Reviews
Recent Editions
This annual bibliography of documentary editions recently published in the fields of American and British history, literature, and culture is generally restricted to scholarly first editions of English-language works.
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ADAMS FAMILY. Adams Family Correspondence, Volume 12: March 1797 to April 1798. Edited by Sara Martin, C. James Taylor, Neal E. Millikan, Amanda A. Mathews, Hobson Woodward, Sara B. Sikes, Gregg L. Lint, and Sara Georgini. Harvard University Press. 2015. 688 pp. $95. ISBN: 9780674504660. This volume opens with John Adams’s inauguration and closes just after details of the XYZ affair are made public in America. Abigail’s letters demonstrate her role as an unofficial member of the administration. John Quincy and Thomas Boylston Adams offer insights into political turmoil in France and court life in Berlin following the coronation of Frederick William III.
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AMERICAN INDIANS. A Call for Reform: The Southern California Indian Writings of Helen Hunt Jackson. Edited by Valerie Sherer Mathes and Phil Brigandi. University of Oklahoma Press. 2015. 232 pp. $29.95. ISBN: 9780806143637. Journalist, novelist, and scholar Helen Hunt Jackson (1830–85) remains one of the most influential and popular writers on the struggles of American Indians. This volume collects for the first time seven of her most important articles, which served as the basis for Jackson’s 1884 novel, Ramona. Includes an introduction and annotation
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AMERICAN INDIANS. Through Indian Sign Language: The Fort Sill Ledgers of Hugh Lenox Scott and Iseeo, 1889–1897. Edited by William C. Meadows. University of Oklahoma Press. 2015. 520 pp. $55. ISBN: 9780806147277. Hugh Lenox Scott, who would one day serve as chief of staff of the US Army, spent a portion of his early career at Fort Sill in Indian and, later, Oklahoma Territory. There he commanded an all-Indian cavalry unit. From members of this unit, in particular a Kiowa soldier named Iseeo, Scott collected three volumes of information on American Indian life and culture—a body of ethnographic material conveyed through Plains Indian Sign Language and recorded in handwritten English. The Scott ledgers contain an array of historical, linguistic, and ethnographic data—a wealth of primary-source material on Southern Plains Indian people.
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AMERICAN WEST. Before Custer: Surveying the Yellowstone, 1872. Edited by M. John Lubetkin. Arthur H. Clark Company. 2015. 328 pp. $34.95. ISBN: 9780870624315. The Northern Pacific Railroad set out in 1872 to survey the Yellowstone Valley. An emissary from the Lakota chief Sitting Bull had warned two surveying expeditions not to enter the valley. Much to the surprised dismay of US Army strategists and railroad executives, the Indians repeatedly harassed army forces of nearly a thousand men. These previously unpublished documents provide firsthand accounts of the survey’s three-month struggle and the parallel story of the Panic of 1873, which developed out of the Northern Pacific’s thwarted expansion.
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AMERICAN WEST. The Great Medicine Road, Part 2: Narratives of the Oregon, California, and Mormon Trails, 1849. Edited by Michael L. Tate. Arthur H. Clark Company. 2015. 320 pp. $39.95. ISBN: 9780870624377. This second installment of a projected four-part collection includes memoirs and diaries from seven travelers who journeyed west after the discovery of gold in California.
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ART. My Dear BB: The Letters of Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark, 1925–1959. Edited by Robert Cumming. Yale University Press. 2015. 584 pp. $45. ISBN: 9780300207378. This book makes available, for the first time, the complete correspondence between two of the most influential figures in the twentieth-century art world, and gives a new and unique insight into their lives and motivations. The letters are arranged into ten chronological sections, each accompanied by biographical details and providing the context for the events and personalities referred to.
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AUBREY, JOHN. John Aubrey: Brief Lives with an Apparatus for the Lives of our English Mathematical Writers. Edited by Kate Bennett. Oxford University Press. 2015. 2 vols. 1,897 pp. $399. ISBN: 9780199689538. This is the first scholarly edition of Aubrey’s Brief Lives since 1898, the first to include the complete text of the three Brief Lives manuscripts (including censored and deleted material, title pages, antiquarian notes, and the indexes), and the first to provide a full general and critical introduction and comprehensive commentary. The work is here presented as an antiquarian and collaborative text, containing the autograph papers of biographical subjects and the annotations of those among whom the manuscripts circulated.
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AUDEN, W. H. The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose, Volume V, 1963–1968. Edited by Edward Mendelson. Princeton University Press. 2015. 604 pp. $65. ISBN: 9780691151717. Prose, Volume VI, 1969–1973. 2015. 856 pp. $65. ISBN: 9780691164588. Volume 5 contains Auden’s most personally revealing essays, the ones in which he wrote for the first time about the full history of his family life, his sexuality, and the development of his moral and religious beliefs. Includes many unpublished speeches and lectures. Volume 6 contains the full text of the only book that Auden regarded as an autobiography, A Certain World. It also features late essays and reviews.
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BENTHAM, JEREMY. The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham: The Book of Fallacies. Edited by Philip Schofield. Oxford University Press. 2015. 640 pp. $150. ISBN: 9780198719816. The present edition of The Book of Fallacies is the first that follows Bentham’s own structure for the work, and includes a great deal of material, both in terms of the fallacies themselves and the illustrative matter, that previous versions of the work have omitted.
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BERLIN, ISAIAH. Affirming: Letters, 1975–1997. Edited by Henry Hardy and Mark Pottle. Random House UK. 2015. 704 pp. $75. ISBN: 9781784740085. In this final volume, Berlin is as prolific a correspondent as ever, but the publication of new essay collections produces a striking change in tone, as readers seek clarification of his ideas. He dwells on pluralism of values and cultures, political liberalism, the defense of democracy, and the challenge posed by fundamentalism. But there is also a generous leavening of gossip to friends, reflections on music, the arts, and artists, as well as a fascination with the variety of humankind.
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BERNARD, FRANCIS. The Papers of Francis Bernard, Governor of Colonial Massachusetts, 1760–69. Volume 4: 1768. Edited by Colin Nicolson. University of Virginia Press. 2015. 600 pp. $49.50. ISBN: 9780985254346. Governor Francis Bernard’s historical reputation rests on his role in pushing the American colonists toward revolution. In 1768 the colonists and their governor vied to control information flowing to London. But it was Bernard who triumphed in the war of information, convincing the British government to send British troops to Boston to avert a possible insurrection and support the civil government.
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BERNARD, FRANCIS. The Papers of Francis Bernard, Governor of Colonial Massachusetts, 1760–69. Volume 5: 1768–69. Edited by Colin Nicolson. University of Virginia Press. 2015. 500 pp. $49.50. ISBN: 9780985254353. British Regulars marched into Boston at midday on Saturday, October 1, 1768; the troops were there to deter rioters, cow radicals, and support the civil government. Despite rumors to the contrary, there was no revolt to crush. No one expected war in 1769, but it was no longer unthinkable to Bostonians living alongside British soldiers or to British politicians discussing the allegedly treasonable activities of Bostonians. Their differences hinged on what Bernard had been telling the British government. This fifth volume examines the evidence and debates as they unfolded in Boston and London.
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BOYLE, KAY. Kay Boyle: A Twentieth-Century Life in Letters. Edited by Sandra Spanier. University of Illinois Press. 2015. 848 pp. $40. ISBN: 9780252039317. One of the Lost Generation modernists who gathered in 1920s Paris, Boyle published more than forty books, including fifteen novels, eleven collections of short fiction, eight volumes of poetry, three children’s books, and various essays and translations. Yet her achievements can be even better appreciated through the letters she wrote between 1919 and 1992 to the literary and cultural titans of her time.
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BRAGG, ALICE AND SIR LAWRENCE. Crystal Clear: The Autobiographies of Sir Lawrence and Lady Bragg. Edited by A. M. Glazer and Patience Thomson. Oxford University Press. 2015. 448 pp. $59.95. ISBN: 9780198744306. Previously unpublished autobiographies of Alice Bragg and her husband, William Lawrence Bragg, who along with his father developed a whole new branch of science: X-ray crystallography. Their autobiographies complement each other to give a rounded picture of the real personalities behind their public appearance.
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BURNEY, FRANCES. The Additional Journals and Letters of Frances Burney, Volume I: 1784–1786. Edited by Stewart Cooke. Oxford University Press. 2015. 480 pp. $200. ISBN: 9780199658114. This is the first of two volumes of The Additional Letters and Journals of Frances Burney, which will present materials not included in existing series of Burney materials. Written at the height of Burney’s fame as a novelist, the journals and letters included in this volume detail the loss of her friendship with Hester Thrale upon the latter’s marriage, and the growth of her friendships with William and Frederica Lock and Mary Delany. Also includes Burney’s unique record of the final days of Samuel Johnson’s life and an appreciation of his life and work.
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CALIFORNIA. The Army Surveys of Gold Rush California: Reports of Topographical Engineers, 1849–1851. Edited by Gary Clayton Anderson and Laura Lee Anderson. Arthur C. Clark Company. 2015. 256 pp. $34.95. ISBN: 9780870624308. As the army’s topographical engineer in California from 1849 to 1851, George Horatio Derby wrote detailed reports on the region, its people, its resources, and its geography. Derby’s reports and journals appear here alongside those of other surveyors; these documents offer views of the environment, natural resources, geography, and early settlement, as well as the effects of disease on Native and white populations.
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CANADA. The Writings of David Thompson, Volume 2: The Travels, 1848 Version, and Associated Texts. Edited by William E. Moreau. McGill-Queen’s University Press. 2015. 436 pp. $44.95. ISBN: 9780773545519. The second in a planned three volumes of Thompson’s writings, this edition completes the Canadian surveyor and fur trader’s autobiographical narrative. In the 1848 Travels, Thompson describes his most enduring historical legacy—the extension of the fur trade across the Continental Divide between 1807 and 1812. Like its companion Volume 1, this work presents an entirely new transcription of Thompson’s manuscript and includes an introductory essay and annotation.
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CARROLL, LEWIS. The Pamphlets of Lewis Carroll, Volume 5: Games, Puzzles, and Related Pieces. Edited by Christopher Morgan. University of Virginia Press. 2015. 394 pp. $75. ISBN: 9780930326029. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, “Lewis Carroll,” was not only the author of the beloved Alice tales but an inveterate and talented creator of puzzles and games in both the recreational mathematics and wordplay fields. Collected together for the first time in this book, his charming and humorous creations are no longer hidden in obscure Victorian magazines, rare antiquarian books, and sporadic, incomplete collections.
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CIVIL WAR. A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary at the Confederate States Capital, Volume 1: April 1861–July 1863. Edited by James I. Robertson Jr. University Press of Kansas. 2015. 480 pp. $45. ISBN: 9780700621231. Volume 2: August 1863–April 1865. 2015. 608 pp. $50. ISBN: 9780700621248. The wartime diary of John Beauchamp Jones, clerk in the War Department of the Confederacy, was first published in 1866. This is the first republishing to include an editorial introduction and notes. The day-by-day uninterrupted four-year chronicle includes unique materials on the Civil War drawn from Jones’s access to confidential files, command-level conversations, official correspondence, revelations, rumors, statistics, weather reports, and personal opinion in the Confederate War Department.
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CIVIL WAR. A Yankee Scholar in Coastal South Carolina: William Francis Allen’s Civil War Journals. Edited by James Robert Hester. University of South Carolina Press. 2015. 344 pp. $49.95. ISBN: 9781611174960. Allen served from late 1863 through mid-1864 as a member of the “Gideonite band” of businessmen, missionaries, and teachers who migrated to the South Carolina Sea Islands as part of the Port Royal Experiment. After the war, from April through July 1865, he served as assistant superintendent of schools in Charleston. In his journals from this time, he recorded events and impressions of hundreds of people, especially ex-slaves, fellow Gideonites, Union soldiers and officials, and ex-Confederates.
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COBDEN, RICHARD. The Letters of Richard Cobden, Volume IV: 1860–1865. Edited by Anthony Howe and Simon Morgan. Oxford University Press. 2015. 552 pp. $225. ISBN: 9780199211982. Fourth and final volume of this critical edition of the letters of the prominent nineteenth-century British politician. This volume deals with Cobden’s search for a permanent political legacy, both at home and abroad, including his success in negotiating the Anglo-French Commercial Treaty of 1860, his involvement in smoothing Anglo-American relations at the time, and his work toward the enfranchisement of the working classes.
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CONSTITUTION, UNITED STATES. The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution. Volume 11, Ratification of the Constitution by the States: Maryland, No. 1. Edited by John P. Kaminski, Charles H. Schoenleber, Gaspare J. Saladino, Jonathan M. Reid, Timothy D. Moore, Johanna E. Lannér-Cusin, Margaret R. Flamingo, and David P. Fields. Wisconsin Historical Society Press. 2015. 512 pp. $95. ISBN: 9780870206856. Volume 12, Ratification of the Constitution by the States: Maryland, No. 2. Wisconsin Historical Society Press. 2015. 592 pp. $95. ISBN: 9780870206863. These two volumes document Maryland’s public and private debates about the Constitution.
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DARWIN, CHARLES. The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, Volume 22: 1874. Edited by Frederick Burkhardt and James A. Secord. Cambridge University Press. 2015. 904 pp. $152. ISBN: 9781107088726. Volume 22 of the definitive edition of Darwin’s correspondence includes letters from 1874, the year in which he completed his research on insectivorous plants and published second editions of Descent of Man and Coral Reefs. The year also saw an acrimonious dispute between Darwin and St. George Jackson Mivart as a result of an anonymous review the latter had written in which he criticized Darwin’s son George.
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DAVIS, JEFFERSON. The Papers of Jefferson Davis, Volume 14: 1880 to 1889. Edited by Lynda Lasswell Crist and Suzanne Scott Gibbs. Louisiana State University Press. 2015. 688 pp. $150. ISBN: 9780807159095. The final volume of The Papers of Jefferson Davis follows the former president of the Confederacy through the completion of his two monumental works on the history of the Confederate States of America. In the first, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (1881), Davis sought to recast the Confederacy as a just and moral nation that was constitutionally correct in standing up for its rights. Himself the subject of heated debates about why the Confederacy lost, Davis also used the book to castigate Confederate government and military officials who he believed had failed the cause. Later, A Short History of the Confederate States (1890) attempted to burnish the image of the former Confederacy and to refute accusations of intentional mistreatment of Union prisoners.
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DICKINSON, EMILY. Dickinson in Her Own Times: A Biographical Chronicle of Her Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates. Edited by Jane Donahue Eberwein, Stephanie Farrar, and Christanne Miller. University of Iowa Press. 2015. 214 pp. $55. ISBN: 9781609383916. Even before the first books of her poems were published in the 1890s, friends, neighbors, and even apparently strangers knew Emily Dickinson was a writer of remarkable verses. Featuring both well-known documents and material printed or collected here for the first time, this book offers a broad range of writings that convey impressions of Dickinson in her own time and for the first decades following the publication of her poems.
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DOYLE, RICHARD. The Illustrated Letters of Richard Doyle to His Father, 1842–1843. Edited by Grant F. Scott. Ohio University Press. 2015. 440 pp. $79.95. ISBN: 9780821421857. Before he joined the staff of Punch and designed its iconic front cover, illustrator Richard “Dicky” Doyle was a young man whose father (political caricaturist John Doyle) charged him with sending a weekly letter, even though they lived under the same roof. This volume collects the fifty-three illustrated missives in their entirety for the first time. The sketches offer a fresh perspective on major social and cultural events of London during the early 1840s by a keen observer not yet twenty years old.
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EDISON, THOMAS A. The Papers of Thomas A. Edison, Volume 8: New Beginnings, January 1885–December 1887. Edited by Paul B. Israel, Louis Carlat, Theresa M. Collins, Alexandra R. Rimer, and Daniel J. Weeks. Johns Hopkins University Press. 2015. 1,032 pp. $115. ISBN: 9781421417493. At this time Edison’s inventive activities took off in new directions, including practical projects (such as wireless and high-capacity telegraph systems) and futuristic ones (exploring forms of electromagnetic energy and the convertibility of one to another). Inside two years, he would travel widely, remarry, leave New York City for a suburban setting, and construct a winter laboratory and second home in Florida.
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EINSTEIN, ALBERT. The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 14: The Berlin Years: Writings and Correspondence, April 1923–May 1925. Edited by Diana Kormos Buchwald, József Illy, Ze’ev Rosenkranz, Tilman Sauer, and Osik Moses. Princeton University Press. 2015. 1,208 pp. $140. ISBN: 9780691164106. The more than one thousand letters and several dozen writings included in this volume cover the years immediately before the final formulation of new quantum mechanics. The discovery of the Compton effect in 1923 vindicates Einstein’s light quantum hypothesis. Einstein attempts to reformulate a unified theory of the gravitational and electromagnetic fields. In early November 1923, Einstein flees overnight to the Netherlands in the wake of threats on his life and anti-Semitic rioting in Berlin. In 1925 he undertakes a seven-week tour of Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil and delivers lectures, meets with heads of state, and visits major institutions. During this period Einstein has a falling out with family members over how to invest part of the Nobel Prize money.
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ELIOT, T. S. The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 5: 1930–1931. Edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden. Yale University Press. 2015. 928 pp. $85. ISBN: 9780300211795. During this period the acclaimed American-born writer earnestly embraced his newly avowed Anglo-Catholic faith, a decision that earned him the antagonism of friends like Virginia Woolf and Herbert Read and caused further estrangement with his wife, Vivien. In 1930 Eliot composed the poems Ash-Wednesday and Marina and published Coriolan the following year. He also interacted with important literary figures as director of the British publishing house Faber and Faber and editor of The Criterion.
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ENGLAND. The Building Accounts of the Savoy Hospital, London, 1512–1520. Edited by Charlotte A. Stanford. Boydell and Brewer. 2015. 490 pp. $99. ISBN: 9781783270668. Founded by Henry VII, the Savoy hospital was a landmark of early Tudor London. Published for the first time here, the building-accounts record provides detailed evidence of the structure, as well as of the hundreds of craftsmen and laborers who toiled to complete it. Includes an introduction, notes, and a glossary of building terms.
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GIROUX, ROBERT. The Letters of Robert Giroux and Thomas Merton. Edited by Patrick Samway. University of Notre Dame Press. 2015. 408 pp. $29. ISBN: 9780268017866. From the time they first met as undergraduates at Columbia College in New York in the mid-1930s, the noted editor Robert Giroux and the Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton became friends. These letters capture their personal and professional relationship, extending from the time of the 1948 publication of Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain until a few months before Merton’s death in 1968. Giroux not only edited twenty-six of Merton’s books but served as an adviser to Merton as he dealt with unexpected problems with his religious superiors.
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GORE-BOOTH, EVA. The Political Writings of Eva Gore-Booth. Edited by Sonja Tiernan. Oxford University Press. 2015. 244 pp. $110. ISBN: 9780719088742. Gore-Booth was an important Irish political activist. This is the first time her writings have been published together. The volume includes an array of letters, political pamphlets, newspaper articles, and poetry relating to key aspects of Irish and British events of the early twentieth century.
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HEMINGWAY, ERNEST. The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Volume 3: 1926–1929. Edited by Rena Sanderson, Sandra Spanier, and Robert W. Trogdon. Cambridge University Press. 2015. 731 pp. $45. ISBN: 9780521897358. Volume 3 includes many previously unpublished letters from a period when Hemingway emerges from the literary Left Bank of Paris and moves into the American mainstream. In this period he publishes Torrents of Spring and The Sun Also Rises, and completes A Farewell to Arms. These letters reflect landmark events in his personal life, including the dissolution of his first marriage, his remarriage, the birth of his second son, and the suicide of his father.
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HOPKINS, GERARD MANLEY. The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Volume 3: Diaries, Journals, and Notebooks. Edited by Lesley Higgins. Oxford University Press. 2015. 480 pp. $150. ISBN: 9780199534005. Entries extend from September 1863, during Hopkins’s second term at Oxford, until February 1875, while studying theology as a Jesuit in Wales, and from February 1884 until July 1885, while Hopkins was living in Dublin as a classics professor at University College and fellow of the Royal University of Ireland.
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HUGHES, LANGSTON. Selected Letters of Langston Hughes. Edited by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel. Knopf. 2015. 480 pp. $35. ISBN: 9780375413797. This is the first comprehensive selection from the correspondence of Langston Hughes. Arranged by decade and linked by expert commentary, the volume guides us through Hughes’s journey in all its aspects: personal, political, practical, and literary. His letters range from those written to family members, friends, fellow artists, critics, and readers.
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JAMES, HENRY. The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1878–1880: Volume 2. Edited by Pierre A. Walker and Greg W. Zacharias. University of Nebraska Press. 2015. 296 pp. $95. ISBN: 9780803269859. This volume documents the full establishment of James as a professional writer and critic on both sides of the Atlantic, as he publishes the novel Confidence and the literary biography Hawthorne and begins work on Washington Square and The Portrait of a Lady. James also visits Paris, Florence, Rome, and Naples, begins his friendship with Constance Fenimore Woolson, and deepens his attachment to London and to his acquaintances there.
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JAY, JOHN. The Selected Papers of John Jay, Volume 4: 1785–1788. Edited by Elizabeth M. Nuxoll. University of Virginia Press. 2015. 872 pp. $95. ISBN: 9780813936369. Volume 4 opens in January 1785 as Jay assumes office as secretary for foreign affairs and explores his actions in this role, including his efforts to implement the peace treaty with Great Britain, facilitate American trade, and renegotiate an intrusive consular treaty with France. It documents his promotion of constitutional change as the weaknesses of the Confederation thwart diplomacy and his written defenses of the proposed Constitution. The volume closes as Jay takes a leave of absence from office to support ratification of the Constitution as delegate to the New York ratifying convention.
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JEFFERS, ROBINSON. The Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers, with Selected Letters of Una Jeffers: Volume 3, 1940–1962. Edited by James Karman. Stanford University Press. 2015. 1,024 pp. $95. ISBN: 9780804794671. This third and final volume of Jeffers’s correspondence spans the mid-twentieth century. In these decades Jeffers published four important books, experienced the rewards of being a successful dramatist, and endured the loss of his wife, Una.
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JEFFERSON, THOMAS. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 41: 11 July to 15 November 1803. Edited by Barbara B. Oberg, James P. McClure, Elaine Weber Pascu, Tom Downey, Martha J. King, and W. Bland Whitley. Princeton University Press. 2015. 856 pp. $125. ISBN: 9780691164205. The Louisiana Purchase dominates the months covered in this volume. The French government’s offer to transfer the Louisiana Territory to the United States brings Jefferson enthusiastic congratulations, but the reality of getting the agreement with France approved and implemented raises many weighty questions. With the widening of the country’s borders, Jefferson’s project to send an exploratory party westward seems even timelier.
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JEFFERSON, THOMAS. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, Volume 11: 19 January to 31 August 1817. Edited by J. Jefferson Looney, Robert F. Haggard, Julie L. Lautenschlager, Ellen C. Hickman, and Andrea R. Gray. Princeton University Press. 2015. 792 pp. $125. ISBN: 9780691164113. During this time Jefferson devotes much time and energy to founding Central College, the predecessor of the University of Virginia, and begins the process of raising funds and purchasing land. Jefferson also prepares a legal brief for his chancery suit against the directors of the Rivanna Company. After years of disagreements and failed negotiations, he composes and revises a lengthy legal statement of his claim to the property in dispute.
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JENNINGS, SIR IVOR. Constitution-Maker: Selected Writings of Sir Ivor Jennings. Edited by H. Kumarasingham. Cambridge University Press. 2015. 306 pp. $80. ISBN: 9781107091115. Sir Ivor Jennings (1903–65), Downing Professor of Law at the University of Cambridge, was one of the twentieth century’s most famous and significant constitutional scholars. Beyond his prestigious roles in Britain, Jennings was also influential internationally as an advisor on constitutional questions during the 1950s and 1960s. This volume brings together unpublished letters, memoranda, diaries, and confidential evaluations of constitutional issues, political elites, and critical events in Ceylon, Ethiopia, India, Malta, Malaysia, Nepal, New Zealand, Pakistan, Rhodesia, Singapore, South Africa, and Sudan.
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JONSON, BEN. Ben Jonson’s Walk to Scotland: An Annotated Edition of the ‘Foot Voyage.’ Edited by James Loxley, Anna Groundwater, and Julie Sanders. Cambridge University Press. 2014. 256 pp. $99. ISBN: 9781107003330. At the heart of this book is a previously unpublished account of Ben Jonson’s celebrated walk from London to Edinburgh in the summer of 1618. This unique firsthand narrative provides an insight into where Jonson went, whom he met, and what he did on the way. Includes annotation and a series of contextual essays on topics including evidence of provenance and authorship.
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MADISON, JAMES. The Papers of James Madison, Presidential Series, Volume 8: July 1814–18 February 1815. Edited by Angela Kreider, J. C. A. Stagg, Anne Mandeville Colony, Katharine E. Harbury, and Mary Parke Johnson. University of Virginia Press. 2015. 760 pp. $85. ISBN: 9780813936949. Volume 8 of the Presidential Series covers the final months of the War of 1812, as Madison awaited the outcome of peace negotiations at Ghent while defending the country against British invasion, warding off government bankruptcy, and preparing to meet armed resistance in New England. The volume closes with Madison receiving a copy of the Treaty of Ghent on February 14, 1815.
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MERTON, THOMAS. See GIROUX, ROBERT.
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METAPHYSICAL SOCIETY. The Papers of the Metaphysical Society, 1869–1880: A Critical Edition. Edited by Catherine Marshall, Bernard Lightman, and Richard England. Oxford University Press. 2015. 3 vols. 1,488 pp. $550. ISBN: 9780199643035. The Metaphysical Society was founded in 1869 as a private club which gathered together a latter-day clerisy. Building on the tradition of the Cambridge Apostles, they elected talented members from across the Victorian intellectual spectrum: bishops, a cardinal, philosophers, men of science, literary figures, and politicians. The papers they produced are key primary sources that shed new light on the ideas of their authors on the burning subjects of the day.
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MILTON, JOHN. The Complete Works of John Milton, Volume VI: Vernacular Regicide and Republican Writings. Edited by N. H. Keeble and Nicholas McDowell. Oxford University Press. 2014. 832 pp. $170. ISBN: 9780199218059. Fourth of a projected eleven-volume edition, this volume brings together Milton’s English writing in prose on the political issues that exercised him throughout his life: civil and religious liberty, republicanism and the constitution of a free commonwealth, the rights and duties of citizens, resistance of tyranny and the role of military force in securing national stability.
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NEWMAN, JOHN HENRY. John Henry Newman: A Portrait in Letters. Edited by Roderick Strange. Oxford University Press. 2015. 608 pp. $49.50. ISBN: 9780199604142. John Henry Newman was one of the most eminent of Victorians and an intellectual pioneer for an age of doubt and unsettlement. His teaching transformed the Victorian-era Church of England, yet many still want to know more of Newman’s personal life. Newman’s printed correspondence runs to thirty-two volumes, and this single volume offers a way through the maze, with letters that illustrate both the well-known and less familiar aspects of Newman’s personality.
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OLMSTED, FREDERICK LAW. Frederick Law Olmsted: Plans and Views of Public Parks. Edited by Charles E. Beveridge, Lauren Meier, and Irene Mills. Johns Hopkins University Press. 2015. 448 pp. $74.95. ISBN: 9781421410869. Illustrated with over 470 images, this book reveals Olmsted’s design concepts for more than seventy public park projects through a rich collection of sketches, studies, lithographs, paintings, historical photographs, and comprehensive descriptions.
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OLMSTED, FREDERICK LAW. The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, Volume 9: The Last Great Projects, 1890–1895. Edited by David Schuyler, Gregory Kaliss, and Jeffrey Schlossberg. Johns Hopkins University Press. 2015. 1,104 pp. $110. ISBN: 9781421416038. This final volume covers the last six years of Olmsted’s professional career. In this period he was involved in a number of major ongoing projects, including the Boston, Buffalo, and Rochester park systems, the campus plan for Stanford University, and numerous private estates. In the 1890s Olmsted and his partners were also appointed landscape architects for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and Olmsted worked on designs for the grounds of the Biltmore estate near Asheville, North Carolina.
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PUGIN, A. W. N. The Collected Letters of A. W. N. Pugin, Volume 5: 1851 to 1852. Edited by Margaret Belcher. Oxford University Press. 2015. 800 pp. $250. ISBN: 9780198713913. This is the final volume of correspondence of the leading architect in the Gothic Revival in England. Subjects in this volume include the international exhibition held in the Crystal Palace, Pugin’s letters and pamphlets in support of the Catholic Church, and Pugin’s design work in a broad range of mediums. The volume also includes some letters that have come to light too late for inclusion in their proper chronological places and some texts of doubtful authenticity.
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RICHARDSON, SAMUEL. The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson: Correspondence Primarily on Sir Charles Grandison (1750–1754). Edited by Betty A. Schellenberg. Cambridge University Press. 2015. 336 pp. $130. ISBN: 9780521832182. Richardson produced his final work of fiction, the epistolary novel The History of Sir Charles Grandison, in 1753. These letters from the period 1750 to 1754 discuss Richardson’s completion of the work, incorporate his responses to the Irish piracy of the novel, and his exchanges with anonymous fans, including those who attacked the novel’s tolerance for Catholicism and those who pleaded for a sequel.
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RICHARDSON, SAMUEL. The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson: Correspondence with Sarah Wescomb, Frances Grainger and Laetitia Pilkington. Edited by John A. Dussinger. Cambridge University Press. 2014. 450 pp. $130. ISBN: 9780521830348. This volume contains Richardson’s correspondence with three very different young women. Sarah Wescomb and Frances Grainger, two young, unmarried correspondents, sought paternal advice from the middle-aged author and in the process contested stances taken in his novels. Laetitia Pilkington, an accused adulteress, offers poignant glimpses into an impoverished woman’s struggles to survive in Grub Street.
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ROSSETTI, DANTE GABRIEL. The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Volume 10: Index, Undated Letters and Bibliography. Edited by William E. Fredeman. Boydell and Brewer. 2015. 395 pp. $220. ISBN: 9781843843955. Volume 10 is the first-ever analytical and biographical index to all Rossetti’s letters from 1835 to 1852. It augments partial indexes in previous volumes, giving subject entries and mini-précis descriptions of annotation.
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RUSSELL, BERTRAND. The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, Volume 5: Toward Principia Mathematica, 1905–08. Edited by Gregory H. Moore. Routledge. 2014. 1,072 pp. $355. ISBN: 9780415820981. This volume finds Russell focused on writing Principia Mathematica from 1905 to 1908. Eight previously unpublished papers shed light on his different versions of a substitutional theory of logic, with its elimination of classes and relations. A recurring issue for him was whether a type hierarchy had to be part of a substitutional theory. In mid-1907 he began writing up the final version of Principia, now using a ramified theory of types, and eleven unpublished drafts from 1907 to 1908 deal with this. Numerous letters show his thoughts on the process.
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SANTA FE TRAIL. Over the Santa Fe Trail to Mexico: The Travel Diaries and Autobiography of Dr. Rowland Willard. Edited by Joy L. Poole. Arthur H. Clark Company. 2015. 320 pp. $29.95. ISBN: 9780870624391. One of the first Anglo-Americans to record his travels to New Mexico, Dr. Rowland Willard (1794–1884) journeyed west on the Santa Fe Trail in 1825 and then down the Camino Real into Mexico, taking notes along the way. This edition of the young physician’s travel diaries and subsequent autobiography is a rich historical source on the two trails and the practice of medicine in the 1820s.
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SANTAYANA, GEORGE. The Works of George Santayana, Volume 7, Book 4. The Life of Reason or the Phases of Human Progress: Reason in Art. Edited by Marianne S. Wokeck and Martin A. Coleman. MIT Press. 2015. 336 pp. $75. ISBN: 9780262029605. In this fourth book of The Life of Reason, Santayana writes that art is perfectly native to human endeavor; it is the paradigm of all productive activity. He argues that the conduct of the life of reason is the supreme art.
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SKINNER FAMILY. The Belles of Williamsburg: The Courtship Correspondence of Eliza Fisk Harwood and Tristrim Lowther Skinner, 1839–1849. Edited by Mary Maillard. Amazon Digital Services. 2015. 497 pp. $35. ASIN: B00QY2GO3A. This correspondence between Eliza Fisk Harwood of Virginia and Tristrim Lowther Skinner of Edenton, North Carolina, charts Eliza’s education, coming of age, courtships, and engagement, and Tristrim’s practical education in the management of the Skinner family’s farms. At the age of twenty-one, Eliza married Trim and left her childhood home to help take charge of a Carolina plantation.
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SMITH, JOSEPH. The Joseph Smith Papers. Journals, Volume 3: May 1843–June 1844. Edited by Andrew H. Hedges, Alex D. Smith, and Brent M. Rogers. Church Historian’s Press. 2015. 680 pp. $57.95. ISBN: 9781629721477. This third and final volume of the Journals series features journal entries from the last year of Joseph Smith’s life. Topics include Smith’s teaching on humanity’s potential to become like God, the establishment of the Council of Fifty, Smith’s candidacy for United States president, and the escalating conflict against Smith and the church. Appendixes provide detailed, contemporary accounts from Willard Richards and William Clayton of the murder of Smith and his brother Hyrum.
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SMITH, JOSEPH. The Joseph Smith Papers. Revelations and Translations, Volume 3, Part 1: Printer’s Manuscript of the Book of Mormon, 1 Nephi 1–Alma 35. Edited by Royal Skousen and Robin Scott Jensen. Church Historian’s Press. 2015. 576 pp. $89.99. ISBN: 9781629720609. Volume 3, Part 2: Printer’s Manuscript of the Book of Mormon, Alma 36–Moroni 10. Edited by Royal Skousen and Robin Scott Jensen. Church Historian’s Press. 2015. 447 pp. $89.99. ISBN: 9781629720616. This work presents the most complete early text of the Book of Mormon: the printer’s manuscript. Each page of the manuscript is presented as a high-resolution photograph and accompanied by a color-coded transcript that shows which scribe made each change to the manuscript. Part 1 contains introductory and explanatory materials, the copyright and preface pages of the printer’s manuscript, and the text of the Book of Mormon from 1 Nephi through Alma 35. Part 2 contains the text of the Book of Mormon from Alma 36 through Moroni, statements of Book of Mormon witnesses, and reference material including a chronology, a biographical register, and a table documenting how the printer’s manuscript was used in printing the 1830 and 1837 editions of the Book of Mormon.
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SOUTH AMERICA. The Improbable Conquest: Sixteenth-Century Letters from the Río de la Plata. Edited by Pablo García Loaeza and Victoria L. Garrett. Penn State University Press. 2015. 144 pp. $24.95. ISBN: 9780271065489. This volume offers translations of a series of little-known letters from the chaotic Spanish conquest of the Río de la Plata region. These letters were written by a wide variety of individuals, including clergy, military officers, and the region’s first governor, Pedro de Mendoza. There is also an exceptional contribution from Isabel de Guevara, one of the few women involved in the conquest to have recorded her experiences. Includes an introduction, timeline, and a glossary of difficult and archaic Spanish terms.
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STEPHEN, JAMES FITZJAMES. Selected Writings of James Fitzjames Stephen: On Society, Religion, and Government. Edited by Thomas E. Schneider. Oxford University Press. 2015. 450 pp. $180. ISBN: 9780199585717. Stephen (1829–1894) is remembered as a judge and legal historian. He is less well remembered for his journalism, though it earned him a reputation among his contemporaries as one of the most trenchant writers on topics ranging across the social, religious, political, moral, and philosophical questions debated in his time. Only a small proportion of these writings were collected during his lifetime, and very little has been republished since his death. The essays in this volume are drawn mostly from Stephen’s unsigned contributions to the Saturday Review, with additions, both signed and unsigned, from other periodicals, extending from the 1850s to the 1880s.
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STUART, ELIZABETH, QUEEN OF BOHEMIA. The Correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia, Volume I: 1603–1631. Edited by Nadine Akkerman. Oxford University Press. 2015. 840 pp. $250. ISBN: 9780199551071. First chronological volume of the first complete edition of the letters of Elizabeth Stuart (1596–1662), Electress Palatine of the Rhine and Queen of Bohemia, daughter of King James I of England and Anna of Denmark. Includes keys to several cipher codes, translations of all letters in French, and annotation.
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THURMAN, HOWARD WASHINGTON. The Papers of Howard Washington Thurman, Volume 3: The Bold Adventure, September 1943–May 1949. Edited by Walter Earl Fluker. University of South Carolina Press. 2015. 456 pp. $59.95. ISBN: 9781611175417. Volume 3 documents Thurman’s founding and leadership of the Fellowship Church for All Peoples in San Francisco, California: the nation’s first major interracial, interfaith church. The war years showed Thurman new possibilities and strains in American culture. Amid the uncertainty of this period, Thurman embarked on his great interfaith experiment as pastor to a small group of people who were primarily middle class, with at least as many white as black people, in a city that in 1940s America was far from the mainstream of black life. His letters, essays, and sermons show Thurman struggling to define and maintain the interracial character and practice of Fellowship Church, building its programs and membership while constantly wrestling with financial and location problems and preserving its separation from other organizations, most notably the Communist Party and its adult education program, the California Labor School.
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TWAIN, MARK. Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 3: The Complete and Authoritative Edition. Edited by Benjamin Griffin, Harriet E. Smith, Victor Fischer, Michael Barry Frank, Amanda Gagel, Sharon K. Goetz, Leslie Diane Myrick, and Christopher M. Ohge. University of California Press. 2015. 792 pp. $45. ISBN: 9780520279940. Final volume of the complete and critically reconstructed autobiography. Created from March 1907 to December 1909, these dictations present Mark Twain at the end of his life: receiving an honorary degree from Oxford University; railing against Theodore Roosevelt; founding numerous clubs; incredulous at an exhibition of the Holy Grail; credulous about the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays; relaxing in Bermuda; and observing new technologies. Twain also commemorates his daughter Jean, who died in 1909. Includes the previously unpublished “Ashcroft-Lyon Manuscript,” Twain’s indictment of his “putrescent pair” of secretaries.
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UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, OXFORD. Early Records of University College, Oxford. Edited by R. H. Darwall-Smith. Boydell and Brewer. 2015. 440 pp. $60. ISBN: 9780904107272. University College claims to be the oldest college in Oxford, tracing its origins to an endowment of 1249. This book brings together the great majority of pre-1550 documents, other than its account rolls, from the college’s archives, providing a sourcebook for its early history. With notes and translations.
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USSR. The Maisky Diaries: Red Ambassador to the Court of St James’s, 1932–1943. Edited by Gabriel Gorodetsky. Yale University Press. 2015. 448 pp. $40. ISBN: 9780300180671. The terror and purges of Stalin’s Russia in the 1930s discouraged Soviet officials from leaving documentary records, let alone keeping personal diaries. A remarkable exception is the unique diary assiduously kept by Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to London between 1932 and 1943. This selection from Maisky’s diary, never before published in English, grippingly documents Britain’s drift to war during the 1930s, appeasement in the Munich era, negotiations leading to the signature of the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact, Churchill’s rise to power, the German invasion of Russia, and the intense debate over the opening of the second front.
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WASHINGTON, GEORGE. The Papers of George Washington, Presidential Series, Volume 18: 1 April–30 September 1795. Edited by Carol S. Ebel. University of Virginia Press. 2015. 896 pp. $95. ISBN: 9780813936451. International issues occupying Washington at this time include peace agreements with Morocco and Algiers, the fall of the Netherlands to France, and the ratification of the 1794 Treaty of Amity, Commerce, and Navigation with Great Britain. Domestically, Washington had to deal with several high-level governmental resignations and oversaw instructions to General Anthony Wayne that culminated in the Treaty of Greenville with the northwest Indians and agreed to the negotiation of a new treaty between Georgia and the Creek Indians. While away from Mount Vernon, he dispatched meticulous letters to his farm manager.
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WASHINGTON, GEORGE. The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, Volume 23: 22 October–31 December 1779. Edited by William M. Ferraro. University of Virginia Press. 2015. 904 pp. $95. ISBN: 9780813936956. As October 1779 became November, Washington curtailed preparations for a combined Franco-American assault against the British forces in New York City before the end of the year, and instead concentrated on settling his army for winter and arranging for his wife, Martha, to join him at winter camp at Morristown.
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WHITMAN, WALT. Walt Whitman’s Selected Journalism. Edited by Douglas A. Noverr and Jason Stacy. University of Iowa Press. 2015. 320 pp. $29.95. ISBN: 9781609383152. Long before he was a celebrated poet, Walt Whitman was a working journalist. By the time he published the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855, Whitman had edited three newspapers and published thousands of reviews, editorials, and human-interest stories in newspapers in and around New York City. Yet for decades, much of his journalism has been difficult to access or even find. This volume thematically and chronologically organizes a compelling selection of Whitman’s journalism from the late 1830s to the Civil War.
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WORLD WAR II. From Wright Field, Ohio, to Hokkaido, Japan: General Curtis E. LeMay’s Letters to His Wife Helen, 1941–1945. Edited by Benjamin Paul Hegi and Alfred F. Hurley. University of North Texas Press. 2015. 455 pp. $34.95. ISBN: 9781680400014. General LeMay’s activities in World War II are well documented, but his personal history is less thoroughly recorded. Throughout the war he wrote hundreds of letters to his wife, Helen, and daughter, Jane. They are published for the first time in this volume, with narrative essays buttressed by both official and unofficial sources and supplemented with extensive footnotes.
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YOUNG, BRIGHAM. The Prophet and the Reformer: The Letters of Brigham Young and Thomas L. Kane. Edited by Matthew J. Grow and Ronald W. Walker. Oxford University Press. 2015. 568 pp. $39.95. ISBN: 9780195397734. Brigham Young first met Thomas L. Kane on the plains of western Iowa in 1846. Young came to rely on Kane, twenty-one years his junior, as his most trusted outside adviser, making Kane the most important non-Mormon in the history of the Mormon church. In return, no one influenced the direction of Kane’s life more than Young. The letters exchanged by the two offer crucial insights into Young’s personal life and views as well as his actions as a political and religious leader.