New & Forthcoming Books

The Preacher and the Politician
Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama, and Race in America
Clarence E. Walker and Gregory D. Smithers

Barack Obama’s inauguration as the first African American president of the United States has caused many commentators to conclude that America has entered a postracial age. The Preacher and the Politician argues otherwise, reminding us that, far from inevitable, Obama’s nomination was nearly derailed by his relationship with Jeremiah Wright.

Garbage In, Garbage Out:
Solving the Problems with Long-Distance Trash Transport
Vivian E. Thomson

The patterns of trash migration reveal much about power sharing among state, local, and national institutions, about the Constitution’s protection of trash transport as a commercial activity, and about competing notions of social fairness. Vivian Thomson looks at Virginia’s status as the second-largest importer of trash in the United States and uses it as a touchstone for exploring the many controversies around trash generation and disposal.

Fixing College Education
A New Curriculum for the Twenty-first Century
Charles Muscatine

"Fixing College Education is full of cogent, frank, even refreshingly blunt criticism of undergraduate education. Muscatine’s passion pervades the volume, and he does not hesitate to criticize the sacred cows of academe in search for improved education of students."—Jerry G. Gaff, Senior Scholar, Association of American Colleges and Universities, Washington, D.C.

Best New Poets 2009:
50 Poems from Emerging Writers
Edited by Kim Addonizio
Jeb Livingood, Series Editor

In just four years Best New Poets has established itself as a crucial venue for rising poets and a valuable resource for poetry lovers. The only publication of its kind, this annual anthology is made up exclusively of work by writers who have not yet published a full-length book.

The Barking Tree Frog
and Other Curious Tales
Diane Casto Tennant

Selected from Tennant’s widely admired writing for the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, these stories reveal the rich natural history Virginia had compiled long before the first human set eyes on it—as well as the fascinating phenomena that still surround us.

Buildings of Pennsylvania
Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania
Lu Donnelly, H. David Brumble IV, and Franklin Toker

This latest volume in the Society of Architectural Historians’ Buildings of the United States series considers the architecture, landscape, and town plans of thirty-one counties west of Blue Mountain and north to Lake Erie, including cities and communities big and small, from Pittsburgh, Beaver Falls, Johnstown, and Altoona to Bellefonte, State College, Lock Haven, Clarion, and Erie, and scores of places in between.

Shaping the American Landscape:
New Profiles from the Pioneers of American Landscape Design Project
Charles A. Birnbaum and Stephanie S. Foell

This book explores the lives and work of 151 professionals who quite literally shaped both the land itself and our ideas of what the American landscape means. Although the contributors consider many important figures from the past, the book breaks new ground by including seminal designers who are in their twilight years, and in some cases still professionally active, to provide a fascinating look at the modern era of design in action.

Melodramatic Landscapes
Urban Parks in the Nineteenth Century
Heath Schenker

During the nineteenth century, large, naturalistic urban parks began to appear in cities around the world. These parks, as Melodramatic Landscapes engagingly demonstrates, offered the opportunity for visitors to assert their social status in performances suited to the theatrical age in which they flourished. How and why did prototypical park landscapes become the norm in the midst of modernizing industrial cities?

Rome Reborn on Western Shores:
Historical Imagination and the Creation of the American Republic
Eran Shalev

"Not only does this study bring a heightened sophistication to the old idea of Revolutionary America as the new Rome, but it presents as well an intriguing challenge to our conventional understanding of the way Americans conceived of history and time. And it does it all in clear and engaging prose."—Gordon Wood, Brown Univesity

Scientific Jefferson: Revealed
Martin Clagett

Well known as a politician and architect, Thomas Jefferson also made important contributions to science. He was elected the third president not only of the United States but also of that most august of scientific clubs, the American Philosophical Society, following in the footsteps of Benjamin Franklin and David Rittenhouse. This volume explores how science shaped Thomas Jefferson's views on politics, religion, economics, and social developments in America.

Thomas Jefferson's Academical Village:
The Creation of an Architectural Masterpiece
Edited by Richard Guy Wilson

The story of the University encompasses the political and architectural worlds, as Jeffeson struggled against great opposition to establish a new type of educational institution. This volume offers a comprehensive look at Thomas Jefferson's design for the University, at how it came into being, at the different perecptions of its successes and failures, and at the alterations that have taken place down through the years.

Matisse, Picasso, and Modern Art in Paris: The T. Catesby Jones Collections at the Virginia Museum of Fine Art and the University of Virginia Art Museum
Featured essays by John Ravenal and Matthew Affron

A New York lawyer with Virginia roots, T. Catesby Jones acquired an extraordinary collection of paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures by some sixty artists working in Paris during the early twentieth century. Jones's collection of almost three hundred works, divided between two Virginia institutions after his death, is reunited here in an illustrated catalogue with a full-color checklist accompanied by entries on twenty-four of the artists.

Darkroom:
Photography and the New Media in South Africa, 1950-Present
Tosha Grantham
With a preface by Deborah Willis
Essays by Isolde Brielmaier and Tumelo Mosaka

Photography and video are powerful tools for shaping perception and effecting change, as is convincingly portrayed through the images in this catalogue. Featuring the works of sixteen South African photographers and video artists from 1950 to the present, the catalogue was conceived to accompany the exhibition of the same name at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

"Answer at Once"
Letters of Mountain Families in Shenandoah National Park, 1934-1938
Edited by Katrina M. Powell

With the Commonwealth of Virginia's Public Park Condemnation Act of 1928, the state surveyed for and acquired three thousand tracts of land that would become Shenandoah National Park. The Commonwealth condemned the homes of five hundred families so that their land could be "donated" to the federal government and placed under the auspices of the National Park Service. Prompted by the condemnation of their land, the residents began writing letters.

The Fight for Fairfax presents the story of a group of local citizens in Fairfax County, Virginia, and their efforts over the past half-century to invent a place that would be more than simply a Washington, D.C., suburb. Told from the group's point of view, the book chronicles their vision of Fairfax and the steps they took to bring it to life.

Acts of Narrative Resistance:
Women's Autobiographical Writings in the Americas
Laura J. Beard

This exploration of women's autobiographical writings in the Americas focuses on three specific genres: testimonio, metafiction, and the family saga as the story of a nation. What makes Laura J. Beard’s work distinctive is her pairing of readings of life narratives by women from different countries and traditions.

Above All, Don't Look Back follows the path of a young woman—Amina—as she makes her way through a city, a life, and a sense of self that have been ravaged by an earthquake. In this powerful novel, inspired by a devastating earthquake in northern Algeria in 2003, the acclaimed Algerian writer Maïssa Bey skillfully interweaves descriptions of the earthquake with descriptions of Amina's family, culture, and country and her place within them.

Spectacular Blackness:
The Cultural Politics of the Black Power Movement and the Search for a Black Aesthetic
Amy Abugo Ongiri

"Spectacular Blackness is one of the sharpest discussions of the Black Arts Movement, Black Power, and popular culture that I have encountered. It is the best account of the cultural impact of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense that I have read." —James Smethurst, University of Massachusetts

Assembling a rich archive of images and texts from the eighteenth century to the present, Rachel Hall offers a history of the "wanted" poster, examining its uses, patterns of circulation, and formal development as an iconic print genre. Her narrative covers a wide range of images: execution broadsides, runaway slave notices, private detective posters, FBI posters, artists' approximations, and the depiction of key figures in the "war on terror." Hall's cultural analysis has profound implications for our understanding of contemporary America.

Taking up the challenge of redefining modernity from a Caribbean perspective instead of assuming that the North Atlantic view of modernity is universal, Maria Cristina Fumagalli shows how the Caribbean's contributions to the modern world not only provide a more accurate account of the past but also have the potential to change the way in which we imagine the future.Fumagalli uses the myth of Medusa's gaze turning people into stone to describe the way North Atlantic modernity freezes its "others" into a state of perpetual backwardness.

Exhibiting Slavery:
The Caribbean Postmodern Novel as Museum
Vivain Nun Halloran

This book examines the ways in which Caribbean postmodern historical novels about slavery written in Spanish, English, and French function as virtual museums, simultaneously showcasing and curating a collection of "primary documents" within their pages. As Vivian Nun Halloran attests, these novels highlight narrative "objects" extraneous to their plot. In doing so, they demand that their readers go beyond the pages of the books to sort out fact from fiction and consider what relationship these featured "objects" have to slavery and to contemporary life.

Building Charleston:
Town and Society in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World
Emma Hart

In the colonial era, Charleston, South Carolina, was the largest city in the American South. From 1700 to 1775 its growth rate was exceeded in the New World only by that of Philadelphia. The first comprehensive study of this crucial colonial center, Building Charleston charts the rise of one of early America's great cities, revealing its importance to the evolution of both South Carolina and the British Atlantic world during the eighteenth century.

Accommodating Revolutions: Virginia's Northern Neck in an Era of Transformation, 1760-1810
Albert H. Tillson Jr.

This book addresses a controversy of long standing among historians of eighteenth-century America and Virginia—the extent to which internal conflict and/or consensus characterized the society of the Revolutionary era. In particular, it emphasizes the complex and often self-defeating actions and decisions of dissidents and other non-elite groups. By focusing on a small but significant region, Tillson elucidates the multiple and interrelated sources of conflict that beset Revolutionary Virginia, but also explains why in the end so little changed.

Revolutionary Negotiations:
Indians, Empires, and Diplomats in the Founding of America
Leonard J. Sadosky

Revolutionary Negotiations examines early American diplomatic negotiations with both the European powers and the various American Indian nations from the 1740s through the 1820s. Sadosky interweaves previously distinct settings for American diplomacy—courts and council fires—into one singular, transatlantic system of politics.

Strategies for Survival:
Recollections of Bondage in Antebellum Virginia
William Dusinberre

"With Strategies for Survival William Dusinberre solidifies his reputation as one of our finest historians of southern slavery. His unusually sensitive reading of interviews with Virginia's ex-slaves returns us to basic questions, but offers startling fresh answers. Like his classic study of slavery on the rice plantations, Strategies for Survival will quickly become a must-read for all students of antebellum American history." —James Oakes, author of Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South

Take Care of the Living:
Reconstructing Confederate Veteran Families in Virginia
Jeffrey W. McClurken

Take Care of the Living assesses the short- and long-term impact of the war on Confederate veteran families of all classes in Pittsylvania County and Danville, Virginia. Using letters, diaries, church minutes, and military and state records, as well as close analysis of the entire 1860 and 1870 Pittsylvania County manuscript population census, McClurken explores the consequences of the war for over three thousand Confederate soldiers and their families.

The Correspondence of John Cotton Jr.
Edited by Sheila McIntyre and Len Travers

John Cotton Jr. (1639-1699) was the second son of one of the most famous clergymen of New England's founding generation. He wrote during an era when it was widely accepted that letters would circulate far beyond the immediate addressee. Thus, both his letters and those addressed to him often read more like newsletters than personal correspondence, documenting some of the most dramatic events of the late seventeenth century.

Portrait of a Patriot:
The Major Political and Legal Papers of Josiah Quincy Junior,
Volumes 4 & 5
Edited by Daniel R. Coquillette and Neil Longley York

Josiah Quincy Jr. (1744-1775), Boston lawyer and patriot penman, had he lived longer could have been a leader of the new American Republic with a name familiar in most households. In a five-volume series, the Colonial Society of Massachusetts will reprint his major political and legal writings.

"Evil People"
A Comparative Study of Witch Hunts in Swabian Austria and the Electorate of Trier
Johannes Dillinger
Translated by Laura Stokes

"In this groundbreaking comparative study of witch-hunting in two German territories Johannes Dillinger reaches novel conclusions regarding the support of local communities for the trials, the complex web of popular witch beliefs, and the role of centralized princely authority in bringing the trials to an end. The book illuminates the ‘magical world’ of early modern Germany and analyzes the forces that drove the prosecutions."—Brian Levack, author of The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe

Law, Politics, and Perception:
How Policy Preferences Influence Legal Reasoning
Eileen Braman

Are judges' decisions more likely to be based on personal inclinations or legal authority? The answer, Eileen Braman argues, is both. This book brings cognitive psychology to bear on the question of the relative importance of norms of legal reasoning versus decision markers' policy preferences in legal decision-making. While Braman acknowledges that decision makers' attitudes can play a significant role in judicial decisions, she also believes that decision-makers' belief that they must abide by accepted rules of legal analysis significantly limits the role of preferences in their judgements.

Is Killing Wrong?
A Study in Pure Sociology
Mark Cooney

"Thou shalt not kill" is arguably the most basic moral and legal principle in any society. Yet while some killers are pilloried and punished, others are absolved and acquitted, and still others are lauded and lionized. Why? The traditional answer is that how killers are treated depends on the nature of their killing, whether it was aggressive or defensive, intentional or accidental. But those factors cannot explain the enormous variation in legal officials' and citizens' responses to real-life homicides. Cooney argues that a radically new style of thought—pure sociology—can.

The Papers of James Madison Digital Edition

This online resource contains all of the editorial content of the print edition and adds to this a powerful XML-based search functionality, linked cross-references, and the ability to navigate chronologically or by series volume. As part of the new Rotunda platform, it can be included in searches across the entire American Founding Era Collection, providing invaluable additional context to the great statesman's works.