Recent Titles

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Black Cosmopolitans

Race, Religion, and Republicanism in an Age of Revolution

Black Cosmopolitans examines the lives and thought of three extraordinary black men—Jacobus Capitein, Jean-Baptiste Belley, and John Marrant—who traveled extensively throughout the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Unlike millions of uprooted Africans and their descendants at the time, these men...

Levecq, Christine

Colonial Wounds/Postcolonial Repair

This companion volume to the Colonial Wounds/Postcolonial Repair exhibition at James Madison University’s Duke Hall Gallery of Fine Art contributes to debates about monuments, historical amnesia, and memories of war and colonialism. It includes essays by co-curators Maureen G. Shanahan and Beth...

Menia, Amina, Shanahan, Maureen, Hinderliter, Beth

Character and Mourning

Woolf, Faulkner, and the Novel Elegy of the First World War

In response to the devastating trauma of World War I, British and American authors wrote about grief. The need to articulate loss inspired moving novels by Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. Woolf criticized the role of Britain in the "war to end all wars," and Faulkner recognized in postwar...

Penner, Erin

The Insurgent Delegate

Selected Letters and Other Writings of George Thatcher

George Thatcher served as a U.S. representative from Maine throughout the Federalist Era (1789-1801)—the most critical and formative period of American constitutional history. A moderate on most political issues, the Cape Cod native and Harvard-educated lawyer proved a maverick in matters relating...

diGiacomantonio, William C.

Public Vows

Fictions of Marriage in the English Enlightenment

In eighteenth-century England, the institution of marriage became the subject of heated debates, as clerics, jurists, legislators, philosophers, and social observers began rethinking its contractual foundation. Public Vows argues that these debates shaped English fiction in crucial and previously...

Ganz, Melissa J.

Mourning El Dorado

Literature and Extractivism in the Contemporary American Tropics

What ever happened to the legend of El Dorado, the tale of the mythical city of gold lost in the Amazon jungle? Charlotte Rogers argues that El Dorado has not been forgotten and still inspires the reckless pursuit of illusory wealth. The search for gold in South America during the colonial period...

Rogers, Charlotte

A World of Disorderly Notions

Quixote and the Logic of Exceptionalism

From Jonathan Swift to Washington Irving, those looking to propose and justify exceptions to social and political norms turned to Cervantes’s notoriously mad comic hero as a model. A World of Disorderly Notions examines the literary and political effects of Don Quixote, arguing that what makes this...

Hanlon, Aaron R.

"The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret"

George Washington, Slavery, and the Enslaved Community at Mount Vernon

George Washington’s life has been scrutinized by historians over the past three centuries, but the day-to-day lives of Mount Vernon’s enslaved workers, who left few written records but made up 90 percent of the estate’s population, have been largely left out of the story. In "The Only Unavoidable...

Thompson, Mary V.

A Little Child Shall Lead Them

A Documentary Account of the Struggle for School Desegregation in Prince Edward County, Virginia

In the twentieth-century struggle for racial equality, there was perhaps no setting more fraught and contentious than the public schools of the American south. In Prince Edward County, Virginia, in 1951, a student strike for better school facilities became part of the NAACP legal campaign for...

Daugherity, Brian J., Grogan, Brian

Women in the American Revolution

Gender, Politics, and the Domestic World

Building on a quarter century of scholarship following the publication of the groundbreaking Women in the Age of the American Revolution, the engagingly written essays in this volume offer an updated answer to the question, What was life like for women in the era of the American Revolution? The...

Oberg, Barbara B.

The Papers of James Madison

13 October 1815-30 April 1816

[Book description not available]

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

Studies in Bibliography

The sixtieth volume of Studies in Bibliography continues its tradition of presenting a wide range of articles by international scholars on bibliography, textual criticism, and other aspects of the study of books. The volume opens with an article by magisterial bibliographer G. Thomas Tanselle that...

Vander Meulen, David L.

Sol Plaatje

A Life of Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje, 1876-1932

While the story of modern South Africa has long captured global attention, the story of one of its key forefathers has been eclipsed by those of more iconic political figures. In Sol Plaatje: A Life, Brian Willan restores to history the importance of a remarkable man whose contributions as an...

Willan, Brian

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