June Hall McCash's previous works, The Jekyll Island Club and The Jekyll Island Cottage Colony, have made her one of the foremost authorities on Georgia's famed barrier island. In Jekyll Island's Early Years: From Prehistory through Reconstruction (University of Georgia Press, 2005), McCash 63G 67PhD turns her attention to Jekyll's earliest identifiable inhabitants, the Timucua, a flourishing group of Native Americans who became extinct within a hundred years after their first contact with Europeans. In stories of Jekyll and its residents, the drama of a young nation plays out in microcosm. The American Revolution, the War of 1812, the slavery era, and the Civil War brought change to the island, as did hurricanes and cotton farming. McCash brings insight and detail to a largely untold chapter of Jekyll's past and breathes life into a small part of Georgia that looms large in the state's history.

Weary of the South Beach diet? Go north, carb counters! Sol Jacobs 88C 92M and Jane Conway Caspe provide a geographical counterpoint to the tropical diet fad in The Nantucket Diet (Random House/Ballantine Books, 2005), “an innovative and individualized weight loss program based on the reader's specific metabolic needs... steeped in Nantucket and New England culinary culture.” An Atlanta native, Jacobs practices endocrinology in the greater Boston area, where he is a fellow of the American College of Endocrinology and a faculty member at Tufts University School of Medicine. His book features “personalized methods, meal planning and delicious recipes; a simple and clear approach to the science of weight gain, fad diets, carbs, and health issues, including those related specifically to diabetics; and an evidence-based set of weight loss recommendations aligned with national dietary guidelines.”

Elizabeth Cogswell Baskin 83C takes readers behind the scenes of companies owned by women in her book, How to Run Your Business Like a Girl: Successful Strategies from Entrepreneurial Women Who Made It Happen (Adams Media, 2005). This insider’s tour provides first-hand accounts of how entrepreneurs in a variety of industries from retail and manufacturing to public relations and consulting dealt with the stages of the business cycle, from startup to staffing to the possibility of selling out, and shows women how they can have a great business and a great life at the same time. Baskin is the president/creative director of Tribe, an Atlanta-based ad agency working with national consumer brands such as Porsche and Whole Foods Market.

Women's studies unites with Appalachian studies in Beyond Hill and Hollow: Original Readings in Appalachian Women's Studies (University of Ohio Press, 2005), edited by Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt 99PhD. The first book to focus exclusively on studies of Appalachia's women, Beyond Hill and Hollow features the work of historians, linguists, sociologists, performance artists, literary critics, and theater scholars. The collection examines the hidden lives of urban Appalachian women in the 1800s, rural women in company towns, and an African American Appalachian poet from the 1900s. Engelhardt, assistant professor of American Studies and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, also is the author of The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature (University of Ohio Press, 2003).

Years before Hitler unleashed the “Final Solution” to annihilate European Jews, he began a lesser-known campaign to eradicate the mentally ill, which facilitated the gassing and lethal injection of as many as 270,000 people and set a precedent for the mass murder of civilians.In Confronting the “Good Death” (University Press of Colorado, 2005), Michael S. Bryant 89L 89T, an assistant professor of history and criminal justice at the University of Toledo, analyzes the U.S. government's and the West German judiciary's attempt to punish the euthanasia killers after the war. “Bryant's book offers a unique series of insights into the post-WWII redefinition of euthanasia, after ‘mercy killing’ had served the Nazis as a crucial prelude to the gassings of Jews and other groups,” writes Janet Ward, co-author of German Studies in the Post-Holocaust Age.

In Nation and Citizen in the Domincan Republic, 1880-1916 (University of South Carolina Press, 2005), Teresita Martínez-Vergne 77C combines intellectual and social history to explore the processes by which people in the Dominican Republic began to hammer out a sense of purpose and a common modern national identity at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Martínez-Vergne, a professor of history at Macalester College, shows just how difficult it was to reconcile the realities of people of color, women, and the working poor with elite notions of citizenship, entitlement, and identity. She concludes that the urban setting, rather than defusing the impact of race, class, and gender within a collective sense of belonging, as intellectuals had envisioned, instead contributed to keeping these distinctions intact, thus limiting what could be considered Dominican.

In 1830, a revolution overturned one French monarchy, only to replace it with another. Charles Philippon's caricature of the new monarch, Louis-Philippe, as a pear achieved extraordinary popularity. Drawn on walls from one end of France to another, the pear caricature became a national obsession. Sandy Petrey 62C explores the popularity of the pear caricature in his scholarly work, In the Court of the Pear King: French Culture and the Rise of Realism, and goes on to focus on Balzac, Stendhal, and Sand and their concern with society's power to define and transform the identity of its members during a remarkable series of cultural and political milestones in France. “With imagination and panache, Sandy Petrey teases out subtle connections between the literature of nineteenth-century French realism and the politics of the July Monarchy,” writes Emily Apter of New York University. Petrey is Professor of Comparative Literature at Stony Brook University. He is the author of Realism and Revolution: Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, and the Performances of History and Speech Acts and Literary Theory.