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.

I had been on FOB (forward operating base) Salerno a week. Until then, I had been teaching most of my classes—English, Creative Writing, and Speech—to Army, Marine, and Air Force soldiers, and even a few Navy seamen, on Bagram Airbase. But soldiers on remote FOBs need a diversion, and want a chance to earn some college hours while deployed, too, so I had volunteered and now sat slouched in a metal folding chair in the freezing, cement-floored Bagram PAX terminal all night with seventy or so ragged, exhausted, depressed soldiers waiting for connecting flights on a helicopter, Cessna, or C-130, we never knew which, to remote FOBs. We snacked on potato chips and pasty chocolate chip cookies from vending machines while late ‘90s movies threw flickers of light in our faces. The actors’ voices were hollowed into garble by the metal roof and cement floor of the terminal, but the mouths, eyes, and hands continued gesticulating, and a fair number of us, glazed by the need for sleep, watched on.

When my name was finally called, I dragged my green sausage of a duffle bag to the back of the line behind a couple of corporals built like defensive linemen. We were led a block or so onto the flight line, then to the doorway of a six-seater Cessna. Each of us was scared, cold, and alone, and weighed down by a 30-pound camouflaged flak vest and Kevlar helmet. I hoisted myself up onto the single step and bent forward through the low metal doorway. The three of us crammed into undersized seats made smaller by our awkward flak vests, and through windows the size of dinner plates we watched an F-15 fighter rip down the gray, parallel runway only a few feet from us. Then a C-130 lumbered along behind it like a slug. It hummed that low, deep-throated groan—uummmm—the misery music that permeates Bagram Airbase twenty-four hours a day. Another instant, and the F-15 broke the sound barrier with that symbol of American might, a deafening, vibrating thud. I wondered where the bombs were headed.

On our Cessna’s steep “combat” takeoff, I thought about the nineteen- or twenty-year-old Private on the metal chair in front of me back in the PAX Terminal. He had been bent forward, one elbow on a knee, curled as if staring at a meaningless speck on the cement floor. He rocked just a little in his chair. His hair was that kind of clumped dirty that comes from having slept outside in the open, from sweat and wind. He combed his fingers through it, forehead to crown, in quick strokes, back and forth. Somebody’s son. He was bent over himself, elbows to knees–as if there was a thought he could not take. Something was wrong, real wrong. He had lost a parent, or his wife back in the states had cheated on him or spent all their money, or he was going to the Korengal Valley to a FOB so remote he would have to burn his own excrement, sleep covered in fleas, dodge tarantulas, and might die. Could very well die.

From the sky, Afghanistan is at peace. As the Cessna climbed its steep slope, Bagram’s cement runway became a hyphen in the dust. Soon the world below was a beige-toned infinity punctuated by clusters of mud-brick walls. Villages like tic-tac-toe boards drawn out on the earth, each mud square with a mud house huddled in a corner. After ten minutes or so the view became more rugged. If the earth’s crust had once been a primordial sea, here its hurricane-force waves had frozen into dirt. The infantry soldier across from me was raised on an Iowa farm, just touched down in-country the day before and said he was scared as hell of all planes never mind one the size of a tuna can. He kept tapping the butt of his M-16 on the metal floor and sighing. He was maybe twenty and flinched each time we hit an air pocket. The back of the pilot was only a couple feet in front of us. Inches in front of him came the dials the size of wristwatch faces that held our lives in the balance of their trembling arrows. Twenty minutes later we were crossing the snow-covered Hindu Kush, a field of chiseled daggers as far as the eye can see. The Cessna flew low, meandered between gray spikes draped in snow. Soon we were humming our way over foothills. Then the pilot pointed the plane nose down toward the gravel runway and took us combat-fast into Salerno.

I knew I had my work cut out for me. I caught a ride to my sleeping quarters with a couple of soldiers in a Humvee, dumped the personal stuff, then reported to the education building, a three-room bunker. I set up a table in front of the AFES (military) store that sold pillows and souvenir beer mugs, CDs, and Doritos, so I could first capture people’s attention and, I hoped, register some students, since none had yet signed up for either of my courses. I unpacked the enticement to earn some college credit: free pens and key chains with the university’s white-on-navy logo. There were stacks of catalogues and registration forms. I had brought along an Army green foot locker of English 101 and Library Skills textbooks. By noon I had registered fourteen soldiers. Class would begin in a small room built as a bunker at 1800.

Outside the Wire: American Soliders’ Voices from Afghanistan is available now.

Regular readers of our blog were treated a few weeks back to the story of Fly, a seven-year-old sheepdog “owned” by Donald McCaig. McCaig, the author A Useful Dog and the soon-to-be-released Mrs. and Mrs. Dog: Our Trials, Travels, Adventures, and Epiphanies, continues the story of Fly in this new piece.

Noticing many sheepdog handlers wear shooting glasses to eliminate glare, a novice asked top handler Scott Glenn, what color glasses she should order. “Rose-colored,” Scott deadpanned.

I ask a lot of my dogs: I want an intimate working partnership. I want them to handle any breed of sheep on any terrain in blowing snow, scorching heat, or moonless night. I want them to be politely indifferent to other dogs and mannerly in airports, office buildings, packed elevators, other people’s homes, and public places. I can only ask this much if I can see my dogs; if I’ve put those rose-colored glasses aside. Seeing them is easier said than done.

I was making progress with Fly. She was getting around the trial course and she was more mannerly (not a high bar: she’d been a biting, hysterical, gyp who didn’t know where she lived or where she belonged, clinging desperately to a mistaken image of who she just might be). If she’d gone to a pet home she would have been put down.

Welshman Aled Owens won the World Trial I describe in Mr & Mrs Dog, and he would teach a sheepdog clinic in sunny Georgia. T’weren’t sunny. After hypothermia twice at dog trials, you’d think I’d have learned: PACK FOR THE WORST. It rained cold rain.

Aled trained in a 20-acre field. Novice dogs dragged parachute cord so they could be caught, but he and their handlers did lot of running until each young dog settled. At my age, I admire those who can run. At all.

At my turn, I told Aled, “She’s a seven-year-old open-trial dog who has soured. She’s come partway back but isn’t there yet. Tell me what you see.” At seven years old, trained sheepdogs are well settled into their method and by eight, you won’t be able to change it much. But Fly had had a method at one time. She’d won difficult trials. So I wasn’t so much teaching something new as I was summoning up and rephrasing old skills in a new context.

In our first month Fly wouldn’t work at all. When she started, tentatively, I sent her after the ewes every morning, wherever they were on 160 rumpled acres. No commands. I let Fly figure it out. Her pleasure in the work reawakened, I started adding commands. For nearly a year she’d take commands at home but when they came hot and heavy at a trial, she’d quit. She couldn’t take the pressure. Fly’s theory: I’ve done everything I can and it hasn’t been enough so why break my heart trying?

I had to build her up to take more pressure, while reducing pressure where practicable. Last fall, at the Virginia trials, I’d leave home in the morning, drive 3 hours, run Fly and drive three hours home so she’d be back in her own bed every night—just so that trialing would seem more like “doing a little farm work”. At trials, I gave as few commands as possible—if she was wildly off line for a panel, I didn’t use the deluge of hard commands she needed to hit it. If she was ready to quit, I retired while she was still trying. I set up panels at home and insisted she make them. If she quit at 200 yards, we tried again at 100. Six days a week.

I took her out into the big world of people, dogs, airports, unfamiliar scents, sights and sounds. I trusted her a little more
than I was comfortable with and she’s repaying me. The issue isn’t “can I control her?” but “Must I watch her every moment?”

When we returned to the farm after a week in Seattle, Fly jumped out of the car. I swear I could see her realization: “Oh, so this is my HOME! I will always come back HERE.” Can’t blame her for being slow to figure that out. This home is her sixth.

So I work her. Aled watches. “Do you see how she’s makes that little move, after she’s downed, to hold the pressure?” The sheep are heavy to the exhaust and Fly doesn’t want to go off balance (holding them to me). She trusts HER more than she trusts US. Aled says I’m putting too much energy in my DOWN, that I need to make it more neutral. That one’ll go in the brainbox for later consideration. Lifetime habit, different use of the down. But Aled Owens did win that World Trial and I sure as hell didn’t.

Getting the best out of what the sheepdog coach has to offer is hard because I (and perhaps you) ask our question with an answer already in mind.

I had expected magical advice about de-souring. “Hmmm, better train this gyp in the last quarter of the new moon”.

What I got was useful practical how-to’s. “Flank her around you, turning so you face her. . . . She’s reluctant to be pulled off balance on her comebye side. . . . She needs a better ‘down’. . . . She doesn’t like downing on the drive.” Practical observations from a Master. “Pick up the jacket. Drop the Jacket. Pick up the jacket…”

Advanced sheepdog clinics and dog trials are dog safe: the dogs are mannerly, handlers are dog-savvy. In thirty years I’ve never seen a dogfight at a sheepdog trial. When Fly came to me, she bit people, and if she was loose she’d flee back to the house or the familiar car. Today while I watched other instructions, Fly wandered around exploring until she got bored and came back to sit beside me.

Just like all the other ordinary sheepdogs. When we think about our dogs we picture their quirks, their endearing traits, and their exceptionalisms, both good and bad. No sheepdog can ever replace another; each is unique and uniquely beloved.

But in another sense, all good sheepdogs are the same. They get the work done. While not working, they are mannerly. Fly is becoming ordinary.

Mrs. and Mrs. Dog: Our Trials, Travels, Adventures, and Epiphanies will be published in late March and is available now for pre-order.

The Louvre’s collection includes still-life paintings by the Dutch masters that render sumptuous foods—oysters in particular—with spectacular realism. One of the advantages of living in Paris is that you can simply stroll over to the Louvre and consult these works with your own eyes, in this case in the Richelieu Wing where rooms are dedicated to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch painting. There is no time better to visit a European art museum than in the “r” month of January, and I wanted to see for myself exactly what was going on with the Dutch artists and their singular obsession with oysters.

I wrote to my Dutch friend Geron de Leeuw, a food writer and chef, asking what the oyster represented to his country’s Golden Age still-life painters. He said that people believed oysters possessed aphrodisiac powers, and symbolically represented fertility and prosperity. “Rendering oysters was a bit naughty,” he added, “since they stood for sexual freedom in a time when Calvinism swept the Netherlands.”

Of course, the suggestive form of oysters adds to their sexual insinuations. In Jan Steen’s Girl Eating Oysters, an attractive young woman looks coquettishly at the viewer with an alluring smile while offering an opened oyster.

Oysters possessed other symbolic meanings, representing taste, sensuality, and the temporary pleasures of earthly existence. They are often featured in still lifes known as vanitas, lush cornucopias of foods (some barely eaten), half-finished glasses of wine, lemons with rinds peeled in a spiral signifying the unraveling of time, all caught in hyper-real stillness and masterful rendering of light as it glints off silver, glass, and perfect pools of oyster liquor.

While these paintings are stunning, I studied them for another reason: the oysters don’t look anything like the ones my father, brother, and I collected and ate during the years I grew up in New England, nor do they look like the most common oysters in France, a country famed since Roman times as Europe’s greatest oyster producer. Clearly, the seventeenh-century oysters in the paintings were rounder and flatter than the typical creuses, oysters with a cupped shell that are consumed worldwide.

Through the ages, oysters have reliably served humans. Even Neanderthals ate the original flat European oysters, probably more as “last-chance foods” rather than to bolster sexual prowess. Oyster shells have been fashioned into tools, jewelry, and false teeth; ground up for mortar; and pulverized for biomineralization to relieve osteoporosis. The oysters themselves provide zinc, iron, selenium, and vitamin B12, making them nature’s depression-fighting food. They contain the whole alphabet of vitamins as well as iodine, calcium, phosphorous, magnesium, and copper—all contributing to general nutrition and bolstering the immune system. Their omega-3 fatty acids are good for the heart. Now, what the Dutch and just about everyone else claims about oysters being an aphrodisiac is supported by scientific studies on amino acids, specifically D-aspartic acid and N-methyl-D-aspartate. It’s hardly a wonder that Henry VII held oyster orgies, Napoleon consumed them before battles, Voltaire and Rousseau ate them for inspiration, and Casanova enjoyed passing one between his lips and those of his lovers. Oysters even figure prominently in the “Party Girl Diet.”

It must be obvious that I’ve always been passionate about oysters, and now I find myself living in a true oyster-crazed country. Oysters come in all sizes and from a variety of locales—most notably, going from Normandy to the Aquitaine, Isigny, Cancale, Belon, Bourneuf, Marennes-Oléron, and Arcachon, all boasting perfect conditions for the most delectable produce. The French devour tons of oysters over Christmas and New Year’s, when 70 percent of the annual harvest is eaten. Of course, a good number of oyster lovers spend the holidays with gastroenteritis, but they don’t seem to consider it true cause-and-effect—a bad oyster—but just a bit of holiday bad luck.

I wanted to know more about the genuine European oysters, the ones in the vanitas paintings urging us to indulge earthly sensual pleasures while we still have the chance. I visited most of the major oyster-growing areas in France, including the mucky tidal estuary of the Balon River on the southern side of Brittany’s Finistere, literally land’s end, where Paul Gauguin once painted land- and seascapes. Gauguin also produced still lifes with oysters, and again the oysters resemble the original flat European variety, which many connoisseurs consider the ultimate oyster. These are now raised in the States, where they are prized for their meaty texture and the savor of sea and minerals.

While researching huîtres plates (Ostrea edulis), also known as Belons, I discovered a shocking relative, the wildest of all wild oysters, called a pied de cheval, or literally “horse’s foot.” While they share an uncanny round appearance, the oysters grow wider than a horse’s hoof. Pied de cheval can weigh as much as three pounds and live for thirty years or more, with one equivalent to six good-sized oysters. This enormous rare oyster, found in Normandy’s Bay of Mont Saint-Michel, is a specialty of certain restaurants.  Most people, including the French, have never heard of them.

I watched an interview with a French chef who, rather than describing the overall sensation of eating the oysters, focused instead on three parts of the anatomy of the pied de cheval as if each were a wine. This oyster is perfectly equilibrated for flavor. The liver is soft, creamy, and sweet; the foot is muscular, musty, and chewy with fine, long-lasting taste; and the mantle, the tissue at the lip, is pleasantly bitter. The chef prepared the enormous oyster by cooking it very delicately until tepid and then adding a little cabbage and cream curry sauce.

These record-sized oysters, which have been found in the Chesapeake Bay and close to Humbolt, California, weighing in at more than eight pounds, seem almost large enough for Aphrodite, the love goddess and root of aphrodisiac, to have been conceived in. My favorite oysters are large but not huge, just a perfect mouthful. But the pied de cheval being a delicacy and an oddity intrigued me so much that I planned a trip the Bay of Saint-Michel just to see if I could find one.

I had no idea what I was doing. It’s not like you can dig these up or find them stuck to a rock, as they live in the middle of the English Channel. I hiked the shores above Grandville, a major port, and found shells from pied de cheval everywhere, along with an enormous array of wild edibles. Clam diggers were more than a mile out on the surreal stretches of sand, their dogs running free in long elliptical orbits. No one from the fishing fleet from Granville was selling pied de cheval, so I drove past Mont Saint-Michel to Cancale on the western shore of the bay. Cancale is one of France’s most famous producers of oysters, and sure enough on the north side of the port there were at least eight stands selling and opening oysters for whole families, who sat along the boat ramp and ate dozens for lunch. It was as if we were transported to the nineteenth century, when families strolled to the port and snacked on oysters. The shore was covered with lemons.

On the farthest corner on the left was an uncommonly large, ruggedly handsome vendor with black hair who displayed a crate of pied de cheval. I couldn’t believe my luck and asked, “How much are these?”

“Four euros.”

“Each?” Even if it equaled a half-dozen oysters, this rare oyster seemed expensive. “Okay, I’ll take one. How should I cook it?”

“Cook it? Oh no, you don’t cook these. That’s criminal. Here, I’ll open it for you,” he offered. “Don’t put even a drop of lemon on it. It must be eaten just as is. Nothing is better,” he assured me.

A big man like him might be able to eat a pound of oyster in a gulp, but I was taken aback. I stopped him from opening it. “I will take it with me. I want my wife to taste it too.” I walked with the oyster in hand, feeling like a Greek discus-thrower. In the afternoon, I picked up my wife, Mary, at St. Malo train station, and we headed for Brittany to enjoy the weekend by the sea. Once in the car, I introduced her to my oyster and she was suitably shocked. “He’s huge! And so beautiful. Where did you find him?”

Author M. F. K. Fisher points out in Consider the Oyster that oysters have a peculiar habit of switching sexes, so one can never be sure of the gender. I settle on “it” instead of “him.” “I didn’t find it. I bought it,” I confessed, knowing this would be a bit of a letdown.

Meanwhile, Mary was more than happy just to admire the oyster with me, but had no intention of putting any of it in her mouth. I debated whether I should put it back in the sea or eat it raw to understand the savors and textures of the different parts. It traveled with me for three days, refrigerator-hopping, until we arrived in Paris; there I knew the oyster’s fate was sealed. I set it on the counter, and each time I walked into the room it would clamp shut, making the prospect of butchering it all the more painful. Mary was appalled by the thought that the oyster had become a kind of companion.

I downed a glass of Muscadet for nerve, reflected on the Dutch paintings and vanitas, while guessing at how old the oyster was. Maybe thirty? Certainly, neither Henry VIII nor Napoleon would hesitate to eat this oyster, though “Party Girls” might. I quickly cut the abductor muscle, and the oyster soon lay open, a veritable quarry: liver, gills, and mantle along with the rest of its nutritious anatomy. I honored the rare oyster and ate the sumptuous creature raw.

Check our blog regularly for future reports from Jeffrey Greene on his search for wild edibles. His book The Golden-Bristled Boar will be available in paperback in April.

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The university press blog tour wraps up with the Oregon State University Press. A full schedule for the tour can be found here.

In Business Schools across the country, classes and seminars are devoted to analyzing what ensures and distinguishes a successful business venture. At Harvard’s Business School, for instance, the talk is about “resonant leadership,” a way of connecting managers and employees in authentic, but also productive, ways. Underneath all of the “business speak” is the quest for wholeness. Can we integrate the work process, products, and people in a way that brings out the best in each aspect?

If B-Schoolers need a model for a holistic approach, I recommend checking out a University Press, or at least mine, the University of Virginia Press. I came to them in 1998, with a dissertation to be turned into a book. Editor Dick Holway had got in touch with me when I was still a graduate student, so when it was time to publish, I already felt like I was among friends. I learned so much from every step—from the beginning, when the editors of my series turned that sprawling, baroque manuscript into an actual book, up to the final awe- and terror-inspiring copyediting stage. Susan Lee Foard converted me to the mission of the serial comma, and I am a devoted acolyte to this day. Though by the end, I enthusiastically endorsed the University Press of Virginia (as it was known then) to other authors, I probably didn’t really appreciate what was going on in that quiet building on Sprigg Lane.

Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government came out in 2000 and won the James H. Broussard First Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic and the Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association Annual Book Award. But it also sold. Thanks to the wonderful marketing department, which was Mark Saunders and Trish Phipps, I garnered a lot of press attention. It was kind of amazing. This was a small academic press book—maybe the press run was a thousand or so—but its author was on NPR and C-Span, being reviewed in the Washington Post and Newsweek. Thanks to all this attention, Parlor Politics went into new printings and paperback and continues to sell. Again, I quite rightly attributed all of this media attention to Mark and Trish at the time, but I probably didn’t quite appreciate the specialness of the experience.

With Parlor Politics emerging as the Little Book That Could, the next step seemed inevitable and right. For my next book, a political biography of Dolley Payne Todd Madison, I moved up into the big leagues. With blessings from my publishing “family” at UVP, I went to the big city and signed onto a major house. As the people of the nineteenth century would say, however, it is best to draw a veil over that period in my life as an author. The good news is that book came out, but how the book was created and marketed and the way that it has been subsequently treated is something I don’t like to talk about. At least, not without a few cocktails. OK—one story. From the start, I was clear that mine was to be a scholarly biography of the popular First Lady and accordingly, the working title of the project was The Last of the Founders: Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American Nation. Indeed, I think the book proposal sold because of that title. When we were deep in the process, my editor confessed that if she could she would rename the book, Party Girl. You see why we need the veil.

There’s something else important to note—one that says something about my experience with a major publishing house and the industry as a whole. Not a single person I worked with or met, including my editor or the CEO, is at that house anymore. I even think my editor dropped out of the business. Further, seven years from the debut of my Dolley biography, this publishing house, which had been founded about a hundred and fifty years ago, no longer exists, having been swallowed up by some larger entity.

When it came to my present project, I knew where I had to go. The only publisher for The Queen of America: Mary Cutts’s Life of Dolley Madison was the University of Virginia Press. I returned to find many of the same colleagues and staffers I had worked with on the first book. Dick Holway once again plunged right in and together we crafted a very special volume. This was no simple manuscript that needed mere editing and typesetting. At every turn, the Cutts Memoirs challenged our creativity. Assistant Managing Editor Mark Mones proved especially crafty, right down to deciding how to index a book whose text contained authorial errors. Mary Cutts’s errors, not mine. I pulled his suggestions and solutions into both an editorial note and a note to the index. I remain ridiculously proud of those small pieces of writing. While we wrestled with ideas and prose, Design and Production Manager Martha Farlow solved those writerly problems involving our long-dead author with innovative and inspired solutions involving fonts, spacing, and shadings.

What is the B-School takeaway? Excellence. Integrity. Unanimity. From beginning to end, the integrity of the ideas and the commitment to making the best book we could drove every decision. Author, editor, contributors, production people, marketing staff—we all had one aim in mind. We who wrote and edited struggled to fulfill the intellectual potential of presenting Mary Cutts’s biography of her famous aunt to a reading public. The process of creating this book with UVP has truly been an exercise in holistic business.

In the end, it is a beautiful book. The product reflects the process, which left all of us feeling happy and fulfilled in this work we do. Uniting in a quest for excellence is the hallmark of the University Press, especially mine. I understand that now—and I appreciate that. I really do.

Catherine Allgor
Professor of History, University of California at Riverside

Drawn from the award-winning Buildings of the United States (BUS) series, SAH Archipedia includes histories and thematic essays on Massachusetts (Metropolitan Boston), Rhode Island, Pennsylvania (Eastern and Western), the District of Columbia, Virginia (Tidewater and Piedmont), West Virginia, Michigan, Iowa, Colorado, Nevada, and Alaska. This cross-section of the country demonstrates the richness and diversity of architecture and building practice across many centuries, from mud brick to steel, from ancient cliff dwellings to contemporary office towers.

“SAH Archipedia is an innovative new online publication that we hope will be used by everyone who is interested in exploring the history of American architecture,” said Pauline Saliga, Executive Director of the Society of Architectural Historians. “The University of Virginia Press has once again shown why it is considered the leading university press in pursuit of innovation in the digital humanities.”

Published by Rotunda—the digital imprint of the University of Virginia Press— SAH Archipedia contains more than 8,500 building entries, 6,000 photographs and drawings, 4,300 individual architects and firms, 1,300 unique building types, and hundreds of periods, styles, and building materials, each tagged as a search facet for discovery. All search results and individual entries appear on dynamically generated maps. The site also includes the interpretive introductions from the first twelve volumes published in print. This legacy material from the BUS volumes will be supplemented with original digital content created and edited in an online authoring environment, yielding entries that will ultimately encompass all 50 states.

“SAH Archipedia incorporates the spatial turn in digital humanities for the first time in a Rotunda publication,” said Mark Saunders, Interim Director of the University of Virginia Press. “As a collaboration between a university press and a scholarly society, it represents a new chapter in scholarly communications. From a publishing perspective, the project will be released in a hybrid model, blending licensed and free material, with a commitment to open metadata.”

SAH Archipedia will be released in two complementary versions: a scholars edition for license to libraries, and a free website, SAH Archipedia Classic Buildings, which features over 100 open-access entries on the most important buildings for each state.

“The launch of SAH Archipedia is another step in the development of online scholarly resources that incorporates peer review, contextual information such as maps and satellite images, and tagging that provides further historical context,” said Ann Whiteside, Librarian and Assistant Dean for Information Resources, Frances Loeb Library, Harvard Graduate School of Design. “SAH Archipedia has the potential to transform how architectural history is studied because of the way in which it marries imagery, scholarly rigor, and database searchability within a single resource.”

Libraries interested in acquiring SAH Archipedia for long-term access, please contact Jason Coleman at jcoleman@virginia.edu or 434-924-1450. Press inquiries, please contact Emily Grandstaff at egrandstaff@virginia.edu or 434-982-2932.

Q: Your book includes draft versions of the memoir Dolley Madison’s niece, Mary Cutts, wrote about her aunt. The drafts show that Cutts, and her family, changed things in her account. What were they trying to hide?

Allgor: First, Mary lies about Dolley’s birthplace as part of a general cover-up about Dolley’s father, a difficult man who may have been a bit shady in his dealings. Mary stresses Dolley’s charm, but omits that it never got her anywhere with her marital family, the Madisons, who had a low opinion of “Dolly” and would have sued her at a moment’s notice.

Q: Dolley had two sons from a previous marriage—William Temple, who died from a yellow fever epidemic—and John Payne, who was a bit of an early 19th Century rebel. How does Mary treat his story?

Allgor: Mary couldn’t get away without mentioning Dolley’s famous and famously-profligate son, Payne, but she deliberately does not detail the incredibly bad things he did. Payne squandered hundreds of thousands of dollars on booze and gambling. David Mattern, editor of The Papers of James Madison, says that you can trace Payne’s movements by following the trail of debt up and down the eastern seaboard.

Q: How and why do you think Mary tried to spin Dolley’s life in a more positive way?

Allgor: After James Madison’s death, the abolitionists attacked Dolley as a slaveholder, so it was perhaps because of this that Mary paints a picture of Dolley as beloved by animals and slaves. If you look at Elizabeth Downing Taylor’s book A Slave in the White House: Paul Jennings and the Madisons, you’ll see just how much James’s valet hated Dolley, and might have sold her out to the abolitionist press.

Q: What was Mary like herself? What were her motives in writing the memoir?

Allgor: This gets to the crux of the book. The Big Story, really, as far as I am concerned, is not with Dolley, but with Mary. Here is this woman, deep in the 19th century, when women were supposed to be private and domestic, while Mary was trying to make a name for herself as a historian and her aunt as a historical subject. A tough task, since Mary also wanted Dolley to appear the “perfect lady.” What Mary couldn’t quite contain or cover up is that her Aunt Dolley was a savvy politician and well-connected political player.

The Queen of America, edited by Catherine Allgor and with a foreword by Cokie Roberts, is available now.

For over 400 years a simple patch hid a very important detail on John White’s “Virginae Pars” map, and some historians are now hopeful that it could provide valuable clues to the whereabouts of the “Lost Colony,” a 16th-century settlement that disappeared without a trace. The story of the map’s hidden fort quickly spread past the scholarly arena and was picked up by  the mainstream news. We asked William C. Wooldridge, author of our forthcoming Mapping Virginia: From the Age of Exploration to the Civil War, to share his thoughts on this discovery and what it might mean. Mr. Wooldridge writes:

Maps harbor many mysteries, but few are as intriguing as a recent discovery on John White’s ca. 1587 manuscript map of Virginia. According to news reports, Brent Lane of the First Colony Foundation in North Carolina noticed paper patches on the map, and subsequent investigation by the British Museum revealed that the patches covered earlier drawing, including a symbol suggesting a fort or settlement on the mainland.

A printed version of the map, titled  ”Part of America, Now Called Virginia,” has been familiar to booklovers for over 400 years.  It shows the Outer Banks of North Carolina, the area of the Sir Walter Raleigh’s Lost Colony. The manuscript with the patches (on which the printed map was ultimately though roughly based) came to light in 1865 when a transplanted Vermont Yankee, Henry Stevens, bought John White’s original watercolors, including the map, at a London auction and sold them to the British Museum. So the discovery occurred on a document well known to historians for almost 150 years. Press coverage of the new finding focused on the long-hidden mainland “fort” as a possible clue to the destination of settlers from the Lost Colony, all of whom had disappeared when John White returned to America in 1590. Archeology may eventually reveal a connection between the papered over symbol and the Lost Colony. The manuscript map does not.

What the covered-over lines and symbols do show is that mid-stream changes sometimes need to be made in the course of creating a map.  White would have worked from multiple sketches, notes and surveys, so it is easy to see how there would be occasion for corrections. The British Museum report says the southernmost patch “concealed slight changes to the coastline.” That is the kind of fix that might naturally need to be made in drafting, so a patch does not necessarily imply an intent to hide something accurate underneath it.

When John White sat down to create with graphite and watercolors a map of the part of the New World he knew as Virginia, he did not have the option of making changes by inserting a plug in a woodblock or hammering out an errant line on a copperplate. Instead, he adopted the straightforward method of affixing a patch of matching paper over the parts he wished to change. The British Museum report says this was a common expedient at the time. “They [the patches] seem to have been used to alter or correct features in the original layout, a common practice at this period.” Brent Lane says this “unattributed” assertion (by the report’s four named authors) is wrong and quotes the respected Peter Barber’s conclusion that patches were “rare.”

Common or rare, one of White’s patches covers a place where coastline or watercourses may have been changed, whether because of a slip of the hand on the first attempt, or because better information became available. The other patch covers the symbol that looks like a fort. The covered over fort could mean that White decided to limit his map to existing settlements and to delete a projected one, or that the expedition’s leaders changed their minds about establishing anything at that location. Or it could be more significant.

A much later map, John Farrer’s 1651 picture of Virginia as an isthmus between the Atlantic and Pacific, illustrated in Mapping Virginia, has not one but two fort or settlement symbols on the Roanoke-Chowan-Albemarle Sound watershed, the same watershed but not in the same place as the covered over symbol on the John White map.  (Farrer had a special interest in the region; his map accompanied a pamphlet on “Virginia. . . the South part thereof in particular Including the fertile Carolana.”)

Farrer’s multi-pointed symbols are somewhat similar to what can be seen of White’s covered over symbol. The largest of Farrer’s symbols is labeled “Dazamoncak,” the  name of an Indian village (Dasamunquepeuc on the ms. and printed White maps). Could the covered-over White symbol have been meant to refer to a large—but misplaced—Indian settlement? But the symbol is different from the pictorial symbol (a circular stockade) White and Farrer used for the Indian village of Secotan and is closer to the symbol Farrer used for Fort Orange, the Dutch settlement on the Hudson.  So do the White and Farrer symbols suggest a planned or rumored English presence? We don’t know.  But six decades after John White patched his map, John Farrer thought there was something of interest in roughly the same region.

With or without any connection to the Lost Colony, the White map’s wabi-sabi patches give us a spine-tingling close-up of the artist at work.

—William C. Wooldridge

(William Wooldridge’s Mapping Virginia will be available this fall. The John White map is one of the many illustrations in our A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia.)

Q: When we say the clerks process these briefs, what exactly does that entail?

Peppers: It varies by chamber and by justice. Many justices on the Rehnquist and Roberts courts have had their law clerks prepare bench memoranda prior to oral argument. The bench memo is a basic outline of the appeal before the court, including its procedural history and the main legal claims/arguments made by the parties. Some law clerks even prepare questions for the justices to ask.  In drafting these bench memoranda, law clerks are often asked to review the amicus curiae briefs and prepare summarizes of these briefs for the bench memo. After receiving the bench memoranda, some justices will have either informal conversations or formal meetings with their clerks to discuss the memoranda and the upcoming hearing.

Ward: Of course, the clerks are not starting from scratch when they construct the bench memo. They have the cert pool memo that already outlines the issues and arguments—and, of course, the briefs from the parties in the case, as well as the lower-court opinions.

Q: One Washington lawyer, who calls this case “the blockbuster of blockbusters,” has completed a study showing amicus briefs being cited increasingly often in court rulings. If this is the case, more than ever is hinging on the clerks’ work. How much actual responsibility are they given—is it mainly drudgery or does it require substantial expertise and creativity? And do you see the clerk’s role gaining in importance?

Peppers: This is the most fascinating question regarding the clerkship institution, namely, the influence of law clerks.  Clearly, the modern law clerk has much more substantive responsibility than his or her predecessors. Today, the modern law clerk is involved in all aspects of the chamber’s work—from reviewing cert petitions and preparing bench memoranda to drafting opinions.  During the final years of the Rehnquist Court, Justice Stevens was the only justice who prepared the first drafts of his opinions.  The other justices met with their law clerks, gave them formal instructions (either oral instructions or written instructions), and then reviewed, edited, and re-worked the draft opinions. Whether this process allows law clerks to wield influence has been subject to debate and discussion by court watchers. Former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once commented that “the reason why the public thinks so much of the Justices is that they are almost the only people in Washington who do their own work.”  This is clearly no longer the case, as the justices rely heavily on their clerks.

Ward: Clerks are particularly important in cases, such as this one, where there are a substantial number of briefs to wade through, there are multiple legal arguments to consider, and the stakes are high politically.

Q: How many clerks does each justice typically have? I’m wondering how many people this work is spread among.

Peppers: Each associate justice can hire up to four law clerks; the chief justice can hire five. Additionally, the law clerks for retired justices are often “farmed out” to the associate justices.

Q: Are all clerks involved in the process? If not, how are they chosen—is it an honor to be pulled for this duty?

Peppers: Typically, the aforementioned job duties are evenly divided amongst the clerks in the chambers.

Ward: Clerks are typically assigned cases to work on at random, though some clerks do trade cases either with or without the approval of their justice. Draft opinions are often reviewed by all the clerks in a chambers, regardless of which clerk initially drafted it.

Q: In what other ways are clerks helping the court in the preparation for this week’s case?

Peppers: I’m sure that the justices return after oral argument with legal issues that they want to clerks to research prior to the next day of oral argument.  And while this may not constitute “help,” I’m sure that many of the clerks are in the courtroom—watching the historic proceedings.

Q: When the health-care caravan moves on after this week, will the clerks’ jobs become any easier, or are their lives wall-to-wall work?

Peppers: Clerking on the Supreme Court is the most prestigious legal internship a young lawyer can have.  And it typically involves long hours of work.  What will come next is the drafting of the majority opinion, and with likely accompanying concurring and dissenting opinions—all work which will require the assistance of the clerks.  In short, the rest of the Term will be very busy for these young legal assistants.

Ward: Clerks not only aid their justices with the legal issues in cases but also act as unofficial ambassadors between chambers as the justices begin to write opinions and form coalitions. The clerks discuss the issues and the positions of their justices with one another and act as go-betweens among chambers forming an informal clerk network. In this sense the job of a clerk can be just as political as it is legal.

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.