Recent Titles

Bound for Work

Labor, Mobility, and Colonial Rule in Central Mozambique, 1940-1965

Diverging from the studies of southern African migrant labor that focus on particular workplaces and points of origin, Bound for Work looks at the multitude of forms and locales of migrant labor that individuals—under more or less coercive circumstances—engaged in over the course of their lives....

Kagan Guthrie, Zachary

Resurrections

Authors, Heroes—and a Spy

Jeffrey Meyers’ Resurrections: Authors, Heroes—and a Spy brings to life a set of extraordinary writers, painters, and literary adventurers who turned their lives into art. Meyers knew nine of these figures, in some cases intimately, while five others he admires and regrets never meeting. As he...

Meyers, Jeffrey

Virginia Beer

A Guide from Colonial Days to Craft's Golden Age

The days of choosing between a handful of imports and a convenience store six-pack are long gone. The beer landscape in America has changed dramatically in the twenty-first century, as the nation has experienced an explosion in craft beer brewing and consumption. Nowhere is this truer than in...

Graves, Lee

Reading through the Night

Jane Tompkins, a renowned literature professor and award-winning author, thought she knew what reading was until, struck by a debilitating illness, she finds herself reading day and night because it is all she can do. A lifelong lover of books, she realizes for the first time that if you pay close...

Tompkins, Jane

Becoming Lincoln

Previous biographies of Abraham Lincoln—universally acknowledged as one of America’s greatest presidents—have typically focused on his experiences in the White House. In Becoming Lincoln, renowned historian William Freehling instead emphasizes the prewar years, revealing how Lincoln came to be the...

Freehling, William W.

Guilty Pleasures

Popular Novels and American Audiences in the Long Nineteenth Century

Guilty pleasures in one’s reading habits are nothing new. Late-nineteenth-century American literary culture even championed the idea that popular novels need not be great. Best-selling novels arrived in the public sphere as at once beloved and contested objects, an ambivalence that reflected and...

McIntosh, Hugh

Do You Hear in the Mountains... and Other Stories

This new translation brings together two of Algerian author Maïssa Bey’s important works for the first time in English. "Do You Hear in the Mountains..." is a compelling piece of autofiction in which three destinies meet dramatically on a train moving through France. We meet an Algerian refugee,...

Bey, Maïssa

Fish Town

Down the Road to Louisiana's Vanishing Fishing Communities

Fish Town is an inspired documentary project focused on preserving, through photography and oral history recordings, the cultural and environmental remains of southeastern Louisiana’s fishing communities. Owing to a dying wild-caught seafood industry and a rapidly vanishing coastline, the places...

Blatty, J. T.

Crucible

The President's First Year

Is the presidency a position one must learn on the job, or can one learn from others’ experience? No common thread runs through the list of forty-five presidents; no playbook provides the answers to all the challenges a president will face. Yet even in the most unprecedented situations, history can...

Nelson, Michael, Chidester, Jeffrey L., Georgakis Abbott, Stefanie

Avoiding War with China

Two Nations, One World

Are the United States and China on a collision course? In response to remarks made by Donald Trump’s secretary of state, China’s state-run newspaper Global Times asserted, "Unless Washington plans to wage a large-scale war in the South China Sea, any other approaches to prevent Chinese access to...

Etzioni, Amitai

Higher Calling

The Rise of Nontraditional Leaders in Academia

A revolution has been taking place in the ranks of higher education. University and college presidents—once almost invariably the products of "traditional" scholarly, tenure-track career paths, up through the provost’s office—are rapidly becoming a group with diverse skills and backgrounds. The...

Beardsley, Scott C.

Sucking Up

A Brief Consideration of Sycophancy

Suck-up. Ass-kisser. Brownnoser. Bootlicker. Lickspittle. Toadeater... Found in every walk of life, both real and imagined, sycophants surround us. But whether we grumble about sycophancy or grudgingly tolerate it as a price of getting along in a complex society, we rarely examine it closely. This...

Parker, Deborah, Parker, Mark

The Physics of Possibility

Victorian Fiction, Science, and Gender

The Physics of Possibility traces the sensational birth of mathematical physics in Victorian literature, science, and statistics. As scientists took up new breakthroughs in quantification, they showed how all sorts of phenomena—the condition of stars, atoms, molecules, and nerves—could be...

Tondre, Michael

Charlottesville 2017

The Legacy of Race and Inequity

When hate groups descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, triggering an eruption of racist violence, the tragic conflict reverberated throughout the world. It also had a profound effect on the University of Virginia’s expansive community, many of whose members are involved in teaching issues of...

Harold, Claudrena N., Nelson, Louis P.

Summer of Hate

Charlottesville, USA

In August 2017, violence burst forth in Charlottesville, Virginia, during two days of demonstrations by a combination of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and counterprotest groups from the antifa and Black Lives Matter. Originally motivated by the city’s plans to remove Confederate statues from two...

Spencer, Hawes

What Time and Sadness Spared

Mother and Son Confront the Holocaust

Roma Ben-Atar resisted until late in life the urging of her family to share the memories of her Nazi-era experiences. The Holocaust exerted a dark pressure on all of their lives but was never openly discussed. It was only when her granddaughter insisted on hearing the whole truth, with a directness...

Ben-Atar, Roma Nutkiewicz

Jamestown, the Truth Revealed

What was life really like for the band of adventurers who first set foot on the banks of the James River in 1607? Important as the accomplishments of these men and women were, the written records pertaining to them are scarce, ambiguous, and often conflicting. In Jamestown, the Truth Revealed,...

Kelso, William M.

Handcuffs and Chain Link

Criminalizing the Undocumented in America

Handcuffs and Chain Link enters the immigration debate by addressing one of its most controversial aspects: the criminalization both of extralegal immigration to the United States and of immigrants themselves in popular and political discourse. Looking at the factors that led up to criminalization...

Gonzalez O'Brien, Benjamin

The Queen of America

Mary Cutts's Life of Dolley Madison

For biographers and fans of Dolley Payne Todd Madison, Mary Cutts's memoir of her famous aunt has been indispensable. Because Madison left behind no account of her life, the common assumption has been that Cutts’s account is the closest we have to Madison's autobiographical voice. With this new,...

Cutts, Mary, Allgor, Catherine

Environmental Design

Architecture, Politics, and Science in Postwar America

Much of twentieth-century design was animated by the creative tension of its essential duality: is design an art or a science? In the postwar era, American architects sought to calibrate architectural practice to evolving scientific knowledge about humans and environments, thus elevating the...

Sachs, Avigail

George Washington's Barbados Diary, 1751-52

In the autumn of 1751, at the age of nineteen, George Washington sailed with his older half-brother Lawrence from Virginia to the Caribbean island of Barbados—the one and only time that the future Revolutionary War hero and president would leave the shores of continental North America. Lawrence had...

Washington, George, Anderson, Alicia K., Price, Lynn A.

West with the Rise

Fly-fishing across America

The first book to follow a fly-fishing trip from coast to coast, West with the Rise is James Barilla's account of a solitary journey that begins in New England and ends in Northern California, with little more to keep him company than a secondhand pickup bought just for the trip, a pair of Nikes he...

Barilla, James

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