“I hate the myth of Hemingway. And the reason I hate the myth of Hemingway: It obscures the man. And the man is much more interesting than the myth.” So says Michael Katakis, the manager of the Hemingway estate, toward the very beginning of Ken Burns’s and Lynn Novick’s (excellent)...

UVA Press joins the architecture community in mourning the loss of acclaimed landscape architect Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, who passed away on May 22, 2021. We asked Susan Herrington, a personal friend of Oberlander's and author of the biography Cornelia Hahn Oberlander: Making the Modern Landscape to share her remembrances, which we...

UVA Press is proud to be publishing the memoir of one of America's great public servants, former Virginia Governor and Senator Chuck Robb. IN THE ARENA: A Memoir of Love, War, and Politics moves from a White House wedding to the trenches of Vietnam to the halls of power in Washington D.C. to create...

by Clayton J. Butler, Ph.D., Editorial Fellow at UVA Press

April 12, 2021 marks 160 years to the day since the firing on Fort Sumter, the opening salvo of the Civil War. It can be tempting to think of that stretch of time as a massive gulf, practically unbridgeable—at least in...

In July 2020, UVA Press was proud to publish Dr. Adrian Brettle’s debut book: Colossal Ambitions: Confederate Planning for a Post-Civil War World. Recently, Dr. Brettle’s book was named a finalist for the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, awarded annually to the best scholarly work in English on Abraham Lincoln, the American...

In celebration of Black History Month, we are pleased to offer this selection from the introduction of Dr. Johnetta Cole's new book RACISM IN AMERICAN PUBLIC LIFE: A Call to Action. 

As I was completing my final revisions for this book, two monumental events occurred in the United States. The first...

We are pleased to offer this guest blog post by Dr. Dustin Gish, coeditor with Andrew Bibby of RIVAL VISIONS: How Jefferson and His Contemporaries Defined the Early American Republic to be published in February. 

Rival Visions vs. Insurrections: The Challenge of an Inaugural Address in a Time of Crisis

This past week in America we have...

We are pleased to offer this essay for Inauguration Day by Robert M. S. McDonald and Peter S. Onuf, editors of the new book Revolutionary Prophecies: The Founders and America’s Future. Enjoy! 

Hopes, Fears, and Prophecies

Do these seem like extraordinary, unprecedented times?  Did the 2020 election and its seemingly endless aftermath expose and...

We join everyone celebrating MLK Day with this blog post from Peter Eisenstadt, author of the new book Against the Hounds of Hell: A Life of Howard Thurman (February 2021).   

Honoring Dr. King: Creating the Path to Non-Violence    

Every four years, the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday is celebrated about two...

Putting Enlightenment Science into Practice: Humboldt, Jefferson, and the Transatlantic Fight against Smallpox

A guest post by Sandra Rebok, author of Humboldt and Jefferson: A Transatlantic Friendship of the Enlightenment.

As 2020 turns into 2021, the role of the sciences in society and the importance of target-oriented scientific progress have been visible...

Booker T. Washington, who emerged from slavery to become one of the leading African American intellectuals around the turn of the 20th century, had ties to Charlottesville that eventually led to a city park being named after him.

A new connection between Washington and this area will be forged virtually via...

Last year, UVA Press was proud to publish Tom Kapsidelis’s After Virginia Tech: Guns, Safety, and Healing in the Era of Mass Shootings, which illuminates the experiences of the survivors of the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre—then the deadliest to date—and other community members and portrays in depth their advocacy for reforms...

We are delighted to announce dates for Daniel Mendelsohn's virtual book tour around THREE RINGS: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate (September 8). Tune in this fall to hear Mendelsohn discuss his new book, of which Kirkus in a starred review said "[a] luminous narrative . . . this slender,...

We are delighted to offer the fourth installment in our new podcast series, "UVA Press Presents," via this interview with Eric Brandt, Assistant Director and Editor-in-Chief at UVA Press and Adrienne Munich, Professor of English, Art, Cultural Studies, and Gender Studies, Emerita, at Stony Brook University and author of the new book EMPIRE OF...

Christopher R. Pearl, author of Conceived in Crisis, finds echoes of the past in our current moment. 

I, like many of you, planned to be at SHEAR this year, listening to new ideas shared by colleagues in panels and over a cold pint, but, sadly, we can’t do that. Instead we are home,...

UVA Press author Maurice M. Manring, whose book Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima was published in 1998, writes about his experience researching and writing about the figure of Aunt Jemima. You can read more from Manring in this article published in The Associated Press on 6/19/20.

About 25 years...

UVA Press author Michael Lackey, whose book The Haverford Discussions: A Black Integrationist Manifesto for Racial Justice was published in 2013, reflects on the murder of George Floyd, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, systemic racism, and massive protests:

Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man has become increasingly more painful to teach. One of the most tragic scenes involves...

We are pleased to offer this blog post from UVA Press author Shane Graham, whose book Cultural Entanglements: **Langston Hughes and the Rise of African and Caribbean Literature was published this May.

The COVID-19 pandemic posed a challenge to my new book’s argument before it was even published, but the worldwide uprising...

We are delighted to offer the second installment in our new podcast series, "UVA Press Presents," via this interview with Pulitzer-Prize nominated author Helen Horowitz, author of the new book **TRACES OF J. B. JACKSON: The Man Who Taught Us to See Everyday America, **and Daniel Horowitz, Mary Huggins Gamble Foundation Chair and Professor...

We are delighted to introduce our new podcast series, "UVA Press Presents," via this interview with literary biographer Carl Rollyson, author of the new two-volume series THE LIFE OF WILLIAM FAULKNER, and Stephen Railton, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Virginia and Director of the Digital Yoknapatawpha project. Listen...

As The New York Times Book Review writes of Maryse Condé in their review of her newly translated book The Belle Créole, "For the past half century, Condé has been chronicling the black diaspora in novels that are rollicking and scandalous, that examine gender and culture, class and religion, African and Caribbean society. She performs...

As the noted possum-philosopher Pogo bleakly commented from a trash-strewn Okefenokee Swamp on a 1970 poster announcing the first Earth Day, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Fifty years on, evidence of the damage we humans have wrought upon the environment is everywhere around us: in rising seas,...

By Nadine Zimmerli, editor for history and social sciences

Last week was supposed to be my busiest yet since assuming the mantle of editor of history and social sciences here at UVa Press. I had been looking forward to attending my first Virginia Forum, on “Crafting History,” which—I’m given to understand—would...