The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 swallowed up more than three square miles in two days, leaving thousands homeless and 300 dead. Throughout history, the fire has been attributed to Mrs. O'Leary, an immigrant Irish milkmaid, and her cow. On one level, the tale of Mrs. O'Leary's cow is merely the quintessential urban legend. But the story also represents a means by which the upper classes of Chicago could blame the fire's chaos on a member of the working poor. Although that fire destroyed the official county documents, some land tract records were saved. Using this and other primary source information, Richard F. Bales created a scale drawing that reconstructed the O'Leary neighborhood. Next he turned to the transcripts--more than 1,100 handwritten pages--from an investigation conducted by the Board of Police and Fire Commissioners, which interviewed 50 people over the course of 12 days. The board's final report, published in the Chicago newspapers on December 12, 1871, indicates that commissioners were unable to determine the cause of the fire. And yet, by analyzing the 50 witnesses' testimonies, the author concludes that the commissioners could have determined the cause of the fire had they desired to do so. Being more concerned with saving their own reputation from post-fire reports of incompetence, drunkenness and bribery, the commissioners failed to press forward for an answer. The author has uncovered solid evidence as to what really caused the Great Chicago Fire.

Over the span of forty years, Professor Raphael Dorman OLeary labored tirelessly to make his students understand the importance of originality and of apt expression in English composition. He especially loved words well chosen and dared his students to put beauty and smoothness and sinew into their sentences. He tried passionately to make them feel the dignity and the majesty of the English language at its best. When he died after a short illness in 1936, his personal effects passed among descendants until finally coming to rest with Dennis OLeary and his spouse, Margaret, who discovered them in a poor condition while restoring a family house. Amid Professor OLearys papers was his handwritten journal from the year 1914 to 1915. The journal displays the full measure of R. D. OLeary in his myriad academic, social, political, and religious experiences at the University of Kansas atop Mount Oread; in the adjacent city of Lawrence, Kansas; and while traveling to rural Kansas during the summer months and to Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the dead of winter. Throughout his journal, Professor OLeary portrays with humor and pathos his encounters with students, colleagues, his spouse, his three sons, his mother, shopkeepers, religious zealots, pro-German zealots, anti-German zealots, drayers, Pullman conductors, bankers, politicians, publishers, educated spinsters, and garden wasps, while vividly describing cold classrooms, interminable whist parties, trilling sopranos, Kansas football games, and Lawrence seed stores. R. D. OLeary (18661936): Notes from Mount Oread 19141915 is a fascinating glimpse into the life and times of a revered English professor, half way through his forty years of teaching at the University of Kansas.