Recent Titles

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

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.

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

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.

Lighting the Way

Federal Courts, Civil Rights, and Public Policy

Do our federal courts, including the Supreme Court, lead or merely implement public policy? This is a critical question in the study and practice of law, with a long history of continued dispute and contradictory evidence. In Lighting the Way, Douglas Rice systematically examines both sides of this...

Rice, Douglas

Dandyism

Forming Fiction from Modernism to the Present

The "dandy," a nineteenth-century character and concept exemplified in such works as Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, reverberates in surprising corners of twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture. Establishing this character as a kind of shorthand for a diverse range of traits and tendencies...

Gutkin, Len

Letters from Filadelfia

Early Latino Literature and the Trans-American Elite

For many Spanish Americans in the early nineteenth century, Philadelphia was Filadelfia, a symbol of republican government for the Americas and the most important Spanish-language print center in the early United States. In Letters from Filadelfia, Rodrigo Lazo opens a window into Spanish-language...

Lazo, Rodrigo

Colonizing the Past

Mythmaking and Pre-Columbian Whites in Nineteenth-Century American Writing

After the Revolution, Americans realized they lacked the common, deep, or meaningful history that might bind together their loose confederation of former colonies into a genuine nation. They had been conquerors yet colonials, now politically independent yet culturally subordinate to European...

Watts, Edward

After Virginia Tech

Guns, Safety, and Healing in the Era of Mass Shootings

In what has become the era of the mass shooting, we are routinely taken to scenes of terrible violence. Often neglected, however, is the long aftermath, including the efforts to effect change in the wake of such tragedies. On April 16, 2007, thirty-two Virginia Tech students and professors were...

Kapsidelis, Thomas P.

The False Cause

Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory

The Lost Cause ideology that emerged after the Civil War and flourished in the early twentieth century in essence sought to recast a struggle to perpetuate slavery as a heroic defense of the South. As Adam Domby reveals here, this was not only an insidious goal; it was founded on falsehoods. The...

Domby, Adam H.

Monumental Jesus

Landscapes of Faith and Doubt in Modern America

The American landscape is host to numerous works of religious architecture, sometimes questionable in taste and large, if not titanic, in scale. In her lively study of satire and religious architecture, Margaret Grubiak challenges how we typically view such sites by shifting the focus from...

Grubiak, Margaret M.

Redemption from Tyranny

Herman Husband's American Revolution

For many common people, the American Revolution offered an opportunity to radically reimagine the wealth and power structures in the nascent United States. Yet in the eyes of working-class activists, the U.S. Constitution favored the interests of a corrupt elite and betrayed the lofty principles of...

Stewart, Bruce E.

Best New Poets 2019

50 Poems from Emerging Writers

Entering its fifteenth year, Best New Poets has established itself as a crucial venue for rising poets and a valuable resource for poetry lovers. The only publication of its kind, this annual anthology is made up exclusively of work by writers who have not yet published a full-length book. The...

Marvin, Cate

Grant Wood's Secrets

Incorporating copious archival research and original close readings of American artist Grant Wood’s iconic as well as lesser-known works, Grant Wood’s Secrets reveals how his sometimes anguished psychology was shaped by his close relationship with his mother and how he channeled his lifelong...

Taylor, Sue

Traces of J. B. Jackson

The Man Who Taught Us to See Everyday America

J. B. Jackson transformed forever how Americans understand their landscape, a concept he defined as land shaped by human presence. In the first major biography of the greatest pioneer in landscape studies, Helen Horowitz shares with us a man who focused on what he regarded as the essential American...

Horowitz, Helen L.

Water Graves

The Art of the Unritual in the Greater Caribbean

Water Graves considers representations of lives lost to water in contemporary poetry, fiction, theory, mixed-media art, video production, and underwater sculptures. From sunken slave ships to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, Valérie Loichot investigates the lack of official funeral rites in...

Loichot, Valérie

The Sacred Act of Reading

Spirituality, Performance, and Power in Afro-Diasporic Literature

From Zora Neale Hurston to Derek Walcott to Toni Morrison, New World black authors have written about African-derived religious traditions and spiritual practices. The Sacred Act of Reading examines religion and sociopolitical power in modern and contemporary texts of a variety of genres from the...

Castro, Anne Margaret

Buddha in the Marketplace

The Commodification of Buddhist Objects in Tibet

Classical Tibetan Buddhist scriptures forbid the selling of Buddhist objects, and yet there is today a thriving market for Buddhist statues, paintings, and texts. In Buddha in the Marketplace, Alex John Catanese investigates this practice, which continues to be viewed as a form of "wrong livelihood...

Catanese, Alex John

A Language of Things

Emanuel Swedenborg and the American Environmental Imagination

Long overlooked, the natural philosophy and theosophy of the Scandinavian scientist-turned-mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) made a surprising impact in America. Thomas Jefferson, while president, was so impressed with the message of a Baltimore Swedenborgian minister that he invited him to...

Zuber, Devin P.

Slavery and War in the Americas

Race, Citizenship, and State Building in the United States and Brazil, 1861-1870

In this pathbreaking new work, Vitor Izecksohn attempts to shed new light on the American Civil War by comparing it to a strikingly similar campaign in South America--the War of the Triple Alliance of 1864–70, which galvanized four countries and became the longest large-scale international conflict...

Izecksohn, Vitor

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