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The Alchemy of Conquest
Science, Religion, and the Secrets of the New World

The Age of the Discovery of the Americas was concurrent with the Age of Discovery in science. In The Alchemy of Conquest, Ralph Bauer explores the historical relationship between the two, focusing on the connections between religion and science in the Spanish, English, and French literatures about...

Bauer, Ralph
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Goodness and the Literary Imagination
Harvard's 95th Ingersoll Lecture with Essays on Morrison's Moral and Religious Vision

What exactly is goodness? Where is it found in the literary imagination? Toni Morrison, one of American letters’ greatest voices, pondered these perplexing questions in her celebrated Ingersoll Lecture, delivered at Harvard University in 2012 and published now for the first time in book form....

Morrison, Toni, Carrasco, David, Paulsell, Stephanie, Willard, Mara
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Gerrymanders
How Redistricting Has Protected Slavery, White Supremacy, and Partisan Minorities in Virginia

Many are aware that gerrymandering exists and suspect it plays a role in our elections, but its history goes far deeper, and its impacts are far greater, than most realize. In his latest book, Brent Tarter focuses on Virginia’s long history of gerrymandering to uncover its immense influence on the...

Tarter, Brent
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Transfusion
Blood and Sympathy in the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination

"England may with justice claim to be the native land of transfusion," wrote one European physician in 1877, acknowledging Great Britain’s crucial role in developing and promoting human-to-human transfusion as treatment for life-threatening blood loss. As news of this revolutionary medical...

Kibbie, Ann Louise
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The Field of Imagination
Thomas Paine and Eighteenth-Century Poetry

One of America’s Founding Fathers, Thomas Paine is best remembered as the pamphleteer who inspired the American Revolution. Yet few also know him as an eighteenth-century poet of considerable repute. In The Field of Imagination, Scott Cleary offers the first book on Paine’s poetry, exploring how...

Cleary, Scott M.
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A Guidebook to Virginia's African American Historical Markers

Virginia encompasses "this nation’s longest continuous experience of Afro-American life and culture," esteemed scholar Armstead L. Robinson has written. This book offers both highway and armchair travelers the first published guide to the locations and texts of more than three hundred state...
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Jeffersonians in Power
The Rhetoric of Opposition Meets the Realities of Governing

In the 1790s, the Jeffersonian Republicans were the party of "no." They opposed attempts to expand the government’s role in society, criticized the Washington administration’s national bank, railed against a standing army, and bemoaned the spirit of the Federalist regime, which, they claimed,...

Freeman, Joanne B., Neem, Johann N.
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The Founding of Thomas Jefferson's University

Established in 1819 by Thomas Jefferson, the University of Virginia was known as "The University" throughout the South for most of the nineteenth century, and today it stands as one of the premier universities in the world. This volume provides an in-depth look at the founding of the University and...

Ragosta, John A., Onuf, Peter S., O’Shaughnessy, Andrew J.
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Reclaiming Patriotism

Amitai Etzioni has made his reputation by transcending unwieldy, and even dangerous, binaries such as left/right or globalism/nativism. In his new book, Etzioni calls for nothing less than a social transformation—led by a new social movement—to save our world’s democracies, currently under threat...

Etzioni, Amitai
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Thomas Jefferson's Lives
Biographers and the Battle for History

Who was the "real" Thomas Jefferson? If this question has an answer, it will probably not be revealed reading the many accounts of his life. For two centuries biographers have provided divergent perspectives on him as a man and conflicting appraisals of his accomplishments. Jefferson was...

McDonald, Robert M. S.
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Without the Novel
Romance and the History of Prose Fiction

No genre manifests the pleasure of reading—and its power to consume and enchant—more than romance. In suspending the category of the novel to rethink the way prose fiction works,  Without the Novel demonstrates what literary history looks like from the perspective of such readerly excesses and...

Black, Scott
In the Spirit
The Photography of Michael P. Smith from the Historic New Orleans Collection

[Book description not available]



Nelly Custis Lewis's Housekeeping Book

[Book description not available]

Brady Schmit, Patricia
Perique
Photographs by Charles Martin

[Book description not available]

Martin, Charles
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Schooling Jim Crow
The Fight for Atlanta's Booker T. Washington High School and the Roots of Black Protest Politics

In 1919 the NAACP organized a voting bloc powerful enough to compel the city of Atlanta to budget $1.5 million for the construction of schools for black students. This victory would have been remarkable in any era, but in the context of the Jim Crow South it was revolutionary. Schooling Jim Crow...

Driskell, Jay Winston Jr.
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Mapping Hispaniola
Third Space in Dominican and Haitian Literature

Because of their respective histories of colonization and independence, the Spanish-speaking Dominican Republic has developed into the largest economy of the Caribbean, while Haiti, occupying the western side of their shared island of Hispaniola, has become one of the poorest countries in the...

Myers, Megan Jeanette
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Establishing Religious Freedom
Jefferson's Statute in Virginia

The significance of the Virginia Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom goes far beyond the borders of the Old Dominion. Its influence ultimately extended to the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the separation of church and state. In his latest book, Thomas Buckley tells the story of the...

Buckley, Thomas E.
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Educated in Tyranny
Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s University

From the University of Virginia’s very inception, slavery was deeply woven into its fabric. Enslaved people first helped to construct and then later lived in the Academical Village; they raised and prepared food, washed clothes, cleaned privies, and chopped wood. They maintained the buildings,...

McInnis, Maurie D., von Daacke, Kirt, Nelson, Louis P., Ford, Benjamin
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Summer of Hate
Charlottesville, USA

In August 2017, violence erupted in Charlottesville, Virginia, during two days of demonstrations by white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and counterprotesters, including members of antifa and Black Lives Matter. Ostensibly motivated by the city’s plans to remove Confederate statues from two public parks...

Spencer, Hawes
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After August
Blues, August Wilson, and American Drama

Critics have long suggested that August Wilson, who called blues "the best literature we have as black Americans," appropriated blues music for his plays. After August insists instead that Wilson’s work is direct blues expression. Patrick Maley argues that Wilson was not a dramatist importing blues...

Maley, Patrick
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Facing Freedom
An African American Community in Virginia from Reconstruction to Jim Crow

The history of African Americans in southern Appalachia after the Civil War has largely escaped the attention of scholars of both African Americans and the region. In Facing Freedom, Daniel Thorp relates the complex experience of an African American community in southern Appalachia as it negotiated...

Thorp, Daniel B.
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Buildings of Texas
East, North Central, Panhandle and South Plains, and West

From Dallas–Fort Worth to El Paso, Goodnight to Marfa to Langtry, and scores of places in between, the second of two towering volumes assembled by Gerald Moorhead and a team of dedicated authors offers readers a definitive guide to the architecture of the Lone Star State. Canvassing Spanish and...

Moorhead, Gerald
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Anecdotes of Enlightenment
Human Nature from Locke to Wordsworth

Anecdotes of Enlightenment is the first literary history of the anecdote in English. In this wide-ranging account, James Robert Wood explores the animating effects anecdotes had on intellectual and literary cultures over the long eighteenth century. Drawing on extensive archival research and...

Wood, James Robert
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Women Warriors in Early Modern Spain
A Tribute to Bárbara Mujica

Although scholars often depict early modern Spanish women as victims, history and fiction of the period are filled with examples of women who defended their God-given right to make their own decisions and to define their own identities. The essays in Women Warriors in Early Modern Spain examine...

Fischer, Susan L., de Armas, Frederick A.
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Of Land, Bones, and Money
Toward a South African Ecopoetics

The South African literature of iimbongi, the oral poets of the amaXhosa people, has long shaped understandings of landscape and history and offered a forum for grappling with change. Of Land, Bones, and Money examines the shifting role of these poets in South African society and the ways in which...

McGiffin, Emily

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