Figuring Out Jefferson

Posted on by Jason Coleman

This being the week of President’s Day, we thought we would ask one of our favorite authors, Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello and Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, about her recent reading on the third president.

Q: We at UVA Press, along with Maurizio Valsania, were delighted to learn that you were reading his latest book, The Limits of Optimism: Thomas Jefferson’s Dualistic Enlightenment. How did you come to his work?

Gordon-Reed: My good friend Peter Onuf of the University of Virginia had read the book in manuscript and suggested I read it.

Q: Jefferson is well known as an enlightenment thinker. Did anything in Valsania’s book surprise you?

Gordon-Reed: Well, it’s such a fresh take on Jefferson. It moves beyond the “He was a man of contradictions” approach. That is true, but as Valsania shows, a lot of what Jefferson says and does hangs together.

Q: You co-wrote the introduction to Monticello historian Cinder Stanton’s “Those Who Labor for My Happiness” with Peter Onuf. Can you elaborate on how you’ve learned from and collaborated with her in her research on the lives of Jefferson’s slaves?

Gordon-Reed: I showed up at Monticello with a first draft of my book Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. I sat in her office and played what we came to call “20 questions” or sometimes more or less. I drew on her unparalleled knowledge of TJ and Monticello to answer questions I had about some of the things the historians I was writing about had said about life on the plantation.

She has been a good sounding board for my ideas and interpretations. We do not always agree, and that is good. It’s so much better with a give and take, especially with a person who is so knowledgeable. Everyone has an opinion, but all too often those opinions are formed without anything approaching a sufficient base of knowledge. Information—basic information—is key. But that takes work and long years of study—all things she has done. It has been great to learn from her.

Q: As you know, a Smithsonian exhibit opened in January on Jefferson and slavery. Do you feel that the popular reception to the exhibition will be significantly different than it would have been fifteen or twenty years ago, before you wrote Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings?

Gordon-Reed: Well, I do think the Hemings-Jefferson relationship is not so big a deal to people now that the people who are most knowledgeable about Jefferson have incorporated it into the story of his life. People now want to think about the implications of it all.

Q: In the Boston Globe recently, you said you find history books more “vivid and exciting” than novels, and there have been much-cited essays by novelists such as Tom Wolfe and Jonathan Franzen on why American novelists don’t tackle big subjects. Do you think that big social novels are the answer, or is there some other reason why contemporary novels don’t grab your attention?

Gordon-Reed: I’m not sure that every book should be a “big social” novel.  I do like Wolfe, but more of his “new journalism,” the Wolfe of the 1970s. I suppose I’m just not as interested in the characters so much as I am interested in figures of history. I start reading and it’s fine. But then I wonder do I care enough about this person to continue? Most often, I answer no. I did love Marilynne Robinson’s novel, Gilead; that held my interest—and as I said in the Globe interview, I do like Christopher Isherwood’s novels.  It’s not the novelists, though. It’s me.

Q: What’s next for you in terms of research and writing?

Gordon-Reed: I’m working with Peter Onuf on a book about Jefferson. I have another volume of the Hemings family saga. Then it’s on to a two-volume biography of Jefferson.

LBJ Wins PROSE Award

Posted on by Jason Coleman

Winners of the 36th PROSE Awards were announced on February 2, and our electronic imprint, Rotunda, was honored for its digital edition of The Presidential Recordings of Lyndon B. Johnson, which won 2011 Best eProduct in the Humanities. Sponsored by the Professional Scholarly Publishing division of the Association of American Publishers, the PROSE Awards recognize excellence in books, journals, and electronic content in over 40 categories. The complete list of winners is here (scroll down for digital publications). It’s been a very good 2012 so far for our Lyndon Johnson publication: the PROSE Award follows its being named one of Choice’s Outstanding Academic Titles at the ALA Midwinter Meeting in January.

Library Journal‘s Cheryl LaGuardia is currently offering her blog readers a login for free-trial access to The Presidential Recordings of Lyndon B. Johnson. Hurry and check it out—the login is good for one week only.

The online edition of The Presidential Recordings includes hundreds of hours of presidential tapes covering the major issues of the LBJ administration, from the War on Poverty to the Civil Rights Movement to the Vietnam War. Each conversation is fully transcribed and annotated, and accompanied by its audio file, allowing users to hear all of the collections conversations. This multimedia presentation also includes photo and video galleries, a linked timeline, and powerful XML-based searching ability.

 

CNN on Salomé

Posted on by Jason Coleman

To celebrate Joseph Donohue’s new translation of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé the Press recently collaborated with the university’s drama department on a staged reading of the one-act play. You can watch a clip from the performance here.

CNN blogger Eric Marrapodi attended the event, and his report—including an illuminating interview with Donohue—has just been posted on CNN’s Belief Blog. You may read the Salomé post here.

Although an English speaker and writer, Wilde composed his play in French. Donohue sought to correct earlier translations written in a deliberately archaic idiom of traditional biblical language: his translation offers a fresh and briskly contemporary approach to Wilde’s play by drawing on the more spare and colloquial English of current American speakers. (Marrapodi provides an excellent example of the different translations in his blog post.) Donohue also addresses Wilde’s impressive fluency with the classical world. People who know the playwright mainly as a coiner of clever phrases will be surprised to learn that, at Oxford, Wilde was “a superb classical scholar.”

In case you’re wondering, the portrait above of Salomé and John the Baptist is by renowned illustrator Barry Moser. Moser created 23 engravings for the new edition, which is available now in hardcover and as a signed limited edition.

Enter the First Ladies, 2012

Posted on by Jason Coleman

As we endure another election year, Parlor Politics author Catherine Allgor shared with us these thoughts on the unique significance of the First Lady…

Undoubtedly one of the brightest spots in the tedious, tendentious slog of the Republican presidential debates came in Jacksonville, Florida on January 26, when Wolf Blitzer asked the candidates which of their wives would be the best First Lady. The Twitt-O-Sphere went wild, howling at Gingrich’s gaffe that made him sound like he was evaluating all his wives for the job, mourning the loss of a good “Mormon joke moment” at Romney’s expense. Many commenters did indeed see the question as an occasion for comedy.

But the inquiry about First Lady aptitude was trying to get at something, albeit in a clumsy way. The role of the First Lady can be as important as it is hard to quantify. A look at our history shows that a woman with the right personal gifts and a taste for politics can make a difference in how Americans feel about a president. And that is what is potentially at stake. The “job” of First Lady (unappointed, unhired) can encompass many things, but the most successful First Ladies have acted as “charismatic figures” for their husbands’ administrations, transmitting larger-than-life images and messages of reassurance, legitimacy, and hope. As wives by their husbands’ sides, as mothers with their families, as remarkable women in their own right, they can say much to the issue of character and help turn the abstraction of “Candidate” into a person.

Dolley Madison reassured both Americans and Europeans that the infant republic and the new capital city were secure and growing endeavors and that the Madisons were the right people to rule them both. In the depths of a depression that called into question the American character, Eleanor Roosevelt made us feel moral and caring. Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy was the symbol for a new era in US leadership, one that was young, bright, both cosmopolitan and American. A perfect fit for her husband’s presidency, Michelle Obama lets us know that people like us, middle-class strivers, have brought modern ideas and commonsense to Washington.

Every election season, some journalist asks me how much effect a First Lady or First Lady-hopeful has on the results. They’re looking for a percentage or some kind of number. Of course that’s impossible to provide (except perhaps in the case of the Ford election: don’t we think 100% of the Ford votes were for Betty?). But when a voter steps into the booth, how he or she feels about the candidate, whether the voter trusts one candidate over the other, that has everything to do with his wife.

So. Maybe not such a silly question after all.

Catherine Allgor has been thinking and writing about women and politics since the Clinton administration. A professor of history and Presidential Chair at the University of California at Riverside, Catherine’s books include a political biography of the First Lady who set the tone for all the others: A Perfect Union: Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American Nation (Holt, 2006). Her first book was with the University of Virginia Press, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (2000). Her latest exploration of political women brings her home to Virginia with The Queen of America: Mary Cutts’s Life of Dolley Madison, due for release in Fall 2012.

Grab a Lifeboat

Posted on by Jason Coleman


The still-unfolding story of the Costa Concordia, the Italian cruise ship run aground off the coast of the Tuscan island Giglio, has reminded us of dangers, and remedies, nearly as old as seafaring itself. The many questions about the thousands of passengers’ struggle to escape made us think of John Stilgoe’s Lifeboat. Available now at a special sale price (see details below), the book is the definitive study of one of the fixtures of survival at sea. Stilgoe took a few minutes from his duties as Lois Orchard Professor in the History of Landscape at Harvard to answer our questions about the sinking ship and the enduring role played by the smaller boat you never thought you’d have to use.

Q: Apparently most of the Concordia‘s lifeboats could not even be launched, due to the way the ship listed. Nonetheless the captain managed to escape in one of the lifeboats, claiming he tripped into it and was somehow unable to get out. Is there no “women and children first” rule—or at least “passengers first” rule—during such an evacuation? And what constitutes abandoning one’s ship?

A: Merchant seamen have followed the unwritten law of the sea for well more than a century: passengers go first into the lifeboats, usually women and children and the infirm and injured first, in part because it is easier to board lifeboats before a ship begins to list, in part because if there are not lifeboats for all (if some have been damaged by fire or collision, for example), physically fit men have the best chance of surviving atop floating wreckage.  ”Abandoning ship” means everyone leaves the ship in lifeboats:  the master leaves only after making certain everyone else is off. Continue reading →

UPCC Opens Its Doors

Posted on by Jason Coleman

The University of Virginia Press is among a group of 70 scholarly publishers that are participating in the University Press Content Consortium (UPCC). Part of an expansion of Project MUSE that integrates its journal content with book content on a single platform, the UPCC offers readers a new way to locate and browse e-books.  You will find e-book editions of many of Virginia’s most recent titles here. We will be adding new titles with each season, simultaneous with their release in print, as well as gradually bringing in many of our backlist titles, so this list will be updated regularly.