The existence of two Chinese states—one controlling mainland China, the other controlling the island of Taiwan—is often understood as a seemingly inevitable outcome of the Chinese civil war. Defeated by Mao Zedong, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists fled to Taiwan to establish a rival state, thereby creating the “Two Chinas” dilemma that vexes international diplomacy to this day. Accidental State challenges this conventional narrative to offer a new perspective on the founding of modern Taiwan. Hsiao-ting Lin marshals extensive research in recently declassified archives to show that the creation of a Taiwanese state in the early 1950s owed more to serendipity than careful geostrategic planning. It was the cumulative outcome of ad hoc half-measures and imperfect compromises, particularly when it came to the Nationalists’ often contentious relationship with the United States. Taiwan’s political status was fraught from the start. The island had been formally ceded to Japan after the First Sino-Japanese War, and during World War II the Allies promised Chiang that Taiwan would revert to Chinese rule after Japan’s defeat. But as the Chinese civil war turned against the Nationalists, U.S. policymakers reassessed the wisdom of backing Chiang. The idea of placing Taiwan under United Nations trusteeship gained traction. Cold War realities, and the fear of Taiwan falling into Communist hands, led Washington to recalibrate U.S. policy. Yet American support of a Taiwan-based Republic of China remained ambivalent, and Taiwan had to eke out a place for itself in international affairs as a de facto, if not fully sovereign, state.

2022 NAUTILUS SILVER WINNER FOR LYRIC PROSE—In The Accidental Reef and Other Ecological Odysseys in the Great Lakes, Lynne Heasley illuminates an underwater world that, despite a ferocious industrial history, remains wondrous and worthy of care. From its first scene in a benighted Great Lakes river, where lake sturgeon thrash and spawn, this powerful book takes readers on journeys through the Great Lakes, alongside fish and fishers, scuba divers and scientists, toxic pollutants and threatened communities, oil pipelines and invasive species, Indigenous peoples and federal agencies. With dazzling illustrations from Glenn Wolff, the book helps us know the Great Lakes in new ways and grapple with the legacies and alternative futures that come from their abundance of natural wealth. Suffused with curiosity, empathy, and wit, The Accidental Reef will not fail to astonish and inspire.

Now a major motion picture! Erwin 'Harvard' Vandeer has run out of luck. After failing as an actor in Hollywood, he heads home for Boston, but when he loses all of his cash in a poker game, he finds himself stranded in dusty Abilene, Texas. However, all is not lost. Harvard meets rough and tumble oilman Merle Luskey who takes him in and puts him to work. Except working for Merle may not exactly be the stroke of luck he was hoping for. Merle, teetering on the precipice of foreclosure, pins all his hopes on a new oil discovery to save his skin and stave off the ruthless bank. The stage is set for Harvard and Merle to embark on a high-stakes, rib-tickling adventure through the Lone Star State. They say everything's bigger in Texas, and Accidental Texan proves it right. Bigger laughter, bigger action, and an even bigger story.

The U.S.-led effort to fight the Islamic State in northeastern Syria since 2014 has been as controversial and poorly understood as it has been significant. Advocates of fighting “by, with and through” the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) view the campaign as a near-ideal case study of a cost-effective U.S. military intervention that should be duplicated in the future. Critics of the campaign say that the U.S. allied itself with a terrorist group and endangered its ties with Turkey, a long-stranding NATO partner; losing sight of strategic priorities in order to win tactical victories at low cost. This book combines general research with 50 interviews gathered in Syria with Kurdish, Arab and Christian SDF officers, and 50 interviews with U.S. and French officials and military officers with on-the-ground involvement in the war. It provides an unprecedented window into how the war was really prosecuted, in the eyes of the participants at all levels, uniquely looking not only at how U.S. soldiers view their partner forces, but how the local partners view them in return. This is a unique and essential insight into US strategy in Syria and beyond.

In the five decades after the Civil War, the United States witnessed a profusion of legal institutions designed to cope with the nation’s exceptionally acute industrial accident crisis. Jurists elaborated the common law of torts. Workingmen’s organizations founded a widespread system of cooperative insurance. Leading employers instituted welfare-capitalist accident relief funds. And social reformers advocated compulsory insurance such as workmen’s compensation. John Fabian Witt argues that experiments in accident law at the turn of the twentieth century arose out of competing views of the loose network of ideas and institutions that historians call the ideology of free labor. These experiments a century ago shaped twentieth- and twenty-first-century American accident law; they laid the foundations of the American administrative state; and they occasioned a still hotly contested legal transformation from the principles of free labor to the categories of insurance and risk. In this eclectic moment at the beginnings of the modern state, Witt describes American accident law as a contingent set of institutions that might plausibly have developed along a number of historical paths. In turn, he suggests, the making of American accident law is the story of the equally contingent remaking of our accidental republic.

To coincide with the celebration of Presque Isle State Park's 100-year anniversary in 2021, "Accidental Paradise: A Natural, Political, and Social History of Presque Isle" is targeted for publication by the Jefferson Educational Society in November 2020. Written by Erie historian David Frew with images coordinated and photographed by historian Jerry Skrypzak, the book marks the fifth collaboration by the two authors. Publication follows a three-year project in which Frew and Skrypzak address the geological formation of the peninsula, its natural history, and colorful political history leading to its creation as a state park. It also features the many people, events, and roles played by Erie's peninsula to the present day. Included is naval history, ecology, the Presque Isle Lighthouse, the story of famous squatter Joe Root, the Tom Ridge Environmental Center, Waldameer Park, fishing, environmental issues, the forerunners of the U.S. Coast Guard, and much more.