City and Campus tells the rich history of a Midwest industrial town and its two academic institutions through the buildings that helped bring these places to life. John W. Stamper paints a narrative portrait of South Bend and the campuses of the University of Notre Dame and Saint Mary’s College from their founding and earliest settlement in the 1830s through the boom of the Roaring Twenties. Industrialist giants such as the Studebaker Brothers Manufacturing Company and Oliver Chilled Plow Works invested their wealth into creating some of the city’s most important and historically significant buildings. Famous architects, including Frank Lloyd Wright, brought the latest trends in architecture to the heart of South Bend. Stamper also illuminates how Notre Dame’s founder and long-time president Father Edward Sorin, C.S.C., recruited other successful architects to craft in stone the foundations of the university and the college at the same time as he built the scholarship. City and Campus provides an engaging and definitive history of how this urban and academic environment emerged on the shores of the St. Joseph River.

During the 1930s in the United States, the Works Progress Administration developed the Federal Writers’ Project to support writers and artists while making a national effort to document the country’s shared history and culture. The American Guide series consists of individual guides to each of the states. Little-known authors—many of whom would later become celebrated literary figures—were commissioned to write these important books. John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph Ellison are among the more than 6,000 writers, editors, historians, and researchers who documented this celebration of local histories. Photographs, drawings, driving tours, detailed descriptions of towns, and rich cultural details exhibit each state’s unique flavor. The WPA Guide to Indiana documents a region with a diverse group of people and backgrounds, appropriately known as “the Crossroads of America.” Bounded by Lake Michigan and the Ohio River, Indiana contains a wealth of natural resources—all carefully detailed in this guide. In addition to a great deal of interesting early 20th century history, the WPA guide to the Hoosier State also has one of the most richly documented Native American histories in the collection.