Monday morning, May 4, 1970, found Kent State a place strangely divided against itself: part university, part military installation; a school where students were encouraged to gather in classrooms but prohibited from doing so on the campus Commons. Professors preached caution, or encouraged opposition to authority, or in some cases even tried to lead it. Top administrators fretted over what was to come—President White had called a 7:00 a.m. meeting of his cabinet and an eight o’clock one with the executive committee of the faculty senate. Then, shortly after the conclusion of a 10:00 a.m. gathering with National Guard commanders, White and his brain trust left for an off-campus luncheon meeting. By then, the only certainty seemed to be that thousands of Kent State students would be swept up—by intent, circumstance, or proximity—in a noon rally that the National Guard clearly had no intent of allowing.

“Guards were there in front of the buildings, on the street,” Joseph Sima, then a junior, remembered of school that morning. “They had bayonets on their rifles. I had a class in Bowman Hall, and I had a Guardsman right outside the door. And it was like that in many of the classes.”

Barclay McMillen was among the teachers advising caution. A Kent State alumnus, McMillen served as a legal advisor to President White and a lecturer in the political science department. He devoted the entirety of his 9:00 a.m. American government class to the activities of that weekend and to the coming noon rally.

“The Governor has assumed legal control of this university and has prohibited all forms of outdoor demonstrations or rallies, peaceful or otherwise,” he told his students. “We’re under martial law on this campus. As for students who might be tempted by simple curiosity to join the rally, “When your head is busted or when you are arrested or when you’re tear-gassed, you have only yourself to blame.”

The class was audio-taped by the campus radio station, WKSU, and aired in its entirety beginning at 11:00 a.m. The broadcast ended almost at the exact moment when General Robert Canterbury began deploying his National Guard troops from their position on the grounds of the burned-out ROTC building.

Diane Yale-Peabody’s class on the modern short story met at 11:55 a.m., just as McMillen’s rebroadcast class was ending and five minutes before the protest was to begin. “When I got there, the professor said he knew there was a rally going on, so anyone who wanted to leave class that day and go to the rally, he would not mark them down as being absent. Or if the people who stayed in class would rather talk about the story we were studying at that time, we would do that. We all agreed we were there to learn about this course, so we talked about the story.”

At the same time, Jim Vacarella and as many as fifty other students, by his account, were crammed into his dorm room, preparing for the rally by doing joints. “That was very interesting,” he said in a 2000 interview, “getting a downer drug and then going out there to fight an upper war. That morning, I had a feeling that something was really wrong.”

Dean Kahler, who had turned twenty on May 1, took a far more measured approach to the day’s possibilities: “We’d all heard that there was going to be some kind of a rally at noon, and being a farm boy, I didn’t have time to go to civil rights marches or antiwar rallies. So I was curious. There was a second thing, too: if I could lend my voice to stopping the expansion of the war, I was hoping something like that would come out of it.”

Kahler decided not to go to classes Monday, but he did call all his professors that morning to tell them he wouldn’t be there and to find out what assignments he would be missing. “My zoology professor basically told me to relax and try not to get too close to the Guard and not do anything stupid, so I listened to him.” Kahler would be in the crowd but well away from the action when he was shot in the spine.

“Finally, the cliché is peeled away and the essence of this utterly American character is so revealing. John Chapman comes alive here and it is a thrilling experience to escape the specific gravity of the decades of myth.”

—Ken Burns, director of The Civil War and Baseball

“This is a tremendous book…”

—Glenn Beck

“We all know the caricature, but few of us know the man. Howard Means produces a feast of a story that strips away the myths of this folk-tale hero and gives us the real John Chapman and the rough-and-tumble world he lived in. This is a thoroughly fascinating and fun book.”

—Jay Winik, author of April 1865 and The Great Upheaval

“Johnny Appleseed is one of the great myths of our childhood. With insight and a lively touch, Howard Means tells us the story of the real Johnny Appleseed, John Chapman, a mystic and visionary who turns out to be a most memorable American character.”

—Evan Thomas, author of The War Lovers

To order: Johnny Appleseed: The Man, the Myth, and the American Story from Amazon.com

To contact the illustrator, Ihrie Means, please email iwmeans@gmail.com.

From the ashes of a divided nation came the Confederate States of America — and all that remains of the Union as we knew it is a disaster area called the Industrial Zone. The capital is Richmond, and the races are equal but very, very separate. That’s the premise of Howard Means’s fascinating, provocative, sophisticated new thriller.

For President Spencer Jefferson Lee — the great-great-grandson of both Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee — it’s politics as usual. He’s about to cut the ribbon on the greatest public-works project in history, but of course there’s a political price to pay. On one side, the lily-white Senate wants its quid pro quo; on the other, the all-black House has an agenda of its own. But whatever their differences, the powers-that-be in this alternative America do agree on one thing: Utter separation between the races is the key to peace and prosperity. To love someone of the opposite race is to court disaster; to act on that love is to become officially nonexistent.

But what Spencer Lee and his black friend, Vice President Nathan Winston, are about to learn is that love is beyond the law. And underneath the facade of civil order lies dissent in the form of DRAGO, a protest group made up of the “losers” of this “ideal” society cross-racial lovers and their children, social and environmental idealists led by a mysterious mocha-skinned woman known only as Cara. When two bodies are found in the grim ruins of Washington, D.C., each with a bullet in the head and all their fingers removed so that their identities can be put out on short-term loan, the stage is set for the fastest-paced, most intriguing novel of the year — a tense, breathtaking tale of a pivotal moment in a history that might have been our own.

“In one of the year’s more explosive Washington memoirs, Freeh pulls no punches.”—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The FBI that Freeh took over in the summer of 1993 was still reeling from the bloody standoff at Ruby Ridge and the conflagration at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. Unpopular, underfunded, and understaffed, the Bureau was also creeping along in the technological Dark Ages. For eight years—the second longest tenure of any director since J. Edgar Hoover—Freeh would fight tooth and nail to turn the FBI around.

In My FBI, we follow Freeh through his five-year battle against Clinton, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, and others to win indictments for the Khobar bombings in 2001, which stated that Iranian government officials played a role in the attack.

No wonder Bill Clinton called Freeh a “law enforcement legend” when he nominated him to be FBI Director. No wonder, either, that when Clinton subsequently called that appointment the worst one he made as president, Freeh considered it “a badge of honor.”