The Harvard Guide to American History, edited by Frank Freidel, with the assistance of Richard K. Showman, runs the gamut of our past from abolitionists to the Yuma Indians, from Benjamin Aaron to Frederick Zwierlein. Not surprisingly, this diverse compendium of U. S. history has been called an "incomparable, indispensable reference work" which "anyone interested in this nation's past will, of necessity, eventually turn to. ..." That eventuality has been rendered easier by the publication by Harvard of a new one-volume edition [$45.00 cloth, $12.50 paper]. American historians have been and are, of course, a mixture of many traits, traditions, and talents, but those who hew to the socalled "progressive" tradition follow in the footsteps of three notable scholars—Frederick Jackson Turner, Charles A. Beard, and V. L. Parrington—themselves the subject of a book by another distinguished scholar, the late Richard Hofstadter. First published in 1968, Hofstadter's The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington has now been reissued in paperback by Chicago [$7.95]. Shortly after Chicago published the original edition, The New Yorker commented, "This history of historians is a brilliant exploration into the nature of history as a discipline, and into the nature of the American past and its meaning for the present." One example of how the past can have relevance for the present involves the issue of presidential power, an issue much debated in recent years. An earlier instance of that issue is Maeva Marcus's account of President Truman's seizure of the strike-threatened steel industry in April 1952, a seizure subsequently ruled unconstitutional by the U. S. Supreme Court. Entitled Truman and the Steel Set zure Case: The Limits of Presidential Power, the Marcus study is now available in paperback from Columbia [$7.00]. The South is the subject of two recent editions of books published by Louisiana. The first, in cloth, is John D.Winters' The Civil War in Louisiana, a comprehensive history of the conflict between Blue and Gray in the Cajun state [$24.00]. The second involves a more recent controversy, one of the 20th century's most celebrated civil rights cases—the notable and/or notorious trial of the Scottsboro boys on a rape charge in Depression-ridden Alabama. A definitive history of that case is contained in the revised edition of Dan T.Carter's Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South [$24.95 cloth, $6.95 paper]. Among contemporary stylists, E. B. White has few peers, as can be seen in the Perennial Library edition of The Points of My Compass: Letters From the East, the West, the North, the South [$2.95 paperback]. A fellow New Yorker writer, Jane Kramer, traveled to that point of the compass known as Texas to produce a profile of a vanishing breed as represented by Henry Blanton, The Last Cowboy, which Pocket Books has now reprinted [$1.95]. Vintage Books is offering a paperback edition of a third New Yorker writer's work, namely, Calvin Trillin's American Fried: Adventures of a Happy Eater, which Rolling Stone described as "marvelously funny and horrifyingly mouthwatering" [$1.95].