Today marks the official National Day of Prayer. Republicans and Democrats across the nation will soon sit down to meetings and meals bookended with an opening and closing prayer. Certainly there is much to pray for: action on global climate change, fiscal responsibility, justice for immigrants, wisdom, humility, and peace.

Yet with the National Day of Prayer, we inevitably witness another festival: the debate between those demanding its end in the name of separation of church and state, and others who will complain that government is censoring prayers in the name of political correctness. Upon what might be a welcome bipartisan interlude, shrill voices intrude.

Having spent time studying religious freedom at Monticello’s International Center for Jefferson Studies, 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?

Several years ago, U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb ruled the official Day of Prayer unconstitutional (before the case was thrown out for lack of standing). Judge Crabb was clear: the problem is not prayer, or even prayer by government officials; rather, the issue is government seeking to use prayer for political purposes, literally taking what is sacred and making it profane. Judge Crabb quoted the Supreme Court: “in the hands of government what might begin as a tolerant expression of religious views may end in a policy to indoctrinate and coerce.” This echoed James Madison’s admonition almost two hundred years earlier that official prayer proclamations “seem to imply and certainly nourish the erronious [sic] idea of a national religion.” It was for this reason that Jefferson emphatically rejected any “official,” government call to prayer. Not only did Jefferson see government prayer proclamations as unconstitutional, but he added: “I do not believe it is for the interest of religion to invite the civil magistrate to direct it’s exercises . . . Fasting & prayer are religious exercises. . . . Every religious society has a right to determine for itself the times for these exercises, & the objects proper for them . . . and this right can never be safer than in their own hands, where the constitution has deposited it.” Jefferson undoubtedly would join Judge Crabb in insisting that prayer should not be government-directed or sponsored. Jefferson’s concern for mixing government and religion was both political and theological. Politically, government support of religion threatened “tyranny over the mind,” a country led by “priestcraft.” Theologically, Jefferson would have agreed with eighteenth century evangelicals, equally committed to strict separation of church and state, who understood that even government encouragement interfered with a “free will offering” to God, a wholly-voluntary decision to believe and pray.

To stop there, though, is to miss an important part of Jefferson’s learning. In both of his inaugural addresses, Jefferson invoked divine guidance. Some, ignoring his emphatic declaration to the contrary, insist that Jefferson supported official prayer. Others accuse Jefferson of inconsistency, saying that prayer proclamations which he insisted were unconstitutional and his inaugural prayers were “indistinguishable.” Jefferson did not see it that way. An official proclamation of a day of prayer is a government act – subject to the constraints of the First Amendment; a private prayer, even when made by a public official in a public setting, is not. Madison made a similar point when he concluded that an official congressional chaplain was unconstitutional, but Members of Congress, acting in their private capacity, could certainly gather to pray: “If Religion consist in voluntary acts of individuals . . . and it be proper that public functionaries, as well as their Constituents should discharge their religious duties, let them like their Constituents, do so at their own expense.” What they should not seek is government endorsement or funding for their prayers.Thus, Christian ministers rightly object that government should not tell them to omit Jesus’ name from their prayers, but that is the result of being officially-sponsored. Eighteenth century evangelicals rejected government assistance for this reason, recognizing that it would be “the first link which Draws after it a chain of horrid consequences, and that by Degrees it will terminate in who shall preach, when they shall preach, where they shall preach, and what they shall preach.”

Jefferson was a prayerful man, but he rejected as both inappropriate and dangerous government intrusion into the sacred realm. So, what would Jefferson do? Paul advised to “pray ceaselessly,” but he certainly did not ask the government to sponsor his prayer meetings. Jefferson would agree.

The debut of the new movie 42 reminds us of a time when America was segregated, riven by racial differences, stereotypes, and violence. In 1947, the Brooklyn Dodgers placed Jackie Robinson front and center for our country to debate a bold new step in race relations. His color-barrier-shattering achievements reached far beyond the baseball fields of New York, Chicago, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. Robinson’s efforts opened a new chapter for Americans, bringing us closer to what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. later described as “the beloved community,” a community where integration and tolerance were the watchwords.

Jackie Robinson may have ended Major League Baseball’s color barrier, but in baseball’s minor-league towns throughout the South, both the law and rigid customs barred black men and white men from playing America’s national pastime together. And yet it was here—in places like Danville, Virginia, Hot Springs, Arkansas, Savannah, Georgia, and Birmingham, Alabama—that the next stage of America’s integration was to play out, in the years following Robinson’s ascendency.

“I tend to refer to us as Jackie’s disciples,” explained former big leaguer Ed Charles in Brushing Back Jim Crow. “We spent years and years trying to make breakthroughs down in the South. We were carrying his torch a little further. We all tried to emulate Jackie. All the guys patterned themselves after Jackie. They may have gotten to the point where they wanted to quit and they just thought about Jackie. I know I did.”

Ed Charles weathered many storms during his professional baseball tutelage in the South’s minor leagues where he played eight years in places like Corpus Christi, Louisville, and Jacksonville. Charles was often the first black man whom people had ever seen playing baseball on the same field with white ballplayers. Charles and his compatriots endured segregation, racial taunts, and almost ceaseless racial hostility, all while trying to learn their baseball crafts and follow in Jackie Robinson’s footsteps to the Major Leagues.

A teenaged Henry Aaron broke the color line in Jacksonville, Florida. Growing up in Mobile, Alabama, Aaron was well-acquainted with the Jim Crow South. He understood what he must endure on the ballfields of Charleston, Savannah, and Columbia, South Carolina, while a visiting player for Jacksonville. Aaron, like so many of his fellow line breakers, used the racial invective and segregation he experienced and turned it around, like hitting a high fastball and sending it screaming into the bleachers.

“Believe it or not,” Aaron explained in his interview for Brushing Back Jim Crow, “at night, you laugh about it. That’s one thing that made you go out the next day and say, ‘I can’t believe that people are this ignorant.’ And go out and do better. It was a motivator.”

Aaron’s is only one of the remarkable stories from this dramatic time in sports history. Brushing Back Jim Crow also recounts the successes and disappointments of such greats as Billy Williams, Felipe Alou, Chuck Harmon, Nat Peeples, Al Israel, Willie Tasby, Ed Charles, Don Buford.

As we enjoy 42 and celebrate Jackie Robinson’s achievements, let us also tip our caps to Jackie’s disciples, the men who broke the color barrier down South. As Congressman John Lewis explains in Brushing Back Jim Crow, baseball integration “helped to open and liberate people from stereotypes and attitudes. It broke down walls. It ended those feelings that somehow people could not be together. It had a profound effect on southerners. It was more than race relations. It was just pure human relations.”

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.

Neutra’s Kaufmann House in Palm Springs was the western retreat for the family that commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. In 1937, he designed a modern house—his first outside California—for Pan Am pilot and executive George Kraigher in Brownsville, Texas. The subject of an entry in the just-released Buildings of Texas: Central, South, and Gulf Coast (written by Gerald Moorhead with seven prominent coauthors), the Kraigher House is a preservationist’s success story. Derelict and decaying, this luminous home was carefully rehabilitated by the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College in 2007, to welcome and inspire a new generation of architects, historians, and visitors.

The fifty-year history of one of Neutra’s most important non-residential commissions, the Cyclorama Center in Gettysburg, is recounted at length in Christine Madrid French’s essay in Public Nature: Scenery, History, and Park Design, a new volume edited by Ethan Carr, Shaun Eyring, and Richard Guy Wilson. Carefully positioned in Ziegler’s Grove on Cemetery Ridge, its rooftop ramp allowed visitors to scan the landscape from south to north, from the sites of the repulse of Pickett’s Charge to the dais from which Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address echoed. The center recalled “the essential link between the mass battle of 1863 and the mass culture of the present,” as succinctly summarized in Buildings of Pennsylvania: Philadelphia and Eastern Pennsylvania, by George Thomas and his five coauthors. Here too a battle ensued, this time between preservationists and Civil War historians, who struggled with which history should be safeguarded. Following a protracted lawsuit, the Cyclorama was razed this past month, just shy of the 150th anniversary of the conflict that saved the Union.

How to reconcile these diametrically opposed outcomes? The Kraigher and Kaufmann houses speak to our fascination with the recent past, as evidenced in the popularity and the settings of such shows as “Mad Men,” while the Cyclorama’s demolition privileges our longer national story. If both are worthy of attention, there are clearly no easy answers here.

As a freshman at Gettysburg College in the late 1970s, I spent a fair amount of time exploring the battlefield, walking the length of Cemetery Ridge and the rise of the Cyclorama ramp. For me, the Neutra center was warm and welcoming, an expanse of glass and terrazzo leading to a large cast-cement drum that housed Paul Philippoteaux’s circular panorama painting of the battle. This is how I’ll always recall the place, graced by that modernist memorial, no more intrusive than the Beaux-Arts marble mass of the Pennsylvania Monument to the south. And though historians of our great national conflict may applaud the landscape’s restoration, at least to its late-nineteenth-century appearance, something intangible, perhaps our generation’s rediscovery of the enduring significance of that conflict, has nonetheless been sadly and irrevocably lost.

Carol S. Ebel, William M. Ferraro, David R. Hoth, Benjamin L. Huggins & Edward G. Lengel: Do You Really Know George Washington? Probing His Life and Papers
Wed. March 20th, 12:00 PM, UVa Harrison Institute/Small Special Collections

Cameron Davidson: Photographic Views by Land and Air
Wed. March 20th, 2:00 PM, City Council Chambers

Lisa Russ Spaar: Poets in Prose
Thu. March 21st, 4:00 PM, New Dominion Bookshop

Andrew O’Shaughnessy: Jefferson’s Shadow: The Story of His Science
Thu. March 21st, 5:00 PM, Monticello Visitors Center

David Rigsbee & Lisa Russ Spaar: Poetry: Hard Knowledge
Thu. March 21st, 6:00 PM,UVa Bookstore

Jeb Livingood & Mark Harril Saunders: UVa MFA Alumni Reading
Fri. March 22nd, 12:00 PM, UVa Bookstore

Earl Swift: Eisenhower: The Presidency
Fri. March 22nd, 2:00 PM, UVa Bookstore

John Ragosta: Jefferson’s Legacies
Fri. March 22nd, 4:00 PM, CitySpace-Piedmont Council for the Arts

R. T. Smith: Short Fiction: Tales of Longing, Violence, and Romance
Fri. March 22nd, 4:00 PM, New Dominion Bookshop

Valerie C. Cooper: African American Biographies: Americans Who Changed History
Sat. March 23rd, 12:00 PM, Jefferson School African American Heritage Center

Natasha Trethewey: Poetry: Natasha Trethewey, U.S. Poet Laureate
Sat. March 23rd,  2:00 PM, Jefferson School African American Heritage Center

Mark Harril Saunders: Crime Wave: Thrillers
Sat. March 23rd, 2:00 PM, Omni Hotel, Ballroom C

Donald McCaig: The Dogs in My Life
Sat. March 23rd, 4:00 PM, New Dominion Bookshop

Richard Kerr Holway: Achilles, Hyper-Masculinity, and Honor Killings
Sun. March 24th, 1:30 PM, UVa Bookstore

The Virginia Festival of the Book takes place March 20-24 in Charlottesville. Complete info is here.

My sister Carol’s husband Steve was diagnosed with lung cancer and subsequently had a mini-stroke, fell and broke his replacement hip. I hadn’t visited Seattle since the 2005 Oregon Finals and was past due.

Against my better judgment I’d take Fly. She’d only just begun to trust me and I couldn’t guess how she’d take busy airport terminals and the black roaring cargo hold. Last time she flew she came out of her crate and nailed her handler’s hubby. How would Fly take a small Seattle house full of strangers, quick-moving dog-ignorant toddlers, not to mention the TSA handlers who must get the dog out of the crate to check for dog crate bombs? Fly doesn’t always want to come out of her crate. She’s bit. Hell, she’s bit me.

So: avoid layovers where a well-intentioned airline worker might let (or drag) Fly out of her crate. Nearest FFM (frequent flyer miles) Delta non-stop was Atlanta, eight hours from home.

Since I didn’t know the Atlanta airport, and some airports don’t have porters or SmartCarts, I packed four crate wheels in my bag and a folding trekking pole/faux crook.  Surely you don’t think I’d fly across the country without entering a couple sheepdog trials!

In Atlanta I found a La Quinta where I could leave my car and take their shuttle to the airport next a.m.

Atlanta has porters—WHEW—and grateful Donald followed same to the ticket counter, where Fly’s crate was festooned with animalesque warnings, before rolling to security.  Fly jumped out and the TSA guy checking the crate for doggy bombs says how well behaved she was while I’m thinking “You ain’t been bit yet, Buddy.”

Okay. Fly jumps back in, crate is ziptied, porter’s tipped. Going through security, my Stetson gets stuck in the x-ray, which amuses the x-rayers. Ha, ha.

I try to find someplace in the departure lounge where I can’t hear toothy TV hosts telling me (a) what I know or (b) don’t care to. As I board I ask the stewardess to notify me when my dog is loaded. Plane gets ready. Plane cross checks. Stewardess tells me my two dogs are loaded. I say Fly is one dog. She repeats my two dogs are loaded. I hope Fly is one of them.

There are three dogs waiting with the oversized luggage in Seattle. One’s Fly. When Carol and Steve arrive, Fly comes out of her crate wagging. Seems no different than when she went in.

Seattle is green and moldy, with only occasional cars on 39th Avenue where Fly and I walk. Fly sticks her nose to the earth and draws in essence of Pacific Northwest. Pine scented mildew? I call her in when she ventures into somebody’s back yard. Steve uses a walker but is cheerful. Carol’s never been anything but. Their (setter?) mix Sheila doesn’t like having another bitch in their small house but lives with it.

Next afternoon, Steve’s got an appointment with the cancer docs, so I make dinner. Turns out, the news is unexpectedly good—his lung cancer’s in remission. That magic word is all we talk about. When my niece Jennifer comes over with riot kids Lars and Hank, it’s Remissions-R-Us. It’s a word with resonance and persistence. Fly is upstairs in her crate, so the kids go home unbit.

*  *  *

Next morning, 6 a.m., I set off in Steve’s pickup for the Kirschgessner SDT—one of the Washington Association of Stockdog Handlers (W.A.S.H.) winter trial series—informal, no payback. I’d forgotten to feed Fly, so she gets half my bacon egg & cheese, so we’re both hungry. The GPS delivers us to an old-fashioned Washington homestead—a dugout root cellar, numerous small barns, plenty of firewood, the biggest oldest, well maintained apple trees I’ve ever seen. It’s frosty but the hosts have coffee and “warmies” (little chemical hand warmers) for the handlers. I talk to sheepdoggers I’ve met before: Diane Pagel and that courtly gent who course directs the Finals. I meet local handlers, some I’d heard about, others not. Jack Knox was judging. I hadn’t seen Jack since his fine runs last fall, and when I congratulated him he credited his dog, as Jack is wont to do. At the handler’s meeting Jack lectured us handlers on proper shepherding (as he is wont to do). The sheep were Scottish blackies and cheviot crosses in heavy fleece. The course was short, maybe a 250-yard outrun, with a long drive and very long crossdrive. Split, pen, shed. I didn’t have my trial watch but carried my new foldable crook.

Anyway—Fly’s outrun was fine, lift fine, but she didn’t hold pressure on the fetch and  missed the panels. Silly drive and cross-drive—missed both panels; she refused my whistles and I didn’t want to go to voice. Inbye, we easily got our split and I had them in the pen but pressed too hard and they broke out again. I’d rather our mistake were mine. When I came off, Carol and Steve were there with their friends Jim and Dorothy Dechane. They admired Fly and informed her she’d done good and Fly agreed. We had lunch at the Dechanes’. Jim had been Steve’s boss at the Seattle PD. Jim’s now an apiarist. We talked about bees and geezer ailments. Remission is a powerful word.

That evening my niece Katie visited with boyfriend Steve and toddler Kayden. Steve, who’d worked on Alaskan fishing boats in deadly weather, was a little nervous with retired-cop father and visiting uncle/writer. Kayden zoomed around singing. Fly stayed upstairs in her crate.
Next a.m., I remember to feed Fly, so the breakfast sandwich is mine, mine, mine.  Off I-5, I see signs for Centralia Washington, where in 1919 American Leqion strikebreakers attacked an IWW picnic. Nine dead.

The trial is in a field behind the Roy (pop 300?) rodeo grounds. Fairly big field but very icy—the right-hand outrun is a no-go sheet of ice and there’s so much ice on the fetchline, the hosts have set up a dogleg nearly perpendicular to the usual fetch line.

I don’t think so. Maybe if I could send right and down Fly properly, I could convince Fly this is A WEIRD DRIVE, but I can’t send over no-go ice. Still, I must make an attempt.  The judge would be right to DQ anyone who didn’t try.

Not to worry. Nobody else is coming anywhere near that dogleg fetch panel.

Fly’s sheep fetch straight and hit ice. One goes down and I hold my breath until she finds her feet and comes on.  Four horn hair sheep—Kathadin? St Croix?—they’ve been much dogged, so the pen’s a gimme but the shed isn’t. When they try to come ’round the wrong side of the post, I whack the ground with my folding crook, which promptly folds. The sheep are ASTONISHED. How can I threaten them with a noodle? To sheep, apparently a noodle’s as good as a crook, and they go ‘round properly. Fly is only taking her whistles half the time, so I change to whistle/voice. At the cross-drive panels we have one of those panel moments when I need frantic last minute fixes, but Fly takes my fast commands willingly and they go through. Nice line from panel to pen, Fly’s too far back so I put them in and bang the pen shut. In the shedding ring they split a couple times 2/2 before we get our single and I’m sucking for air like a deflated balloon. Since we’re the first to get our shed we get applauded.

When I come off, Niece Jenny, her toddlers, and husband Andy have arrived. Toddlers less riotous away from Grandma’s house. Fly meets the toddlers and it goes well, but Fly’s a bit too interested: Maybe she wants to start a daycare center?

A handler recommends a local café, where we take a table in the banquet room. The Seahawks have an important game and the TV is in the banquet room, so pretty soon patrons, cooks, busboys, and waitresses come in to gasp, groan, and cheer. Andy’s eyes flicker away from my wonderful stories of sheepdog trials.

That night we go out to Rays Boathouse, where splendid salmon is garnished with chopped Brussels sprouts, onion, and fennel. We drink a little too much wine and reminisce about family.

2:45 a.m., rise and pack. Fly knows I’m leaving and is underfoot. 3:45 the car service picks us up in a big town car. Fly sprawls across the plush leather seat for a belly scratch.

At the airport, a young country couple—she’s pregnant—take turns wiggling fingers inside their dog’s crate. She tells me, “This is my second airplane flight.” I say the dog will be okay, that Delta has done right by my dogs. “He’s one year old,” she says. “We love him.”

A porter comes and as we roll down the cavernous departure lounge, the dog’s shrill barks draw eyes and some unnecessary remarks. I tell the girl that terriers bark. It’s what they do. Aha, that’s why the wiggling fingers—to distract the dog.

At security they pluck the terrier out of the crate and coo while the TSA guy peers under their crate towel.  Fly comes out off leash and waits. The porter informs the couple that gratuities are accepted. The flustered girl blurts, “But we don’t have any money!” When I hand over a couple fives the porter, who is nearly as embarrassed as the girl, says, “This’ll cover both.”

Next day 4:30 am, pouring rain, on I-77 in Atlanta, my right windshield wiper collides with my left wiper and they hug. Froze. Blind, I set the blinkers and ease onto the shoulder. I carry a toolkit, but it’s too wet and black for auto mechanics. I get out, get soaked, and disentangle the wipers. Back inside, I whisper a prayer and turn them back on. Although the passenger wiper doesn’t work, the driver’s wiper does, so I drive home.  It stops raining six hours later.

When she jumps out on the farm, Fly is delirious with joy. In her seven years she’s had six owners, six homes, six packs, six familiar places. When she left home she never knew if she was coming back. She’s worked a hill lambing, she’s faced down stroppy rams and ewes with newborns.  She’s worked in snow and ice. She’s been a tool, sometimes treasured, sometimes beaten—for what she never knew.

A couple days later I went to the UVA Press, who will publish Mr. & Mrs. Dog (Our Travels, Trials, Adventures, and Epiphanies) this March. The Seattle trip has almost decided me to try Fly as my “literary dog” for interviews, readings, and book signings. The literary dog is TV camera bait and gives people who attend these events someone interesting to talk to. Being “literary dog” is no treat. Days of fast travel, odd-tasting water, a zillion strangers, cameras in one’s face, slippery floors, inadequate exercise, and where’s the sheep, the grass, the woods, my pack?

Sheepdogs can and do turn down the job. When Silk 2 took her first look at three hundred people in an auditorium she scrambled inside the speaker’s podium atop the sound system, and as I babbled about sheepdogs, of Silk my readers saw only the very tip of her tail.

The Press offices are a house on the edge of campus, and when we came in, Fly vanished down the hall and I heard surprised human cries.  She checked out offices and located those who had dog treats on their persons. My editor, Boyd Zenner, has Rottweilers, and when Fly greeted her Boyd took Fly’s head in her hands and pulled her ears and ignored her growls and put her hand in Fly’s mouth and they had a grand time doing what I usually forbid.

Trust is a two-way street.

When Fly joined our pack two years ago, she was the strangest sheepdog I’ve ever met. She’d run back to the house, she bit people—including me—and the fine trial dog who’d worked a Scottish hill lambing wouldn’t work sheep. Even when she decided—and it was her decision—to trust her new life; even after she became the best farm dog I’ve ever owned, she refused to do her best at sheepdog trials. Now, she’s decided to give them another chance. We weren’t right at either Washington trial, but she stayed with me when things got tough and got around the Roy Trial. We’ve got further but we’re closer than we were.

I’m not a dog trainer. I don’t teach my dogs to down and stay and come and don’t poop or pee in the house. My pack expects those manners and it doesn’t take most dogs long to learn them. I never taught Fly to lie quietly at my feet while Emily, the Publicity Manager, and I were planning Mr. & Mrs. Dog’s book tour.

Fly has learned to trust me. Now, I must learn to trust her—trust that the dog who has bitten won’t bite again—even when a civilian does something weird.  I must trust that if I continue to hone our sheepdog skills, she will give everything she has at trials. Saying “Away to me” isn’t the same as “Away to me maybe-you-will-maybe-you-won’t.”

What a long strange trip she’s been.

My thanks to Lynne Green, Judy Norris and W.A.S.H for two thoroughly enjoyable trials. Thanks to Diane Pagel for introducing me to new handlers and some fine dogs (many out of her Tess). Thanks to all of you for welcoming my family who commented afterwards how friendly everybody’d been.

See you on down the road.

Donald McCaig’s Mr. and Mrs. Dog: Our Travels, Trials, Adventures, and Epiphanies will be published in March.

Alan G. James

Twenty years ago or so I experienced a literary epiphany: I discovered Henry James. That’s not quite true. I was familiar with his biography and had read some of his plot-oriented work. But I could not say I had a fair idea of his genius, or knew much about his complex personal relations or those of his characters. An event those many years ago triggered my interest in the man and his work. The event was a motion picture based on his novel The Europeans, a film that captivated me. It had an ineffable quality, and made me interested to know more about James and his work. I recall observing to my wife as we left the cinema that I felt I should like to write an article about James. What better theme than a “man behind the scenes” account of the processing in 1915 of James’s application for British nationality whereby he lost his United States citizenship. I considered that I was qualified to do so since I had a good grasp of nationality law, having been chair of the State Department’s Board of Appellate Review, hearing appeals by people who had lost their U.S. citizenship. So I set to work with gusto and produced an article in 1991 entitled “A Memorable Naturalization: How Henry James Became a British Subject and Lost His United States Citizenship.”

The article, which appeared in Henry James Review, was favorably received. I was therefore encouraged to widen the horizons of my study of James. I hit on another theme: his relationship with Field Marshal Lord Wolseley and Lady Wolseley—he a national military hero, she a gifted intellectual. The essay, which was published in 1997, was called “The Field Marshal, His Lady, and the Exquisite, Meticulous Dreamer: The Friendship of Henry James and Lord and Lady Wolseley.”

Feeling I was on a roll, I asked myself, “Why not expand the article into a book?” This I did, and a university press took interest in my manuscript. The press insisted that the opinion of an outside reader should be sought. The reader was in general complimentary, but was emphatic that the book should not be in the form of “a biographical memoir.” Evidently he/she felt that the ground had already been sufficiently plowed by more eminent Jamesian scholars and (sotto voce) that I might not bring to the table the necessary literary competence. The reader insisted that the relationship of James and the Wolseleys would be more profitably left to Henry James to describe. In other words, “let James be James—let him describe the relationship.”

I took the reader’s point and embarked on a long program to edit James’s letters to the Wolseleys, and produced a final manuscript that the University of Virginia Press accepted much to my gratification.

The Master, the Modern Major General, and His Clever Wife: Henry James’s Letters to Field Marshal Lord Wolseley and Lady Wolseley, 1878–1913 is available now.

With the addition of George Herbert to our publications, we have renamed our “Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture” collection as Literature and Culture to reflect its expansion into seventeenth-century England.

Information on institutional or individual purchase is available on Rotunda’s Purchase page. You may also register for a free trial to evaluate this and other Rotunda publications.

In addition to our numerous books on the Civil War—including Civil War Petersburg, a look at the war-torn Virginia city featured in Speilberg’s film—those wishing to learn more might turn next to our four-volume set of Abraham Lincoln’s papers, concentrating on his life before the presidency. Part of an ambitious undertaking to collect and publish the surviving documentary record of Lincoln’s life, The Papers of Abraham Lincoln: Legal Documents and Cases addresses his quarter-century law career. You may read more about this edition here.

This four-volume set, which list for $300.00, is available now at a special 25% discount. To receive this discount, please order via email at vapress@virginia.edu or call toll-free 1-800-831-3406 and use the discount code LINS when ordering. You must use the code to receive the discount. This offer is good though December 31, 2012.

Michael David Cohen, author of Reconstructing the Campus: Higher Education and the American Civil War, has a piece in the New York Times describing the sometimes-strange fates of college campuses during the war between North and South. You may read it here.

In the piece below, written for the Press blog, Cohen considers the first presidential debate between President Obama and Governor Romney. Paying special attention to the two candidates’ positions on what role the university should play in American life, he looks back at an earlier era in the evolving story of higher ed…

In their first presidential debate, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney spent several minutes discussing K-12 education. They agreed on the need for a federal role, including at least some elements of Obama’s Race to the Top program, but disagreed on whether to distribute federal funds to states or, as Romney proposed as a way to promote school choice, to individual students. But beyond brief references to the value of community colleges, the challenge of paying tuition, and the difficulty of finding jobs after graduation, the candidates said little about higher education.

A month ago, however, both parties approved platforms that outline their positions on higher education. Among other disagreements, they diverge on the basic role of college in America. The Democratic platform stresses the importance of “keep[ing] college within reach for every student” and of achieving the world’s highest college-graduation rate. The Republican platform, by contrast, calls for a greater reliance on other forms of education: “private training schools, online universities, life-long learning, and work-based learning in the private sector.”

The Republicans are the reformers here. Americans have long considered college key to entering the middle class. Given today’s economic crisis, Romney’s party is proposing an alternative and (it hopes) more affordable option: non-degree institutions or workplace training as preparation for good jobs.

That’s what used to happen. A century and a half ago, Americans entering most fields never went to college. They learned their skills in independent professional schools or on the job. It was amid another crisis that educators began shifting job training into colleges. Back then, too, politicians helped drive the change.

Before the Civil War broke out in 1861, higher education played a limited role in American life. Only about 1 percent of Americans went to college. Most went to prepare for careers as doctors, lawyers, ministers, or teachers. In the South, planters’ children also went as part of their cultural upbringing. The college curriculum, which emphasized the classical languages and mathematics, provided little in the way of practical knowledge for aspiring professionals or landowners. Indeed, many of them—including the lawyer Abraham Lincoln—skipped college. But it did provide a level of respectability that appealed to Americans aiming for those careers.

The rest of the U.S. population had no reason to go to college. Farmers, engineers, and miners learned their trades in independent vocational schools—degrees in these fields didn’t exist—or, more often, on the job. Even doctors and lawyers, whether they had attended college or not, usually learned the skills of their professions in separate medical or law schools or through apprenticeships. (Many Americans, including blacks held in slavery and poor whites who needed to work from an early age, could not have gone to college even if they had wanted to. Some women did go, though outside the Midwest they usually were confined to separate, all-female colleges.)

The Civil War challenged the old system. Male students left to join the armies. Some women left to become battlefield nurses. The Union and the Confederacy even took over some campuses for military use. South Carolina College, for example, became a Confederate hospital. The University of Missouri served the Union as everything from stables to a prison.

Occupations brought physical damage. At Missouri, prisoners cut holes in the floor while trying to escape and soldiers traded away library books for whiskey. Cumberland University in Tennessee fared much worse: after being occupied by Union troops, it was burned to the ground by Confederate ones.

When the war ended in 1865, colleges tried to return to normal. That was relatively easy in the North, where most colleges had stayed open and few had suffered physical damage. It was harder in the South. Many Southern colleges, even if not in ruins, had closed during the war. South Carolina College had not held a class in nearly three years; the University of Missouri had operated only part of each year. These schools could not simply reopen their gates and continue as before. They needed to repair or rebuild damaged facilities.

Worse yet, Southern colleges needed to attract students in a depression. Planters’ children and prospective professionals had gone to college before the war to gain respectability. But with the elite’s wealth drained—currency was inflated, land was devalued, and human property had ceased to exist—few Southerners could now afford an education that didn’t bring concrete economic benefits.

Educators responded by envisioning colleges—or “universities,” as they increasingly called them—that taught a variety of practical subjects. Farmers and engineers, teachers and miners, doctors and lawyers would all enroll in the universities to learn the skills of their vocations. But creating these programs would require money. Colleges’ coffers had been depleted by wartime inflation; high tuition would have kept students away. Colleges had to do more, charge less, and find money elsewhere.

Enter the government. Most Southern states had created state colleges before the Civil War. Few, however, had given them significant funding. Most had left them to operate and raise money on their own. After the war, that model no longer worked. With potential students poor and reforms necessary, colleges needed public funding.

Daniel Read, recently offered the presidency of the University of Missouri, described the problem candidly. Appearing before the Missouri legislature in 1867, he reminded the lawmakers of the university’s “dilapidated” condition and of their history of “doing nothing whatever for it.” Unless that changed, he said, the school had no hope and he would turn down the job. With state funding, however, he could build it into a true university.

Read’s strategy worked. The legislature established an annual appropriation for the university. Read accepted the presidency and created new schools of agriculture and engineering, mining and metallurgy, teaching, law, and medicine. A few years later the legislature increased funding and cut in-state tuition in half. Students poured in. Thanks to state support and curricular reform, college had become appealing and affordable.

Across the South colleges and governments partnered to diversify curricula and reduce tuition. Colleges made these reforms in order to survive. Politicians supported them for several reasons: commitment to equal opportunity, state pride (it looked bad if one state’s students had to go to another state’s university), and an incipient belief that college was the best place to learn a variety of jobs. (As they made a college education useful to more people, some state universities even admitted students whom they previously had categorically excluded: women and, in Arkansas and South Carolina, African Americans. Sadly, within a few years legislators chose again to exclude blacks.)

State legislators were not the only politicians promoting university vocational training. In 1862, Congress passed and Lincoln signed the Morrill Land-Grant College Act. Obama actually mentioned this law in the debate. It offered states (including former Confederate states once they re-entered the Union) federal land to sell. The proceeds would support colleges teaching agriculture, engineering, military tactics, and the liberal arts. Every state took advantage of the law. Some gave the money to private colleges such as Cornell University in New York. Others, including Missouri, combined it with state tax income to fund the development of state universities.

Civil War–era support for the expansion of collegiate training was not confined to one party. Both Republicans and Democrats voted for the Morrill Act. States controlled by both parties funded state universities and accepted federal money for agricultural colleges. Colleges’ success at attracting students in the new fields varied—most Americans, after all, were unaccustomed to attending college—but by 1890, 36 percent of earned first degrees (excluding those at all-female colleges) were in vocational subjects.

The trend continued in the twentieth century. Colleges further diversified their offerings, high school graduation rates rose, and the G.I. Bill of 1944 enabled millions of veterans to enroll in college. College has now become a highly desired, if not expected, part of life for middle-class Americans. The census shows that enrollment in college and graduate school is now greater than the country’s population aged 18 to 22. The road here began amid the Civil War, when politicians and educators turned to college as a new place to train Americans for jobs. Now a new group of leaders must decide whether the economic crisis demands a reversal of that change.

Michael David Cohen is assistant research professor of history at the University of Tennessee and the author of the new book Reconstructing the Campus: Higher Education and the American Civil War.