An Army in Skirts:  The World War II Letters of Frances DeBra

Frances Debra Brown

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.

$27.95, cloth, ISBN 978-0-87195-264-6, 250 pp, 7 x 8 1/2, b/w illustrations and sketches, index, May 2008.

Indianapolis

The Bass Photo Company Collection

By Susan Sutton

This book 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 the 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 WWI soldiers, the Indianapolis Home Show, transportation and architecture.

Cloth, ISBN 978-0-87195-261-5

the ripest moments:  a southern Indiana childhood

Norbert Krapf

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 prose 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.”

Cloth, ISBN 978-0-87195-262-2.  160pp., 5 x 7, b/w illustrations, April 2008

Spinning Through Clouds: Tales from an Early Hoosier Aviator

Max E. Knight

Aviation pioneers donned leather helmets and fur-lined goggles, climbed into open cockpits, and flew by their feelings rather than by instruments. They looped, spun, hedge hopped, and landed in farm pastures.

Max Knight began flying in 1936 at the age of ten. In his book, Spinning Through Clouds: Tales from an Early Hoosier Aviator, Knight relates the flying adventures he and others enjoyed in and around his father’s airport near Lynn, Indiana. Suitable for young adult and adult readers, the book also explores stories of early state and national aviation history with characters such as Roscoe Turner and Amelia Earhart.

Paper, ISBN 978-0-87195-256-1, 224 pps., 8x8, b/w illustrations, glossary, bibliography, index, Jan. 2008

GOING OVER ALL THE HURDLES

A LIFE OF OATESS ARCHEY

John A. Beineke

"To hurdle  means to go over something, but it also can mean to go forward or make progress.  All people are confronted with barriers in their lives.  Some choose to go around those barriers, while others have no choice but to go over them.  Oatess Archey made the choice in his life to go over the hurdles-all the hurdles."  -John A. Beineke

Cloth.  ISBN 978-0-87195-260-8

Fighting for Equality:
A Life of May Wright Sewall

Ray E. Boomhower

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, women’s rights pioneer and peace activist May Wright Sewall. This young readers biography showcases Sewall’s important contributions to the history of Indianapolis, Indiana, the United States and the world. 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. She served as a valuable ally to such national suffrage leaders as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and gave the women’s movement a worldwide focus through her pioneering involvement with the American National Council of Women and the International Council of Women.

cloth, ISBN 978-0-87195-253-0 160 pp., 7¼x8¾, b/w illustrations, index, Oct. 2007

The Scenic Route:
Stories from the Heartland

Edited by Ellen Munds and Beth Millett

With the publication of The Scenic Route: Stories from the Heartland, the Indiana Historical Society Press celebrates the 20th anniversary of Storytelling Arts of Indiana, which promotes the art and use of storytelling in daily life though its annual festival, concerts, workshops, programs and other events. Storytelling is about gathering with friends, 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 20 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 Scenic Route offers us a dozen stories to enjoy and help us to remember.

paper, ISBN 978-0-87195-259-2  128 pp., 7¼x8¾

A Temporary Sort of Peace:

A Memoir of Vietnam

Jim McGarrah

In his memoir Jim McGarrah, today a poet and writer from southern

Indiana, examines in detail his peacetime life growing up in

Princeton, 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.”

cloth, ISBN 978-0-87195-258-5

251 pp., 6x9, b/w illustrations, Sept. 2007

WEIRD INDIANA

Your Travel Guide to Indiana's Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets

by Mark Marimen, James A. Willis and Troy Taylor

Meredith Nicholson: A Writing Life

Ralph D. Gray

In this first-ever biography of the author and diplomat, 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.”

Nationally respected for its publication program, the IHS Press has

always excelled particularly in one area: telling the life and times

of those who have had an impact on the Hoosier State. The Press

continues this tradition with its Indiana Biography Series, which pairs

writers with Indiana subjects of note. Future volumes in the series will

examine such personalities as Red Skelton, Thomas Marshall, Susan

Wallace and Richard Lieber.

cloth, ISBN 978-0-87195-257-8

281 pp., 5¼x7¾, b/w illustrations, Aug. 2007

Federal Justice in Indiana: The History of the

United States District Court for the

Southern District of Indiana

George W. Geib and Donald B. Kite Sr.

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. 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.

cloth, ISBN 0-87195-202-5; 978-0-87195-202-8

6" x 9", b&w images, index, April 2007

George W. Geib has taught for many years at Butler University in Indianapolis. He has authored

and coauthored a variety of books and articles on Hoosier topics, and has put his interests to work in the public sphere as a member of the Indianapolis Historic Preservation Commission.

Donald B. Kite Sr. is a partner with the Indianapolis law firm of Schultz & Pogue, LLP. Prior to his

entering the private practice of law, he served as a judicial law clerk to three federal judges in the Southern District of Indiana.

A Belief in Providence: A Life of Saint Theodora Guérin

JULIE YOUNG

Long before women marched for equal rights and Title IX sought to change the way everyone looked at college and high school athletics; before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and Eleanor Roosevelt championed the plight of the common man; before Madam C. J. Walker became an entrepreneur and Susan B. Anthony campaigned for woman suffrage, there was Mother Theodore Guérin, a pioneer on the Indiana frontier and the founder of the Sisters of Providence at Saint Mary-of-the-Woods.

A Belief in Providence: A Life of Saint Theodora Guérin, a youth biography, explores the life of the woman who would become Indiana’s first saint. Born Ann-Thérèse Guérin in France, she

joined the Sisters of Providence and in 1840 came to the United States to found an establishment near Terre Haute, Indiana. Despite poor health, primitive frontier conditions, and dealings with a contentious archbishop, who at one point locked her in a room in the rectory, she founded Saint Mary-ofthe-Woods College, the oldest Catholic women’s liberal arts college in the United States, and opened schools in Jasper, Madison, and Vincennes, often facing suspicion and hostility from the local population. The book also examines the process leading to Guérin’s canonization on October 15, 2006.

cloth, ISBN 978-0-87195-255-4

200 pp., 7" x 8.5", index, Mar. 2007

Julie 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. Ms. Young has also worked for the Associated Press, the Herald Weekly newspaper and Scecina Memorial High School in Indianapolis

Finding Indiana Ancestors: A Guide to Historical Research

EDITED BY M. TERESA BAER AND GENEIL BREEZE

Genealogy is history on the most personal level, a quest to discover and share stories about one’s forebears. First-time researchers wonder where to find information and how to compile it. These are the same questions asked by historical scholars seeking to tell community and national stories. Finding Indiana Ancestors: A Guide to Historical Research serves both audiences by  providing an overview of research in general while focusing on Indiana-specific sources. The Indiana Historical Society began compiling this comprehensive guide in 2000, contracting  archivists, librarians, journalists, genealogists, and historians in the state’s major historical and genealogical organizations to write about their areas of expertise. The resulting essays

appeared first in the Society’s family history journal, The Hoosier Genealogist (upgraded recently to THG:CONNECTIONS). In this book, they come together to form a complete guide for historical research in Indiana. The book is divided into six parts. Parts 1–3 focus on getting started, working with family stories and pictures, documenting sources in libraries and archives, and understanding different record groups. Parts 4 and 5 explain researching with maps and researching different ethnic groups. Part 6 discusses manuscript and artifact research, nineteenth-century medicinal and industrial history, and data verification. A sample family group sheet and a sample pedigree chart appear in appendixes. Six model chapters show how to turn data into full-fledged stories. Finding Indiana Ancestors: A Guide to Historical Research will help

students, scholars, and family history researchers delve deeply into historical sources. Readers will learn where to go for the next piece of information, how to interpret the data, and how to incorporate each new fact into the stories of our ancestors—the people of Indiana.

paper, ISBN 978-0-87195-203-5

304 pp., 8.5" x 11", March 2007

The Indiana Book of Trivia

Fred D. Cavinder

Trivia and the pursuit of the trivial are embedded in American culture. Who hasn’t dreamed of winning the million-dollar prize on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, decimating opponents in a rousing game of Trivial Pursuit, or zinging tidbits into conversational breaks at social gatherings? Although knowledge of Indiana trivia will not guarantee an appearance on national television, it can be a conversational icebreaker and just plain fun. Compiled by former Indiana newspaper reporter and author Fred D. Cavinder, this book resists repeating commonly known Hoosier trivia such as Cole Porter was from Indiana or that Don Larsen pitched the only perfect game in World Series history, in favor of listing odder, less historic facts about the Hoosier State and its inhabitants. Considering that there are many books of trivia and a few of them devoted to Indiana, the effort has been made to provide some entertainment and present the really trivial Indiana trivia. As Cavinder notes, “we’re not doing War and Peace here, just a pleasant diversion.”

paper, ISBN 978-0-87195-252-3

224 pp., 6" x 9", March 2007

 Abraham Lincoln Portrayed in the Collections of the Indiana Historical Society

Edited and with an Introduction by Harold Holzer
Catalog of the Collections Compiled by Emily Castle and Barbara Quigley

In 2003 the Indiana Historical Society, with a grant from the Lilly Endowment Inc.,  acquired some eight hundred items from the Jack L. Smith Graphics Collection, the entire Daniel R. Weinberg Lincoln Conspirators Collection, and the one-of-a-kind original collodion wet-plate negative of Alexander Gardner’s iconic photograph of Lincoln taken only days before the 1863 Gettysburg Address.  These collections were added to the some three hundred major pieces of Lincolniana, including a handwritten page from the future president’s childhood sum book, which the Society already owned.  

The Smith Collection includes contemporary and later images of Lincoln with his family, generals, and cabinet members.  Also included are political cartoons, illustrated sheet music, and book and newspaper illustrations of the period.  The Weinberg Collection consists of photographs, manuscripts, books, pamphlets, and newspapers relating to the trial and execution or imprisonment of the Lincoln assassination conspirators.

Edited and with an introduction by Harold Holzer, Abraham Lincoln Portrayed contains guides to these collections and approximately 150 images, many in color.

Harold Holzer, co-chairman of the U.S. Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, is a leading authority on Abraham Lincoln and the political culture of the Civil War era.  He has authored, co-authored, or edited twenty-six books, including The Lincoln Image, Lincoln Seen and Heard, Dear Mr. Lincoln, The Lincoln Mailbag, and Lincoln at Cooper Union, which won a 2005 Lincoln Prize. Among his other honors are three Barondess Awards from New York’s Civil War Round Table, three achievement awards from the Lincoln Group of New York, a lifetime achievement award from the Lincoln Group of Washington, and the first Manuscript Society award.

A frequent guest on television, he has appeared on C-SPAN, PBS, and the History Channel, and has curated several Lincoln exhibitions, lectured widely, and written some three hundred articles for popular magazines and scholarly journals.  He also serves as vice chairman of the Lincoln Forum and on advisory boards of several history museums, including the new U.S.S. Monitor Center.
 Holzer is senior vice president for External Affairs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  He lives in Rye, New York, with his wife Edith.  They are the parents of two grown daughters.

ISBN 0-87195-201-7; 978-0-87195-201-1