New & Forthcoming Books

Mongrel Nation
The America Begotten by Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings
Clarence E. Walker

The debate over the affair between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings rarely rises above the question of “Did they or didn’t they?” But lost in the argument over the existence of such a relationship are equally urgent questions about a history that is more complex, both sexually and culturally, than most of us realize. Mongrel Nation seeks to uncover this complexity, as well as the reasons it is so often obscured.

The Madisons at Montpelier
Reflections on the Founding Couple
Ralph Ketcham

In their last years, James and Dolley Madison personified the republican institutions and culture of the new nation—James as the father of the Constitution and its chief propounder for nearly half a century, and Dolley as the creator of the role of “First Lady.” Anything but uneventful, the retirement period at Montpelier should be seen as a crucial element in our understanding of this remarkable couple.

“What Shall We Do with the Negro?”
Lincoln, White Racism, and Civil War America
Paul D. Escott

Consulting a broad range of contemporary newspapers, magazines, books, army records, government documents, publications of citizens’ organizations, letters, diaries, and other sources, Paul D. Escott examines the attitudes and actions of Northerners and Southerners regarding the future of African Americans after the end of slavery.

250 Years in Fauquier County:
A Virginia Story
Kathi A. Brown, Walter Nicklin, and John T. Toler

Beginning with the early interactions between Native Americans and European explorers and settlers, this history traces three and a half centuries of change in Fauquier County, Virginia. Commissioned by the Fauquier Historical Society to commemorate the county’s 250th anniversary, this engrossing narrative tells the story of the men and women, black and white, who built the region’s farms, plantations, schools, and churches.

Unbounded Practice:
Women and Landscape Architecture in the Early Twentieth Century
Thaïsa Way

Women have practiced as landscape architects for over a century, since the founding of the practice as a profession in the United States in the 1890s. They came to landscape architecture as gardeners, garden designers, horticulturalists, and fine artists. They simultaneously shaped the profession while reflecting contemporary practice. It is all the more surprising, then, that the history of women in American landscape design has received relatively little attention. Thaïsa Way corrects this oversight in Unbounded Practice.

Buildings of Massachusetts:
Metropolitan Boston
Keith N. Morgan, with Richard M. Candee, Naomi Miller, Roger G. Reed, and Contributors

This latest volume in the Society of Architectural Historians’ Buildings of the United States series analyzes the architecture, landscape, and planning patterns of the capital of Massachusetts and forty surrounding cities and towns that fan out from Boston Harbor.

I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem
Maryse Condé
Translated by Richard Philcox
Foreword by Angela Y. Davis
Afterword by Ann Armstrong Scarboro

"In less sure hands, this short, powerful novel, which won France's Grand Prix Littéraire de la Femme in 1986, might well have become merely an extended denunciation of a perverted and evil society. What make it larger and richer are Ms. Condé's gift for storytelling and her unswerving focus on her characters, combined with her mordant sense of humor."—New York Times Book Review

NOW IN PAPERBACK
Train Time:
Railroads and the Imminent Reshaping of the United States Landscape
John R. Stilgoe

“In his new book, Stilgoe . . . examines how railroads influence their physical and social environments. He speaks as a visionary for transportation change, offering numerous examples of how a resurgent rail system based on historical example could transform America. . . . [A]n insightful contribution for those researching transportation options . . . recommended for larger public and all academic libraries with transportation collections.”—Library Journal

NOW IN PAPERBACK
Virginia's Civil War
Edited by Peter Wallenstein and Bertram Wyatt-Brown

"Wyatt-Brown and Wallenstein, as well as the contributors to this volume, deserve much praise, for they did their work well and have produced an impressive book that covers a wide range of topics related to the social and cultural history of the Civil War era. . . . [F]or those looking for a book that will help them better understand the world beyond the battlefield, this exceptional volume of essays is highly recommended."—Civil War News

NOW IN PAPERBACK
Crucible of the Civil War:
Virginia from Secession to Commemoration
Edited by Edward L. Ayers, Gary W. Gallagher, and Andrew J. Torget

"While these essays reach differing perspectives in the Civil War’s continuity/change debate, all are grounded in primary sources, each poses intriguing questions, and their collective chronological, geographic, and topical scope provides valuable insight into the diverse ways Virginians experienced the Civil War era."—Civil War History

NOW IN PAPERBACK
The German Discovery of the World:
Renaissance Encounters with the Strange and the Marvelous
Christine R. Johnson

Current historiography suggests that European nations regarded the New World as an inassimilable “other” that posed fundamental challenges to the accepted ideas of Renaissance culture. The German Discovery of the World presents a new interpretation that emphasizes the ways in which the new lands and peoples in Africa, Asia, and the Americas were imagined as comprehensible and familiar.

NOW IN PAPERBACK
Friends for Life, Friends for Death:
Cohorts and Consciousness among the Lunda-Ndembu
James A. Pritchett

“Pritchett writes with clarity and élan. Even the occasional obligatory forays into theory are blessedly free of jargon. He is a born storyteller, perhaps part of the mutual attraction between him and his Lunda hosts. One imagines that even now he and his family are the subject of stories and skits around the fire—stories far more affectionate than those about the demon Patterson.”—H-Net Reviews

UPDATED EDITION
The City as Suburb:
A History of Northeast Baltimore since 1660
Eric L. Holcomb

"Although The City as Suburb is described as a history, the book holds much of interest for geographers and planners. . . . Readers who are not acquainted with the city will also find the book of interest, for Holcomb describes for Baltimore many of the same processes that have become key elements of city formation throughout the United States. . . . In summary, this is a well-researched and well-documented book by an author who is intimately familiar with his subject."
—Geographical Review

UPDATED EDITION
New Orleans:
The Making of an Urban Landscape, Third Edition
Peirce F. Lewis

“Peirce Lewis’s New Orleans is the best introduction in print to any American city. Much more than a great local guidebook, it is also a model for understanding American cities in general. Using witty, engaging, and accessible text and illustrations, Lewis directs our attention to the large-scale processes that affect New Orleans, as well as to how those processes are linked to what we can see in the everyday streets and buildings of the city.”
—Paul Groth, University of California, Berkeley

Published since 1977 and updated every two years, the Almanac of Virginia Politics is the leading source of information on the legislative process and key players in Virginia government. The 2008 volume is invaluable for those tracking the changing demographics that are bringing about historical shifts in the state.

Something Understood:
Essays and Poetry for Helen Vendler
Edited by Stephen Burt and Nick Halpern

With Something Understood, some of the most important poets, critics, and scholars in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Ireland pay tribute to five decades of Vendler’s work. Included here are new poems, written especially for this volume, from such luminaries as Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, former U.S. poet laureate Rita Dove, and Pulitzer Prize winner Charles Wright. The essays, also exclusive to this book, address a spectrum of issues, from the vastness of the poetic tradition to poetry’s irreducible building blocks

Benjamin Schreier is suspicious of a simple equation of cynicism with quietism, nihilism, selfishness, or false consciousness, and he rejects the notion that modern cynicism represents something categorically different from the classical outlook of Diogenes. He proposes, instead, that cynicism names the difficult position of not being able to recognize the relevance of democratic social norms in the future and yet being nonetheless invested in the power of these norms to determine cultural identity and to regulate social practices.

Cotton’s Queer Relations:
Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the
Southern Plantation, 1936–1968
Michael P. Bibler

Finally breaking through heterosexual clichés of flirtatious belles and cavaliers, sinister black rapists and lusty "Jezebels,"Cotton's Queer Relations exposes the queer dynamics embedded in myths of the southern plantation. Michael Bibler focuses on works by Ernest J. Gaines, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Lillian Hellman, Katherine Anne Porter, Margaret Walker, William Styron, and Arna Bontemps.

The very word “culture” has traditionally evoked the land. But when such writers as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, and, later, Matthew Arnold developed what would become the idea of modern culture, they modeled that idea on Britain’s imperial command of the sea. Instead of locating the culture idea’s beginnings in the dynamic between the country and the city, Samuel Baker insists on taking into account the significance of water for that idea’s development.

Despite their prominent place in twentieth-century literature in English, novelists and poets from Ireland and the anglophone Caribbean have long been separated by literary histories in which they are either representing a local, nationalist tradition or functioning within an international movement such as modernism or postcolonialism. Redressing this either/or framework, Michael Malouf recognizes an integral history shared by these two poetic and political traditions.

Our Coquettes:
Capacious Desire in the Eighteenth Century
Theresa Braunschneider

Before 1660, English readers and theatergoers had never heard of a "coquette"; by the early 1700s, they could hardly watch a play, read a poem, or peruse a newspaper without encountering one. Why does British literature of this period pay so much attention to vain and flirtatious young women? Our Coquettes examines the ubiquity of the coquette in the eighteenth century to show how this figure enables authors to comment upon a series of significant social and economic developments

The Dynamics of Genre:
Journalism and the Practice of Literature in Mid-Victorian Britain
Dallas Liddle

In The Dynamics of Genre, Dallas Liddle innovatively combines Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogic approach to genre with methodological tools from periodicals studies, literary criticism, and the history of the book to offer the first rigorous study of the relationship between mid-Victorian journalistic genres and contemporary poetry, the novel, and serious expository prose.

“A God of Justice?”
The Problem of Evil in Twentieth-Century Black Literature
Qiana J. Whitted

Focusing on the representations of spiritual crisis in twentieth-century African American fiction and autobiography, Qiana J. Whitted asks how some of the most distinguished writers of this tradition wrestle with the inexplicable nature of God and the experience of unmerited natural and moral sufferings such as racial oppression. Although this spiritual and existential dilemma of “the problem of evil” is not unique to African Americans, the writers exmained here offer paradigmatic examples of it in black life and culture after World War I.

Encountering the Secular:
Philosophical Endeavors in Religion and Culture
J. Heath Atchley

In Encountering the Secular, J. Heath Atchley proposes an alternative to the understanding of the secular as that which opposes the religious, and he turns to American and Continental philosophy to support his critique. Drawing from thinkers as disparate as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Gilles Deleuze, and engaging with contemporary literature and film, Atchley shows how the division of experience (individual, cultural, political) into the distinct realms of the religious and the secular overlooks the subtle ways in which value can emerge.

Emily Dickinson's Correspondences
Edited by Martha Nell Smith and Lara Vetter

Unpublished in book form during her lifetime, the poems of Emily Dickinson were nonetheless shared with those she trusted most—through her letters. This XML-based archive brings together seventy-four poems and letters from Emily’s correspondence with her sister-in-law and primary confidante, Susan Dickinson.

Text as Process:
Creative Composition in Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Dickinson
Sally Bushell

"This is a major practical and theoretical study of how poems are written. Its focus is the heart of the creative process, with detailed descriptions of real writers in real situations of writing with real pens, ink, and paper—and then real editors, printers, publishers, purchasers, readers, reviewers, and so on in the further processes of the production of literary works. In the general field of literary study, I cannot think of a more important topic than how writers create their works. Sally Bushell does an excellent job with this topic."—Jack Stillinger, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

The View of the Courts from the Hill:
Interactions between Congress and the Federal Judiciary
Mark C. Miller

The View of the Courts from the Hill explores the current interactions and relationship between the U.S. Congress and federal courts using a “governance as dialogue” approach, which argues that constitutional interpretation in the United States is a continuous and complex conversation among all the institutions of government. Expanding on his previous work on this important theme, Mark C. Miller has interviewed numerous key players specifically for this book. Their candid and thorough comments provide an invaluable resource for students and scholars eager to explore the dynamics between congressional and judicial forces as they have evolved over the past two decades.

Criminal Injustice:
Slaves and Free Blacks in Georgia’s Criminal Justice System
Glenn McNair

This is the most comprehensive study of the criminal justice system of a slave state to date. McNair traces the evolution of Georgia’s legal culture by examining its use of slave codes and slave patrols, as well as presenting data on crimes prosecuted, trial procedures and practices, conviction rates, the appellate process, and punishment.Based on more than four hundred capital cases, McNair’s study deploys both narrative and quantitative analysis to get at both the theory and the reality of the criminal procedure for slaves in the century leading up to the Civil War.

Empires of the Imagination:
Transatlantic Histories of the Louisiana Purchase
Edited by Peter J. Kastor and François Weil

Empires of the Imagination takes the Louisiana Purchase as a point of departure for a compelling new discussion of the interaction between France and the United States. In addition to offering the first substantive synthesis of this transatlantic relationship, the essays collected here offer new interpretations on themes vital to the subject, ranging from political culture to intercultural contact to ethnic identity.

Distant Revolutions:
1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism
Timothy Mason Roberts

"A sophisticated, substantial, and groundbreaking work that fills an enormous void on works about the United States and 1848. Roberts presents a fresh and convincing explanation for why the revolutions of 1848 mattered to Americans and to United States history. By unearthing a fascinating trove of transatlantic observations and connections, this book makes a substantial contribution to transnational studies of American history."—Carl Guarneri, author of America in the World: United States History in Global Context

A "Topping People"
The Rise and Decline of Virginia’s Old Political Elite, 1680-1790
Emory G. Evans

A "Topping People" is the first comprehensive study of the political, economic, and social elite of colonial Virginia. Evans studies twenty-one leading families from their rise to power in the late 1600s to their downfall over one hundred years later. These families represented the upper echelons of power, serving in the upper and lower houses of the General Assembly, often as speaker of the House of Burgesses. Their names—Randolph, Robinson, Byrd, Carter, Corbin, Custis, Nelson, and Page, to note but a few—are still familiar in the Old Dominion some three hundred years later.

City of Trees:
The Complete Field Guide to the Trees of Washington, D.C.
Third Edition

Washington, D.C., boasts more than three hundred species of trees from America, Europe, Africa, and Asia, and City of Trees has been the authoritative guide for locating, identifying, and learning about them for more than twenty-five years. The third edition is fully revised, updated, and expanded and includes an eloquent new foreword by the Washington Post’s garden editor, Adrian Higgins.