Search results for ""University of Virginia Press""

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 poems included in this eclectic sampling represent the best from the many that have been nominated by the country’s top literary magazines and writing programs, as well as some two thousand additional poems submitted through an open online competition. The work of the fifty writers represented here provides the best perspective available on the continuing vitality of poetry as it is being practiced today.

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Entering its twelfth 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 poems included in this eclectic sampling represent the best from the many that have been nominated by the country’s top literary magazines and writing programs, as well as some two thousand additional poems submitted through an open online competition. The work of the fifty writers represented here provides the best perspective available on the continuing vitality of poetry as it is being practiced today.

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For Lewis Carroll, a deacon in the Church of England, faith in Christ and belief in a loving God stood at the core of his being, but little has been written about what the church or faith meant to the celebrated author of the Alice books. With Lewis Carroll: Formed by Faith, Charlie Lovett provides the first in-depth study of the religious life of the famous author, whose real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.By examining Dodgson’s religious education and core beliefs, this book shows how a deep Christian faith undergirded and guided every part of his life and work, from his relationships with children to his renowned writings, his work on logic, even his hobbies of photography and theatre going. The book includes a detailed account of the career of Dodgson’s father—an important figure in the Anglican church and a key influence on his son.Family records give insight into Charles’s early education, and newly discovered manuscript materials paint a full picture of his religious education at Richmond and Rugby Schools. Lovett finds previously unknown influences in Dodgson’s life, analyzes his habits of preaching and prayer, explores his training for confirmation and ordination, analyzes his reasons for eschewing the priesthood, and concludes with an account of his death and funeral and his logically constructed theology of the afterlife. The book makes use of previously untapped sources and highlights new material, including a previously unknown sermon by Dodgson, the first ever discovered. The result is a major contribution offering new perspectives on this creator of fantastical fiction and the spiritual bedrock that informed his life and imagination.

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Between 1737 and 1746, James Knight a merchant, planter, and sometime Crown official and legislator in Jamaica wrote a massive two-volume history of the island. The first volume provided a narrative of the colony's development up to the mid-1740s, while the second offered a broad survey of most aspects of Jamaican life as it had developed by the third and fourth decades of the eighteenth century. Completed not long before his death in the winter of 1746-47 and held in the British Library, this work is now published for the first time. Well researched and intelligently critical, Knight's work is not only the most comprehensive account of Jamaica's ninety years as an English colony ever written; it is also one of the best representations of the provincial mentality as it had emerged in colonial British America between the founding of Virginia and 1750. Expertly edited and introduced by renowned scholar Jack Greene, this volume represents a colonial Caribbean history unique in its contemporary perspective, detail, and scope.

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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 higher education and other arenas of cultural development, Cole explores our institutions' vulnerability to the influence of racism and the wider implications for American society. At the core of Cole's argument is the belief that increasing the representation of historically marginalized groups on college campuses, and in museums, media, and other institutions is, like the liberal arts, vitally important to social progress. Accompanying Cole's urgent calls to implement social change are vividly rendered experiences from her own remarkable life. Cole issues a challenge for courageous conversations about race and racism and places unique responsibility and accountability on institutions of higher education in leading these conversations.

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Winner of the 2020 Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, France's best foreign book of the year.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 of three exiled writers who turned to the classics of the past to create masterpieces of their own—works that pondered the nature of narrative itself. Erich Auerbach, the Jewish philologist who fled Hitler’s Germany and wrote his classic study of Western literature, Mimesis, in Istanbul... François Fénelon, the seventeenth-century French archbishop whose ingenious sequel to the Odyssey,The Adventures of Telemachus—a veiled critique of the Sun King and the best-selling book in Europe for one hundred years—resulted in his banishment... and the German novelist W. G. Sebald, self-exiled to England, whose distinctively meandering narratives explore Odyssean themes of displacement, nostalgia, and separation from home.Intertwined with these tales of exile and artistic crisis is an account of Mendelsohn’s struggles to write two of his own books—a family saga of the Holocaust and a memoir about reading the Odyssey with his elderly father—that are haunted by tales of oppression and wandering. As Three Rings moves to its startling conclusion, a climactic revelation about the way in which the lives of its three heroes were linked across borders, languages, and centuries forces the reader to reconsider the relationship between narrative and history, art and life.

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As he traveled across Germany and the Netherlands and sailed on Dutch and Brandenburg slave ships to the Caribbean and Africa from 1682 to 1696, the young German barber-surgeon Johann Peter Oettinger (1666-1746) recorded his experiences in a detailed journal, discovered by Roberto Zaugg and Craig Koslofsky in a Berlin archive. Oettinger's journal describes shipboard life, trade in Africa, the horrors of the Middle Passage, and the sale of enslaved captives in the Caribbean. Translated here for the first time, A German Barber-Surgeon in the Atlantic Slave Trade documents Oettinger's journeys across the Atlantic, his work as a surgeon, his role in the purchase and branding of enslaved Africans, and his experiences in France and the Netherlands. His descriptions of Amsterdam, Curaçao, St. Thomas, and Suriname, as well as his account of societies along the coast of West Africa, from Mauritania to Gabon, contain rare insights into all aspects of Europeans' burgeoning trade in African captives in the late seventeenth century. This journeyman's eyewitness account of all three routes of the triangle trade will be invaluable to scholars of the early modern world on both sides of the Atlantic.

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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’s relationship with Lieutenant General Rochambeau, the commander of the French army. Urgency and vigor typified Washington’s planning throughout, as he raised new Continental troops, obtained militia reinforcements, increased Stocks of ammunition, gathered wagons and horses, and recognized that he and Rochambeau possessed similar views on campaign plans and other matters—a development that would ultimately prove essential to victory at Yorktown and the successful conclusion of the war.

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In the autumn of 1751, at the age of nineteen, George Washington sailed with his older half-brother Lawrence from Virginia to the Caribbean island of Barbados—the one and only time that the future Revolutionary War hero and president would leave the shores of continental North America. Lawrence had long been in poor health and hoped, in vain, that the island climate would prove restorative. The Washingtons landed in early November, and George spent seven weeks on Barbados, recording his impressions of everything from the exotic landscapes and local culture, to the cultivation of sugarcane and the particulars of plantation slavery, before bidding his brother adieu and embarking on the return sail to Virginia. The two sea voyages provided plenty of adventure, at times harrowing, and framed an island interlude that exposed young George to new cultures and new experiences—and also to smallpox. His exposure to the dread disease, and his resulting immunity, would prove fateful a quarter century later when the commander in chief of the ragtag American revolutionary forces blunted a threat more grave than British cannon by directing the immunization of his troops. Technological advances and fresh scholarship make this the most comprehensive and authoritative edition that has ever been-or likely will ever be-published.

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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 Mexican buildings in the south and southwest and the influence of Anglo- and African American styles in the east and north, the latest book in the Buildings of the United States series serves both as an accessible architectural and cultural history and a practical guide. More than 1,000 building entries survey the most important and representative examples of forts, courthouses, houses, churches, commercial buildings, and works by internationally renowned artists and architects, from the Kimbell Art Museum's Louis Kahn Building to Donald Judd's art installations at La Mansana de Chinati/The Block. Brief essays highlight such topics as the history and construction of federal forts, the growth and spread of Harvey House restaurants, and the birth of Conrad Hilton's hotel empire. Enlivened by 350 illustrations and 45 maps, Buildings of Texas: East, North Central, Panhandle and South Plains, and West affords local and out-of-state visitors, as well as more distant readers, a compelling journey filled with countless discoveries.

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Cars, single-family houses, fallout shelters, air-conditioned malls—these are only some of the many interiors making up the landscape of American suburbia. Indoor America explores the history of suburbanization through the emergence of such spaces in the postwar years, examining their design, use, and representation. By drawing on a wealth of examples ranging from the built environment to popular culture and film, Andrea Vesentini shows how suburban interiors were devised as a continuous cultural landscape of interconnected and self-sufficient escape capsules. The relocation of most everyday practices into indoor spaces has often been overlooked by suburban historiography; Indoor America uncovers this latent history and contrasts it with the dominant reading of suburbanization as pursuit of open space. Americans did not just flee the city by getting out of it—they did so also by getting inside.Vesentini chronicles this inner-directed flight by describing three separate stages. The encapsulation of the automobile fostered the nuclear segregation of the family from the social fabric and served as a blueprint for all other interiors. Introverted design increasingly turned the focus of the house inward. Finally, through interiorization, the exterior was incorporated into the all-encompassing interior landscape of enclosed malls and projects for indoor cities. In a journey that features tailfin cars and World’s Fair model homes, Richard Neutra’s glass walls and sitcom picture windows, Victor Gruen’s Southdale Center and the Minnesota Experimental City, Indoor America takes the reader into the heart and viscera of America’s urban sprawl.

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What was life really like for the band of adventurers who first set foot on the banks of the James River in 1607? Important as the accomplishments of these men and women were, the written records pertaining to them are scarce, ambiguous, and often conflicting. In Jamestown, the Truth Revealed, William Kelso takes us literally to the soil where the Jamestown colony began, unearthing footprints of a series of structures, beginning with the James Fort, to reveal fascinating evidence of the lives and deaths of the first settlers, of their endeavors and struggles, and new insight into their relationships with the Virginia Indians. He offers up a lively but fact-based account, framed around a narrative of the archaeological team's exciting discoveries.Unpersuaded by the common assumption that James Fort had long ago been washed away by the James River, William Kelso and his collaborators estimated the likely site for the fort and began to unearth its extensive remains, including palisade walls, bulwarks, interior buildings, a well, a warehouse, and several pits. By Jamestown's quadricentennial over 2 million objects were cataloged, more than half dating to the time of Queen Elizabeth and King James.Kelso's work has continued with recent excavations of numerous additional buildings, including the settlement's first church, which served as the burial place of four Jamestown leaders, the governor's rowhouse during the term of Samuel Argall, and substantial dump sites, which are troves for archaeologists. He also recounts how researchers confirmed the practice of survival cannibalism in the colony following the recovery from an abandoned cellar bakery of the cleaver-scarred remains of a young English girl. CT scanning and computer graphics have even allowed researchers to put a face on this victim of the brutal winter of 1609–10, a period that has come to be known as the ""starving time.""Refuting the now decades-old stereotype that attributed the high mortality rate of the Jamestown settlers to their laziness and ineptitude, Jamestown, the Truth Revealed produces a vivid picture of the settlement that is far more complex, incorporating the most recent archaeology and using twenty-first-century technology to give Jamestown its rightful place in history, thereby contributing to a broader understanding of the transatlantic world.

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Thomas Jefferson considered the University of Virginia to be among his finest achievements-a living monument to his artistic and intellectual ambitions. Now, on the occasion of the University's bicentennial, Brendan Wolfe has assembled one hundred objects that, brought together in one fascinating book, offer a new, sometimes surprising history of Jefferson’s favorite project. Mr. Jefferson’s Telescope begins with the years leading up to the University's 1819 founding and continues to the triumphs and challenges of the present day, each entry joining a full-color image with an engaging description that both stands alone and contributes to an engrossing larger narrative about how the school has evolved over time. Considering an orange and blue silk handkerchief, Wolfe reveals that the University’s school colors were originally cardinal red and gray-calling to mind a Confederate soldier’s blood-stained uniform but ultimately deemed not bright enough to stand out on muddy football fields. The record of an overdue book checked out by a young Edgar Allan Poe speaks to a long literary tradition. On the subject of a key to the Rotunda’s doors, Wolfe introduces us to its keeper, the Monticello-born ex-slave who rang the hourly bells on Grounds into the early twentieth century.Beautifully illustrated with over one hundred new and archival images, this book brings to life a remarkable array of significant objects while offering to the reader the best introduction available to the history of Jefferson’s great institution.

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Thomas Jefferson was a figure both central and polarizing in his own time, and despite the passage of two centuries he remains so today. Author of the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, yet at the same time a slaveholder who likely fathered six children by one of his slaves, Jefferson has been seen as an embodiment of both the best and the worst in America’s conception and in its history.In Monticello in Mind, poet Lisa Russ Spaar collects fifty contemporary poems--most original to this anthology--that engage the complex legacy of Thomas Jefferson and his plantation home at Monticello. Many of these poems wrestle with the history of race and freedom at the heart of both Jefferson’s story and America’s own. Others consider Jefferson as a figure of Enlightenment rationalism, who scrupulously excised evidence of the supernatural from the gospels in order to construct his own version of Jesus’s moral teachings. Still others approach Jefferson as an early colonizer of the West, whose purchase of the Louisiana territory and launch of the Lewis and Clark expedition anticipated the era of Manifest Destiny.Featuring a roster of poets both emerging and established--including Lucille Clifton, Rita Dove, Claudia Emerson, Terrance Hayes, Robert Hass, Yusef Komunyakaa, Tracy K. Smith, Natasha Tretheway, Charles Wright, and Kevin Young--this collection offers an aesthetically and culturally diverse range of perspectives on a man whose paradoxes still abide at the heart of the American experiment

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Thomas Jefferson had a radical dream for higher education. Designed to become the first modern public university, the University of Virginia was envisioned as a liberal campus with no religious affiliation, with elective courses and student self-government. Nearly two centuries after the university’s creation, its success now seems preordained—its founder, after all, was a great American genius. Yet what many don’t know is that Jefferson’s university almost failed.In Rot, Riot, and Rebellion, award-winning journalists Rex Bowman and Carlos Santos offer a dramatic re-creation of the university’s early struggles. Political enemies, powerful religious leaders, and fundamentalist Christians fought Jefferson and worked to thwart his dream. Rich students, many from southern plantations, held a sense of honor and entitlement that compelled them to resist even minor rules and regulations. They fought professors, townsfolk, and each other with guns, knives, and fists. In response, professors armed themselves—often with good reason: one was horsewhipped, others were attacked in their classrooms, and one was twice the target of a bomb. The university was often broke, and Jefferson’s enemies, crouched and ready to pounce, looked constantly for reasons to close its doors.Yet from its tumultuous, early days, Jefferson’s university—a cauldron of unrest and educational daring—blossomed into the first real American university. Here, Bowman and Santos bring us into the life of the University of Virginia at its founding to reveal how this once shaky institution grew into a novel, American-style university on which myriad other U.S. universities were modeled.

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The opening of this vital new book centers on a series of graves memorializing baboons killed near Amboseli National Park in Kenya in 2009--a stark image that emphasizes both the close emotional connection between primate researchers and their subjects and the intensely human qualities of the animals. Primates in the Real World goes on to trace primatology’s shift from short-term expeditions designed to help overcome centuries-old myths to the field’s arrival as a recognized science sustained by a complex web of international collaborations. Considering a series of pivotal episodes spanning the twentieth century, Georgina Montgomery shows how individuals both within and outside of the scientific community gradually liberated themselves from primate folklore to create primate science. Achieved largely through a movement from the lab to the field as the primary site of observation, this development reflected an urgent and ultimately extremely productive reassessment of what constitutes ""natural"" behavior for primates. An important contribution to the history of science and of women’s roles in science, as well as to animal studies and the exploration of the animal-human boundary, Montgomery’s engagingly written narrative provides the general reader with the most accessible overview to date of this enduringly fascinating field of study.

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During the quarter century between 1945 and 1970, Americans crafted a new manner of living that shaped and reshaped how residential builders designed and marketed millions of detached single-family suburban houses. The modest two- and three-bedroom houses built immediately following the war gave way to larger and more sophisticated houses shaped by casual living, which stressed a family's easy sociability and material comfort and were a major element in the cohesion of a greatly expanded middle class. These dwellings became the basic building blocks of explosive suburban growth during the postwar period, luring families to the metropolitan periphery from both crowded urban centers and the rural hinterlands. Detached America is the first book with a national scope to explore the design and marketing of postwar houses. James A. Jacobs shows how these houses physically document national trends in domestic space and record a remarkably uniform spatial evolution that can be traced throughout the country. Favorable government policies, along with such widely available print media as trade journals, home design magazines, and newspapers, permitted builders to establish a strong national presence and to make a more standardized product available to prospective buyers everywhere. This vast and long-lived collaboration between government and business?fueled by millions of homeowners?established the financial mechanisms, consumer framework, domestic ideologies, and architectural precedents that permanently altered the geographic and demographic landscape of the nation.

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Virginia is as much a state of mind as a set of geographical boundaries. Its western terrain encompasses dramatically beautiful mountaintops and scrubby lowlands, luxuriantly rich terrain, and rocky, almost untillable land. The green forests, rich loam, red clay, and sandy soil attracted waves of immigrants, newcomers almost as varied as the landscape. They came first to explore and trade and then to work, often to overwork, the land. The result in architecture is one of conservatism and rebellion, a region supremely proud of its history and, all too often, neglectful of its preservation. This second of two volumes devoted to the Old Dominion encompasses five regions (Shenandoah Valley, Allegheny Highlands, Piedmont, Southside, and Southwest Virginia), comprising 55 counties and 20 of the state's independent cities. More than 1,250 building entries document the commonwealth's history from prehistory to early settlement, through the Civil War, Reconstruction, Massive Resistance, and the civil rights movement, to the present day, surveying a range of building types and styles from log cabins to tobacco plantation houses, including the birthplaces of Booker T. Washington and Confederate general Jubal Early, set in close proximity in Franklin County, and the homes of Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee in Lexington. The text, enhanced and enlivened by 300 photographs and 31 maps, canvasses everything from Thomas Jefferson's Poplar Forest and Woodrow Wilson's Presidential Library to Roanoke's modernist Taubman Museum of Art and the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley to Shenandoah National Park and the Blue Ridge Parkway, highlighting along the way Virginia's contributions to literature (Willa Cather to the Waltons), music (the Carter Family and Ralph Stanley), cuisine (apple orchards, turkey farms, and whiskey distilleries), and tourism (Luray Caverns to Natural Bridge). A volume in the Buildings of the United States series of the Society of Architectural Historians.

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The highlight events of the months from October 1794 through March 1795, the period documented by Volume 17 of the Presidential Series, were the suppression of the Whiskey Insurrection in western Pennsylvania and the negotiation of the Jay Treaty with Great Britain.The volume opens with Washington, believing that his constitutional duty as commander in chief required his presence, en route to rendezvous with the troops called out to suppress the insurrection. After meeting with representatives from the insurgent counties and reviewing the troops, he concluded that serious resistance was unlikely, and, after penning a letter to Henry Lee on 20 October commending the troops and reminding them to support the laws, he returned to the capital. Still, regular letters from Alexander Hamilton, who remained with the expedition, kept him apprised of troop movements and activities. Washington devoted more than half of his annual address to discussion of the rebellion. After the submission of the rebellious counties, he also had to consider requests for pardons for the few individuals not included in a general pardon issued in November. Other domestic issues included a transition in Washington’s cabinet, as Hamilton and Henry Knox resigned the Treasury and War departments; supervision of the Federal City, where the commissioners sent a comprehensive statement of the affairs of the City to Washington in early 1795; and Indian affairs, which in the north involved the aftermath of the Battle of Fallen Timbers and treaty negotiations with the Iroquois and Oneida, and in the south involved news of the destruction of the Cherokee towns of Nickajack and Running Water as well as continuing concerns about Creek hostility in Georgia and the Southwest Territory. Washington also received an early report that the Yazoo land scheme threatened to increase tensions with the Creeks in Georgia. In addition to writing the State Department, John Jay kept Washington apprised of the progress of negotiations. Of particular note are his letters of 19 November, announcing the signing of the treaty, and 25 February, justifying his efforts. However, although notice of the treaty was received, the official copy did not arrive at Philadelphia by the adjournment of Congress, so consideration of the treaty would await a special session of the Senate. Meanwhile, Samuel Bayard had been dispatched to London to prosecute American claims in the British admiralty courts. Elsewhere, Thomas Pinckney was sent to Madrid as a special envoy to revive stalled negotiations with Spain. David Humphreys returned to the United States to discuss negotiations with the Barbary States, prompting Washington to ask Congress to authorise consuls for those states and to appoint Humphreys as minister plenipotentiary to negotiate with them. James Monroe sent one optimistic letter discussing his reception as minister to France. As for private concerns, Washington’s weekly correspondence with his Mount Vernon farm manager, largely suspended during his time with the troops, resumed upon his return to Philadelphia. He entertained offers about his lands in western Pennsylvania, on the Ohio River, and on Difficult Run in Virginia, and he paid taxes on and sought information about his land in Kentucky. Washington also corresponded with Tobias Lear about the Potomac Company’s development of the Potomac River.

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This is an extended meditation on what many consider to be Dickens’s and nineteenth-century England’s greatest work of narrative fiction.

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Barack Obama's inauguration as the first African American president of the United States has caused many commentators to conclude that America has entered a postracial age. ""The Preacher and the Politician"" argues otherwise, reminding us that, far from inevitable, Obama's nomination was nearly derailed by his relationship with Jeremiah Wright, the outspoken former pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ on the South Side of Chicago. The media storm surrounding Wright's sermons, the historians Clarence E. Walker and Gregory D. Smithers suggest, reveals that America's fraught racial past is very much with us, only slightly less obviously so. With meticulous research and insightful analysis, Walker and Smithers take us back to the Democratic primary season of 2008, viewing the controversy surrounding Wright in the context of key religious, political, and racial dynamics in American history. In the process they expose how the persistence of institutional racism, and racial stereotypes, became a significant hurdle for Obama in his quest for the presidency. The authors situate Wright's preaching in African American religious traditions dating back to the eighteenth century, but they also place his sermons in a broader prophetic strain of Protestantism that transcends racial categories. This latter connection was consistently missed or ignored by pundits on the right and the left who sought to paint the story in simplistic, and racially defined, terms. Obama's connection with Wright gave rise to criticism that, according to Walker and Smithers, sits squarely in the American political tradition, where certain words are meant to incite racial fear, in the case of Obama with charges that the candidate was unpatriotic, a Marxist, a Black Nationalist, or a Muslim. Once Obama became the Democratic nominee, the day of his election still saw ballot measures rejecting affirmative action and undermining the civil rights of other groups. ""The Preacher and the Politician"" is a concise and timely work that reminds us of the need to continue to confront the legacy of racism even as we celebrate advances in racial equality and opportunity.

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The Norfolk museum that would one day bear the Chrysler name was always a good museum of its kind, home to a respectable collection serving a smallish city. But when Norfolk native Jean Outland married Walter Chrysler, heir to the automobile manufacturing fortune and an avid art collector, the museum found a person with whom its fortunes would be intertwined, sometimes spectacularly, for decades to come. Walter had already established a Chrysler Museum in Provincetown, Massachusetts, but in 1971 - in need of more space and, admittedly, a fresh start - he relocated the operation to Norfolk.The museum that had once fretted over the possible purchase of a minor Cezanne because it would by itself deplete the entire budget now found itself playing host almost overnight to works by the Old Masters as well as many of the most notable modern artists. Chrysler's was a world-class art collection, containing pieces by, among others, Fragonard, Ingres, Gericault, Tiffany, Matisse, and Braque. The groundwork was laid for Norfolk's place on the cultural map.In ""Legacy"", Peggy Earle paints a vivid picture of this provincial museum's transformation into one of the finest art museums on the East Coast. She also delivers a captivating portrait of Walter Chrysler, a generous and demanding man who found in art patronage a focus not only for his wealth but also for his tremendous energy. Not content to merely admire the work, Walter had a naturally gregarious side and was apt to deal with artists such as Pablo Picasso directly. And yet he was also intensely private. Earle provides readers with a fascinating view of the politics of the museum world, where even good relationships are never uncomplicated. (The addition of the Chrysler collection's works to the museum was not unanimously applauded by the community; nor was it a foregone conclusion that, upon Chrysler's death, the pieces would even stay with the museum.)This lively account of the unlikely union between an arts maverick and a city on the cusp of cultural evolution sheds new light on how great art finds a place to call home.

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In this compelling new study, Debra Walker King considers fragments of experience recorded in oral histories and newspapers as well as those produced in twentieth-century novels, films, and television that reveal how the black body in pain functions as a rhetorical device and as political strategy. King's primary hypothesis is that, in the United States, black experience of the body in pain is as much a construction of social, ethical, and economic politics as it is a physiological phenomenon.As an essential element defining black experience in America, pain plays many roles. It is used to promote racial stereotypes, increase the sale of movies and other pop culture products, and encourage advocacy for various social causes. Pain is employed as a tool of resistance against racism, but it also functions as a sign of racism's insidious ability to exert power over and maintain control of those it claims - regardless of race. With these dichotomouse uses of pain in mind, King considers and questions the effects of the manipulation of an unspoken but long-standing belief that pain, suffering, and the hope for freedom and communal subsistence will merge to uplift those who are oppressed, especially during periods of social and political upheaval. This belief has become a ritualized philosophy fueling the multiple constructions of black bodies in pain, a belief that has even come to function as an identity and community stabilizer.In her attempt to interpret the constant manipulation and abuse of this philosophy, King explores the redemptive and visionary power of pain as perceived historically in black culture, the aesthetic value of black pain as presented in a variety of cultural artifacts, and the socioeconomic politics of suffering surrounding the experiences and representations of blacks in the United States. The book introduces the term Blackpain, defining it as a tool of national mythmaking and as a source of cultural and symbolic capital that normalizes individual suffering until the individual - the real person - disappears. Ultimately, the book investigates America's love-hate relationship with black bodies in pain.

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What was it like to be a slave in colonial South Africa? What difference did freedom make? The questions themselves are simply put, but John Edwin Mason has found complex answers after delving deeply into the slaves' experience within the slaveholding patriarchal household, the work that slaves performed, the families they created, and the religions they practiced. Grounding his analysis within the context of South Africa's incorporation into the British Empire - primarily examining the period of 1820-50 - Mason investigates a wealth of documentation from the British Colony of the Cape of Good Hope. Colonial officials, particularly the slave protectors, created and preserved a rich archive within which the voices of slaves and slaveholders, free blacks, and poor whiles are recorded, and from which Mason presents vividly descriptive and telling accounts of slave life. In Social Death and Resurrection Mason draws upon Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson's theory that a slave's social degradation rendered him socially dead. ""Social death"" defined slavery in the ideal, slavery as it would have been had the slaves played along. But in colonial South Africa slaves did not play along: they fought the lash and resisted domination, retaining a cultural and moral community of their own. Mason investigates the subsequent ""resurrection"" of slaves following their successful struggle to preserve family, faith, community ties, and human dignity, despite their class domination and racial subjugation by slaveowners. Although slavery officially came to an end with a series of reforms during a mid-nineteenth-century period of modernization and reform, the British colonial state's commitment to formal equality was in fact compatible with continued class domination. As a result, slaves did not entirely cease to be slaves, but through their own efforts and some governmental assistance, they achieved at least a partial victory over slavery's violence, marginalization, and degradation.

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The advertising campaigns launched by Kodak in the early years of snapshot photography stand at the centre of a shift in American domestic life that goes deeper than technological innovations in cameras and film. Before the advent of Kodak advertising in 1888, writes Nancy Martha West, Americans were much more willing to allow sorrow into the space of the domestic photograph, as evidenced by the popularity of postmortem photography in the mid-19th century. Through the taking of snapshots, Kodak taught Americans to see their experiences as objects of nostalgia, to arrange their lives in such a way that painful or unpleasant aspects were systematically erased. West examines a wide assortment of Kodak's most popular inventions and marketing strategies, including the ""Kodak Girl"", the momentous invention of the Brownie camera in 1900, the ""Story Campaign"" during World War I, and even the Vanity Kodak Ensemble, a camera introduced in 1926 that came fully equipped with lipstick. Enhanced with over 50 reproductions of the Kodak ads themselves, this work illustrates the fundamental changes in American culture and the function of memory in the formative years of the 20th century.

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Enter the bustling realm of domestic workers at Maymont House from 1893 to 1925, the opulent mansion of Richmond multimillionaire James H. Dooley. Drawing on personal letters, business documents and oral histories, O'Leary examines the parallel and divergent viewpoints of server and served.

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Uses survey, archival and interview data to assess the strategic politics of US Supreme Court practice, the ways in which dominant litigators can shape the Court's decisions, and what the existence of such an elite implies for judicial fairness.

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Taking its cue from Perry Miller’s 1956 classic of American literary criticism, The Raven and the Whale: The War of Words and Wits in the Era of Poe and Melville, Caroline Chamberlin Hellman’s new book examines ways in which contemporary multi-ethnic American writers of the United States have responded to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century texts historically central to the American literary canon.Each chapter of Children of the Raven and the Whale looks down the roads American literature ultimately traveled, examining pairs and constellations of texts in conversation. In their rewritings and layerings of new stories over older ones, contemporary writers forge ahead in their interrogations of a spectrum of American experience, whether they or their characters are native to the United States, first- or second-generation immigrants, or transnational. Revealing the traces of texts by writers such as Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin lying beneath contemporary American literature by Chang-rae Lee, Jonathan Lethem, Jhumpa Lahiri, Junot Díaz, Joseph O’Neill, Colum McCann, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Caroline Chamberlin Hellman posits the existence of a twenty-first-century American Renaissance.

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If art is our bid to make sense of the senseless, there is hardly more fertile creative ground than that of the twentieth century. From the trench poetry of World War I and Holocaust memoirs by Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel to the post-colonial novels of southern Asia and the anti-apartheid plays of the South African Market Theater, writers have married beauty and horror. This ""century of trauma"" produced writing at once saturated in political violence and complicated by the ethics of aesthetic representation. Stretching across genres and the globe, Terrible Beauty charts a course of aesthetic reconciliation between empathy and evil in the great literature of the twentieth century.The ""violent aesthetic""—a category the author traces back to Plato and Nietzsche—accommodates the pleasure people take not only in destruction itself but also in its rendering. As readers, we oscillate between a fascination with atrocity and an ethical imperative to bear witness. Arguing for the immersive experience of literature as particularly conducive to ethical contemplation, Marian Eide plumbs the aesthetic power and ethical purpose of this creative tension. By invoking the reader as complicit—both stricken witness and enthralled voyeur— Terrible Beauty sheds new light on the relationship between violence, literature, and the moral burdens of art.

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In Inkface, Miles P. Grier traces productions of Shakespeare's Othello from seventeenth-century London to the Metropolitan Opera in twenty-first-century New York. Grier shows how the painted stage Moor and the wife whom he theatrically stains became necessary types, reduced to objects of interpretation for a presumed white male audience. In an era of booming print production, popular urban theater, and increasing rates of literacy, the metaphor of Black skin as a readable, transferable ink became essential to a fraternity of literate white men who, by treating an elastic category of marked people as reading material, were able to assert authority over interpretation and, by extension, over the state, the family, and commerce. Inkface examines that fraternity’s reading of the world as well as the ways in which those excluded attempted to counteract it.

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The first thoroughly interdisciplinary study to examine how thetransatlantic relationship between the United States and Britain helped shape the conflicts between North and South in the decade before the American Civil War, Twice-Divided Nation addresses that influence primarily as a problem of national memory.Samuel Graber argues that the nation was twice divided: first, by the sectionalism that resulted from disagreements concerning slavery; and second, by Unionists' increasing sense of alienation from British definitions of nationalism. The key factor in these diverging national concepts of memory was the emergence of a fiercely independent press in the U.S. and its connections to Britain and British news.Failing to recognize this shifting transatlantic dynamic during the Civil War era, scholars have overlooked the degree to which the conflict between the Union and the Confederacy was regarded at home and abroad as a referendum not merely on Lincoln's election or the Constitution or even slavery, but on the nationalist claim to an independent past. Graber shows how this movement toward cultural independence was reflected in a distinctively American literature, manifested in the writings of such diverse figures as journalist Horace Greeley and poet Walt Whitman.

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Analogical thought is fundamental to creativity. The use of analogy can help to solve problems, make connections between disciplines, and use those relations to form original solutions. In Analogy and Design, Andrea Ponsi considers the role of analogical thought in architectural design. Almost all work on design and architecture is the result of analogical thinking, with respect to systems derived from nature, technical and scientific models, artistic experiences, and above all past models of architecture or objects. Ponsi considers the history of architecture through a series of examples that demonstrate the value of analogy as both creative technique and didactic tool. As an architect and product designer, Ponsi himself operates on a set of principles he terms ""analogous design""?a theory he developed that involves breaking down images into abstract elements, analyzing them, and then conceptually reassembling them in another form as a sort of parallel composition. In Analogy and Design, he looks at the principal models designers have utilized as their reference from the beginning to our own day: primary analogies, that is to say the human body, nature, and the abstract universe of signs; disciplinary analogies, taken from already existing examples of architecture and design; and analogies from outside the field, such as from music, literature, and the visual arts. The components are very different, but they maintain a similar relationship to each other. This methodology, Ponsi maintains, can be applied to compositions of a wide variety of types, including buildings, landscapes, household products, furniture, music, and literature. Merging scientific and academic research?so often limited to a specialized audience?Analogy and Design lays down the principles of analogous design, enabling a student or practitioner to ""see"" works and materials in a new way.

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Volume 17 of the ""Revolutionary War Series"" opens with Washington moving his army north from White Plains, New York, into new positions that ran from West Point to Danbury, Connecticut. His purpose in doing so was threefold: to protect his army, to protect the strategically important Hudson highlands, and to shore up the equally vital French fleet anchored at Boston. His new headquarters, located near Fredericksburg, New York, about seventy miles north of New York City, was one of the most obscure of the Revolutionary War. Nevertheless, Washington remained as busy with important tasks during the fall of 1778 as during any other period of the war.It was a time of delicate transition for the new Franco-American alliance and for British strategists yet unwilling to concede defeat. Both circumstances required Washington to exercise the sort of mental agility he had demonstrated during the first three years of the war. Equally pressing were the immediate problems of British raids - threatened and real - in New Jersey and New York and along the extensive American frontier and coastline. Within the Continental army, troubling breakdowns in discipline and morale demanded Washington's close attention, as did the logistical and political difficulties of planning proper troop dispositions for the coming winter - the fourth straight winter that Washington would not see home.Although Washington could not foresee in October 1778 that the British would soon try their hand at conquering the southern states and that the war would last another five years, he sensed that the British Ministry still had both the financial means and the political will to continue the struggle. Ever a realist, Washington recognized that American victory would not come cheaply in what had become a war of attrition as well as an international conflict involving North American, European, and Caribbean theaters. As he had done since 1775, Washington was once more adjusting his thoughts to meet new realities on the long road to American independence.

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The massive ""Revolutionary War Series"" (1775-1783) presents in documents and annotation the myriad military and political matters with which Washington dealt during the long war for American independence. Volume 16 documents a time of unusual optimism for Washington and his army. Following the great victory at the Battle of Monmouth, Washington received the welcome news that a French fleet had arrived in American waters. Understanding the advantages usually afforded to the British army by their control of the seas, Washington looked to deliver a decisive blow that might end the war.

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Volume 12 of the Revolutionary War Series documents Washington's unsuccessful efforts to capitalize on the American victory at Saratoga and his decision to encamp the Continental army for the winter at Valley Forge. The volume opens with the British forces at Philadelphia, where they had returned following the Battle of Germantown, and the Continental army, in Washington's words, ""hovering round them, to distress and retard their operations as much as possible."" Recognizing the importance of restricting communication between General William Howe and the British fleet, Washington dispatched a brigade to New Jersey to assist in the defense of Forts Mifflin and Mercer, key components in the American effort to obstruct the Delaware River. Upon receiving news of the surrender of British general John Burgoyne's army to Major General Horatio Gates at Saratoga, Washington called a council of war to consider his army's options. Although his generals advised against an immediate assault on Philadelphia, Washington perceived an opportunity to defeat Howe and dispatched his aide-de-camp Alexander Hamilton to the northern department to urge upon General Gates the ""absolute necessity"" of sending a ""very considerable"" reinforcement to the main army. If those troops arrived before the British could open a supply route on the Delaware or be reinforced from New York, then the American forces could ""in all probability reduce Genl Howe to the same situation in which Genl Burgoine now is."" There was little further that Washington could do to strengthen the Delaware River defenses, however, and despite the determined efforts of Fort Mifflin's defenders, the Americans were forced to evacuate the fort in mid-November following a sustained bombardment from British land and naval artillery. Moreover, British and Hessian troops from New York arrived before Washington's reinforcement and joined in the British occupation of Fort Mercer a few days later. After the fall of the Delaware River forts, Washington and his generals began extensive deliberations about the related questions of a possible winter campaign and where to quarter the troops for the winter. The generals were nearly unanimous that a winter campaign was not feasible, but they were divided between quartering the troops at Wilmington, Delaware, or in Pennsylvania along a line from Bethlehem to Lancaster. Washington settled on the third option discussed: hutting in the Great Valley of Pennsylvania. Consequently, the volume closes in December with Washington establishing his headquarters at Valley Forge, about twenty miles northwest of Philadelphia.

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Volume 10 of the Presidential Series continues the fourth chronological series of The Papers of George Washington. The Presidential Series, when complete, will cover the eight precedent-setting years of Washington's presidency. These volumes present the public papers written by or sent to Washington during his two administrations. Among the documents are Washington's messages to Congress, addresses from public and private bodies, applications for office and letters of recommendation, and documents concerning diplomatic and Indian affairs. Also included are Washington's private papers, consisting of family correspondence, letters to and from friends and acquaintances, and documents relating to the administration of his Mount Vernon plantation and the management of the presidential household. In the period covered by volume 10, the spring and summer of 1792, Washington was busy dealing with a host of foreign and domestic issues. In response to General Arthur St. Clair's disastrous defeat on 4 November 1791, Washington ordered both the preparation of a renewed offensive against the hostile Indian tribes in the Northwest Territory and an attempt to secure peace without further recourse to arms. The first initiative necessitated the selection of a new commanding general and the appointment or promotion of a large number of junior officers. The second induced Washington to invite delegations from several nonhostile Indian nations to Philadelphia in the hopes that they either would support the American military effort or would convince their brethren to make peace with the United States. In addition, both the promulgation of a new French constitution and the recent arrival of the British plenipotentiary George Hammond - who had instructions to settle the outstanding difficulties arising from the Treaty of Paris of 1783 and lay the groundwork for improved Anglo-American commercial relations - required careful handling. Domestically, Washington's veto of the congressional Apportionment Act in April 1792 on the grounds that it was unconstitutional marked the first use of the presidential veto in American history. In the wake of Pierre L'Enfant's dismissal as superintendent of the Federal City, Washington attempted to keep on schedule the construction of the new capital on the Potomac River. Throughout this period Washington wistfully longed to retire to Mount Vernon at the close of his term in office. Although informed by all of his closest advisers that his retirement would have calamitous consequences, Washington instructed James Madison to draft a farewell address for his use if he decided not to stand for reelection.

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This is the 11th part in a series of volumes containing the papers of George Washington. This particular volume contains correspondence, orders and other documents from August to October 1777, one of the most militarily active periods of America's Revolutionary War.

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This volume presents documents written during the final sessions of the First Congress. Congress passed legislation that established a national bank and federal excise, and increased the size of the army. Washington also gave a lot of time to the new federal city on the Potomac.

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Volume 3 covers the final months of the siege of Boston. It opens with General Washington proclaiming the commencement of the remodeled Continental army on New Year's Day 1776 and closes at the end of March as he prepares to depart for New York in the wake of the British evacuation of Boston.Washington's correspondence and orders for this period reveal an uncompromising attitude toward reconciliation with Britain and a single-minded determination to engage the enemy forces in Boston before the end of the winter. Washington's bold proposal to attack Boston across the frozen back bay in the middle of February was rejected as too risky by a council of war, but the council did approve occupying the strategic Dorchester Heights overlooking the city and harbor. During the last weeks of February and the first days of March, Washington devoted himself to mobilizing artillery and gunpowder for a massive cannonade of Boston and assembling materials for portable fortifications to be erected on the frozen soil of Dorchester Heights. The successful execution of this operation on the night of 4 March failedto provoke General William Howe into assaulting the American lines and thereby open the way to counterattack on the city as Washington hoped it would. It did, however, compel the British to withdraw from Boston in haste a few days later, giving Washington and his army a spirit of confidence with which to embark on the New York campaign. The volume also includes a number of documents relating to Washington's private affairs in Virginia, the most important of which are eight letters from his Mount Vernon manager Lund Washington.

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By weaving in a single narrative the city's siting, geography, spatial qualities, culture, economy, society, and tragedy, it affords us an exceptional insight into the city as it is today, and remains a passionate journey through one of our nation's most fascinating places.""--from Karen Kingsley's foreword.In his now classic work of historical geography, originally published in 1976, Lewis traces the rise and expansion of New Orleans through four major historical periods. Newly reissued by the University of Virginia Press, this second edition offers a revised and greatly expanded look at this unique community on the Mississippi Delta?""a fearsome place, difficult enough for building houses, lunacy for wharves and skyscrapers""?with a new foreword that situates Lewis’s work post-Katrina, and argues that it remains as insightful and compelling today as it was before the hurricane made landfall in August 2005.

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The break-in at Watergate and the cover-up that followed brought aboutthe resignation of Richard Nixon, creating a political shockwave that reverberates to this day. But as Ken Hughes reveals in his powerful new book, in all the thousands of hours of declassified White House tapes, the president orders a single break-in- and it is not at the Watergate complex. Hughes’s examination of this earlier break-in, plans for which the White House ultimately scrapped, provides a shocking new perspective on a long history ofillegal activity that prolonged the Vietnam War and was only partly exposed by the Watergate scandal.As a key player in the University of Virginia’s Miller Center Presidential Recordings Program, Hughes has spent more than a decade developing and mining the largest extant collection of transcribed tapes from the Johnson and Nixon White Houses. Hughes’s unparalleled investigation has allowed him to unearth a pattern of actions by Nixon going back long before 1972, to the final months of the Johnson administration. Hughesidentified a clear narrative line that begins during the 1968 campaign, when Nixon, concerned about the impact on his presidential bid of the Paris peace talks with the Vietnamese, secretly undermined the negotiations through a Republican fundraiser named Anna Chennault. Three years after the election, in an atmosphere of paranoia brought on by the explosive appearance of thePentagon Papers, Nixon feared that his treasonous- and politically damaging--manipulation of the Vietnam talks would be exposed. Hughes shows how this fear led to the creation of the Secret Investigations Unit, the ""White House Plumbers,"" and Nixon’s initiation of illegal covert operations guided by the Oval Office. Hughes’s unrivaled command of the White House tapes has allowed him to build an argument about Nixon that goes far beyond what wethink we know about Watergate.Chasing Shadows is alsoavailable as a special e-book that links to the massive collection of White House tapes published by the Miller Center through Rotunda, the electronic imprint of the University of Virginia Press. This unique edition allows the reader to move seamlessly from the book to the recordings’ expertly rendered transcripts and to listen to audio files of the remarkable- and occasionally shocking- conversations on which this dark chapter in American history would ultimately turn.

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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 poems included in this eclectic sampling represent the best from the many that have been nominated by the country's top literary magazines and writing programs, as well as some two thousand additional poems submitted through an open online competition. The work of the fifty writers represented here provides the best perspective available on the continuing vitality of poetry as it is being practiced today.

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Tells the stories of remarkable Black men and women in post-Civil War Virginia who persevered in the face of overwhelming barriers to seek their freedom and create a new world for themselves and future generations.

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