leader, as the citizens elected him as town clerk and later onto the board of trustees. Richmond was a straight-laced town, so there was some "tongues of slander" when it became known the trustees were drinking Boswell's brews at town expense.

How much traveling did you do to research microbreweries now in the state?

Oh, I wandered all over the place. Beyond my trips to research archives and locales about historical breweries, I visited all the contemporary craft brewery operating in the state at the time--almost three dozen at this point. This is the most breweries operating in Indiana since Prohibition.

Was there anything that surprised you about beer in Indiana during your research?

I had a funny experience down in Vincennes, where I descended from French and Alsatian-German stock. I was in the public library looking at an early-20th-century county history, the type that include biographies and engraved photos of the leading businessmen and professionals of the day. It is a good source of information on historic breweries, as they were often one of the major industries in town. I was looking for info on the Hack and Simon Brewery, which was a big regional player with a brewery that stretched a couple of blocks long near what is today the Vincennes University campus.

I was flipping through this hundred-year-old county history, when I suddenly encountered a photo of my father--or so I first thought. After I got over the disjuncture of seeing what I thought was a totally impossible picture, I learned it was a picture of my great-grandfather John Ebner. (They always said my long-deceased father looked like the Ebner side of the family.) As I read the bio, I realized John Ebner was the founder of the Hack and Simon brewery, first naming Eagle Brewery before leasing it to Hack and Simon. I never knew he was a brewer, though he had a mansion in Vincennes, which was typical for the Indiana-German brewers of the heyday of lager brewing. I learned John Ebner was an Alsatian, who'd served in the French Foreign Legion in Africa before immigrating here. Made me think I came by both my wanderlust and love of beer honestly.

Have you ever tried to homebrew?

I believe I am one of the worst homebrewers ever. I have brewed horrible beer--beer so bad not even my son's post-college rock-and-roll band, Johnny Socko, would drink it. Those guys would drink any virtually free beer, so it was a real sign that I needed to stick to writing about beer, rather than trying to actually brew it. I think the world is a better place for that decision.

What is your favorite Indiana beer?

I'm not being coy when I say I don't have a favorite Indiana beer. There are just a lot of great beers being brewed across the state. Many folks know that the Three Floyds Brewery in Munster, Indiana, was rated the top brewery in the world, as well as having their Dark Lord imperial stout being ranked as the world's best beer. But that's just the start. Hoosier brewers up and down the state are brewing world-class beer--and getting recognized for it. And we get to drink it right here.

IHS Press Releases New Beer Book

2010-07-13T11:28:00.002-04:00

Indiana: One Pint at a Time; A Traveler's Guide to Indiana's Breweries, just released from the Indiana Historical Society Press and written by Douglas A. Wissing, explores the history and living artisanal culture of the state's long, vibrant brewing tradition.

Using regional, ethnic, and commercial lens, the text depicts the early-nineteenth-century origins of Indiana's commercial breweries, through the early-twentieth-century heyday when forty-one Hoosier breweries hustled beer, to the mid-twentieth-century consolidation and decline.

The book focuses on Indiana brewing's remarkable post-1989 renaissance. Today more than thirty breweries produce award-winning craft microbrews across the state. Indiana: One Pint at a Time provides a travel guide to these craft breweries, interweaving their stories with Indiana architecture, ethnicity, and regional specificity, connecting the dynamics of today with the luster of the past.

Wissing is a Bloomington-based independent journalist and author. A descendant of nineteenth-century Indiana-German brewers, he has written articles for numerous publications and is the author of the book Pioneer in Tibet. Wissing has reported widely on the war in Afghanistan, including radio work for BBC and the Indiana NPR network.

Indiana: One Pint at a Time costs $24.95. The paperback book is available from the IHS's History Market.

Interview with Fall Creek Massacre Author

2010-06-30T13:27:00.003-04:00

Chairman of the Department of History and Political Science at Anderson University, David Thomas Murphy teaches courses in Western Civilization, Modern German history, the history of modern Europe, and the history of the Holocaust and comparative genocides. Murphy tackles a different subject in his new book Murder in Their Hearts: The Fall Creek Massacre. In the following interview he explains how he came to write about this tragic incident in Indiana's pioneer past.

How did you get interested in writing about the Fall Creek Massacre?

Through my work as a teacher of history here at Anderson University. One of the courses I teach regularly is called "Historical Inquiry", and it's designed to get our advanced history majors working on topics that use primary research materials. One of the most accessible ways to do that, in my experience, is to have students complete either a genealogical or local history project, and I always require that. A few years ago, one of my students in the course who came from the Pendleton area did his project on the Fall Creek Massacre.

I am originally from northern Illinois, and had never heard of the Massacre. The paper really intrigued me, and when I looked for more information on the episode, I didn't find much. There was Jessamyn West's novel, and there were a few articles, but no archivally-based, book-length study. And that was the beginning of the project. (And, yes, I do thank that student in the preface.)

In doing your research, did anything surprise you about the event?

A couple of things surprised me. One was the variety and complexity of the attitudes held toward Native Americans by the settlers of the early white Indiana community. There were of course a few truly racist Indian haters, and that didn't surprise me so much. But I have come to believe that such unalloyed hostility was anything but the norm. Most of the whites, so far as their feelings are today discernible, seem to have regarded their native neighbors with mingled respect, fear, suspicion, tolerance and at times sympathy for a people whom many believed had been treated cruelly by fate. John Johnston, the Indian agent in the area, for example, had a deep respect for the nobility of character he believed he saw in many of his charges, while never romanticizing them or ignoring their sometimes fearsome cruelty in battle.

I was also surprised by the sophistication of the land speculation business on the frontier. Every settler of any means was deeply committed to the steady appreciation of land values--investment in land was the stock market of that time and place - and the steps taken to exploit (and manipulate) that generator of wealth seemed like they could have been taken from the headlines of the last few years.

The unreliable nature of frontier record-keeping took some getting used to as well. I have done two previous books on aspects of modern German history, so I know that error creeps into the official record at times. But I still found in early county records a casual disregard for getting basic facts straight that surprised me.

How hard was it to reconcile the conflicting accounts of the event?

Sometimes it was not hard at all. For example, it was pretty easy to use contemporary newspaper accounts, which were carefully dated, of course, to figure what dates in the transcripts were accurate and which had to be incorrect.

Other times it was very difficult, and could finally be resolved only by making judgments about what seemed most plausible. A dozen conflicting accounts of the tribal origins of the victims of the Massacre are out there, and sometimes the same witness will identify them as of one tribal group at one time and as of a different group later. So, I had to take the results of modern anthropological research about who was most likely to have been here in numbers at the time, consider that with the testimony of the earliest and most knowledgeable sources, and try to decide where the truth seemed most probably to lie. I believe I came up with a defensible and plausible solution, but there is no way to say, categorically, that my view on this, or some similar matters, is the right one.

Were there books or authors that you drew upon for inspiration as you wrote your book?

While I was working on this book, Larry McMurtry, whose writings I admire, published a book called "O, What a Slaughter", about interracial violence in the Old West. That book gave me some ideas about how a person might present such events in a way that was historically accurate, and appealing to readers who, while not experts, are discriminating, perceptive and educated. I relied a lot upon the Indiana histories of Barnhart and Carmony, upon James Madison's Indiana Way, and Drew Cayton's Frontier Indiana. And I think anyone interested in writing regional history that is accurate, sophisticated, and written with verve can do a lot worse than consider John Bartlow Martin's Indiana: An Interpretation.

What is your next project?

I am working on two books now. One is a study of Jewish and Catholic interfaith relations in the West over the last two centuries. It is really just in the beginning stages, and relates to some earlier research I have done in German history. The other is a book about literature and education tentatively entitled "The Twenty-First Century Mind-Diet." We'll see what happens with that.

IHS Press Releases Book on Fall Creek Massacre

2010-06-30T13:15:00.002-04:00

In March of 1824 a group of angry and intoxicated settlers brutally murdered nine Indians camped along a tributary of Fall Creek. The carnage was recounted in lurid detail in the contemporary press and the events that followed sparked a national sensation.

As author David Thomas Murphy notes in the new IHS Press book Murder in Their Hearts: The Fall Creek Massacre, although violence between settlers and Native Americans was not unusual in the Old Northwest Territory during the early nineteenth century, in this particular incident the white men responsible for the murders were singled out and hunted down, brought to trial, convicted by a jury of their neighbors, and, for the first time under American law, sentenced to death and executed for the murder of Native Americans.

In the aftermath of the slayings, federal and state authorities perhaps motivated more by the encouragement of economic growth and the preservation of regional security than a commitment to justice for the victims, nevertheless, were determined to maintain the fragile peace of interracial coexistence. Their success in doing so proved to be local, temporary, and imperfect.

Murphy is chair of the Department of History and Political Science at Anderson University, where he also serves as codirector of the University Honors Program. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Illinois. His previous works include The Heroic Earth: Geopolitical Thought in Weimar Germany, 1918-1933 (1997) and German Exploration of the Polar World, 1870-1940 (2002).

Murder in Their Hearts costs $13.95 and is available from the IHS History Market.

IHS Author Television Interview

2010-06-15T12:47:00.002-04:00

IHS Press author Norbert Krapf, Indiana's Poet Laureate, was interviewed last week by WISH-TV, Channel 8, in Indianapolis.

In the interview, Krapf discusses his recent article in the spring 2010 issue of the IHS Press popular history magazine Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History detailing his decision to return to Indiana from Long Island, New York, and the writing of his memoir The Ripest Moments: A Southern Indiana Childhood, published by the IHS Press in 2008.

Juvenile Fiction Book Honored

2010-05-27T10:55:00.002-04:00

The IHS Press book By Freedom’s Light, written by Elizabeth O’Maley, won an honorable mention honor in the juvenile fiction category in ForeWord Reviews 2009 Book of the Year Awards. ForeWord named 201 Book of the Year Award winners in 60 categories at a ceremony Wednesday, May 26, at BookExpo America in New York City. These books, representing the best independently published works from 2009, were selected by a panel of librarian and bookseller judges.

ForeWord’s founder and publisher, Victoria Sutherland, spoke at the awards ceremony and announced the winners. “This year more than ever before, we heard from the judges how great the finalist books were and how difficult it was to make their decisions,” she said. “Despite this tough economy, independent publishers are producing some of the best books out there, and we are happy to honor them today.”

By Freedom’s Light, a historical novel for grades four and up, examines both the harshness of a slave society and the brave acts of people who helped slaves find freedom.

Thirteen-year-old Sarah Caldwell is an unhappy Indiana pioneer. She misses her sister, Rachel, who stayed behind in North Carolina. Worse yet, their widowed father has married a Quaker schoolteacher, whom Sarah discovers is a secret abolitionist. When Rachel and her family arrive for a visit, Sarah is overjoyed. Rachel brings Polly, a slave girl, with her. As Polly and Sarah become friends, Sarah questions her beliefs about slavery. Soon she is faced with a life-altering decision.

IHS Press Book Wins National Book Honor

2010-05-14T10:31:00.003-04:00

IHS Press author Jim McGarrah's 2007 book, A Temporary Sort of Peace: A Memoir of Vietnam, has won the Legacy Nonfiction Prize for 2010 from the Eric Hoffer Award for Short Prose and Independent Books.

Titles in the Legacy Nonfiction category are nonfiction books more than two years of age that hold particular relevance to any subject matter or art form. Unlike many in the industry, the Eric Hoffer Award believes "good books last longer than one season."

"Eric Hoffer was a great American philosopher," said McGarrah. "His foundation honors, in their own words, 'independent publishers and authors who who write and release extraordinary books to little or no recognition.' To have received the Legacy Nonfiction Award for 2010 gives me the encouragement I need to keep writing literary books that provoke lasting thought and strengthens my belief that the best words in the best order can actually help make the world a little better place."

In honoring McGarrah's work, the Hoffer Award noted the following: "McGarrah paints a remarkable canvas in a true-life account of his time in the Vietnam War. Our senses become in tune, as we feel, hear, smell, and touch the Viet Cong jungle. McGarrah offers a glimpse into his life before Viet Nam, his military years, the aftermath of coming home, and his later return to Vietnam. Some accounts are candid and bold, such as his teenage quest for sex or the brutal reality of the Viet Cong jungle. It is an honest and memorable story."

Each year, independent publishers (academic, independent, small press, and self-published authors) release extraordinary books to little or no recognition. The Eric Hoffer Award for independent books recognizes excellence in publishing with a $1,500 grand prize and various category honors and press type distinctions, as well as the winners of the Montaigne Medal and the da Vinci Eye. The book awards are covered in the US Review of Books. After the contest, books are donated to libraries, schools, and hospitals where appropriate.

IHS Press Author to Appear on Radio Program

2010-04-07T12:52:00.005-04:00

Ray E. Boomhower will be appearing on the Hoosier History Live! radio program to discuss his new IHS Press book Fighter Pilot: The World War II Career of Alex Vraciu at 11:30 a.m. Saturday, April 10, on WICR, 88.7 FM.

Hoosier History Live! is a weekly radio adventure through Indiana history, live with call-in, hosted by Nelson Price, historian and author of Indiana Legends and Indianapolis: Then and Now. Each week, the program includes a featured guest and topic, a call in from The Roadtripper with a tip about a Hoosier heritage-related road trip, and a Hoosier History Trivia question, complete with a prize for the correct answer. It is the nation's first and only call-in talk-radio show about history, premiering as a live weekly show on Jan. 12, 2008. The call-in number is (317) 788-3314.

IHS Press Books Nominated for Awards

2010-03-16T08:54:00.002-04:00

Three books published by the IHS Press in 2009 have been named as finalists in ForeWord Reviews 2009 Book of the Year Awards.

The books selected as finalists and their categories are:

* By Freedom’s Light, by Elizabeth O’Maley, juvenile fiction

* My Indiana: 101 More Places to See in Indiana, by Earl Conn, travel guide

* Steve McQueen: The Great Escape, by Wes Gehring, biography

The finalists, representing 360 publishers, were selected from 1,400 entries in sixty categories. The winners will be determined by a panel of librarians and booksellers selected from ForeWord Review’s readership. Gold, Silver, and Bronze winners, as well as Editor's Choice Prizes for fiction and nonfiction, will be announced at a special program at BookExpo America in New York City on May 25. The winners of the two Editor's Choice Prizes will be awarded $1,500 each. The ceremony is open to all BEA attendees.

ForeWord's Book of the Year Awards program was designed to discover distinctive books from independent publishers across a number of genres.

Alex Vraciu Biography Released

2010-03-09T07:44:00.002-05:00

On the morning of June 19, 1944, as U.S. troops were battling Japanese forces on Saipan in the Mariana Islands in the Pacific, American pilots based on aircraft carriers offshore rushed to their planes to protect their fleet from an enemy attack from the air.

Calling the mission a “once-in-a-lifetime fighter pilot’s dream” when he spotted a large mass of enemy planes bearing down on the U.S. ships, one navy pilot from Indiana, Alex Vraciu, flying a Hellcat fighter from the USS Lexington, pounced on the Japanese and shot down six dive bombers in just eight minutes. “I looked ahead,” Vraciu later told a Chicago Tribune reporter. “There was nothing but Hellcats in the sky. I looked back. Up above were curving vapor trails. And down on the sea, in a pattern 35 miles long, was a series of flaming dots where oil slicks were burning.”

Written by award-winning biographer Ray E. Boomhower, Fighter Pilot: The World War II Career of Alex Vraciu, the sixth volume in the Indiana Historical Society Press’s youth biography series, examines the daring exploits of the Hoosier flier during his wartime career. A graduate of DePauw University, Vraciu learned to fly during his college years through a government program and joined the navy before America was thrust into the war following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

Possessed with keen eyesight, quick reflexes, excellent shooting instincts, and a knack for finding his opponent’s weak spot, Vraciu became skilled in the deadly game of destroying the enemy in the skies over the Pacific Ocean. For a period of four months in 1944, Vraciu stood as the leading ace in the U.S. Navy. He shot down nineteen enemy airplanes in the air, destroyed an additional twenty-one on the ground, and sank a large Japanese merchant ship with a well-placed bomb hit.

Vraciu’s luck, however, finally ran out on December 14, 1944, during a strafing run against a Japanese airfield before the American invasion to retake the Philippines. Luckily he was almost immediately rushed to safety by a small group of U.S. Army in the Far East guerrillas, who had been battling the Japanese in the area for the past few years. The navy pilot spent the next five weeks with the guerrillas, receiving the honorary rank of brevet major while with them. Vraci finally marched into an American camp carrying with him a captured Japanese Luger pistol and sword.

Boomhower is senior editor with the Indiana Historical Society Press, where he edits the quarterly popular history magazine Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History. His previous books have included biographies of author and Civil War general Lew Wallace, famed Hoosier war correspondent Ernie Pyle, suffragette and peace activist May Wright Sewall, World War II photographer John A. Bushemi, and astronaut Gus Grissom. In 1998 Boomhower received the IHS’s Hoosier Historian honor.

Fighter Pilot costs $17.95 and is available from the IHS's History Market.

Interview with Nuremberg Author

2010-01-20T07:47:00.002-05:00

A graduate of the University of Rochester and the Boston University School of Law, Suzanne Bellamy practiced law for twenty-five years as a corporate counsel in Indianapolis. She used this experience to help her with her writing of the new Indiana Historical Society Press book Hoosier Justice at Nuremberg. Bellamy took took to answer a few questions about her book.

How did you first become involved with this project?

Indiana Chief Justice Randall T. Shepard approached me about five years ago about researching and writing this book. He was interested in how two judges from the Indiana Supreme Court had ended up as judges in the American military trials in Nuremberg, Germany after World War II. As a public history student and an attorney, I was instantly attracted to the topic as it combined both of my disciplines.

Did your training as a lawyer help with the research and writing of this book?

Definitely. In order to tell the story of Curtis Shake and Frank Richman, I had to tell the story of the trial in which each was involved. In Shake’s case, he was the presiding judge at the I.G. Farben trial. Richman was on the panel for the trial of Friedrich Flick and his associates. I needed to explain the counts of each indictment and the evidence presented relative to each such count in order to make sense of the verdicts and the responses thereto. I also did research at the law library on the significant cases brought before the Indiana Supreme Court during their tenures in which Shake and Richman wrote the majority opinions.

What did you learn in doing the project that surprised you?

I learned that these Hoosier judges were both men of depth whose stories each included tests of their character. In Shake’s case, he was accused as a young man of being a member of the Ku Klux Klan, which derailed his run for statewide office in Indiana. Richman was tested by his own political party when he was not renominated for his seat on the Indiana Supreme Court due to an opinion he had written contrary to his party’s position.

What is your next writing project?

I participated in writing several sections of the upcoming book on all of the Indiana Supreme Court justices which the Indiana Historical Society is publishing in July 2010. I am currently writing an institutional history of this decade for the American Legion Auxiliary, a national women’s patriotic organization.

Indiana Native Americans Explored in New Book

2010-01-19T11:25:00.002-05:00

Native American ancestors inhabited the land of Indiana from around 9,500 BC. European contact with Indiana's Miami, Wea, Mascouten, and Shawnee tribes began in 1679. The history of Native Americans in the state is examined in the new Indiana Historical Society Press book The Native Americans.

Written by Elizabeth Glenn and Stewart Rafert, the book is the second volume in the IHS Press's Peopling Indiana series based on the 1996 publication Peopling Indiana: The Ethnic Experience. Each volume in the series includes an updated essay on one of the state's larger ethnic groups illuminating the migratory, settlement, and community-building experiences of the essay's subject group.

Native Americans in Indiana were forced into western reservations by the 1830s. By 1850 only a portion of the Miami remained in Indiana. Many natives either assimilated into white culture or hid their identity. This scenario changed when Native Americans served in the military and at home during World War II. Afterward, Indians from many lineages flocked to Indiana. Along with Indiana's Miami and Potawatomi, they are creating a diverse Indian culture, expressed through pan-Indian as well as tribal activities, that enriches the lives of all Hoosiers.

Glenn is professor emerita of the Ball State University Anthropology Department. An adjunt professor of history at the University of Delaware, Rafert is the author of The Miami Indians of Indiana, published by the IHS Press in 1996.

The Native Americans costs $13.95 and is available from the IHS's History Market.

Book Examines Nuremberg Trials

2010-01-13T09:52:00.003-05:00

In the years after World War II, as the world grappled with the enormity of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazi regime, two Hoosiers had a significant role in the American response to unfolding events in Germany.

In the Indiana Historical Society Press book Hoosier Justice at Nuremberg, part of the Indiana Supreme Court Legal History Series, author Suzanne S. Bellamy examines how Frank Richman of Columbus, Indiana, and Curtis Shake of Vincennes, Indiana, both served with distinction as members of the Indiana Supreme Court. By early 1947 both justices had stepped down from the court to begin new phases in their profession. Shake resumed his law practice in Vincennes, and Richman planned to teach law. World events intervened when both men were called to serve as civilian judges in tribunals convened in Nuremberg to try secondary Nazi war criminals. Shake and Richman sat on the bench in the trials of leading German industrialists for crimes against humanity, applying international law according to American concepts of fairness.

Despite lingering doubts about the legitimacy of American judges having jurisdiction over German nationals, Richman and Shake responded with grace, competence, and high ethical standards, along with a little controversy. The book highlights the role two leading citizens of Indiana played in events that, more than sixty years later, still resonate across the world.

Bellamy is a graduate of the University of Rochester and the Boston University School of Law. She practiced law for twenty-five years as a corporate counsel in Indianapolis. As a freelance historical researcher and writer, she has worked on projects for the IHS, the American Legion Auxiliary, and the Indiana Supreme Court.

Hoosier Justice at Nuremberg costs $6.95 and is available from the IHS's History Market.

Jackson Featured in Fall 2009 Traces

2009-12-01T13:29:00.003-05:00

The fall 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 an article, "A Hoosier Thriller: Gary, Indiana's Michael Jackson," by Julie Young exploring the Indiana boyhood and early career of music legend Michael Jackson, who died on June 25, 2009.

In addition, the issue includes articles on the history of Shapiro's Deli in Indianapolis; the fiftieth anniversary of the film Ben-Hur, based upon the best-selling book by Hoosier author and general Lew Wallace; a look back at how Indianapolis reacted to the great railroad strike of 1877; and a piece on the African American Townsend family of Putnam County, Indiana.

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.

Wissing Wins Dunn Award

2009-11-30T09:21:00.003-05:00

Douglas Wissing, a freelance writer from Bloomington, Indiana, is the winner of the Indiana Historical Society’s annual Jacob Piatt Dunn Jr. Award for the best article to appear in Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History for 2009. Wissing’s article, “‘Cook Good, Serve Generously, Price Modestly’: The Shapiro’s Story,” appeared in the fall 2009 issue.

Named for the noted Indiana historian and author, the $500 award honors the article that in the opinion of the Traces editorial board and staff best serves the magazine’s mission. This mission involves presenting thoughtful, research-based articles on Indiana history in an attractive format to a broad audience of readers.

Dunn (pictured above, left), who helped revitalize the Society in the 1880s, produced such standard works as the two-volume Greater Indianapolis (1910) and his five-volume Indiana and Indianans (1919). In his remarkable career, Dunn also worked on a variety of Indianapolis newspapers, campaigned to establish free public libraries, endeavored to preserve the language of the Miami Indians, and prospected for minerals in Haiti.

Interview with McQueen Biographer

2009-11-23T08:41:00.007-05:00

Wes D. Gehring, professor of Film at Ball State University, is the author of twenty-nine books, many of which examine the lives of Hollywood legends. During his career, Gehring has written about the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, Joe E. Brown, Carole Lombard, W. C. Fields, Red Skelton, and Charlie Chaplin.

Gehring's latest book is a biography of Steve McQueen titled Steve McQueen: The Great Escape recently released by the IHS Press. Here, he talks about the book and McQueen:

You have written about a number of Hollywood legends. What drew you to McQueen?

Growing up, McQueen was one of my favorite actors.

McQueen is seen by many fans as the prototypical screen tough guy. Is that an accurate description of his appeal?

Yes and no. McQueen was more an antiheroic tough guy. He wasn't big like Wayne, or intellectually articulate like his film star favorite Bogart. In Bullitt he's old school tough. But he is just as likely to mix that toughness with poignant vulnerability, as in The Sand Pebbles and Junior Bonner. His stone faced toughness is often a sort of desperate minimalist cover for the universal fears of modern life.

How is what we see on screen of McQueen the same or different from him in real life?

He did not have a great acting range, but he was brilliant at playing the aforementioned antiheroic tough guy--which was McQueen in real life . . . on a good day. Like many artists, the work is where he got it right.In real life that macho minimalism could explode into rage. He was fond of saying that his life was screwed up before he was born. Thus, the foundation for the underdog toughness. The true link between the actor and the person was defining himself through his interaction with objects in the film frame, particularly mechanical things--a favorite off-screen passion. The guy tinkering with engines in The Sand Pebbles or The Reivers was McQueen. But he carried an attention to detail, be it getting on and off a horse, in and out of a race car, handling weapons, fixing breakfast in The Getaway--that gave his work an authenticity that was consistent with the real life, work with his hands, physical man.

Is there anything you found out about McQueen in your research that surprised you or that you did not know before?

I was most amazed by the extreme sadness of his youth. He never got that chip off his shoulder.

What is McQueen’s legacy?

In his best films, there is a sense of the Hemingway axiom, about life destroying you but (if you have some personal code), not defeating you.

What project are you working on now?

I have two forthcoming books: I, Red Skelton: Exit Laughing (a novelized memoir), and Forties Film Comedians: In the Shadow of World War II (a film criticism). I'm currently writing a biography of director Robert Wise.

IHS Press Releases McQueen Biography

2009-11-19T07:58:00.002-05:00

The poster-child victim of a dysfunctional family from Beech Grove, Indiana, Steve McQueen experienced an unsettled early life with a rebellious and alcoholic mother. McQueen channeled his difficult childhood into a masterful career on screen portraying tough, self-sufficient characters in such iconic films as The Magnificent Seven (1960), The Great Escape (1963), The Sand Pebbles (1966), Bullitt (1968), and Papillon (1973).

Nationally known film historian Wes D. Gehring explores how McQueen rose from his days as a troubled youth into one of Hollywood’s top box-office stars of the 1960s and 1970s, and how he attempted to ease the lives of other troubled youth, in a new biography now available from the IHS Press titled Steve McQueen: The Great Escape. Along the way, Gehring delves into McQueen’s early success as a television star on the hit Western Wanted: Dead or Alive, his sometimes rocky relationships with women, his sardonic sense of humor, the actor’s love of fast cars and motorcycles, and McQueen’s often neglected acting in such films as The Reivers (1969) and Junior Bonner (1972), which Gehring labels as “arguably his greatest performance.” McQueen ironically saw the title of one of his best films, The Great Escape, as a veiled reference to what his life might have been like without the movies: “If I hadn’t made it as an actor, I might have wound up a hood.”

McQueen died from cancer on November 7, 1980, at the age of fifty. Reflecting on the Hoosier actor’s career, Gehring notes that “McQueen’s often unorthodox life was always lived on his own terms, but with the underlying insecurity of the lost child he perceived himself to be.”

Gehring is a professor of film at Ball State University and an associated media editor for USA Today Magazine, for which he also writes the column “Reel World.” The award-winning author of twenty-eight books, Gehring has written biographies of such screen legends as Charlie Chaplin, W. C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, Irene Dunne, Carole Lombard, James Dean, and Red Skelton.

Steve McQueen: The Great Escape costs $19.95. The book is available from the IHS's History Market.

IHS Hosts Seventh Annual Holiday Author Fair

2009-10-22T12:09:00.003-04:00

Mingle with your favorite Indiana authors, photographers and illustrators, finish your holiday shopping, and get your books signed at the Indiana Historical Society's seventh annual Holiday Author Fair from noon to 4 p.m. on Saturday, December 5, at the Indiana History Center, 450 West Ohio Street, Indianapolis.

The fair features approximately 75 talented writers of fiction, nonfiction, history, gardening, poetry, and children's books. Among the authors set to attend are such award winners as James H. Madison, Susan Neville, Mary Mackey, Philip Gulley, Lou Harry, James Alexander Thom, Norbert Krapf, Alan Garinger, and Ray E. Boomhower.

There will be speakers throughout the day, holiday music, and refreshments and free gift wrapping.

The schedule of speakers, presented in the Frank and Katrina Basile Theater, are:

12:30 p.m. "My Indiana Adventure" Student Writing Contest Awards Presentation

1 p.m. Lou Harry, author and journalist, "The Lou Harry Write-About-Anything Lecture and Game Show Extravaganza"

1:30 p.m. Jane Fortune, author, "To Florence, Con Amore"

2 p.m. Dick Wolfsie, author and humorist, "Mornings with Barney and Indiana Curiosities"

2:30 p.m. Terry Border, author and artist, "Bent Objects"

3 p.m. Ingrid Cummings, author and journalist, "the Vigorous Mind: How to Cross-train Your Brain and Why it Matters"

IHS, Storytelling Arts Sponsor Youth Writing Contest

2009-10-16T14:57:00.002-04:00

The Indiana Historical Society and Storytelling Arts of Indiana are sponsoring "My Indiana Adventure: A Writing Contest." Children as young as five years old are invited to enter. Participants should write about an adventure they’ve experienced in the state of Indiana. It could be anything-–a special event, holiday celebration or day at the park. Maybe it happened at the Indiana State Fair or at a relative’s house. It could be something that happened at a museum, while watching a sporting event or even at school.

Stories should be no more than 500 words. First, second, and third-place winners will be invited to read their stories on Saturday, December 5, 2009, at the IHS's seventh annual Holiday Author Fair, sponsored by Verizon Wireless, at the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana History Center, 450 West Ohio Street, Indianapolis.

Stories must be postmarked by November 1 and mailed to:

My Indiana Adventure
Indiana Historical Society
Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana History Center
450 West Ohio Street
Indianapolis, IN 46202-3269

Awards to be given include:

5 to 8 Years Old

First, second and third place: A signed copy of Evie Finds Her Family Tree and two tickets to a Storytelling Arts of Indiana event

PLUS

First place: $20 gift certificate to Basile History Market
Second place: $15 gift certificate to Basile History Market
Third place: $10 gift certificate to Basile History Market

9 to 12 Years Old

First, second and third place: A signed copy of By Freedom’s Light and two tickets to a Storytelling Arts of Indiana event

PLUS

First place: $20 gift certificate to Basile History Market
Second place: $15 gift certificate to Basile History Market
Third place: $10 gift certificate to Basile History Market

13 to 18 Years Old

First, second and third place: A signed copy of Going Over All the Hurdles: A Life of Oatess Archey and two tickets to a Storytelling Arts of Indiana event

PLUS

First place: $20 gift certificate to Basile History Market
Second place: $15 gift certificate to Basile History Market
Third place: $10 gift certificate to Basile History Market

IHS Press Author Earl Conn Dies

2009-09-29T09:13:00.003-04:00

IHS Press author Earl L. Conn, 82, passed away Sunday, September 20, 2009 at Ball Memorial Hospital.

Conn, the author of two IHS Press books, My Indiana: 101 Places to See and My Indiana: 101 More Places to See, was born August 12, 1927 in Marion, Indiana, the son of Wayne and Mildred Conn. He graduated from Marion High School in 1945 and received a bachelor of arts from the University of Kentucky in 1950. He earned a master of arts degree from Ball State University in 1957 and a doctor of education degree from Indiana University in 1970.

Conn became a sportswriter for The Chronicle in Marion, Indiana, in 1943 while still in high school. In 1945 he joined the U.S. Navy and was a military staff writer from 1945 to 1946. After his service ended, he worked for United Press wire service in its Louisville bureau from 1950 to 1951. In 1951 his U.S. Air Force Reserve Unit was called to active duty and he served once again as a military staff writer from 1951 to 1952.

After completing this term of duty, Earl returned to Indiana to work at the Leader-Tribune in Marion as wire editor. In 1954 he began a high school teaching career at Somerset High School followed by Richmond High School. He joined the faculty at Ball State University in 1958, teaching journalism and English as well as advising the Orient yearbook. He resigned in 1962 to become full-time editor of Quaker Life magazine, a publication he helped found in 1960. In 1963 Conn returned to Ball State as assistant director of its Public Information Services before rejoining the faculty in 1965. During these years, he was also faculty adviser to the Daily News. He was named chair of the Department of Journalism in 1984, a position he held for twelve years. In 1996 he became the first Dean of the newly created College of Communication, Information, and Media and was inducted into the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame in 1997.

In 1998 Conn retired from Ball State as Dean Emeritus and returned to his writing career. He began an Indiana travel column, "Traveling Indiana," which has appeared in five Indiana newspapers. He has written six books, including Beneficence: Stories About the Ball Families of Muncie; essays for Painting Indiana; and a history of Ball State University's Administration Building. He also co-authored Effective Business Writing: Write Tight and Right. He wrote for a number of periodicals, including the Saturday Evening Post. As a reporter, one of the highlights of his career was attending and reporting on the March on Washington in August 1963 when Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have A Dream" speech. Conn was one of the founders of the Midwest Writers Workshop and continued to play an integral role in it until his death.

Wander Indiana with New IHS Press Book

2009-09-09T10:12:00.003-04:00

As a follow-up to Earl Conn's popular travel book My Indiana: 101 Places to See, published in 2006, the Indiana Historical Society Press is pleased to announce the publication of My Indiana: 101 More Places to See.

The sites in My Indiana: 101 More Places to See are a mixture of highly visible Hoosier travel destinations and many tucked in nooks and corners around the state--museums, state parks, historic sites, monuments, recreation areas, and other attractions--that beckon to tourists. Written in a conversational style, the book offers opinions on each destination from a visitor's perspective.

Handsomely illustrated with approximately 300 color photos taken by the author, the paperback book includes detailed route descriptions, travel information, local contact information, and attraction fees. Each site is presented in a two-page spread, allowing easy reference as the traveler navigates the state's front roads, back roads, and cross roads.

Whether looking for well-known locations or those off the beaten path, the traveler will find this guide a handy tool and an invaluable companion on tours across the Hoosier State.

Conn, dean emeritus, Collection of Communication, Information and Media, Ball State University, is a well-known writer and columnist. He has written a column called "Traveling Indiana" in the Muncie Star Press since 1998.

My Indiana: 101 More Places to See costs $19.95. The book is available from the Indiana Historical Society's History Market.

Summer 2009 Traces Ready

2009-09-02T09:45:00.000-04:00

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.

Interview with IHS Press Children's Author

2009-08-31T07:59:00.003-04:00

As a young girl growing up in in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, a small town near Cleveland, IHS Press author Elizabeth O'Maley, who wrote the new book By Freedom's Light, discovered an interest in both history and writing when she won a fourth grade essay contest sponsored by the local historical society.

A graduate of Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, O'Maley worked after college as a school psychologist in Cincinnati, Louisville, Indianapolis, and Fort Wayne. While her four children were growing up, she taught Sunday school classes at Unity Christ Church and also volunteered as a docent at the Lincoln Museum.

O'Maley took some time recently to answer questions about her new book.

What drew you to write about this subject?

We have relatives in Richmond, Indiana, and always drove by the Levi Coffin house on our way there from our home in Fort Wayne. One day I got a copy of Reminiscences of Levi Coffin from our library. It was the original 1876 edition, and I found it very exciting holding this old book and hearing the voice that spoke from it, while knowing that many of the events described happened right there at that house.

In researching your character, Sarah Caldwell, did you draw upon any real-life people?

Not directly. I did a lot of research on the setting in which I placed Sarah--on the Underground Railroad, Levi Coffin, pioneer life in Indiana, etc. But I created Sarah somewhat apart from the time and place, with basic characteristics and disposition that could just as easily identify a child today. Her personality and background grew in my mind until she became very real to me. Then I dropped her into Newport, Indiana, in 1842 and watched her react to that environment and the people and situations I threw her way.

What did you learn about the Underground Railroad that you did not know before beginning this project?

Well, one surprising fact I encountered was that not one of the runaways that Levi Coffin helped in Newport was ever captured. That's a remarkable record of success considering how ruthlessly they were hunted down. It's also surprising that despite the many threats against him, Levi Coffin was never physically assaulted nor did any of the slave hunters ever gain entry to his home. Maybe that's because he never resorted to violence himself, but instead relied on his quick wits, knowledge of the law, and commanding presence, a self-assured bearing that was probably born of his strong sense of moral authority.

Do you enjoy writing for children and young adults?

Yes. I enjoy trying to communicate my own enthusiasms and viewpoints to children and young adults, and writing is the best medium for me. I'm a terrible speaker!

What are you working on now?

I've been working on a book concerning the collision of the Native American and white cultures in this area from the time of the American Revolution until the Indians were finally removed in the 1840s. The stories of the people and events of that era are full of color and drama. Very exciting stuff, and like Levi Coffin and the Underground Railroad, it happened right here in our own backyard! A bit further afield, I've also been doing some research and thinking about Grace O'Malley, the Irish pirate queen of the sixteenth century.

By Freedom's Light is available in hardback for $15.95 and in paperback for $7.95. The book is available from the Indiana Historical Society's History Market.

IHS Press Title Named Finalist in Best Books Contest

2009-08-06T15:55:00.004-04:00

The IHS Press publication The Ripest Moments: A Southern Indiana Childhood, a memoir by Norbert Krapf, has been named as a finalist in the nonfiction--historical/biographical category of the 2009 Best Books of Indiana Contest sponsored by the Indiana Center for the Book.

The titles of all former, current and future Best Books finalists will be featured in the State Library's Indiana Authors Room indefinitely. In addition, each category winner will be engraved on a plaque placed in the Indiana Authors Room. Also, three copies of each 2009 contest entry have been added to the State Library's collections. One of the copies will circulate; the other two copies are available to all Hoosiers at the State Library and via interlibrary loan at their local public library.

The winners of the 2009 Best Books of Indiana Contest will be announced at an awards ceremony taking place on Saturday, August 29, 2009 at 4:00 p.m. (EDT) at the Indiana State Library in Indianapolis. A reception will follow the event with refreshments and light hors d'oeuvres.

A Day of Poetry

2009-08-05T14:16:00.003-04:00

Norbert Krapf, Indiana Poet Laureate and author of the IHS Press book The Ripest Moments: A Southern Indiana Childhood, will join other Hoosier poets in a special program "Indiana Poets: Words on Wings," from noon to 3:30 p.m. Saturday, August 29, at the Indiana State Library and Historical Building, 315 West Ohio Street, Indianapolis. The program is sponsored by the Indiana Historical Bureau.

Other poets include Joyce Brinkman, who served as Indiana's poet laureate from 2002-2008; Ruthelen Burns; Mitchell L. H. Douglas; Tasha Jones, reading from her just released Poet 24/7; Karen Kovacik; David Schumate; and Elizabeth Weber.

The poets will be available after readings to sign books, being sold at a 20% discount in the Indiana Historical Bureau Book Shop (Room 130).

For more information on the event, contact Matt Allison at (317) 232-2535, or mallison@history.IN.gov.

IHS Press Releases New Children's Book

2009-08-03T08:03:00.003-04:00

In By Freedom's Light, a historical novel for children and young adults, child psychologist Elizabeth O'Maley gives readers a glimpse of frontier life. From the harshness of a crude farm wrested from a forested wilderness, readers will hear authentic voices of a revival preacher, a country doctor, a famous orator, Quakers, runaway slaves, slave traders, and well-known abolitionists. Here they will experience both the stark realities of a slave society as well as the redeeming acts of a brave few who helped enslaved black people escape to freedom.

To thirteen-year-old Sarah Caldwell, everything in Indiana is dark—the bug-filled cabin, the woods engulfing the farm, and especially the future. She is far from her beloved sister, Rachel, who stayed in North Carolina when their family moved. Their widowed father has married Eliza, a young Quaker schoolteacher, and Sarah has just discovered that Eliza is an abolitionist! Sarah believes she must tell her father about the secret, unlawful activities Eliza’s sewing circle performs at Levi and Catherine Coffin’s home.

Yet when Sarah learns her sister will be visiting Indiana with her husband and baby, happiness and anticipation overcome her concern about Eliza. Rachel’s family soon arrives, bringing Polly, a slave girl about Sarah’s age. Thrown together to do farm chores and look after Rachel’s baby, the two girls, white and black, free and enslaved, slowly develop a friendship. Between Polly’s company and that of her extended family, Sarah’s world brightens.

Meanwhile, Sarah begins to question her beliefs about slavery. When bounty hunters nearly kidnap Polly, Sarah worries for her safety. Tensions mount within the cramped household as it appears that her brother-in-law may trade Polly’s future for his family’s prosperity.

By Freedom's Light is available in hardback for $15.95 and in paperback for $7.95. The book is available from the Indiana Historical Society's History Market.

Archey Biography Receives High Marks

2009-07-21T09:29:00.003-04:00

John A. Beineke's book Going over all the Hurdles: A Life of Oatess Archey, has been named an "Outstanding Title" in the 2009 edition of The University Press Books for Public and Secondary School Libraries, an annual collection development tool published for two divisions of the American Library Association: the American Association of School Librarians and the Public Library Association.

Sabrina Carnesi of the AASL wrote about the book: "The biography of a college track star who, with a university degree, had to take a custodial job with his hometown school system, due to racism, before later rising to become a beloved teacher, coach, sheriff, and FBI agent. The word 'hurdles' is both literal and symbolic. It represents the hurdles Archey had to master in his college track career and the hurdles he had to overcome in life."

Beineke was born in Indianapolis and grew up in Marion, Indiana. His undergraduate degree in social studies was from Marion College, now Indiana Wesleyan University, and his masters and doctoral degrees were from Ball State University in education and history.

Beineke has been a public school teacher, a college professor and administrator, and a program director in leadership and education at the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. He is currently dean of the College of Education and a professor of educational leadership and curriculum and also professor of history at Arkansas State University.

Blog Reviews Vietnam Book

2009-07-13T11:43:00.003-04:00

Author Cym Lowell has written a review of the IHS Press book "To Bear Any Burden": A Hoosier Green Beret's Letters from Vietnam on his blog.

From 1968 to 1969, Daniel H. FitzGibbon, a Columbus, Indiana, native, graduate of West Point, and today an Indianapolis attorney, served as a captain with the Fifth Special Forces in South Vietnam. During his time in country, FitzGibbon wrote letters to his parents back home in Columbus about his experiences running two Special Forces A team camps, one located in the north central portion of South Vietnam, and the other near the country's border with Cambodia.

FitzGibbon's letters were saved by his mother and were given back to the veteran, who typed and copied them for his children so they would know "what Daddy did in the war."

IHS Press Authors Nominated for Honor

2009-07-02T08:34:00.002-04:00

Two Indiana Historical Society Press authors, James H. Madison and Susan Neville, have been nominated as finalists in the inaugural Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Award.

This new award seeks to recognize the contributions of Indiana authors to the literary landscape in Indiana and across the nation by the Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library Foundation, and is funded by the generosity of The Glick Fund, a fund of Central Indiana Community Foundation.

Nominations were submitted from across the state in early spring. Any published writer who was born in Indiana or has lived in Indiana for at least five years was eligible. A seven-member, statewide Award Panel selected the national winner and finalists in three categories from the pool of publicly nominated authors:

• National Author - $10,000 prize: a writer with Indiana ties, but whose work is known and read throughout the country. National authors were evaluated on their entire body of work. Winner: James Alexander Thom; Finalists: Scott Russell Sanders and Margaret McMullan

• Regional Author - $7,500 prize: A writer who is well-known and respected throughout the state of Indiana. Regional authors were evaluated on their entire body of work.Finalists: Jared Carter, Madison, and Neville

• Emerging Author - $5,000 prize: A writer with only one published book. Emerging authors were evaluated on their single published work. Finalists: Kathleen Hughes, Christine Montross, and Greg Schwipps.

Award finalists in all three categories will be honored on September 26, 2009 at the Central Library in downtown Indianapolis. The day’s events will include free public programming such as author lectures, “how to get published” workshops for aspiring writers, and more. An award dinner/fund raiser benefiting the Library Foundation will follow that evening where the winner of the Regional Author and Emerging Author categories will each be named. Thom will serve as the dinner’s keynote speaker. Ticket information for the award dinner is available by contacting the Library Foundation at (317) 275-4700 or by visiting www.indianaauthorsaward.org.

Madison is the author of the IHS Press books Eli Lilly: A Life, 1885-1977, Indiana through Tradition and Change: A history of the Hoosier State and its People, 1920-1945, and The Indiana Way: A State History (co-published with Indiana University Press). Neville wrote the IHS Press publication Twilight in Arcadia: Tobacco Farming in Indiana. Madison, Neville, and Carter have also written for the IHS Press's popular history magazine Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History.

Bass Photo Book Receives Honor

2009-04-23T11:10:00.003-04:00

The Indiana Historical Society Press book Indianapolis: The Bass Photo Company Collection, written by Susan Sutton, has been named as one of three finalists in the 2009 Benjamin Franklin Awards competition in the Regional category. The awards are sponsored by the Independent Book Publishers Association.

The 2009 Benjamin Franklin Award winner will be chosen from one of the three finalists and will receive the Benjamin Franklin Award during a ceremony on Thursday evening, May 28, 2009 at the Roosevelt Hotel, New York located at 45th and Madison in New York City.

Named in honor of America's most cherished publisher/printer, the Benjamin Franklin Awards recognizes excellence in independent publishing. Publications, grouped by genre are judged on editorial and design merit by top practitioners in each field.

Indianapolis: The Bass Photo Company Collection contains 183 photos selected from the vast Bass Photo Company Collection. The assorted images depict Indianapolis in good times and bad and provide a visual link to the city's past. Many of the images are so vivid that one can almost hear the clang of a trolley, the click of horse hooves, the roar of engines, and the din in the streets filled with bustling pedestrians. Included in the volume are nostalgic images of the Indianapolis 500 Mile Race, leisure activities, individual portraits, street scenes, Monument Circle, a parade of returning World War I soldiers, the Indianapolis Home Show, transportation, and architecture

IHS Press Titles Nominated for Awards

2009-03-12T08:34:00.002-04:00

Three books published by the Indiana Historical Society Press are finalists in ForeWord Magazine's 2008 Book of the Year Awards. More than 1,400 books were entered in 61 categories. These were narrowed to 668 finalists from 376 publishers. These books represent some of the best work coming from today's independent press community.

The IHS Press books in the competition and their categories are:

* Red Skelton: The Mask behind the Mask by Wes D. Gehring, Biography

* Alone: The Journey of the Boy Sims by Alan K. Garinger, Juvenile nonfiction

* Going over all the Hurdles: A Life of Oatess Archey by John A. Beineke, young adult nonfiction

The winners will be determined by a panel of librarians and booksellers, selected from the magazine's readership. Gold, Silver, and Bronze winners, as well as Editor's Choice Prizes for Fiction and Nonfiction will be announced at a special program at BookExpo America at the Javits Center in New York City on May 29. The winners of the two Editor's Choice Prizes will be awarded $1,500 each. The ceremony is open to all BEA attendees.

Small Press Month Workshop

2009-01-09T09:05:00.003-05:00

March is Small Press Month and you are invited to learn more about publishing opportunities in Indiana by participating in a "How to Get Published" workshop from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Saturday, March 7, 2009, at the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana History Center, 450 W. Ohio Street, Indianapolis.

Three Hoosier small presses--the Indiana Historical Society Press, Indiana University Press, and Hawthorne Publishing--will be involved in the program. Ray Boomhower and Teresa Baer from the IHS Press, Nancy Baxter from Hawthorne Publishing, and Janet Rabinowitch from IU Press will give their insight on small press trends. You will learn about what these publishers focus on and what they and other small presses have to offer writers.

Participants will also explore how the process works and what they need to consider when approaching a press with a book idea or manuscript. Participants will receive complimentary magazine and book copies and will be entered to win additional prizes.

The cost for attending the workshop is $15; $12 for IHS members. Reservations are required as seating is limited. To make a reservation, call the Society at (317) 232-1882.

Small Press Month is a nationwide celebration highlighting the valuable work produced by independent publishers. Held annually in March, Small Press Month raises awareness about the need for broader venues of literary expression. From March 1 to 31, independent, literary events will take place from coast-to-coast, showcasing some of the most diverse, exciting, and significant voices being published today.

As best-selling author Sherman Alexie—the face of this year's Small Press Month Poster—states: "The small presses represent what is most brave, crazy and beautiful about our country and our literature. So let us all sing honor songs for the independent publishers."

Small Press Month, now in its thirteenth year, is a grass-roots effort co-sponsored by: the New York Center for Independent Publishing, the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, and the Independent Book Publishers Association.

Article on Holiday Author Fair

2008-12-15T09:34:00.004-05:00

John A. Beineke, author of the IHS Press youth biography Going over all the Hurdles: A Life of Oatess Archey, was one of the approximately 90 Hoosier writers who participated in the sixth annual Indiana Historical Society Holiday Author Fair, which was held on Saturday, December 6, at the Indiana History Center in Indianapolis.

Following his time at the Author Fair, Beineke wrote an article on the event that was published in the Indianapolis Star on Friday, December 12. Here is his article:

There were other things to do last Saturday afternoon. Basketball games to watch, holiday shopping at the malls, or even just staying home out of the cold. And there was also that so-called "light" snow that made roads tricky, even hazardous.

But hundreds of readers found dozens of writers at the Indiana Historical Society's sixth annual Holiday Author Fair. The Indiana History Center on West Ohio Street hosted 90 Indiana authors who sat behind tables with their works piled in neat stacks in front of them. Children and adults roamed from table to table to peruse the books and chat with the authors.

Topics and themes of the books included art, fiction, mystery, humor, sports and travel. Biography was a popular subject. Ball State University professor of film Wes Gehring had his new biography of Red Skelton available in a bright yellow dust jacket, and the fourth edition of Nelson Price's "Indiana Legends," with biographical sketches from Lombard to Letterman and Riley to Robertson, demonstrated that there is no shortage of famous Hoosiers.

Talented Indiana Historical Society Press editor Ray Boomhower was there with his new book on the 1968 Indiana primary campaign of Robert Kennedy. Sitting behind another table, dressed in a 60-year-old Army captain's uniform, was a youthful Rick Barry, author of "Gunner's Run" a World War II thriller.

Sitting next to me was one of the more popular authors that afternoon, 89-year-old Francis DeBra Brown. "An Army in Skirts" is her splendid memoir of life in the Women's Army Corps in World War II. This book makes a good companion to James Madison's "Slinging Doughnuts for the Boys," the story of Mishawaka Red Cross volunteer Elizabeth Richardson's service in wartime England and France.

We are told that book companies are having a hard time of it and that kids and adults just don't read that much anymore. Video games, DVDs, the Internet, and HD television keep most people occupied. That is no doubt happening.

But it also needs to be reported that for a good number of Hoosiers the reading of books is still alive and well. Many individuals, young and old, left the Indiana History Center on Saturday afternoon with a bag full of books by Hoosier authors.

Dunn Award Winner Announced

2008-11-26T07:52:00.004-05:00

Ann Allen is the winner of the Indiana Historical Society’s annual Jacob Piatt Dunn Jr. Award for the best article to appear in Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History for 2008. Allen, pictured at right receiving her award from James H. Madison, IHS trustee, won for her article, “Reece Oliver: Indiana’s Shadow Hero,” which appeared in the summer 2008 issue of Traces.

Named for the noted Indiana historian and author, the $500 award honors the article that in the opinion of the Traces editorial board and staff best serves the magazine’s mission. This mission involves presenting thoughtful, research-based articles on Indiana history in an attractive format to a broad audience of readers.

Former editor of the Akron/Mentone News, Allen has written about Akron, Indiana, and its residents for nearly fifty years, including her time as a correspondent for the Rochester Sentinel. She has written four books set in Akron. Allen is a past president of the Woman’s Press Club of Indiana.

Dunn, who helped revitalize the Society in the 1880s, produced such standard works as the two-volume Greater Indianapolis (1910) and his five-volume Indiana and Indianans (1919). In his remarkable career, Dunn also worked on a variety of Indianapolis newspapers, campaigned to establish free public libraries, endeavored to preserve the language of the Miami Indians, and prospected for minerals in Haiti.

Annual Holiday Author Fair December 6

2008-11-13T14:26:00.006-05:00

Holiday shopping for an array of family, loved ones, and new friends can be a daunting task, but the Indiana Historical Society offers a personalized, one-stop shopping opportunity for book lovers and gift givers alike this holiday season at the sixth annual Holiday Author Fair, taking place from noon to 4 p.m. on Saturday, December 6, at the Indiana History Center, located at 450 W. Ohio St. in downtown Indianapolis.

The Holiday Author Fair is the largest book signing gathering for Indiana-related material, featuring more than 90 Hoosier authors. Books include works of fiction, non-fiction, cookbooks, photography, history, children’s books and more. Visitors can converse with authors, have books signed, and enjoy refreshments and live entertainment.

New this year will be a special area for children (complete with a craft table and the children’s book authors) on the Eli Lilly Hall mezzanine and readings/presentations in the Frank and Katrina Basile Theater. Six author presentations will also take place in the Frank and Katrina Basile Theater. Featured authors include Harold Holzer, Philip Gulley, James Alexander Thom, Norbert Krapf, James H. Madison, and Lou Harry.

IHS Press authors participating in the event include M. Teresa Baer and Geneil Breeze, William Bartelt, John Beineke, Ray E. Boomhower, Frances DeBra Brown, Fred Cavinder, Earl Conn, Daniel H. FitzGibbon, Alan Garinger, Wes D. Gehring, Ralph D. Gray, Glory-June Greiff, Mary Blair Immel, Max Knight, Norbert Krapf, Cinnamon Caitlin-Legutko, Jim McGarrah, Geoff Paddock, Ashley Ransburg, Susan Sutton, and Julie Young

Some of the authors will give talks during the day. The schedule of talks are as follows:

* 12:30 p.m. Harold Holzer, "Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter, 1860-1861."

* 1 p.m. Bill Harley, "Toads, Pirates, and Other Creatures!"

* 1:30 p.m. Norbert Krapf, Selections from Bloodroot: Indiana Poems and The Ripest Moments: A Southern Indiana Childhood.

* 2 p.m. Todd Tucker, "Notre Dame vs. the Klan vs. IUPUI: Anatomy of a Free Speech Controversy."

* 2:30 p.m. Tasha Jones, Selections from Hello Beautiful: A Memoir.

* 3 p.m. Susan Sutton, "The Bass Photo Company Collections: A Family Album for the City."

There is no admission charge for this event, and free parking is available in the Indiana History Center’s surface lot (corner of New York and West Streets). The Basile History Market will also offer complimentary gift wrapping on books and other purchases, such as music, Indiana-made household products, jewelry, original art, handmade textiles, children’s merchandise, reproductions from the IHS collection, and more.

The Holiday Author Fair is sponsored by Verizon and Indy Reads. For more details on these and other Indiana Historical Society offerings, call the IHS at (317) 232-1882 or toll-free at (800) 447-1830.

Interview with Skelton Biographer

2008-11-11T07:45:00.005-05:00

Wes D. Gehring, professor of Film at Ball State University, is the author of twenty-eight books, many of which examine the lives of Hollywood legends. During his career, Gehring has written about the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, Joe E. Brown, Carole Lombard, W. C. Fields, and Charlie Chaplin.

Gehring's latest book is a biography of Hoosier comedian Red Skelton, Red Skelton: The Mask behind the Mask, recently released by the IHS Press. Here, he talks about the book and Skelton:

You’ve written about a number of famous film comedians, why did you select Red Skelton?

I am a big fan. And when Ball State University gave him an honorary doctorate, I was selected to give the keynote address. He liked it and we got together when he would play Ball State. Though I had written an earlier biography of Red, the wealth of new onformation in recently released private papers attracted me yet again to the comedian.

Was there something about Skelton that surprised you when you were researching your subject?

I was shocked by what I discovered about the true dysfunctional nature of his childhood family--and the elaborate fantasy background he created as a cover.

What was it about Skelton’s comedy that made him such a hit with fans?

Though his comic gift was huge, especially his poignant mime, his enthusiasm to please could sell even the most corny of gags. He was an oh-so-talented favorite uncle.

Does Skelton get the respect he deserves as a comedian?

Sadly, he does not. But part of it was because he always refused to make his television show available for syndication. His TV comedy legacy is as important as Lucille Ball and Jackie Gleason but while their reruns have been on non-stop since the 1950s, the under 40 crowd do not know Red.

What are you working on now?

I have a comic novel coming out in late November (The James Dean Murder Mystery), and a novelized Skelton memior set to appear in early 2009. I am currently researching a biography of Robert Wise, and writing a book about film comedians of the 1940s.

Norbert Krapf on You Tube

2008-11-10T10:12:00.005-05:00

Indiana Poet Laureate and IHS Press author Norbert Krapf is featured in two interviews now available on You Tube. The interviews are:

* The WTIU program "Weekly Special."

* The Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library's program "Between the Lines."

Krapf, the author of the memoir The Ripest Moments: A Southern Indiana Childhood, released in 2008 by the IHS Press, received his bachelor’s degree from Saint Joseph’s College. He took his master’s degree and doctorate in English from the University of Notre Dame and taught English at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University for thirty-four years.

His seven poetry collections, in which his Indiana German heritage is central, include Somewhere in Southern Indiana, The Country I Come From, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and the retrospective collection Bloodroot: Indiana Poems, recently released by Indiana University Press.

IHS Press Titles Win Awards

2008-11-07T13:13:00.003-05:00

The IHS Press won two honors at the 57th annual Chicago Book Clinic’s Book and Media Show Thursday, November 7, in Chicago.

The Press won the show's top honor--the Crystal Book Award of Excellence--in the General Trade Nonfiction with one-color and two-color internals for its publication Meredith Nicholson: A Writing Life. Also, the Press won an Honorable Mention in the Special Trade Pictorial category for Indianapolis: The Bass Photo Company Collection.

The Book and Media Show received more than 150 entries from publishers across the country. Founded in 1936, the Chicago Book Clinic encourages excellence in publishing by providing a platform for educational, social, and professional interaction of its members—professionals in book and media publishing, printing, editorial, design, and all business aspects of the publishing industry.

Red Skelton Biography Available

2008-10-29T10:27:00.005-04:00

For twenty years, Hoosier comic Red Skelton entertained millions of viewers who gathered around their television sets to delight in the antics of such notable characters as Freddie the Freeloader, Clem Kaddiddlehopper, Cauliflower McPugg, and Sheriff Deadeye. Noted film historian Wes D. Gehring examines the man behind the characters--someone who never let the facts get in the way of a good story--in the new IHS Press biography Red Skelton: The Mask behind the Mask.

Gehring delves into Skelton's hardscrabble life with a shockingly dysfunctional family in the southern Indiana community of Vincennes, his days on the road on the vaudeville circuit, the comedian's early success on radio, his up-and-down movie career with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and his sometimes tragic personal life.

Gehring is a professor of film at Ball State University. The award-winning author of twenty-eight books, Gehring has written biographies of such screen legends as Charlie Chaplin, W.C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, Irene Dunne, Carole Lombard, and James Dean.

Red Skelton: The Mask behind the Mask costs $19.95 in hardback and is available from the Society's Basile History Market. To order, call (800) 447-1830 or order online at the History Market.

New Children's Book Released by IHS Press

2008-09-30T09:36:00.004-04:00

Orphaned at age thirteen, pioneer Joshua Sims joins a survey crew helping to build the Michigan Road in order to pay for his family's northern Indiana homestead. When the surveyors' ink supply is accidentally lost in the Tippecanoe River, Sims is ordered to travel alone to Detroit, Michigan, to obtain more.

In Alone: The Journey of the Boy Sims, a historical novel for children and young adults, author Alan K. Garinger imaginatively retells the story of the boy known in the survey crew's official journal only as "the boy Sims."

Traveling by foot, boat, and horseback, Sims meets runaway slaves, Native Americans, canal builders, and other frontier figures as he journeys to Fort Wayne, across Lake Erie, and along the Sauk Trail in Michigan. Sims's encounters force him to re-evaluate his beliefs about the people in the rapidly changing land he now calls home.

A past recipient of the Indiana Outstanding Young Educator and Indiana Outstanding Community Educator awards, Garinger is also the author of the Jeremiah Stokely series. His novel Torch in the Darkness: The Tale of a Boy Artist in the Renaissance, published in 2000 by Guild Press of Indiana, was a Young Hoosier Reader Award nominee.

Alone: The Journey of the Boy Sims costs $15.95 for hardback and $7.95 for paperback and is available from the Society's Basile History Market. To order, call (800) 447-1830 or order online at the History Market.

Book Highlights Indiana Political Heroes

2008-08-20T10:20:00.002-04:00

Politics has always played an important role in Indiana, and the state itself at one time furnished candidates for national office for an assortment of American political parties. From 1840, when Whig William Henry Harrison captured the White House with his “Tippecanoe and Tyler too” campaign, to 1940, when Wendell Willkie won the Republican presidential nomination and challenged incumbent President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s try for a third term in office, approximately 60 percent of the elections had Hoosiers on a party’s national ticket.

Seeking political office became so ingrained into the state’s character that noted humorist and journalist George Ade once joked—playing off General William Tecumseh Sherman’s famous quote—that the first words of every Hoosier child upon birth were: “If nominated I will run, if elected I will serve.”

Geoff Paddock’s Indiana Political Heroes takes a contemporary look at those who serve in public office as it includes essays on eight Hoosier politicians that have made a difference in Indiana and in the nation’s capital as well. Paddock profiles such distinguished Democratic and Republican lawmakers as Birch Bayh, John Brademas, Richard Hatcher, Vance Hartke, William Hudnut, Richard Ristine, J. Edward Roush, and William Ruckelshaus. In these essays readers will learn about national educational reform, opposition to the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, the U.S. Supreme Court, and the growth of Indianapolis into a nationally respected community.

Paddock serves as the executive director of the Headwaters Flood Control and Park Project in Fort Wayne and is past president of the Fort Wayne Community Schools board of trustees. He is a frequent contributor to the Indiana Historical Society popular history magazine Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History and is the author of Headwaters Park: Fort Wayne’s Lasting Legacy (Arcadia Publishing, 2002).

Indiana Political Heroes costs $12.95 and is available from the Society's Basile History Market. To order, call (800) 447-1830 or order online at the History Market.

IHS Press Author Interview

2008-07-28T09:13:00.002-04:00

Norbert Krapf, author of the IHS Press memoir The Ripest Moments: A Southern Indiana Childhood, was interviewed by the Indianapolis Star recently about his work and his appointment as Indiana's new poet laureate.

IHS Press Youth Biographies Nominated for Indiana Best Books Competition

2008-07-21T14:22:00.008-04:00

Two publications in the IHS Press's Youth Biography Series--A Belief in Providence: A Life of Saint Theodora Guérin by Julie Young and Fighting for Equality: A Life of May Wright Sewall by Ray E. Boomhower--are finalists in the Indiana Center for the Book's 2008 Best Books of Indiana competition.

Joining the IHS Press books as a finalist in the Children's/Young Adult category is When I Crossed No-Bob, written by Margaret McMullan and published by Houghton Mifflin.

This competition began in 2005 to highlight Indiana's ongoing literary successes. Books by Indiana authors or about Indiana, published between January 1 and December 31 of the previous year, are eligible. Categories include fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and children/young adult. A complete list of the finalists is available on the Center's web site.

The winners of the competition will be announced in a ceremony at 1 p.m. on Saturday, August 16, at the Indiana State Library in Indianapolis.

Interview with Lincoln Author

2008-07-21T12:23:00.010-04:00

William E. "Bill" Bartelt is a retired educator who, for more than fifteen summers, worked as a ranger and historian at the Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial. Here he answers questions about his new book "There I grew up": Remembering Abraham Lincoln's Indiana Youth.

What was the main reason you decided to do this book on Abraham Lincoln’s Indiana years?

It is part of the Lincoln story that is not well known. When I worked as a ranger at Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial I learned few visitors understood that Lincoln spent almost a quarter of his life in Indiana. Even those who are aware of Lincoln’s time in the state have no real understanding of the land and the people of his Spencer County neighborhood.

I decided I would let Lincoln, his family, and his neighbors tell the story. I saw my purpose as providing the context for what Lincoln and others remembered about his life from age 7 to 21.

How important was Lincoln’s time in Indiana in shaping his character for his life to come?

I think we can all agree that much of our character is developed early in our lives and the period from age 7 to 21 is extremely important. The same can be said for Lincoln.

It is difficult to say with certainty exactly how those Indiana years formed his character, but it is obvious that experiences in Indiana helped develop traits we associate with the mature man. These traits include his ability to think for himself and trust his opinions, his ambition, his sensitivity and compassion, the ability to craft words to entertain and influence others, his curiosity, and his desire to learn from books and the people he met. Certainly the deaths of his mother and sister taught him at an early age that bad things happen and those things cannot be changed.

Did you discover anything new about Lincoln in doing your research?

I learned much more about the people living in his neighborhood. Using census records, land records, and family histories I was able to develop a greater understanding of the people he associated with on a daily basis. Many biographers fail to tell the story of the Little Pigeon Creek Community and portray the Lincoln family living in the woods far from other people. That was not the case. Lincoln and his family had neighbors to share the work, joys, hardships, and daily events of the area.

The most exciting discovery for me occurred while examining neighborhood land records in the National Archives. I unfolded a bundle of documents that probably had not been viewed for 150 years or more. There I found the record documenting that Thomas Lincoln had a claim on a quarter section of land adjoining his farm. He disposed of the claim after two years and the importance may be insignificant, but to discover something no one else knew was exciting. Adding to the thrill was seeing Thomas Lincoln’s signature and the signature of the local Justice of the Peace—one of Lincoln’s Indiana teachers.

You worked many years at the Lincoln Boyhood Home. What is your favorite story from your time there?

I have many fond memories of my summers at Lincoln Boyhood. I think I learned more about what history really is during that time than from any college class. There is a real difference between examining the big picture in a class and interpreting the story at a specific historic site.

One event that I remember with amusement occurred one afternoon as I worked the information desk. A small boy walked up to me and hesitantly offered an unexpected statement, “I have a friend who doesn’t believe in Abraham Lincoln.” I assured the boy that Lincoln had indeed been a real person and lived at this site when he was the boy’s age. That encounter has forced me to present Abraham Lincoln as a real human and not as some sort of mythical figure.

What are some of the things Indiana is doing to celebrate the Lincoln bicentennial?

The mission of the Indiana Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission is to educate residents of Indiana and the nation about Indiana's important role in the life of Abraham Lincoln. This is being accomplished by conducting conferences, erecting historical markers, constructing a Lincoln Bicentennial Plaza in Lincoln State Park, working with local communities to observe the celebration, erecting “Welcome to Indiana, Lincoln’s Boyhood home” signs on highways, and making a Lincoln’s Boyhood Home license plate available. Much of the work of the commission is focusing on education and assisting the schools of Indiana to observe the event in a meaningful manner.

I encourage everyone to go to the Web site IndianasLincoln.org for a more complete answer to this question.

Lincoln's Legacy Explored in New IHS Press Book

2008-07-15T07:57:00.003-04:00

In 1859 Abraham Lincoln covered his Indiana years in one paragraph and two sentences of a written autobiographical statement that included the following: “We reached our new home about the time the State came into the union. It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals in the woods. There I grew up.”

William E. Bartelt's new book “There I Grew Up”: Remembering Abraham Lincoln’s Indiana Youth uses annotation and primary source material to tell the history of Lincoln’s Indiana years by those who were there. Bartelt begins with Lincoln’s own words written in two short autobiographical sketches in 1859 and 1860, and in the poetry Lincoln wrote following a campaign trip to Indiana in 1844. In 1865 Lincoln’s law partner, William H. Herndon, began interviewing Lincoln’s family and those who knew Lincoln in Indiana. Bartelt examines Herndon’s interviews with Lincoln’s stepmother Sally Bush Johnston Lincoln, cousin Dennis Hanks, stepsister Matilda Johnston Moore, neighbors Nathaniel Grigsby, Elizabeth Crawford, and David Turnham, and others who knew Lincoln in Indiana. Also included in the volume are excerpts from Lincoln biographies by William Herndon, Ida Tarbell, Albert Beveridge, and Louis Warren, in which Bartelt analyzes to what extent these authors researched Lincoln’s Indiana period.

The book also reveals, through the words of those who knew him, Abraham Lincoln’s humor, compassion, oratorical skills, and thirst for knowledge, and it provides an overview of Lincoln’s Indiana experiences, his family, the community where the Lincolns settled, and southern Indiana during the years 1816 to 1830.

Bartelt is a retired educator who, for more than fifteen summers, was employed as a ranger and historian at the Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial. He is a member of the Federal Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission's Advisory and Education Committees and serves as vice chair of the Indiana Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission.

“There I Grew Up”: Remembering Abraham Lincoln’s Indiana Youthcosts $27.95 and is available from the Society's Basile History Market. To order, call (800) 447-1830 or order online at the History Market.

IHS Press Examines an Army in Skirts

2008-06-24T13:12:00.007-04:00

More than 150,000 women served in the Women's Army Corps (WAC) in World War II. Although the majority of WACs were assigned to duties in the United States, several thousand received overseas assignments.

One of these women was Frances DeBra Brown from Danville, Indiana, who worked as a draftsman at American headquarters in London and Paris. An Army in Skirts: The World War II Letters of Frances DeBra, recently released by the IHS Press, contains the letters that Frances wrote to her family and letters from family and friends to Frances. The letters vividly detail her World War II service, beginning with basic training at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia.

After an assignment at an army air field in Marianna, Florida, where DeBra worked on the post newsletter, she was shipped overseas on the RMS Queen Mary. While in London she worked through buzz bomb and V-2 rocket attacks, slept in shelters fully clothed, and made the acquaintance of a young English woman and her family. Arriving in Paris two weeks after the city’s liberation, Frances witnessed the city’s devastation and the effects of war on the populace. During her stay in Paris she attended classes at the École des Beaux-Arts and received a marriage proposal.

Frances DeBra Brown, a teacher, artist, and art conservator, lives in Yazoo City, Mississippi. A prize-winning miniature artist, her work was accepted by the Royal Society of Miniature Painters, Sculptors, and Gravers for its art show at The Mall Galleries, The Mall, London, England. She is a member of the American Institute for Conservation and the International Institute for Conservation and has cleaned and repaired hundreds of paintings and has done conservation work for the Mississippi State Capitol, the Hall of Governors, and the Old Capitol of Mississippi Museum.

An Army in Skirts costs $27.95 and is available from the Society's Basile History Market. To order, call (800) 447-1830 or order online at the History Market.

Press Author Named Indiana Poet Laureate

2008-06-18T10:19:00.005-04:00

Norbert Krapf, author of the IHS Press book The Ripest Moments: A Southern Indiana Childhood, has been named Indiana Poet Laureate by the Indiana Arts Commission. Krapf discusses his appointment on his web site.

According to the IAC, former State Treasurer Joyce Brinkman was named Indiana's first official Poet Laureate by House Resolution in 2002. After researching other states Poet Laureate selection process and duties, the Indiana Arts Commission, Ms. Brinkman, and Senator Theresa Lubbers developed Senate Bill 433, which formalized the Poet Laureate for Indiana.

IAC is charged with selecting the Poet Laureate, providing an annual stipend and per diem, and working with the State Department of Education in scheduling appearances.

The Indiana Poet Laureate official duties include:

* Making presentations at schools, libraries, and other educational facilities
* Promoting poetry and writing to schools and communities across the state
* Providing advice on how to promote poetry and writing to the IAC and other organizations

Krapf's poetry collections include Somewhere in Southern Indiana, The Country I Come From, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, Looking for God's Country, Invisible Presence: A Walk through Indiana in Photographs and Poems, and Bloodroot: New and Selected Indiana Poems.

IHS Press Book Wins Award

2008-06-02T07:50:00.004-04:00

The IHS Press publication The Scenic Route: Stories from the Heartland received a gold award in the essays category of ForeWord Magazine's tenth annual Book of the Year Awards. Two hundred and twelve winners in sixty categories were honored in a ceremony at BookExpo America in Los Angeles. These books, representing the best work from independent publishers in 2007, were selected by a panel of librarian and bookseller judges.

The Scenice Route celebrates the twentieth anniversary of Storytelling Arts of Indiana, which promotes the art and use of storytelling in everyday life through its annual festival, concerts, workshops, programs, and other events.

Storytelling is about gathering with freinds, family, and even those we have just met to share with one another stories of our childhood, our culture, and our heritage. In this age of over-scheduled lives, Internet and television addictions, and outside pressures, stories remind us of our roots and traditions.

Storytelling Arts of Indiana has spent twenty years creating places for individuals to come together and experience storytelling in the hope of encouraging that sharing and listening relationship in our everyday lives. The Scenice Rout offers the reader a dozen stories to enjoy and to help us remember.

The books costs $8.95 and is available from the Society's Basile History Market. To order, call (800) 447-1830 or order online at the History Market.

Interview with Archey Biographer

2008-05-29T07:58:00.002-04:00

John Beineke is dean of the College of Education and a professor of educational leadership and curriculum and also professor of history at Arkansas State University. Here he answers questions about his new book Going over All the Hurdles: A Life of Oatess Archey.

What prompted you to write a biography of Oatess Archey?

I first thought it a very good story about the courage and tenacity of an individual. I also believed it would be an excellent vehicle for a young adult book and a way to write about how our national history played itself out in the life of an individual from Indiana. Finally, Mr. Archey was my teacher, coach, and role model. In a way this book was a very personal experience for me.

Is there anything that surprised you in doing your research for the book?

An author always hopes that the pieces will come together to make the story complete. This occurred several times with my research and writing of this book. Episodes such as the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Educationcase were mirrored in Marion, Indiana, with the swimming pool integration issue in the same year or the experiences in the 1950's of Oscar Robertson in Indianapolis and Oatess Archey in Marion. Also, how the 1930 lynching that involved the Grant County Sheriff came full circle when Mr. Archey became the sheriff himself sixty-five years later.

What lessons, if any, would you like for readers of the book to take away with them?

From the title Going over All the Hurdles I would want readers to realize that while we all have "hurdles" in our lives, some of these hurdles can be overcome by facing them as Oatess Archey did. We all realize that there are some barriers that cannot be overcome. And yet there are those, like Mr. Archey, who have been confronted with challenges, but succeeded. I would want readers to find hope in this book.

What ties do you still have with Marion, Indiana?

I keep in contact with Bill Munn, Marion High School history teacher and recently appointed Grant County Historian. While at the Kellogg Foundation I was able to fund a Community History Project under Bill's direction which continues on a decade later in Marion. I still have friends in the city and this project on Mr. Archey took me back to Marion for research and interviews.

Is there another project you are currently working on?

I am currently working on two manuscripts. One is on the educational cartoons of the late Washington Post cartoonist and Pulitzer Prize
winner Herbert Block (Herblock). I am able to combine my love of
history with my work in teacher education. The other project I am working on is a young adult biography of the World War I Canadian poet John MacRae who wrote "In Flanders Fields." MacRae is a distant relative on my mother's side of the family.

IHS Press Releases New Youth Biography

2008-05-08T08:48:00.002-04:00

Located sixty-five miles northeast of the state capital of Indianapolis, Marion, Indiana, has seen a number of notable people pass through the community, including such Indiana legends as Cole Porter and James Dean. It has also, however, been home to racial strife, including the infamous lynching of two African American men in
1930. Marion was also the hometown of a young black man who would do much to help restore harmony among blacks and whites in the community.

Going over All the Hurdles: A Life of Oatess Archey, written by John A. Beineke, who lived in Marion and was one of Archey’s students, is the fifth volume in the IHS Press’s youth biography series. The book explores the career of Archey, the first African American to be elected sheriff in Indiana. Raised in Marion, Indiana, the young Archey and his loving family lived under the cloud of the notorious 1930 lynching. A star athlete, including winning the state championship in the high hurdles in 1955, Archey endured discrimination when he attempted to return to his hometown after college and tried to secure a teaching job with the Marion schools.

Instead of teaching in a classroom, Archey was forced to take a janitorial position with the school system. He later rose to become a beloved teacher and coach, before moving on to a career in law enforcement with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He returned to Marion in triumph and served as a popular sheriff for Grant County.

As author Beineke notes, the word hurdle is used in his book “both symbolically and athletically. As a symbol, it will embody the barriers that Archey had to overcome throughout his life. The hurdle, as an obstacle in a track-and-field event, will also represent a moment of achievement that exemplified his entire life. Archey not only went over hurdles, but he taught others how to go over them, too. That is how a life truly makes a difference.”

Beineke was born in Indianapolis and grew up in Marion, Indiana. His undergraduate degree in social studies was from Marion College, now Indiana Wesleyan University, and his masters and doctoral degrees were from Ball State University in education and history.

Beineke has been a public school teacher, a college professor and administrator, and a program director in leadership and education at the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. He is currently dean of the College of Education and a professor of educational leadership and curriculum and also professor of history at Arkansas State University. Beineke is the author of And There Were Giants in the Land: The Life of William Heard Kilpatrick. He has three children and lives in Jonesboro, Arkansas, with his wife, Marla.

Going over All the Hurdles costs $17.95. The hardback book is available from the Society's Basile History Market. To order, call (800) 447-1830 or order online at the History Market.

Interview with Norbert Krapf

2008-05-01T08:26:00.008-04:00

Norbert Krapf is a popular and respected Indiana poet and teacher. His work has received national attention and has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Here he answers questions about his new memoir, The Ripest Moments: A Southern Indiana Childhood, recently published by the Indiana Historical Society Press. (Author photo by Andreas Riedel)

What prompted you, after years of writing poetry, to tackle a memoir?

Before I began to write poetry in early 1971, after moving to teach in the New York area in 1970, I began a series of “sketches,” as I called them, as preparation for writing a short story cycle. That was in the fall of 1970, but in January of 1971 I began to write poems, at the age of 27, and good poems and publication came quickly. However, I have been primarily a narrative poet, which means I tell stories. I never lost my love of stories, of hearing and telling them.

I began The Ripest Moments about a month after my mother died in 1997. I had been commuting between Long Island and southern Indiana to help take care of her during her final illness (lymphoma) and spent a lot of time with my brother, who came back home to Jasper from Florida, for the time being, to take care of her. We talked a lot about our memories of childhood, and that was a stimulus. Also, our father had died in 1979, we knew the family house would be sold after our mother died, and I think it’s natural to want to preserve family memories and experiences at a time like that, to keep them alive and pass them on.

Some of those early “prose sketches” I mentioned above became part of the memoir. I fleshed them out some, tightened them, and they became part of the overall narrative of The Ripest Moments. I finished about half of the chapters after we moved to Indy in July of 2004.

What kind of ties do you still retain with the community of Jasper?

Deep and persistent ones! I have never lost touch with the Jasper and Dubois County community. I still have many cousins in and around Jasper and see them when we go down to visit. During the 34 years we lived in the New York area, on Long Island, we came back and forth regularly. In one sense, I never left, because in my poetry I was always going back, returning, discovering roots, finding more layers of origins and heritage. I’m still good friends with many of my high school classmates and friends, who come to my readings, buy my books, and write to me about them. John Fierst, my American history teacher, the driving force behind the Dubois County Historical Society and also the Dubois County Museum, a marvelous facility and repository, to which I gave my childhood, high school, and college papers, as well as family history materials, is still a good friend. I call him often. He helped me eliminate some factual errors in the memoir, even as late as the third page proof! My mentor Jack Leas, my senior English teacher, became a good friend of the family and when he died, I came back from New York to be his pall bearer. I dedicated my first full-length poetry collection to him and my parents, and you’ll find him and John Fierst mentioned in the acknowledgments of the memoir.

I should count up the names of local people I mentioned in the memoir. It could be at least a hundred! I believe in living locally, staying in touch, going down into your past so that you arrive at the ultimate source. That’s enough to keep any writer and any human being alive and motivated and nourished for at least one life time. My wife and our children spent so much time in southern Indiana during the summer and other vacations (holidays) that my children always considered Indiana a second home. Our daughter went to Butler on a violin scholarship and our son is now at IUPUI. I should mention that I spent over twenty years editing and annotating the pioneer German journals and letters in my Finding the Grain book, which came out in 1996. That book includes the letters of Croatian missionary Joseph Kundek, who colonized the area with German Catholics. I am rooted, deeply rooted. I know where I come from, I have friends in my ancestral region in Germany, Franconia, in northern Bavaria. My dialect writer (poet and playwright) friend Helmut Haberkamm, who has translated many of my poems into German, came to Indy in 2006 and asked me to take him to Jasper, so he could see the place and the people that I write about. He loved it there. He heard me read from the then new collection Looking for God’s Country, which includes some 25 poems inspired by the work of his photographer friend Andreas Riedel, with whom he, too, has collaborated.

Finally, I should say that I have read my poetry many times in Jasper, most often at the Dubois County Museum, in its most recent location, a former plant of The Jasper Corporation/Kimball, but also when it was located on Main Street in the Gutzweiler-Gramelspacher House, across from the library, where I also read a number of times. My readings in Jasper, I have been told by people who’ve seen me read elsewhere, are different from my readings elsewhere. My Jasper audience knows the subjects of my poems, where they come from, they understand my humor, which only encourages me to use it more. Almost every time I read in my hometown, a bunch of us go out for beer and food and conversation. Now that is community: poetry, beer (or wine), food, and conversation.

Memoirs have been in the news recently because of some authors’ seeming willingness to stretch the truth about their lives. Did you consider this when writing your memoir?

Yes I did. Norbert tolerates no stretchers! I have too much respect for historical accuracy to play with the facts. Admittedly, memory can play tricks on us, memory and imagination are kissing kin, I say in my Preface, but I went to great lengths to minimize factual errors. I probably made some errors, but that’s part of going back fifty years or more into the past. We had a good discussion on this issue at the first reading I gave from the memoir, sponsored by the Writers’ Center of Indiana. I said that it’s true that some portraits are composites based on more than one experience, such as the description of shooting my first squirrel. My writer friend Susan Neville made a good point. She said it’s not a problem if you based such a chapter on composite experiences, but it is a problem if you never shot a squirrel and try to convince the reader that you did. I agree that the writer has a kind of contract with the reader. If I want you to trust me as a narrator or teller of stories, I have to win you over, and I should not do that by trickery, because if you find me cheating, you won’t keep on reading. You’ll be justifiably upset and feel deceived. To use novelistic devices in writing a memoir, however, is not a deception, but a form of art and a respected and necessary device that deepens the lived experience you are trying to describe and make come alive and stay alive for the reader.

Was there a particular memory of your youth that remains vivid and unforgettable to you today?

To pick one is difficult if not impossible; but I can say that my deepest memories have to do with the hundreds if not thousands of hours I spent in the woods of Dubois County. It was going squirrel hunting with my father and other relatives that started that, which became a process that turned into a metaphor. In “The Woods Behind the House,” one of the memoir chapters, I quote both Robert Frost and Henry David Thoreau. I often told my students at Long Island University and the people who came to hear me read in the New York area that for me the woods was what the ocean is to them. The southern Indiana woods “gave me pasture enough for my imagination,” to borrow from Thoreau. I stopped hunting squirrels fairly early, but I never stopped going into woods and looking, listening, and recording impressions. I must have written more woods, tree, and squirrel poems than any other American poet!

Have you received any reaction as of yet from your family about the book?

Nobody in my family has yet had a chance to read the entire memoir, but my sister Mary, who is the subject of the chapter “Baby Sisters,” is a very loyal and enthusiastic reader of my writing, always buys one copy of each of my books for herself and two for her children, and loved that chapter when I e-mailed it to her earlier, will certainly give me her reaction. I am the oldest and she is the youngest of four; my brothers, we could say, are not great readers of my work. This is not, however, all that unusual for poets. We poets talk to one another about this kind of stuff, you know!

Do you maintain a regular writing schedule, or wait for inspiration to strike?

Well, anybody who is a good friend of mine knows that I was a maniac for writing letters (sigh, that day is gone) and now e-mails, I have also kept a journal since 1970 (almost four big boxes full in the closet here in my study, in downtown Indy), and so I am writing all the time. More and more, I write poems early in the morning, before anybody else in the family is awake. But I can write almost anywhere, at any time, if I’m on a roll. I tend to write poems in groups, clusters, cycles, which is perhaps related to the fact that I am so often a narrative poet.

But my poems have become more and more meditative in recent years, perhaps one could say more and more spiritual. Contemporary poet William Stafford, a mentor who died in the early 1990s, had a practice of writing a poem every morning, early. After our daughter moved to Portland, Oregon, near where Stafford lived, wrote, and taught for over 30 years (he was a Kansas native), I got to visit the William Stafford Archive and was very moved to see all his drafts, how he organized and preserved them, put his books together, etc. When we got back home, low and behold, I started to write at least one poem early every morning. That went on for over 90 days, even when I went to Germany to visit my writer friend Helmut, in whose house I have written a number of poems. But I didn’t keep it up. When I’m really into it, I’ve been known to write almost all day long and in the middle of the night, but that’s really exhausting. When I was writing the poems that were published in Invisible Presence, my collaboration with Darryl Jones, I wrote so fast and furious and long, that my wife once looked at me and said, “You’ve got that faraway look in your eye again!” She’s pretty understanding. I guess she has to be!

Let me say something glorious: I am now retired and for the past four plus years, I’ve been able to give all my energies to writing. It’s been a great run, I’ve recorded a CD with the superb jazz pianist and composer Monika Herzig, I did a book, Invisible Presence>, with the excellent photographer Darryl Jones, and I have a book coming out in the fall, Bloodroot: Indiana Poems, with about 70 b/w photographs by David Pierini, who for ten years worked with The Herald in Jasper; this prose memoir, half of which I wrote here in downtown Indy, is just out, and next year I have another poetry collection coming out, Sweet Sister Moon, love poems and tributes to women. I must be doing something right, must have done the right thing to come back to Indiana, must be living in the right place.

I’ve been told that I’m a disciplined writer. I never say no to inspiration, however. Any time my Muse comes, I do not say no! Again, I want to come back to William Stafford, who saw the writing of poetry as a very natural and human activity. When people would ask him when he started writing, he would ask them when they stopped. Children love figurative language, think and speak in images and metaphors, without having to labor at it. They love nursery rhymes, the magical sounds of language, including rhyme, and rich fantasy! What happens when they grow up? Something in our culture tells them/us that an activity like writing poems is not an adult activity.

I’m therefore happy to be a retired child, to have people come to hear me read my poems, buy my books, and even write to me about them. I feel both lucky and blessed to be doing this and am about to knock-knock on my beautiful wooden desk for continued good luck!

Author Explores His German-Catholic Roots

2008-04-29T08:43:00.004-04:00

In the 1840s and 1850s, thousands of German families left Europe for a new life in America. Hundreds of these immigrants eventually settled in the Dubois County community of Jasper, Indiana, the county seat. Surrounding the town were dense hardwood forests that provided the raw materials for craftsmen to begin the furniture-making firms for which the area became well known. Two of the German families that put down roots in the Jasper area, the Schmitts and the Krapfs, produced a son who today remembers those days of close ties to family and the land.

The Ripest Moments: A Southern Indiana Childhood is a memoir by noted Indiana poet and essayist Norbert Krapf of his childhood and growing up in Jasper. In the book Krapf, who was born in 1943 and whose poetry has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, recalls his rural, small-town upbringing in the German-Catholic community and unearths the distinctive place and culture in which he lived. As Krapf observes, “Behind this book and my collections of poetry is a conviction that an awareness of individual and collective origins can enlighten, nourish, guide, and sustain us and those who come after us.”

Krapf’s writing evokes a time when Hoosiers lived closer to the land, connecting with nature through such everyday activities as playing hide-and-seek with cousins in an old barn, trundling down the road as a child to catch a glimpse of fields being harvested, and going camping, hunting, and fishing. The author also captures the joy of playing and watching sports and shows how a community can come together through rituals passed down from one generation to the next, such as the custom of children pulling homemade Labor Day boxes in an annual parade. Beneath the surface, however, lies the sadness of having a stillborn sister and seeing his father suffer from depression. “I have always believed that any story set deeply in one time and place, if told well, speaks for other times, places, and people,” Krapf notes. “To put it another way, a sense of time and place travels and settles well.”

Krapf received his bachelor’s degree from Saint Joseph’s College. He took his master’s degree and doctorate in English from the University of Notre Dame and taught English at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University for thirty-four years. In 2004 he moved with his family to Indianapolis, where he completed The Ripest Moments.

His seven poetry collections, in which his Indiana German heritage is central, include Somewhere in Southern Indiana, The Country I Come From, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and the retrospective collection Bloodroot: Indiana Poems. He is also the editor of Finding the Grain, a collection of pioneer German journals and letters from Dubois County, and the editor/translator of a book of legends set in his ancestral Franconia, Beneath the Cherry Sapling.

The Ripest Moments costs $15.95. The hardback book is available from the Society's Basile History Market. To order, call (800) 447-1830 or order online at the History Market.

Pyle Book Honored

2008-04-29T08:36:00.004-04:00

The Indiana Historical Society Press publication The Soldier's Friend: A Life of Ernie Pyle, written by Ray E. Boomhower, won second place in the book category at the Indiana Professional Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists' annual Best in Indiana journalism contest Friday, April 25. The winners were honored for their work in 2007 at the Indianapolis Marriott North Hotel.

The Indiana Professional Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists works to promote and protect First Amendment freedoms, offers scholarships, sponsors the annual “Best of Indiana” journalism contest and conducts professional development programs.

The Indiana University Press publication Long Journey Home: Oral Histories of Contemporary Delaware Indians, produced by Rita Kohn and Jim Brown, captured first place in the book category.

IHS Press Books Receive Award Nominations

2008-03-05T17:08:00.003-05:00

Six IHS Press books have been named as finalists in ForeWord Magazine's 2007 Book of the Year competition.

Nearly 1,600 books were entered in 61 categories. These were narrowed to 658 finalists, from 350 publishers.

The winners will be determined by a panel of librarians and booksellers, selected from our readership. ForeWord's Book of the Year Awards program was designed to discover distinctive books across a number of genres.

The finalists and categories in which they are entered are:

* Meredith Nicholson: A Writing Life by Ralph D. Gray in Biography

* Finding Indiana Ancestors: A Guide to Historical Research, edited by M. Teresa Baer and Geneil Breeze in Craft and Hobbies

* The Scenic Route: Stories from the Heartland in Essays

* Federal Justice in Indiana: The History of the United States District Court of the Southern District of Indiana by George W. Geib and Donald B. Kite Sr. in Regional

* A Belief in Providence: A Life of Saint Theodora Guerin by Julie Young in Young Adult, Nonfiction

* Fighting for Equality: A Life of May Wright Sewall by Ray E. Boomhower in Young Adult, Nonfiction

Gold, Silver, and Bronze winners, as well as Editor's Choice Prizes for Fiction and Nonfiction will be announced at a special program at BookExpo America at the Los Angeles Convention Center in Los Angeles on May 29. The winners of the two Editor's Choice Prizes will be awarded $1,500 each. The ceremony is open to all BEA attendees.

Aviation Pioneer Tells Story

2008-01-16T15:19:00.000-05:00

Aviation pioneers of the 1930s flew by the seat of their pants. Donning leather helmets and fur-lined goggles, these adventurous men and women climbed into open cockpits to battle the elements, sitting in narrow, flimsy cabins. Early pilots flew by feelings—not instruments or radios. Flying new planes as quickly as they were crafted, early pilots repeatedly broke speed, distance, and endurance records, flying the jet age into being.

The Indiana Historical Society Press is proud to announce the release of Spinning Through Clouds: Tales from an Early Hoosier Aviator. Written by Max E. Knight, the book recounts his days as a young pilot and adventurer while providing national context to the history of aviation.

Growing up in Lynn, Indiana, Knight began flying in 1936 at the age of 10. At his father’s airport there, he met many of the state’s aviation pioneers, learning to fly from some of them. He flew in early planes, from Piper Cubs to the Tin Goose (the first transcontinental passenger plane).

Knight tells about his early flying adventures in Spinning Through Clouds: Tales from an Early Hoosier Aviator. Suitable for young adults and adults, the book also tells stories from the early period of national aviation, introducing air racing champions such as Roscoe Turner and Jacqueline Cochran alongside better-known pilots such as Amelia Earhart and Howard Hughes.

The paperback book costs $19.95 is available from the Society's Basile History Market. To order, call (800) 447-1830 or order online at the History Market.

IHS Press Writers at Holiday Author Fair

2007-11-13T10:30:00.000-05:00

A number of IHS Press writers and their books will be featured at the Indiana Historical Society's fifth annual Holiday Author Fair from noon to 4 p.m. on Saturday, December 1, 2007, at the Indiana History Center, 450 W. Ohio St., Indianapolis.

The Holiday Author Fair is the largest book signing gathering for Indiana-related material, featuring more than 90 “Hoosier” authors. Books include works of fiction, non-fiction, cookbooks, photography, history, children’s books and more. Visitors can converse with authors, have books signed and enjoy refreshments and live entertainment.

This year’s event includes special appearances by renowned gospel singer and prolific author Gloria Gaither as well as screenwriter Angelo Pizzo, whose films Hoosiers and Rudy have inspired millions. Featured authors also include Philip Gulley, James Alexander Thom, Jim Madison, Lou Harry, and Dick Wolfsie.

IHS Press authors and their books at the Holiday Author Fair include:

* M. Teresa Baer and Geneil Breeze, Finding Indiana Ancestors: A Guide to Historical Research
* Ray Boomhower, Fighting for Equality: A Life of May Wright Sewall
* Fred Cavinder, Indiana Book of Trivia
* Earl Conn, My Indiana: 101 Places to See
* George Geib and Donald Kite Sr., Federal Justice in Indiana
* Ralph Gray, Meredith Nicholson: A Writing Life
* Linda Gugin and James E. St. Clair, The Governors of Indiana
* Mary Blair Immel, Captured! A Boy Trapped in the Civil War
* Jim McGarrah, A Temporary Sort of Peace: A Memoir of Vietnam
* Ellen Munds and Beth Millett, The Scenic Route: Stories from the Heartland
* Ashley Ransburg, Evie Finds Her Family Tree
* Julie Young, A Belief in Providence: A Life of Saint Theodora Guerin

There is no admission charge for this event, and free parking is available in the Indiana History Center’s surface lot (corner of New York and West Streets). The Basile History Market will also offer complimentary gift wrapping on books and other purchases, such as music, Indiana-made household products, jewelry, original art, handmade textiles, children’s merchandise, reproductions from the IHS collection and more.

Genealogy Book Honored

2007-11-12T13:45:00.001-05:00

The Indiana Historical Society Press book Finding Indiana Ancestors: A Guide to Historical Research, edited by Teresa Baer and Geneil Breeze, won honorable mention honors at the Chicago Book Clinic's 56th annual Book and Media Show.

Finding Indiana Ancestors received the award in the Instructional/Self-Help/Cookbooks with one color and two color internals category. The Book and Media Show received 146 submissions for its 2007 show.

Founded in 1936, the Chicago Book Clinic enourages excellence in publishing by providing a platform for educational, social, and professional interaction of its members. Its members are professionals in book and media publishing, printing, editorial, design, and all business aspects of the publishing industry.

IHS Press Releases Storytelling Book

2007-10-17T12:26:00.000-04:00

With the publicatin of The Scenice Route: Stories from the Heartland, the Indiana Historical Society Press celebrates the twentieth anniversary of Storytelling Arts of Indiana, which promotes the art and use of storytelling in everyday life through its annual festival, concerts, workshops, programs, and other events.

Storytelling is about gathering with freinds, family, and even those we have just met to share with one another stories of our childhood, our culture, and our heritage. In this age of over-scheduled lives, Internet and television addictions, and outside pressures, stories remind us of our roots and traditions.

Storytelling Arts of Indiana has spent twenty years creating places for individuals to come together and experience storytelling in the hope of encouraging that sharing and listening relationship in our everyday lives. The Scenice Rout offers the reader a dozen stories to enjoy and to help us remember.

The books costs $8.95 and is available from the Society's Basile History Market. To order, call (800) 447-1830 or order online at the History Market.

Youth Biography Examines Hoosier Suffragist

2007-10-17T10:52:00.000-04:00

Famed Indiana author Booth Tarkington once took on the task of naming three of Indianapolis’s most outstanding citizens. Two of the three he named—former president Benjamin Harrison and legendary poet James Whitcomb Riley—were well-known people. The third, however, was someone whose memorable accomplishments have become lost to history—educator, woman’s rights pioneer, and peace activist May Wright Sewall.

Written by award-winning author and historian Ray E. Boomhower, Fighting for Equality: A Life of May Wright Sewall, a biography aimed at young readers, showcases Sewall’s important contributions to the history of Indianapolis, Indiana, the United States, and the world. A woman who had the “organizing touch,” Sewall helped to establish such Indianapolis institutions as the Girls’ Classical School, the Indianapolis Woman’s Club, the Contemporary Club, the Art Association of Indianapolis (today known as the Indianapolis Museum of Art), and the Indianapolis Propylaeum.

Sewall also worked tirelessly on behalf of rights for women in the United States—and around the globe—during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She served as a valuable ally to such national suffrage leaders as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and gave the woman’s movement an worldwide focus through her pioneering involvement with the American National Council of Women and the International Council of Women.

After working on behalf of peace as a delegate on millionaire automaker Henry Ford’s failed Peace Trip in 1915, Sewall shocked her friends by releasing a book telling of her communications beyond the grave with her deceased husband, Theodore Sewall. She related her remarkable experiences with spiritualism in her book Neither Dead nor Sleeping, published by Bobbs-Merrill of Indianapolis in 1920 just a few months before Sewall’s own death.

Fighting for Equality: A Life of May Wright Sewall costs $17.95 and is available from the Society's Basile History Market. To order, call (800) 447-1830 or order online at the History Market.

Interview with Vietnam Memoir Author

2007-09-04T10:48:00.000-04:00

Jim McGarrah teaches teaches creative writing at the University of Southern Indiana, where he is an assistant professor in the English department. Here he answers questions about his new book A Temporary Sort of Peace: A Memoir of Vietnam, recently released by the Indiana Historical Society Press.

For many, the Vietnam War is still too fresh and too painful to read about or see in movies or on TV. What’s your experience with this?
I think a testament to these memories remaining fresh and painful for everyone concerned is the time lapse between when I returned from Vietnam in 1968 and when I actually began my career as a writer trying to come to terms with some of my ghosts in 1998. It took three decades and considerable therapy for PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) before I was willing to take on the frightening and often retraumatizing challenge of reflecting on what had happened to all of us in that generation.

How well do you think that movies, books, TV programs, etc. have done thus far in portraying the realities of that war?
There have been some brilliant books written on the subject, including poetry collections, but almost exclusively by people who have had firsthand experience with the Vietnam War. These are books that adhere to Tim O’Brien's famous adage: “you can tell a true war story by its uncompromising and absolute allegiance to obscenity and evil.”

Movies tend to drift away from that because we Americans like to see positive resolution in our Hollywood dramas. The good guy needs to win before we feel like we got our money’s worth and Hollywood caters to that shallowness; TV caters to it even more. Consequently, with those mediums the concern is often more economic success than honesty. There are exceptions. Born on the Fourth of July and Full Metal Jacket were both overwhelmingly real and honest. Apocalypse Now, which was also a great movie, may have been the most real because of its surreality--that vague shadow of existential malaise and then the blatant insanity that ran through every scene.

How have they misrepresented things?
One has only to watch Rambo or any of Chuck Norris’ Vietnam movies to understand the answer to that question. One Vietnam veteran is not equal to 50 other men. Rifles do run out of ammunition. American grenades don’t blow up bad guys and leave innocent people alone.

The Vietnam War was part of a political agenda and, as an exercise in “flexible” warfare, had nothing to do with patriotism or justice, as the movies and some books might lead you to believe. As a matter of fact, that may be the most tragic misrepresentation because it makes it easier for politicians to manipulate the public into new wars, like Iraq.

You say that “the jungles of Vietnam, the one place where life was at its best and worst simultaneously every minute of every day.” Briefly explain that sentiment.
There really is no brief answer to that question. It’s a complex and guilt-ridden psychological fact. We are taught that killing is wrong and every fiber of our consciousness rebels against that act. On the other hand, a firefight that a soldier lives through often brings a high, an adrenalin rush that creates a subconscious, sometimes addictive, feeling of euphoria. It’s hard to lie to yourself and not admit it’s one of the greatest physical sensations you’ve ever had. So, when you live through a firefight in which others die, you’re psyche is horribly conflicted with both guilt and joy-–the best and worst of life at the same time.

Has writing this book and going back to Vietnam been healing for you? Has it given you peace?
As the title indicates, there is nothing for combat veterans other than a temporary peace, an island of respite that lets your mind rest from time to time from itself. In that regard, the book and the trip both allowed me some rest at the completion of each.

What is your greatest hope for what people will take away from reading this book?
I hope that people will take away from this book how easy it is in our society to manipulate support for dubious causes and that we all, as free citizens, need to demand more accountability from our leaders when they sacrifice our only treasure, the young. But, that we also need to demand more from ourselves in terms of critical thinking about issues before we allow politicians to send our children to war. War has always got to be the very last option on the table when countries have differences. Too often, it’s been the first.

Vietnam Memoir Available

2007-08-31T11:01:00.000-04:00

Growing up in Princeton, Indiana, during the 1950s, Jim McGarrah spent his days pursuing dreams of athletic glory on the baseball diamond, becoming captain of his high school’s baseball team and winning, for a time, the affections of a blond cheerleader, escorting her to dates at the local drive-in in his 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air. Although he earned a baseball scholarship to college, McGarrah flunked out of school in May 1967 and, on the way home, enlisted for service in the U.S. Marine Corps, causing his father, a veteran of World War II, to warn him he had no idea what he had just done.

In his new memoir A Temporary Sort of Peace, recently published by the Indiana Historical Society Press, McGarrah, today a poet and writer from southern Indiana, examines in detail his peacetime life in Indiana, his indoctrination into the cult of the marines as a fledgling warrior in basic training at Parris Island in South Carolina (“a small cog of the ‘lean green fighting machine,’” McGarrah notes in the book), and his introduction to the life of a combat soldier in Vietnam observing bulging body bags at an air base’s morgue in Da Nang and going to his first assignment armed with a malfunctioning M-16 rifle. Many years later, the former private first class, serial number 2371586, realized that for him, home had become “the jungles of Vietnam, the one place where life was at its best and worst simultaneously every minute of every day.”

The book also includes the author’s days with a small marine Combat Action Group trying to win the hearts and minds of Vietnamese in the village of Gia Le, his wounding by shrapnel from a rocket-propelled grenade during the height of the Tet Offensive, and dealing with his war memories back home in the United States. In August 2005, at the age of fifty-seven, McGarrah returned to Vietnam, visiting the sites of his former battles with his son and sharing memories of the past and future with a Vietnamese poet in a graceful peace ceremony in Hue.

McGarrah teaches creative writing at the University of Southern Indiana, where he is an assistant professor in the English department. He is the author of an award-winning poetry collection, Running the Voodoo Down; the novel, Going Postal; and served as co-editor with Tom Watson of the Indiana Historical Society Press collection Home Again: Essays and Memoirs from Indiana. McGarrah serves as poetry editor of Southern Indiana Review and is co-director of the RopeWalk Readers Series.

The book costs $19.95 and is available from the Society's Basile History Market. To order, call (800) 447-1830 or order online at the History Market.

Interview with Nicholson Biographer

2007-08-14T07:55:00.000-04:00

Ralph D. Gray is professor emeritus of history at Indiana University–Purdue University at Indianapolis and founding editor of the Journal of the Early Republic. He is the author of the new IHS Press biography Meredith Nicholson: A Writing Life. He recently answered a few questions about Nicholson.

What drew you to writing about Nicholson?
When I compiled a “reader” on Indiana history in 1979-80, I realized that only Meredith Nicholson, among Indiana’s Big Four writers, had no biography. So I looked into filling that gap. But when I started, I found another person, a Butler professor, also trying to fill the gap, but her work, eventually completed shortly before her death, has not been published. So Ray Boomhower gave me a second chance, more than 20 years later, to resume my Nicholson study and contribute to the Indiana Biography Series.

What’s the most interesting thing you learned during the writing of this book?
I suppose two things. First would be fascinating details about his personal life (both triumphs and tragedies--his father’s suicide, the loss of his first wife in 1931, after which no more novels were written, and much more) and the quality of his writings besides his novels--short stories, trenchant social and political commentary essays and good poetry.

What do you wish more people knew about Meredith Nicholson?
First of all, I’d like people to recognize Nicholson’s humor, sly and understated, but omnipresent. I also think his life story is fascinating, given his lack of formal education and a difficult home life, but he persevered and did outstanding work in at least four areas--as a newspaperman, a poet (an unlikely close friend, Riley, was his idol), a novelist and a diplomat. He was also a good businessman, but he disliked such work.

That flap copy for the book says “Nicholson stands as the most Hoosier of all Indiana writers, serving as an outspoken advocate for his state.” Give an example of what makes this true.
The totality of his writings--as I say somewhere, he never failed to boost all things Hoosier, and he repeatedly sprang to his state’s, and to his adopted city’s, defense if he detected a slight by someone.

What can we learn from Nicholson?
As he himself said in an autobiographical essay, “Without Benefit of College” (which could have been titled “Without Benefit of High School”), he was not bragging but wanted to assure parents concerned about their children’s lack of success in school, that there were other ways a person, if properly self-motivated and diligent, could make their way in society. Obviously, too, I hope people will think of Nicholson as a true, worthy member of the Big Four, not the one often forgotten in listing them all.

Press Publishes Nicholson Biography

2007-08-13T15:49:00.000-04:00

From 1880 to 1920, Indiana experienced a golden age of literature, with Hoosier authors achieving both national prominence and national acclaim. These writers provided readers with stories that emphasized traditional values and offered shelter from an ever-changing world.

Although those who lived in the state took an immense pride in what Indiana writers produced, they heaped special attention on four men, including the great Hoosier poet, James Whitcomb Riley; Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Booth Tarkington; and noted newspaper columnist and humorist George Ade. The other member of this special group—Meredith Nicholson—also won enormous success with his novels. As Ralph D. Gray notes in this first-ever biography of the author and diplomat, Meredith Nicholson: A Writing Life, the fifth volume in the Indiana Historical Society Press’s Indiana Biography Series, Nicholson stands as the most Hoosier of all Indiana writers, serving as an outspoken advocate for his state. Indiana literary historian Arthur S. Shumaker called Nicholson the “most rabid” of Indiana’s major authors.

In addition to writing such national best sellers as Zelda Dameron and The House of a Thousand Candles, his best-known work, Nicholson won praise as an insightful essayist, with his work published in such national magazines as the Saturday Evening Post and Atlantic Monthly. “Nicholson’s enduring faith in ‘folks,’ the ordinary people of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys and the Midwest, his inherent belief in democracy and democratic values, and his unapologetic patriotism permeate his essays,” notes Gray, “some of which excoriated the Ku Klux Klan and upheld the rights and virtues of women, attitudes not always popular at the time.”

A longtime supporter of the Democratic Party, Nicholson’s loyalty to his party was rewarded in 1933 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him to be America’s top diplomat in war-torn Paraguay. Nicholson gave able service to the United States and went on to serve in two other Latin American countries before retiring from public life in 1941.

The book costs $19.95 and is available from the Society's Basile History Market. To order, call (800) 447-1830 or order online at the History Market.

History and Genealogy

2007-08-10T07:53:00.000-04:00

At the Midwestern Roots Conference, co-sponsored by the Indiana Historical Society and the Indiana Genealogical Society in August 2005, a special session was held, "History and Genealogy–Why Not Both?"

Participants in the session included professional genealogists Elizabeth Shown Mills and Tony Burroughs, archival manager Curt B. Witcher, historians Marianne S. Wokeck and James H. Madison, and the session was introduced by historical editor M. Teresa Baer of the IHS Press. All participants are also published authors. Three of the participants, Mills, Witcher, and Baer, submitted papers based on the discussion to the Indiana Magazine of History, published by Indiana University. The editors of the IMH published all three papers on the periodical's Web site. The link to them is at the top, left side of the home page. The end of the introductory paper (Baer’s) includes a call for comments. The participants and the editors of the IMH welcome comments and hope the publication of these articles furthers the discussion and fosters closer ties between the scholarly pursuits of genealogy and history.

District Court History Published

2007-07-02T14:28:00.000-04:00

Since Indiana’s inception as a territory under the Northwest Ordinance, the federal courts held here over the last two centuries have played an important and distinguished role in both local and national legal history. This significance is vividly represented in Federal Justice in Indiana: The History of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Indiana. From its earliest days as a territorial court to the District Court’s current composition, the people and places central to the conduct of the court’s business are placed into the wider context of Indiana and American history.

Authors George W. Geib and Donald B. Kite Sr. provide the reader with an understanding of both the organizational structure of the court as well as glimpses into the cases, both great and small, which have come before it. The discussions on the court’s structure allows for insight into the selection and appointment of judges, contextualizes the constitutional basis of the court’s authority, and makes the politics and administration of federal justice in Indiana comprehensible.

The variety of cases that Geib and Kite include in the text illustrates the evolution of the court. More importantly, these cases lend a sense of humanity to the court, as those individuals involved with the trials and hearings are brought out of the shadows of legal history to stand as witnesses to the court’s past. From the famous Ex parte Milligan case to the modern court’s rulings on religion, pornography, and civil rights, the significance and influence of the federal judiciary in Indiana is clarified.

Federal Justice in Indiana is an important addition to the growing collection of books on American legal history and a valuable resource to those interested in Indiana history. With its balanced handling of legal, social, and political issues, this book will appeal to attorneys and non-attorneys alike.

Best Books of Indiana Nominations

2007-07-02T08:05:00.000-04:00

Two IHS Press books have received nominations in the third annual Best Books of Indiana competiton sponsored by the Indiana Center for the Book, a program of the Indiana State Library. The competition highlights Indiana's ongoing literary successes by recognizing recent books about Indiana or by Indiana authors.

The Press books Evie Finds Her Family Tree by Ashley B. Ransburg, and The Soldier's Friend: A Life of Ernie Pyle by Ray E. Boomhower, are finalists in the children's literature category. The other finalist is Georgie's Moon by Chris Woodworth, published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Winners in the children's literature, fiction, non-fiction, and poetry categories will be announced at an awards ceremony from 3 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, July 19, in the Authors Room at the Indiana State Library, 140 N. Senate Ave., Indianapolis.

The purpose of the Indiana Center for the Book is to stimulate public interest in books and reading at the state and local levels and to encourage the study of books in society. The Indiana Center serves as an affiliate with the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress to promote books and reading through programs, discussion groups, lectures, and exhibitions throughout the state. The Indiana Center also represents Indiana at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C. each year.

The Indiana Center for the Book is a program of the Indiana State Library, with an advisory group consisting of representatives from the Indiana Humanities Council, the Indiana Library Federation, the Writers' Center of Indiana, the Indiana Historical Bureau, the Indiana Arts Commission, and the Indiana Historical Society.

Foreward Magazine Honors Press Title

2007-06-06T11:15:00.000-04:00

The IHS Press book Abraham Lincoln Portrayed in the Collections of the Indiana Historical Society received a silver prize in the regional category of ForeWord Magazine's 2006 Book of the Year Awards.

A panel of judges composed of librarians and booksellers named 216 winners, narrowed from nearly 1,400 entries, representing the finest work from today’s vibrant independent publishing community. The winners were announced at a ceremony Friday, June 1, at BookExpo America in New York City.

Pyle Youth Biography Honored

2007-04-18T09:45:00.000-04:00

The IHS Press youth biography The Soldier's Friend: A Life of Ernie Pyle has been named as one of three finalists in the 2007 Benjamin Franklin Awards competition. The book is a finalist in the Juvenile, Young Adult Nonfiction, category.

The 2007 Benjamin Franklin Award winner will be chosen from one of the three finalists and will receive the Benjamin Franklin Award during a ceremony on Thursday evening, May 31, 2007, at the Park Central New York, located at 870 Seventh Avenue at 56th Street in New York City.

Sponsored by the Publishers Marketing Association, an independent book publishers association, the Benjamin Franklin Awards recognizes excellence in independent publishing. Publications, grouped by genre are judged on editorial and design merit by top practitioners in each field. The trophies are awarded to the best books in several categories and are presented to the publishers during a gala awards ceremony on the last evening of the Publishing University (just before the opening of Book Expo America).

Written by Ray E. Boomhower, The Soldier's Friend: A Lifer of Ernie Pyle explores the reporter’s legendary career from his days growing up in the small town of Dana, Indiana, to his life as a roving correspondent with the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, to his growing fame as a columnist detailing the rigors of combat faced by the average G.I. during World War II. The book also features numerous illustrations, samples of Pyle’s World War II columns, a detailed bibliography of World War II sources, and an index.

New Youth Biography Joins IHS Press Titles

2007-04-16T09:24:00.000-04:00

The Indiana Historical Society Press is proud to announce the release of its newest youth biography title, A Belief in Providence: A Life of Saint Theodora Guérin. The book explores the life and legacy of the woman who would become Indiana’s first saint.

Written by Julie Young, A Belief in Providence follows the life of Saint Theodora Guérin (born Anne-Thérèse Guérin in 1798) from her childhood and formative, faith-building years in France to her answer of the call to found a religious establishment near Terre Haute, Indiana. It also details her work as a religious and educational pioneer on the Indiana frontier.

Despite poor health, primitive frontier conditions, and dealings with a contentious archbishop (who at one point locked her in a room in the rectory), Mother Theodore Guérin founded Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College, the oldest Catholic women’s liberal arts college in the United States, and opened schools in Jasper, Madison and Vincennes, Indiana, often facing suspicion and hostility from the local population.

The book also examines the process leading to Guérin’s canonization, from the beginning of the official Cause for her sainthood in 1909 to the culmination of this century-long effort on Oct. 15, 2006.

Young is a freelance writer and adjunct faculty at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, teaching creative writing and freelance writing through its community learning network. A graduate of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College with a degree in professional writing, her work has been seen in various publications, including Indianapolis Woman, Evansville Living and AAA Home and Away magazines as well as CNN.com. She has also worked for the Associated Press, the Herald Weekly newspaper and Scecina Memorial High School in Indianapolis.

The books costs $17.95 and is available from the Society's Basile History Market. To order, call (800) 447-1830 or order online at the History Market.