New & Forthcoming Books

Darwin's Fox and My Coyote
Holly Menino

How do wild carnivores live? And what is it about the places they live that allows them to survive? Holly Menino joins up with three young scientists to find out, and along the way is drawn into a broader consideration of the science that defines these animals' natural histories.

Legacy: Walter Chrysler Jr. and the Untold Story of Norfolk’s Chrysler Museum of Art
Peggy Earle

Legacy paints a vivid picture of this provincial museum’s transformation into one of the finest art museums on the East Coast. It also delivers a captivating portrait of Walter Chrysler, a generous and demanding man who found in art patronage a focus not only for his wealth but also for his tremendous energy.

Opportunity Time:
A Memoir by Governor Linwood Holton

Opportunity Time is a disarmingly candid memoir that offers a behind-the-scenes account of the former governor's private and public life at a critical juncture in the political history of Virginia and the nation.

All That Mighty Heart :London Poems
Edited by Lisa Russ Spaar

This collection of poems about London will appeal to most anyone: the stduent abroad for the semester, the armchair traveler, or the most critical reader of poetry. The book conveys a sense that London, as both city and text, is a place of exile and transplantation, a protean site of history, projection, culture, and personal drama.

Buildings of Delaware
W. Barksdale Maynard

The latest volume in the Society of Architectural Historians' prestigious Buildings of the United States series, Buildings of Delaware is the first book to document the state's architectural history from all periods.

City of Trees:
The Complete Field Guide to the Trees of Washington, D.C. (Third Edition)
Melanie Choukas-Bradley
Illustrations by Polly Alexander

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. This third edition is fully revised, updated, and expanded and includes an elegant new foreword by the Washington Post's garden editor, Adrian Higgins.

What’s Bugging You?
A Fond Look at Animals We Love to Hate
Arthur V. Evans

What’s Bugging You? brings together fifty unforgettable stories from the celebrated nature writer and entomologist’s popular Richmond Times-Dispatch column. The reader emerges from the book realizing that even seemingly mundane forms of insect and spider life present us with unexpected beauty and fascinating lifestyles.

The Papers of Thomas Jefferson
Digital Edition
Barbara B. Oberg and J. Jefferson Looney, Editors in Chief

This digital edition is the perfect entrance to Jefferson’s extensive writings. Users can search by name, date, author, and recipient; they can even conduct French-language searches. This edition includes all the illustrations and bibliographical content of the print edition, with the added convenience of linked cross-references and a master index.

Representation in the American Revolution
Revised Edition
Gordon S. Wood

From one of America’s most celebrated historians, the Pulitzer Prize winner Gordon S. Wood, comes an early work whose relevance is undiminished. Originally published in 1969, now revised and with a new preface, this book examines the ways in which a government is created and how, in the face of great difficulties as well as great possibilities, its citizens are represented.

NOW IN PAPERBACK
Realistic Visionary:
A Portrait of George Washington
Peter R. Henriques

"A deeply thoughtful appraisal of Washington's career and character. . . . The chapters on slavery and religion are especially beguiling. Henriques's approach allows him to zoom in on the most salient and controversial issues with a focused clarity not possible in a conventional biography."
—Joseph J. Ellis, Mount Holyoke College, author of His Excellency: George Washington

NOW IN PAPERBACK
Thomas Jefferson: Reputation and Legacy
Francis D. Cogliano

In his probing new study, Francis Cogliano focuses on Thomas Jefferson's relation to history, both as the context in which he lived, and as something he made considerable, and conscious, efforts to influence. He was acutely aware that he would be judged by posterity, and he believed that the fate of the republican experiment depended to a large extent on how it was rendered by historians

NOW IN PAPERBACK
Thomas Jefferson, Draftsman of a Nation
Natalie S. Bober

"Bober has taken on an extremely vital, but difficult, task: writing a history that speaks to young people, black and white alike, in a way that is respectful to both cultures."
—Annette Gordon-Reed, New York Law School, author of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy

NOW IN PAPERBACK
The Making and Unmaking of a Revolutionary Family:
The Tuckers of Virginia, 1752-1830
Phillip Hamilton

Drawing upon an extraordinary archive of private letters, journals, and other manuscript materials, Phillip Hamilton illustrates how two generations of a colorful and influential family adapted to social upheaval.

NOW IN PAPERBACK
Byrd's Line: A Natural History
Stephen Conrad Ausband

In 1728, William Byrd, the wealthy, English-educated master of Westover plantation, undertook a journey with a troop of commissioners, surveyors, and woodsmen to determine the exact boundary between North Carolina and Virginia. Byrd's Line is Stephen Ausband's dialogue with Byrd across the years.

For two centuries, the early years of the French Revolution have inspired countless democratic movements around the world. Yet little attention has been paid to the problems of violence, justice, and repression between the Reign of Terror and the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte. Howard Brown analyzes these years to reveal the true difficulty of founding a liberal democracy in the midst of continual warfare, repeated coups d’etat, and endemic civil strife.

The process by which presidents decide whom to nominate to fill Supreme Court vacancies is obviously of far-ranging importance, particularly because the vast majority of nominees are eventually confirmed. But why is one individual selected from among a pool of presumably qualified candidates? Christine Nemacheck makes heavy use of presidential papers to reconstruct the politics of nominee selection from Herbert Hoover’s appointment of Charles Evan Hughes in 1930 through President George W. Bush’s nomination of Samuel Alito in 2005.

"Christopher Decker has come forward with a splendid critical edition of the poem, containing FitzGerald's introductory essay and notes to each version. It prints all four printed versions along with manuscript variants and, most usefully indeed, apppends a comparative version in which each quatrain appears in a column with its variants keyed to their order of placement in the four editions as well as revised copy- and proof-texts for that of 1872."
—John Hollander, Yale Review

NOW IN PAPERBACK
Pilgrimage to Vallombrosa:
From Vermont to Italy in the Footsteps of George Perkins Marsh
John Elder

On a Fulbright year, Elder chooses to follow in George Perkins Marsh's footsteps along a trajectory running from Vermont to Italy, and at length fetches up at the managed forest of Vallombrosa. Here is an exceptional reading experience, the chance to follow two of the finest chroniclers of our place in nature—separated by years, but by surprisingly little else.

This guide includes a user-friendly key, an illustrated glossary of frequently used botanical terms, and is packed with nearly 400 elaborately and artistically detailed pen-and-ink drawings to make plant identification simple and fun.

Building After Katrina: Visions for the Gulf Coast
Edited by Betsy Roettger
With a preface by Karen Van Lengen

After the devastation caused by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in the fall of 2005, entire towns, neighborhoods, and ecologies were destroyed. This book offers a set of fresh approaches to rebuilding the Gulf Coast that will challenge architects, planners, policy makers, and citizens alike.

The Abandoned Baobab:
The Autobiography of a Senegalese Woman
Ken Bugul
Translated by Marjolijn de Jager
Reprinted in paperback, with a new introduction by Jeanne Garane

”This is a beautiful, tragic book. . . . We should be grateful that Ken Bugul found her way back at last to Africa and that she created this searing document as testimony of her suffering.”
—Booklist

Fathoming the Cosmos and Ordering the World
The Yijing (I-Ching, or Classic of Changes) and Its Evolution in China
Richard J. Smith

Fathoming the Cosmos and Ordering the World is the first full-length study in any Western language of the development of the Yijing in China from earliest times to the present. Drawing on the most recent scholarship in both Asian and Western languages, Richard J. Smith offers a fresh perspective on virtually every aspect of Yijing theory and practice for some three thousand years.

In and Out of the West: Reconstructing Anthropology
Maurice Godelier

Deriving from the 2002 Page-Barbour Lectures delivered by the French anthropologist Maurice Godelier at the University of Virginia, and supplemented by additional lectures and articles by the author, In and Out of the West addresses a series of fundamental topics and issues in social anthropology—including family, kinship, and the construction of the self. He particularly emphasizes the strategic role of political-religious relations in the construction of societies and social life.

African Americans and the Culture of Pain
Debra Walker King .

In this compelling new study, Debra Walker King considers fragments of experience recorded in oral histories and newspapers as well as those produced in twentieth-century novels, films, and television that reveal how the black body in pain functions as a rhetorical device and as political strategy.

The Bourgeois Interior
Julia Prewitt Brown

From Robinson Crusoe's cave to Henry Selwyn's hermitage, the domestic interior tells a story about "things" and their relation to character and identity. Julia Prewitt Brown argues that the bourgeois interior functions as a medium, a many-layered fabric across which different energies travel, be they psychological, political, or aesthetic. In this way, objects are not symbols but rather the materials out of which symbols are made—symbols that constitute the very soul of the bourgeois

Tree of Liberty:
Cultural Legacies of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World
Edited by Doris L. Garraway

The contributors to this volume argue that, while suppressed and disavowed in some quarters, the Haitian Revolution nonetheless had an enduring cultural and political impact, particularly on peoples and communities that have been marginalized in the historical record and absent from the discourses of Western historiography.

Soon Come: Jamaican Spirituality, Jamaican Poetics
Hugh Hodges

Soon Come celebrates Jamaican poetry as an expression and extension of the island's rich spiritual traditions, offering fresh insights into some of the late twentieth century's most important and influential poetry. Drawing inspiration from the history of Myal, Kumina, Revivalism, and Rastafari, Hodges develops a critical language for the discussion of a wide range of Jamaican texts, both oral and written.

Signs of Dissent:
Maryse Condé and Postcolonial Criticism
Dawn Fulton

Maryse Condé is a Guadeloupean writer and critic whose work has challenged the categories of race, gender, and geography that inform conotemporary literary and critical debates. In this, the first full-length study in English on Condé, Dawn Fultyon situates this award-winning author's work in the context of current theories of cultural identity in order to foreground Condé's unique contributions to these discussions.

Border Fictions
Globalization, Empire, and Writing at the Boundaries of the United States
Claudia Sadowski-Smith

Border Fictions offers the first comparative analysis of multiethnic and transnational cultural representations about the United States' borders with Mexico and Canada. Blending textual analysis with theories of globalization and empire, Claudia Sadowski-Smith forges a new model of inter-American studies.

Virginians Reborn
Anglican Monopoly, Evangelical Dissent, and the Rise of Baptists in the Late Eighteenth Century
Jewel L. Spangler

Evangelical Protestant dissenters dramatically remade Virginia’s religious terrain when they rapidly coalesced into congregations in the decades just before the American Revolution, and then overwhelmed a weakened Anglican Church in the war’s aftermath. Virginians Reborn examines the intricate processes by which one of these groups, the Baptists, was able to take root, expand, and successfully compete for converts.

From the Yeoman to Redneck in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1850-1915
Stephen A. West

In this book Stephen A. West revises undertandings of the American South by offering a new perspective on two iconic figures in the region's social landscape. "Yeoman," a term of praise for the small landowning farmer, was commonly used during the Antebellum era but ultimately eclipsed by "redneck," an epithet that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century.

Industrious in Their Stations:
Young People at Work in Urban America, 1720-1810
Sharon B. Sundue

Industrious in Their Stations is the first comparative study of child labor in eighteenth-century America. Focusing on Philadelphia, Boston, and Charleston, Sharon Sundue examines the work experiences of children and analyzes regional differences in child labor according to gender, race, and class.

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

Current historiagraphy suggests that European nations regarded the New World as an unassimilable "other" that posed fiundamental challenges to the accepted ideas of Renaissance culture. This new study presnets a new interpretaion that emphasizes the ways in which the new lands and peoples in Africa, Asia, and tyhe Americas were imagined as comprehensible and familiar.

The Papers of George Washington
Theodore J. Crackel, Editor in Chief

Revolutionary War Series
Volume 17
15 September-31 October 1778
Edited by Philander D. Chase

Revolutionary War Series
Volume 18
1 November-1778-14 January 1779
Edited by Edward G. Lengel

Artificial Light:
New Light-Based Sculpture and Installation Art
John B. Ravenal

This book explores the resurgence of interest among younger artists in working with light as matrerial. With sixty-three color illustrations, Artificial Light featires new sculpture and installations by the international artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Spencer Finch, Ceal Floyer, Ivan Navarro, Nathaniel Rackowe, and Douglas Ross.

Rule Britannia!
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Introductory Essay by Richard Ormond
Catalogue Entries by James Taylor

Rule Britannia! explores the rich artistic culture of Elizabethan and Stuart England and the artists who forged their reputations in the alternately violent and decadent circles of some of the last exponents of absolute monarchy.