New this month is our annotated edition of Mary Cutts’s memoir of her famous aunt, Dolley Madison. The Queen of America presents both drafts of Cutts’s manuscript with an introductory essay and notes by Dolley biographer and Parlor Politics author Catherine Allgor. A reliable guide is especially necessary in this case because it turns out Cutts may have had a few things to hide—or at least conveniently ignore—in her life of the First Lady. Allgor spoke with us about the fine line Cutts walked in her famous memoir.

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.

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.

The Supreme Court’s hearing on the constitutionality of President Obama’s health care law has attracted a nearly unprecedented amount of interest, not only from individuals demonstrating on the court’s steps—or waiting in line literally for days for a seat inside—but from organizations either supporting or opposing the law. Apparently a record number of briefs have been filed—so-called amicus curiae, in which organizations provide historical and legal data to influence the process. As these briefs are processed by the court’s law clerks, we thought we would go to Todd C. Peppers and Artemus Ward, editors of In Chambers: Stories of Supreme Court Law Clerks and Their Justices, with some of our questions about the preparation for this historic ruling.

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.