May 2 is National Prayer Day. John Ragosta, author of Religious Freedom: Jefferson’s Legacy, America’s Creed, penned the following thoughts at the outset of the day and has shared them with us. Writes Ragosta, “I inevitably come back to the following question: What would Jefferson do? How would he react to a National Day of Prayer mandated by Congress and proclaimed by the President?”
When we published a new translation of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé last year, we celebrated with a live reading of the play that was covered by CNN. Joseph Donohue’s translation is now being staged at Villanova University, where it has received raves, one of which you may read online here.
With the release this week of the Jackie Robinson biopic 42, we asked Bruce Adelson to contribute a few comments. Adelson’s Brushing Back Jim Crow: The Integration of Minor League Baseball in the American South documented many of the challenges that African American ball players faced, and overcame, in a society still practicing racial segregation.
Donald McCaig, author of the just-published Mr. and Mrs. Dog, has been contributing a series of pieces on a little sheepdog named Fly. In this latest piece, McCaig indulges in a little dog psychology—always a perilous undertaking with someone who may be smarter than you. McCaig followers will want to know that Mrs. and Mrs. Dog as just been reviewed in the Washington Post. Read the review here.
This week the Press will be at the Society of Architectural Historians annual meeting in Buffalo. In this post, our assistant managing editor, Mark Mones, shares his thoughts on some titles that will be on exhibit there. He writes: “The celebrated modernist architect Richard Neutra (1892-1970) figures prominently in several recently published UVa Press volumes, and with his work we are faced with the enduring questions of how we define, honor, and struggle with history.”
Christine Dumaine Leche, editor of Outside the Wire: American Soldiers’ Voices from Afghanistan, appeared on NPR’s Weekend Edition to describe the creative writing class she taught in occupied Afghanistan and her amazing students, all of whom were American soldiers. You may listen to the interview here. In the following piece, “Flight to Salerno,” Leche takes us behind the scenes of this powerful new book. The trying journey described here is only the beginning of military life in Afghanistan.