As the EU approves a second bailout for the failing Greek economy, we thought it would be a good time to hear from historians John P. Kaminski and Richard Leffler. Their most recent project, an English-language edition of Jürgen Heideking’s The Constitution before the Judgment Seat, reveals many compelling parallels between Europe’s current fiscal challenges and those faced by the founders in the days of the early republic.
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.
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.
Because it had been too long since we’d been on a trip, and because we’re not always busy selling books, we decided to go to London this past summer. Naturally we ended up at the British Museum. We knew that Giovanni Belzoni (1778-1824), subject of a new biography by Ivor Noël Hume, had brought back from Egypt many of the museum’s most prized artifacts, including the bust of Ramesses II. What we were not prepared for was the sight of Belzoni’s name actually carved into those works (as the vacation photo to the left shows).
Aside from coming up with possibly the greatest haul of Egyptian artifacts ever to reach the West, Belzoni is perhaps most famous for sparking controversy among critics who feel this former circus “strong man” was more vandal than archaeologist. The Wall Street Journal notes this same contradiction in their new review of the Noël Hume biography : ” in this entertaining and graceful account of Belzoni’s adventures, Mr. Hume opens a window on the raffish days of early Egyptology, when an Italian giant towered over his competitors.”
Rotunda, the University of Virginia Press’s electronic imprint, has added a digital edition of The Papers of Alexander Hamilton to its American Founding Era collection. Among the founding fathers, Hamilton is perhaps the most controversial, both in his own time and in history. With the release of this important new resource, we talked with historian Mary-Jo Kline, who served as a consultant on the digital edition.
Who believes in American Exceptionalism? Alexis de Tocqueville, for one. Tocqueville felt that traveling to America would reveal the secret of the modern world, in which democracy and equality were destined to rule.