Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort as we continue to explore SIU Press’s new releases in 2024.

Civil twilight is the astronomical term for the minutes just before sunrise and just after sunset. If one took a snapshot, it would be impossible to tell whether the light was increasing or diminishing. The poems in Civil Twilight, the newest collection from National Book Award finalist Cynthia Huntington, arise in this liminal space. With luminous precision, Huntington examines the civil twilight we live in now, unsure of whether the darkness is closing in or whether the light is about to break. In a world teetering on the edge of collapse, Civil Twilight wrestles hard-won hope from disquiet, coming to rest in what is.

In August of 1968, approximately 7,000 people protested the Vietnam War against the backdrop of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. This highly televised event began peacefully but quickly turned into what was later termed a “police riot.” Brian Mullgardt’s investigation of this event and the preceding tensions shines a light on the ministers, Yippies, and community members who showed up and stood together against the brutality of the police. Charting a complex social history, Brian Mullgardt’s Wear Some Armor in Your Hair: Urban Renewal and the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Lincoln Park brings together Chicago history, the 1960s, and urbanization, focusing not on the national leaders, but on the grassroots activists of the time.

In 1924 Beulah Annan was arrested for killing her lover, Harry Kalsted. Six weeks later, a jury acquitted her of murder. Inspired by the sordid event, trial, and acquittal, reporter Maurine Watkins wrote the play Chicago, a Broadway hit that was adapted several times. Through a fresh retelling of Annan’s story and Watkins’s play, in They Both Reached for the Gun: Beulah Annan, Maurine Watkins, and the Trial that Became Chicago, Charles H. Cosgrove provides the first critical examination of the criminal case and an exploration of the era’s social assumptions that made the play’s message so plausible in its time. He exposes the weaknesses of the case against Annan and vindicates the jury that tried her.

Offering a glimpse into a world largely misunderstood by mainstream society, Mennonites of Southern Illinois: A Photographic Journal documents the period of eight years that Jane Flynn practiced with Mennonites in two different Southern Illinois communities: Stonefort, and Mount Pleasant in Anna. Despite her status as an outsider, Flynn was welcomed and allowed to photograph the Mennonites in their homes, making applesauce, farming, and beekeeping. The imagery explores the Mennonites’ labors, leisure, and faith by documenting their homes, places of work and worship, and the Illinois Ozark landscape they inhabit.

Throughout his extensive career with the Boston Police, Paul F. Joyce was at the forefront of the Department’s anti-gang and youth violence initiatives. Later in his career, after thirty-one years in policing, Joyce transitioned to academia as a criminologist, seeking to better understand the lives of the gang members he had encountered during his time as an officer. He interviewed thirty Black and Latino men who witnessed and led the emergence of the street gang phenomenon in Boston. In It Started with the Hats: The Life Experiences of Boston’s Founding Street Gang Members, Joyce examines the influences that motivated the men toward joining gangs, their gang experiences, and the turning points that shaped their paths later in life, whether leading to desistance from or continued persistence in criminal behavior.

Puerto Ricans in Illinois by Maura I. Toro-Morn and Ivis Garcia offer readers an opportunity to learn about the history of Puerto Rico, the migration of Puerto Ricans to Illinois, and the cultural, economic, and political contributions of the Puerto Rican women, men, and families that call Illinois home. A compelling weave of scholarship summary, archival research, and the extensive sociological study including interviews conducted across the state, the book documents just how much many fail to know about a growing and transforming community in Illinois.

Watchman, Tell Us: John J. Bird and Black Politics in Post-Civil War Illinois by Wayne T. Pitard recently won the 2024 Friends of Morris Library Delta Award. This key biography of John J. Bird unveils the forgotten story of a remarkable Black political figure in post-Civil War Illinois. Emerging as a leader in Cairo, the city with Illinois’ second-largest Black community, Bird played a pivotal role in advancing civil rights within the state, also becoming Illinois’ first Black elected judge and first Black trustee of the University of Illinois.

To destroy Confederate infrastructure, avenge the horrors of slavery, and shorten the war, the 45th Illinois Volunteer Infantry imposed the pillaging of hard-war philosophy upon Confederate lands. The Lead Mine Men: The Enduring 45th Illinois Volunteer Infantry, by Thomas B. Mack, is a comprehensive and engaging narrative that explores the Civil War ordeals and triumphs of this unit. Mack uncovers the history of this unit of resilient midwesterners and how they brought hard-war to the Confederacy in 1862, earlier than other historians have previously suggested.