Recent Titles

Conceived in Crisis

The Revolutionary Creation of an American State

Conceived in Crisis argues that the American Revolution was not just the product of the Imperial Crisis, brought on by Parliament’s attempt to impose a new idea of empire on the American colonies. To an equal or greater degree, it was a response to the inability of individual colonial governments...

Pearl, Christopher R.

Eden's Endemics

Narratives of Biodiversity on Earth and Beyond

In the past thirty years biodiversity has become one of the central organizing principles through which we understand the nonhuman environment. Its deceptively simple definition as the variation among living organisms masks its status as a hotly contested term both within the sciences and more...

Callaway, Elizabeth

Victorians on Broadway

Literature, Adaptation, and the Modern American Musical

Broadway productions of musicals such as The King and I, Oliver!, Sweeney Todd, and Jekyll and Hyde became huge theatrical hits. Remarkably, all were based on one-hundred-year-old British novels or memoirs. What could possibly explain their enormous success? Victorians on Broadway is a wide-...

Weltman, Sharon Aronofsky

Colossal Ambitions

Confederate Planning for a Post–Civil War World

Leading politicians, diplomats, clerics, planters, farmers, manufacturers, and merchants preached a transformative, world-historical role for the Confederacy, persuading many of their compatriots to fight not merely to retain what they had but to gain their future empire. Impervious to reality,...

Brettle, Adrian

Hostile Humor in Renaissance France

In sixteenth-century France, the level of jokes, irony, and ridicule found in pamphlets and plays became aggressively hostile. In Hostile Humor in Renaissance France, Bruce Hayes investigates this period leading up to the French Wars of Religion, when a deliberately harmful and destructive form of...

Hayes, Bruce

Newest Born of Nations

European Nationalist Movements and the Making of the Confederacy

From the earliest stirrings of southern nationalism to the defeat of the Confederacy, analysis of European nationalist movements played a critical role in how southerners thought about their new southern nation. Southerners argued that because the Confederate nation was cast in the same mold as its...

Tucker, Ann L.

The Papers of George Washington

22 September 1796-3 March 1797

The concluding volume of the Presidential Series begins following the publication of Washington’s Farewell Address, which was circulated widely in newspapers and drew reactions from citizens across the nation. With his approaching retirement from the presidency, Washington tended to a number of...

Washington, George, Garbooshian-Huggins, Adrina

The Papers of James Madison

1 May 1816-3 March 1817, with a supplement, 1809-1815

The final volume of the Presidential Series covers Madison’s last ten months in office, during which he maintained a busy schedule despite taking the longest summer vacation in all his time in Washington. Foreign policy was dominated by crises with Spain and Algiers. Negotiations with Great Britain...

Madison, James, Stagg, J. C. A., Johnson, Mary Parke, Harbury, Katharine E., Colony, Anne Mandeville

Suicide

The Social Causes of Self-Destruction

The conventional approach to suicide is psychiatric: ask the average person why people kill themselves, and they will likely cite depression. But this approach fails to recognize suicide’s social causes. People kill themselves because of breakups and divorces, because of lost jobs and ruined...

Manning, Jason

Comrade Sister

Caribbean Feminist Revisions of the Grenada Revolution

In 1979, the Marxist-Leninist New Jewel Movement under Maurice Bishop overthrew the government of the Caribbean island country of Grenada, establishing the People’s Revolutionary Government. The United States under President Reagan infamously invaded Grenada in 1983, staying until the New National...

Lambert, Laurie R.

The Complete Writings and Selected Correspondence of John Dickinson

The Complete Writings and Selected Correspondence of John Dickinson, vol. 1 inaugurates a multivolume documentary edition that will, for the first time ever, provide the complete collection of everything Dickinson published on public affairs over the course of his life. The documents include...

Dickinson, John, Calvert, Jane E.

The Devil's Art

Divination and Discipline in Early Modern Germany

In early modern Germany, soothsayers known as wise women and men roamed the countryside. Fixtures of village life, they identified thieves and witches, read palms, and cast horoscopes. German villagers regularly consulted these fortune-tellers and practiced divination in their everyday lives. Jason...

Coy, Jason P.

The Correspondence of Thomas Hutchinson

1767-1769

The second volume of Thomas Hutchinson’s correspondence covers the years 1767 through 1769. In 1767, Charles Townshend's new taxes, in addition to his ambitious plans to improve customs enforcement and render crown officials in the colonies more independent of local assemblies, caused increasing...

Hutchinson, Thomas, Tyler, John W., Dubrulle, Elizabeth

Virginians and Their Histories

Histories of Virginia have traditionally traced the same significant but narrow lines, overlooking whole swathes of human experience crucial to an understanding of the commonwealth. With Virginians and Their Histories, Brent Tarter presents a fresh, new interpretive narrative that incorporates the...

Tarter, Brent

God on the Grounds

A History of Religion at Thomas Jefferson’s University

Free-thinking Thomas Jefferson established the University of Virginia as a secular institution and stipulated that the University should not provide any instruction in religion. Yet over the course of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, religion came to have a prominent place in...

Gamble, Harry Y.

Empire of Diamonds

Victorian Gems in Imperial Settings

In 1850, the legendary Koh-i-noor diamond, gem of Eastern potentates, was transferred from the Punjab in India and, in an elaborate ceremony, placed into Queen Victoria’s outstretched hands. This act inaugurated what author Adrienne Munich recognizes in her engaging new book as the empire of...

Munich, Adrienne

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

Cultural Entanglements

Langston Hughes and the Rise of African and Caribbean Literature

In addition to being a poet, fiction writer, playwright, and essayist, Langston Hughes was also a globe-trotting cosmopolitan, travel writer, translator, avid international networker, and—perhaps above all—pan-Africanist. In Cultural Entanglements, Shane Graham examines Hughes’s associations with a...

Graham, Shane

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