Recent Titles

The Selected Papers of John Jay

1794–1798

Volume 6 opens with John Jay aboard the Ohio, bound for London in May 1794, to begin what will prove to be the most controversial mission of his career: the negotiation of the treaty that now bears his name. The volume documents the series of proposals and drafts that culminated in the treaty, as...

Jay, John, Nuxoll, Elizabeth M.

Henry Adams in Washington

Linking the Personal and Public Lives of America’s Man of Letters

A descendent of two U.S. presidents and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Henry Adams enjoyed a very particular place in American life, not least due to his ancestry. Yet despite his prolific writing in the years between 1877 and 1891, when he lived in Washington, D.C., Adams has somehow slipped into...

Seavey, Ormond

By Broad Potomac's Shore

Great Poems from the Early Days of Our Nation's Capital

Following her successful Literary Guide to Washington, DC, which Library Journal called "the perfect accompaniment for a literature-inspired vacation in the US capital," Kim Roberts returns with a comprehensive anthology of poems by both well-known and overlooked poets working and living in the...

Roberts, Kim

We Are Kings

Political Theology and the Making of a Modern Individual

When British and American leaders today talk of the nation—whether it is Boris Johnson, Barack Obama, or Donald Trump—they do so, in part, in terms established by eighteenth-century British literature. The city on a hill and the sovereign individual are tropes at the center of modern Anglo-American...

Jackson, Spencer

The Life of William Faulkner

This Alarming Paradox, 1935–1962

By the end of volume 1 of The Life of William Faulkner ("A filling, satisfying feast for Faulkner aficianados"— Kirkus), the young Faulkner had gone from an unpromising, self-mythologizing bohemian to the author of some of the most innovative and enduring literature of the century, including The...

Rollyson, Carl

Fulfilling the Promise

Virginia Commonwealth University and the City of Richmond, 1968–2009

Founded in Richmond in 1968, Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) began with a mission to build a university to serve a city emerging from the era of urban crisis—desegregation, white flight, political conflict, and economic decline. With the merger of the Medical College of Virginia and the...

Kneebone, John T., Trani, Eugene P.

Nervous Fictions

Literary Form and the Enlightenment Origins of Neuroscience

"The brain contains ten thousand cells," wrote the poet Matthew Prior in 1718, "in each some active fancy dwells." In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, just as scientists began to better understand the workings of the nerves, the nervous system became the site for a series of elaborate...

Keiser, Jess

Inventing the Critic in Renaissance England

The turn of the seventeenth century was an important moment in the history of English criticism. In a series of pioneering works of rhetoric and poetics, writers such as Philip Sidney, George Puttenham, and Ben Jonson laid the foundations of critical discourse in English, and the English word "...

Russell, William M.

Colonial Williamsburg: The Story

From the Colonial Era to the Restoration

It was in Williamsburg, Virginia, that American independence—and democracy—took root. And it is in the Historic Area of Colonial Williamsburg that millions have learned about the continuing relevance of America’s founding ideas. Spanning nearly five centuries, Williamsburg: The Story chronicles...

Lengel, Edward G.

Innovation in the Italian Counter-Reformation

The enduring "black legend" of the Italian Counter-Reformation, which has held sway in both scholarly and popular culture, maintains that the Council of Trent ushered in a cultural dark age in Italy, snuffing out the spectacular creative production of the Renaissance. As a result, the decades...

McHugh, Shannon, Wainwright, Anna

The Case for Identity Politics

Polarization, Demographic Change, and Racial Appeals

Following the defeat of Hillary Clinton in the presidential election of 2016, many prominent scholars and political pundits argued that a successful Democratic Party in the future must abandon identity politics. While these calls for Democrats to distance themselves from such strategies have...

Stout, Christopher T.

Humus

While researching in Nantes, a port city enriched by the slave trade, celebrated French novelist Fabienne Kanor came across a chilling report written in 1774 by the commander of a slave ship, Le Soleil. Captain Louis Mosnier recounted the loss of valuable "cargo" when fourteen African women escaped...

Kanor, Fabienne

First and Always

A New Portrait of George Washington

George Washington may be the most famous American who ever lived, and certainly is one of the most admired. While surrounded by myths, it is no myth that the man who led Americans’ fight for independence and whose two terms in office largely defined the presidency was the most highly respected...

Henriques, Peter R.

Three Rings

A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate

In this genre-defying book, best-selling memoirist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn explores the mysterious links between the randomness of the lives we lead and the artfulness of the stories we tell. Combining memoir, biography, history, and literary criticism, Three Rings weaves together the stories...

Mendelsohn, Daniel

Armed Citizens

The Road from Ancient Rome to the Second Amendment

Although much has changed in the United States since the eighteenth century, our framework for gun laws still largely relies on the Second Amendment and the patterns that emerged in the colonial era. America has long been a heavily armed, and racially divided, society, yet few citizens understand...

Shusterman, Noah

Belzoni

The Giant Archaeologists Love to Hate

The Italian son of a barber. A failed hydraulic engineer. A giant who performed feats of strength and agility in the circus. Giovanni Belzoni (1778–1824) was all of these before going on to become one of the most controversial figures in the history of Egyptian archaeology. A man of exceptional...

Noël Hume, Ivor

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

Yuletide in Dixie

Slavery, Christmas, and Southern Memory

How did enslaved African Americans in the Old South really experience Christmas? Did Christmastime provide slaves with a lengthy and jubilant respite from labor and the whip, as is generally assumed, or is the story far more complex and troubling? In this provocative, revisionist, and sometimes...

May, Robert E.

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

Furnace and Fugue

A Digital Edition of Michael Maier's "Atalanta fugiens" (1618) with Scholarly Commentary

An Innovative New Open-Access Resource In 1618, on the eve of the Thirty Years’ War, the German alchemist and physician Michael Maier published Atalanta fugiens, an intriguing and complex musical alchemical emblem book designed to engage the ear, eye, and intellect. The book unfolds as a series of...

Nummedal, Tara, Bilak, Donna

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

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