Recent Titles

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 Papers of Robert Treat Paine, 1787-1814

The fifth and final volume of this series encompasses Robert Treat Paine’s time as a justice on the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts and covers the final years of his life. Best known as a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Paine spent the remainder of his public career in state...

Paine, Robert Treat, Hanson, Edward W.

"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.

Fashioning the New England Family

As America’s first historical society, the Massachusetts Historical Society has collected family materials since 1791, including long-cherished pieces of clothing that were acquired alongside papers such as letters and diaries. Because of the different storage requirements for textiles and...

Alexander, Kimberly S.

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

The Circuit of Apollo

Eighteenth-Century Women's Tributes to Women

Written by a combination of established scholars and new critics in the field, the essays collected in Circuit of Apollo attest to the vital practice of commemorating women’s artistic and personal relationships. In doing so, they illuminate the complexity of female friendships and honor as well as...

Runge, Laura L., Cook, Jessica

Retelling the Siege of Jerusalem in Early Modern England

This compelling book explores sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English retellings of the Roman siege of Jerusalem and the way they informed and were informed by religious and political developments. The siege featured prominently in many early modern English sermons, ballads, plays, histories,...

Neelakanta, Vanita

Eliza Fenwick

Early Modern Feminist

This captivating biography traces the life of Eliza Fenwick, an extraordinary woman who paved her own unique path throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as she made her way from country to country as writer, teacher, and school owner. Lissa Paul brings to light Fenwick’s letters...

Paul, Lissa

Enigmatic Stream

Industrial Landscapes of the Lower Mississippi River

As it churns toward its terminus in southeastern Louisiana, the Mississippi River becomes a wide, muddy superhighway of activity, matched in might only by the megastructures of heavy industry that line its banks. The section of the river from Baton Rouge to New Orleans doubles as one of the most...

Sexton, Richard

Creole Drama

Theatre and Society in Antebellum New Orleans

The stages of antebellum New Orleans did more than entertain. In the city’s early years, French-speaking residents used the theatre to assert their political, economic, and cultural sovereignty in the face of growing Anglo-American dominance. Beyond local stages, the francophone struggle for...

Braun, Juliane

The Unlikely Reformer

Carter Glass and Financial Regulation

Recently described as "the single most important lawmaker in the history of American finance," Carter Glass nonetheless remains a much misunderstood and overlooked figure in that history. Glass is most widely remembered as the sponsor (with Henry Steagall) of the Glass-Steagall provisions of the U....

Fink, Matthew P.

Inhabiting the Sacred in Everyday Life

How to Design a Place That Touches Your Heart, Stirs You to Consecrate and Cultivate It as Home, Dwell Intentionally within It, Slay Monsters for It, and Let It Loose in Your Democracy

Human beings in the 21st century hunger, often unconsciously, for places to live that are more than efficient, economical machines. Inhabiting the Sacred offers sound and innovative guidance to both citizens and planning professionals who seek to transform public spaces into sites that answer not...

Hester, Randolph T., Jr., Nelson, Amber D.

Historian in Chief

How Presidents Interpret the Past to Shape the Future

Presidents shape not only the course of history but also how Americans remember and retell that history. From the Oval Office they instruct us what to respect and what to reject in our past. They regale us with stories about who we are as a people, and tell us whom in the pantheon of greats we...

Cotlar, Seth, Ellis, Richard J.

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.

American Abolitionism

Its Direct Political Impact from Colonial Times into Reconstruction

This ambitious book provides the only systematic examination of the American abolition movement’s direct impacts on antislavery politics from colonial times to the Civil War and after. As opposed to indirect methods such as propaganda, sermons, and speeches at protest meetings, Stanley Harrold...

Harrold, Stanley

Novel Cultivations

Plants in British Literature of the Global Nineteenth Century

Nineteenth-century English nature was a place of experimentation, exoticism, and transgression, as site and emblem of the global exchanges of the British Empire. Popular attitudes toward the transplantation of exotic species—botanical and human—to Victorian greenhouses and cities found anxious...

Chang, Elizabeth Hope

Four Fools in the Age of Reason

Laughter, Cruelty, and Power in Early Modern Germany

Unveiling the nearly lost world of the court fools of eighteenth-century Germany, Dorinda Outram shows that laughter was an essential instrument of power. Whether jovial or cruel, mirth altered social and political relations. Outram takes us first to the court of Frederick William I of Prussia, who...

Outram, Dorinda

Gettysburg Contested

150 Years of Preserving America's Cherished Landscapes

After the American Revolution, sites representing key events in American history were crucial to the young nation's efforts to formalize its story. Following the Civil War, national history became a primary vehicle for patriotic and spiritual reconstruction, and sites such as historic battlefields...

Black, Brian

Advertising the Self in Renaissance France

Lemaire, Marot, and Rabelais

Advertising the Self in Renaissance France explores how authors and readers are represented in printed editions of three major literary figures: Jean Lemaire de Belges, Clément Marot, and François Rabelais. Print culture is marked by an anxiety of reception that became much more pronounced with...

Francis, Scott

The Enemy in Italian Renaissance Epic

Images of Hostility from Dante to Tasso

In The Enemy in Italian Renaissance Epic, Andrea Moudarres examines influential works from the literary canon of the Italian Renaissance, arguing that hostility consistently arises from within political or religious entities. In Dante’s Divina Commedia, Luigi Pulci’s Morgante, Ludovico Ariosto’s...

Moudarres, Andrea

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