Recent Titles

Fashioning Character

Style, Performance, and Identity in Contemporary American Literature

It’s often said that we are what we wear. Tracing an American trajectory in fashion, Lauren Cardon shows how we become what we wear. Over the twentieth century, the American fashion industry diverged from its roots in Paris, expanding and attempting to reach as many consumers as possible. Fashion...

Cardon, Lauren S.

Mind over Matter

Memory Fiction from Daniel Defoe to Jane Austen

How do we understand memory in the early novel? Departing from traditional empiricist conceptualizations of remembering, Mind over Matter uncovers a social model of memory in Enlightenment fiction that is fluid and evolving—one that has the capacity to alter personal histories. Memories are not...

Eron, Sarah

Wandering Memory

The daughter of Haitian journalist and pro-democracy activist Jean Léopold Dominique, who was assassinated in 2000, Jan J. Dominique offers a memoir that provides a uniquely personal perspective on the tumultuous end of the twentieth century in Haiti. Wandering Memory is her elegy for a father and...

Dominique, Jan J.

Collateral Damage

Women Write about War

From Homer to Tim O’Brien, war literature remains largely the domain of male writers, and traditional narratives imply that the burdens of war are carried by men. But women and children disproportionately suffer the consequences of conflict: famine, disease, sexual abuse, and emotional trauma...

Mujica, Bárbara

Monumental

Oscar Dunn and His Radical Fight in Reconstruction Louisiana

Monumental tells, for the first time, the incredible story of Oscar James Dunn, a New Orleanian born into slavery who became America’s first Black lieutenant governor and acting governor. A champion of universal suffrage, civil rights, and integrated public schools, Dunn fought for radical change...

Mitchell, Brian K., Edwards, Barrington S., Weldon, Nick

Buildings of Mississippi

As Eudora Welty observed, "One place understood helps us know all places better." Nowhere is this more apropos than in her home state of Mississippi. Although accounts of its architecture have long conjured visions of white-columned antebellum mansions, its towns, buildings, and landscapes are...

Baughn, Jennifer V. O., Fazio, Michael W.

Beastly Natures

Animals, Humans, and the Study of History

Although the animal may be, as Nietzsche argued, ahistorical, living completely in the present, it nonetheless plays a crucial role in human history. The fascination with animals that leads not only to a desire to observe and even live alongside them, but to capture or kill them, is found in all...

Brantz, Dorothee

Narrating the Mesh

Form and Story in the Anthropocene

A hierarchical model of human societies’ relations with the natural world is at the root of today’s climate crisis; Narrating the Mesh contends that narrative form is instrumental in countering this ideology. Drawing inspiration from Timothy Morton’s concept of the "mesh" as a metaphor for the...

Caracciolo, Marco

Economy Hall

The Hidden History of a Free Black Brotherhood

It is impossible to imagine New Orleans, and by extension American history, without the vibrant and singular Creole culture. In the face of an oppressive white society, members of the Société d’Economie et d’Assistance Mutuelle built a community and held it together through the era of slavery, the...

Shaik, Fatima

Against the Hounds of Hell

A Life of Howard Thurman

An inspiration to Martin Luther King Jr., James Farmer, and other leaders of the civil rights movement, Howard Thurman was a crucial figure in the history of African Americans in the 20th century. Until now, however, he has not received the biographical treatment he deserves. In Against the Hounds...

Eisenstadt, Peter

The Problem with Rules

Essays on the Meaning and Value of Liberal Education

There is a constant drumbeat of commentary claiming that STEM subjects—science, technology, engineering, and math—are far more valuable in today’s economy than traditional liberal arts courses such as philosophy or history. Many even claim that the liberal arts are "under siege" by neoliberal...

Churchill, John

Statute Law in Colonial Virginia

Governors, Assemblymen, and the Revisals That Forged the Old Dominion

Between 1632 and 1748, Virginia’s General Assembly revised the colony’s statutes seven times. These revisals provide an invaluable opportunity to gauge how governors, councilors, and burgesses created a hybrid body of colonial statute law that would become the longest strand in the American legal...

Billings, Warren M.

At Home with Apartheid

The Hidden Landscapes of Domestic Service in Johannesburg

Despite their peaceful, bucolic appearance, the tree-lined streets of South African suburbia were no refuge from the racial tensions and indignities of apartheid’s most repressive years. In At Home with Apartheid, Rebecca Ginsburg provides an intimate examination of the cultural landscapes of...

Ginsburg, Rebecca

Monacan Millennium

A Collaborative Archaeology and History of a Virginia Indian People

While Jamestown and colonial settlements dominate narratives of Virginia’s earliest days, the land’s oldest history belongs to its native people. Monacan Millennium tells the story of the Monacan Indian people of Virginia, stretching from 1000 A.D. through the moment of colonial contact in 1607 and...

Hantman, Jeffrey L.

Saul Steinberg's Literary Journeys

Nabokov, Joyce, and Others

Saul Steinberg’s inimitable drawings, paintings, and assemblages enriched the New Yorker, gallery and museum shows, and his own books for more than half a century. Although the literary qualities of Steinberg’s work have often been noted in passing, critics and art historians have yet to fathom the...

Feldman, Jessica R.

Racism in American Public Life

A Call to Action

For some in our society, diversity is a threat. Others feel society should be more inclusive, if only out of fairness. But as Johnnetta Cole argues in her new book, embracing diversity and inclusiveness is more than a virtuous ideal; it is essential to a healthy, productive society. Focusing on...

Cole, Johnnetta Betsch

Rival Visions

How Jefferson and His Contemporaries Defined the Early American Republic

The emergence of the early American republic as a new nation on the world stage conjured rival visions in the eyes of leading statesmen at home and attentive observers abroad. Thomas Jefferson envisioned the newly independent states as a federation of republics united by common experience, mutual...

Gish, Dustin, Bibby, Andrew

Revolutionary Prophecies

The Founders and America’s Future

The America of the early republic was built on an experiment, a hopeful prophecy that would only be fulfilled if an enlightened people could find its way through its past and into a future. Americans recognized that its promises would only be fully redeemed at a future date. In Revolutionary...

McDonald, Robert M. S., Onuf, Peter S.

Sapphic Crossings

Cross-Dressing Women in Eighteenth-Century British Literature

Across the eighteenth century in Britain, readers, writers, and theater-goers were fascinated by women who dressed in men’s clothing—from actresses on stage who showed their shapely legs to advantage in men’s breeches to stories of valiant female soldiers and ruthless female pirates. Spanning...

Klein, Ula Lukszo

Reading Reality

Nineteenth-Century American Experiments in the Real

In the early 1800s, American critics warned about the danger of literature as a distraction from reality. Later critical accounts held that American literature during the antebellum period was idealistic and that literature grew more realistic after the horrors of the Civil War. By focusing on...

Finan, E. Thomas

The Papers of George Washington

28 August–27 October 1780

In late August 1780, Gen. George Washington was buoyed by expectations that French reinforcements would participate in an attack on New York City and that a southern army was poised to advance through South Carolina and possibly regain Charleston. News soon reached him that a key division was...

Washington, George

Of Courtiers and Princes

Stories of Lower Court Clerks and Their Judges

Praise for In Chambers: "This new collection of essays, including some by former clerks, takes readers inside justices’ chambers for a look at clerkship life.... [T]he best parts of the book are the behind-the-scenes descriptions of life at the court."— Associated Press "An excellent book... It’s...

Peppers, Todd C.

Patriots, Prostitutes, and Spies

Women and the Mexican-American War

In Patriots, Prostitutes, and Spies, John M. Belohlavek tells the story of women on both sides of the Mexican-American War (1846-48) as they were propelled by the bloody conflict to adopt new roles and expand traditional ones. American women "back home" functioned as anti-war activists, pro-war...

Belohlavek, John M.

Marketing Analytics

Essential Tools for Data-Driven Decisions

The authors of the pioneering Cutting-Edge Marketing Analytics return to the vital conversation of leveraging big data with Marketing Analytics: Essential Tools for Data-Driven Decisions, which updates and expands on the earlier book as we enter the 2020s. As they illustrate, big data analytics is...

Venkatesan, Rajkumar, Farris, Paul W., Wilcox, Ronald T.

The Complete Pamphlets of Lewis Carroll

A Miscellany of Works on Alice, Theatre, Religion, Science, and More

The final volume in the Pamphlets of Lewis Carroll series collects more than one hundred of his works on the Alice books, the theater, religion and morality, science and mathematics, photography, letters and postage, humor, stories, poetry, undergraduate papers, circular letters, and miscellaneous...

Carroll, Lewis, Lovett, Charlie

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