"Half of all the colleges founded before the Civil War did not survive. Wittenberg did. This is the story of a college on the Ohio frontier that sought to Americanize millions of German immigrants and to Americanize the German Lutheran Church. In spite of that, Wittenberg was caught in the anti-foreign prejudice of “Nativists” who feared the influence of immigrants on American institutions. The school prospered after the Civil War as America embraced German culture from classical music to the Christmas tree. The school again faced prejudice in the anti-German furor of World War I. Simultaneously, this is the story of students and faculty coping with the pressures of a nation going from the poverty of the rural frontier to the wealth of an urban-industrial society and how they and Wittenberg changed."

Whatever happened to America's small, private, residential, undergraduate, Liberal Arts Colleges? Will they survive the present contest with pragmatic publicly supported community colleges and the secular mega universities? The story of Wittenberg, one of the best of Ohio's many good Liberal Arts Colleges, provides answers to such questions. It looks at this critical period in their history giving hope that the very best of them will prosper. They are an endangered national resource that should be preserved and no more of them are being started. The book is written both for the casual reader and for historians and professional educators.

Ghost stories were very popular with college students at the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth. They still are today. As a college president, I sometimes told ghost stories to students on Halloween. One student wrote, The next time that the darkness closes in, the wind blows through the trees, rustling the crisp dry leaves, and the owls come out, screeching into the clear and starry night and soaring through the darkness to grab its prey from under the leaves, think twice about the spirited haunting that seems to frequent our stately campus. As the tales of campus hauntings grew, we concluded that our campus surely was Americas most haunted campus. I assured the students that these were only stories. It was not the ghosts that aroused their fears; it was their fears that aroused the ghosts.

Join the jury as two of history’s most stubborn intellectuals go head-to-head in a highly entertaining battle of reason versus faith. Set in late 1517, this smart, sprightly and audacious comedy centres on a fictitious meeting between university colleagues Dr. Faustus (a man of appetites), Martin Luther (a man of faith), and their student Hamlet (a young Prince struggling not only with his beliefs but also with his tennis game).This sparkling celebration of history, language, academia and religion by award-winning American playwright David Davalos will appeal to anyone looking for the answers to life’s big questions.

A “thoroughly researched [and] historically enlightening” account of how the Commonwealth of Virginia split in two in the midst of war (Civil War News). “West Virginia was the child of the storm.” —Mountaineer historian and Civil War veteran Maj. Theodore F. Lang As the Civil War raged, the northwestern third of the Commonwealth of Virginia finally broke away in 1863 to form the Union’s 35th state. Seceding from Secession chronicles those events in an unprecedented study of the social, legal, military, and political factors that converged to bring about the birth of West Virginia. President Abraham Lincoln, an astute lawyer in his own right, played a critical role in birthing the new state. The constitutionality of the mechanism by which the new state would be created concerned the president, and he polled every member of his cabinet before signing the bill. Seceding from Secession includes a detailed discussion of the 1871 U.S. Supreme Court decision Virginia v. West Virginia, in which former Lincoln cabinet member Salmon Chase presided as chief justice over the court that decided the constitutionality of the momentous event. Grounded in a wide variety of sources and including a foreword by Frank J. Williams, former Chief Justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court and Chairman Emeritus of the Lincoln Forum, this book is indispensable for anyone interested in American history.

Provides insight into the real personality of the famous warrior