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Join UMass Press for a September 14 book talk from Scott Bane, author of A Union Like Ours: The Love Story of F. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney, out now from the Bright Leaf imprint.

Our Kind of Historian—the first in-depth look at Lerone Bennett Jr.’s life—moves from his childhood experiences in Jim Crow Mississippi and his time at Morehouse College to his participation in a dizzying range of Black intellectual and activist endeavors while he was at the helm of Ebony magazine from the 1950s until his final years. Drawing on previously inaccessible archival collections, as well as interviews with close relatives, colleagues, and confidantes, West proves that Bennett left an indelible mark on twentieth-century American history and culture.

Examining a time of transition and decline in Maine’s forest economy, Haywire traces pathways for understanding the challenges that have faced Maine’s logging community and, by extension, the state’s forestry sector, from the postwar period through today. Drawing on his own experience with the region’s forest products industry, interviews with Maine loggers, media coverage, and court documents, Egan follows the troubled recent history of the industry and its battle for survival.

Tracing the upsurge in abortion during the first decades of the nineteenth century, Certain Concealments shows how the practice became increasingly visible in the popular culture of the era, appearing openly in advertisements, newspaper reports, and popular fiction.

Chronicling the untold stories of marginalized veterans in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Service Denied uncovers the generational divides, cultural stigmas, and discriminatory policies that have affected veterans during and after their military service.