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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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1930
The First Automobile Trip in North America, from Manhattan to Managua

Imagine setting out on a road trip in a 1929 Ford Model A Roadster, with the stated goal of traveling from Manhattan to Mexico and Central America, after only a week’s worth of preparation. This is exactly what brothers Arthur Lyon and Joe Lyon Jr. did on March 23, 1930. The Lyons acquired some...

Lyon, Arthur, Lyon, Larry
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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
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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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The Belle Créole

Possessing one of the most vital voices in international letters, Maryse Condé added to an already acclaimed career the New Academy Prize in Literature in 2018. The twelfth novel by this celebrated author revolves around an enigmatic crime and the young man at its center. Dieudonné Sabrina, a...

Condé, Maryse
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The Shortest Way with Defoe
Robinson Crusoe, Deism, and the Novel

A scholarly and imaginative reconstruction of the voyage Daniel Defoe took from the pillory to literary immortality, The Shortest Way with Defoe contends that Robinson Crusoe contains a secret satire, written against one person, that has gone undetected for 300 years. By locating Defoe's nemesis...

Prince, Michael B.
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Love and Depth in the American Novel
From Stowe to James

Love and Depth in the American Novel seeks to change how we think about the American love story and how we imagine the love of literature. By examining classics of nineteenth-century American literature, Ashley Barnes offers a new approach to literary theory that encompasses both New Historicism...

Barnes, Ashley C.
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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
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Afro-Creole Poetry in French from Louisiana's Radical Civil War-Era Newspapers
A Bilingual Edition

Collected here for the first time, seventy-nine poems published in the Civil War–era Afro-Creole New Orleans newspapers L’Union and La Tribune—most unavailable anywhere but in archives—bring to life a close-knit, politically progressive French-speaking community of artists and intellectuals whose...

Bruce, Clint
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Milton among Spaniards

Firmly grounded in literary studies but drawing on religious studies, translation studies, drama, and visual art, Milton among Spaniards is the first book-length exploration of the afterlife of John Milton in Spanish culture, illuminating underexamined Anglo-Hispanic cultural relations. This study...

Duran, Angelica
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Falling Short
The Bildungsroman and the Crisis of Self-Fashioning

A paradox haunts the bildungsroman: few protagonists successfully complete the process of maturation and socialization that ostensibly defines the form. From the despondent endings of Dickens’s Great Expectations and Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel to the suicide of Balzac’s Lucien de...

Stević, Aleksandar
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The Silent Prologue
How Judicial Philosophies Shape Our Constitutional Rights

The U.S. Constitution contains a series of rights and liberties operating as restrictions on the powers of government, and courts have the final authority to determine what these often nebulous restrictions require. But judges are deeply divided over the correct methodology to follow in making...

Raban, Ofer
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Cajun Document
Acadiana, 1973-74

For six months in 1974, two young photographers, fresh out of art school in Chicago, traveled through Cajun country, documenting the people, festivals, material culture, and haunting landscapes of Acadiana and its coastal outposts. Never before published or exhibited as a group, the 163 black-and-...

Baz, Douglas, Traub, Charles H.
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Bad Men
Creative Touchstones of Black Writers

How have African American writers drawn on "bad" black men and black boys as creative touchstones for their evocative and vibrant art? This is the question posed by Howard Rambsy’s new book, which explores bad men as a central, recurring, and understudied figure in African American literature, and...

Rambsy II., Howard
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The Sketch, the Tale, and the Beginnings of American Literature

Accounts of the rise of American literature often start in the 1850s with a cluster of "great American novels"—Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Melville’s Moby-Dick and Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But these great works did not spring fully formed from the heads of their creators. All three relied on...

Fash, Lydia G.
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After Print
Eighteenth-Century Manuscript Cultures

The eighteenth century has generally been understood as the Age of Print, when the new medium revolutionized the literary world and rendered manuscript culture obsolete. After Print, however, reveals that the story isn’t so simple. Manuscript remained a vital, effective, and even preferred forum...

King, Rachael Scarborough
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Neoliberal Nonfictions
The Documentary Aesthetic from Joan Didion to Jay-Z

With the ascendancy of neoliberalism in American culture beginning in the 1960s, the political structures governing private lives became more opaque and obscure. Neoliberal Nonfictions argues that a new style of documentary art emerged to articulate the fissures between individual experience and...

Worden, Daniel
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The Life of William Faulkner
The Past Is Never Dead, 1897-1934

William Faulkner emerged from the ravaged South—half backwoods, half defeated empire—transforming his corner of Mississippi into the fictional Yoknapatawpha County and bestowing on the world some of the most revolutionary and enduring literature of the twentieth century. The personal story behind...

Rollyson, Carl
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The Papers of George Washington
5 July-27 August 1780

Three major themes dominate George Washington’s correspondence in volume 27 of the Revolutionary War Series: the arrival of a French expeditionary army and navy, the urgent need to prepare the Continental army for a joint Franco-American offensive to take New York City, and the cultivation of...

Washington, George, Huggins, Benjamin L.
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Art and Artifact in Austen

Jane Austen distinguished herself with genius in literature, but she was immersed in all of the arts. Austen loved dancing, played the piano proficiently, meticulously transcribed piano scores, attended concerts and art exhibits, read broadly, wrote poems, sat for portraits by her sister Cassandra...

Battigelli, Anna
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The Worst Passions of Human Nature
White Supremacy in the Civil War North

The American North’s commitment to preventing a southern secession rooted in slaveholding suggests a society united in its opposition to slavery and racial inequality. The reality, however, was far more complex and troubling. In his latest book, Paul Escott lays bare the contrast between progress...

Escott, Paul D.

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