Do My Heart Good: My Odyssey Through Country Music, Medicine, and History

Author: Cleve Francis
Co-published with Country Music Foundation Press

Born to a struggling family in Jim Crow–era Louisiana, Cleve Francis followed his love for music and passion for science into parallel careers as a singer-songwriter and cardiologist. One of the few Black artists to record for a major country music label, Francis had four Billboard hits as a Capitol Nashville/Liberty Records artist in the 1990s.

Kitchen Table History: Contending with My Family’s Radical Past

Author: Daniel Czitrom

Daniel Czitrom learned early on that radical politics was a family affair that stretched across generations and was shared around the kitchen table. In this historical memoir, Czitrom explores how memories and political beliefs shaped his life and his identity as a historian.

The Hours Are Long, But the Pay Is Low: A Curious Life in Independent Music

Author: Rob Miller

Rob Miller arrived in Chicago wanting to escape the music industry. In short order, he co-founded a trailblazing record label revered for its artist-first approach and punk take on country, roots, and so much else. Miller’s gonzo memoir follows a music fan’s odyssey through a singular account of Bloodshot Records, the Chicago scene, and thirty years as part of a community sustaining independent artists and businesses.

Mormon Studies Review

Review Article by Daniel K. Williams of Romney: A Reckoning by McKay Coppins

In this review article, Williams discusses Coppins’ biography of Mitt Romney, the first member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saint to receive a presidential nomination from a major political party in the U.S. Coppins is also LDS and the book not only engages with Romney’s political career, but also matters of faith.

Sallie Martin, Mother of Gospel Music

Author: Kay Norton

Sallie Martin combined fame as a performer with a far-sighted business acumen that brought Black gospel music to a national audience and laid the foundation for the industry that followed. Kay Norton’s biography follows Martin’s parallel careers from her early plans to grow the genre through her celebrity in the 1960s–1970s and eventful retirement.

For the Love of Labor: The Life of Pauline Newman

Author: Cathryn J. Prince

From her start as one of the youngest activists in US history, Pauline Newman helped shape the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) into a dominant force in industrial America. Cathryn J. Prince tells the story of a self-educated Jewish immigrant who dedicated herself to a legion of causes and lifelong battles against sexism and classism.

Sol Butler: An Olympian’s Odyssey through Jim Crow America

Author: Brian Hallstoos

A superstar in both football and track and field, Sol Butler pioneered the parlaying of sports fame into business prosperity. Brian Hallstoos tells the story of a Black athlete’s canny use of mainstream middle-class values and relationships with white society to transcend the athletic, economic, and social barriers imposed by white supremacy.

The Polish Review

“Introducing Jadwiga Maurer’s Biography as Writer and Scholar” by Beata Dorosz and Gerard T. Kapolka

The goal of this article is to present an outline biography of the writer who spent most of her adult life on university campuses in the US and whose prose works, highly regarded in émigré literary circles, had not, for a variety of questionable reasons, achieved the status of mainstream authors of the postwar Polish diaspora.

Richard Lyman Bushman: A Mormon Ambassador

Author: J.B. Haws

As a historian, theologian, and mentor, Richard Lyman Bushman greatly influenced the shaping of how those inside and outside of the Church perceived Latter-day Saint history. J.B. Haws’s examination of Bushman’s life and thought tells the story of a scholar with a foot in both the Church and secular society—and his efforts to bridge their two very different worldviews.

Jens Jensen: Nature’s Artist

Author: William H. Tishler

Celebrated as one of the great landscape architects of his era, Jens Jensen drew on his love of nature to transform Illinois and the Midwest. Chicago’s Columbus Park and the Lincoln Memorial Garden in Springfield, Illinois, remain part of his vast living legacy while Jensen’s conservation work influenced the establishment of national parks and natural spaces.

Buzz Busby: Father of Washington, DC, Bluegrass

Author: Kip Lornell and Tom Mindte

Buzz Busby’s move to Washington, D.C., in 1951 helped launch bluegrass in the nation’s capital while the intensity of his mandolin playing drew raves for its unrelenting pace and innovative style. His high lonesome singing rivaled that of Bill Monroe. Kip Lornell and Tom Mindte draw on interviews and some fifty hours of Busby speaking about his life to tell the story of a largely forgotten bluegrass virtuoso.

Illinois Classical Studies

“Plutarch’s Presentation of Philopoemen as the ‘Last of the Greeks’: A Homage to Fading Greekness” by Nasser B. Ayash

Philopoemen is chronologically the last Greek whose biography is written by philosopher and biographer Plutarch. This paper examines the tools with which this distinction is rendered the main thematic of the Life, intertwined with a fatalistic tone conveying a reminiscence of past glories relived for one last time through the agency of Philopoemen.

Daniel Burnham and Louis Sullivan: Personal Histories of Two Icons of American Architecture

Author: Trygve Thoreson

Peers, foils, colleagues, and rivals—Daniel Burnham and Louis Sullivan’s impact on each other still expresses itself in architectural masterworks that anchor Chicago’s cityscape. Trygve Thoreson’s parallel biography places their lives and careers within a panoramic history of the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Comrade Rhys: The Life and Times of Albert Rhys Williams

Author: William Benton Whisenhunt

Albert Rhys Williams used his cover as a journalist to, as one observer put it, go “through the Bolshevik Revolution in a dress suit.” Inspired by brief friendships with Lenin and John Reed, Williams spent the next forty-five years defending socialism and the Soviet Union.

Johann Most: Life of a Radical

Author: Tom Goyens

Known best for articulating the propaganda of the deed, Johann Most was and still is caricatured as a radical fanatic. Tom Goyens’ in-depth biography rediscovers the complexities that animated the German American agitator and made him a pivotal figure in the development of anarchism in the US and socialism in Germany.