Search results for ""University of Virginia Press""

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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Entering its eleventh 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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The 2017 "Summer of Hate" in Charlottesville became a worldwide media event, putting at center stage the resurgence of emboldened and empowered white supremacy and "alt-right" extremism, as well as the antiracist movement opposing it. Aniko Bodroghkozy’s trenchant study examines this formative moment in recent U.S. history by juxtaposing it against two other epochal moments that put American racism and the struggle against it on worldwide display: the 1963 Birmingham and 1965 Selma campaigns of the civil rights movement. Making #Charlottesville investigates the historical "rhymes" in the mass media’s treatment of these events, separated by half a century, along with the ways that activists on both sides made use of the new media environment of their day to organize and amplify their respective messages. Bodroghkozy teases out the connections, similarities, and resonances among these events—from the ways all three places were consciously chosen as stage sets for media campaigns, to the similarly iconic and heavily circulated images they produced, to the sustained cultural purchase they continue to hold in the United States and around the world.

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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 False Cause focuses on North Carolina to examine the role of lies and exaggeration in the creation of the Lost Cause narrative. In the process the book shows how these lies have long obscured the past and been used to buttress white supremacy in ways that resonate to this day.Domby explores how fabricated narratives about the war’s cause, Reconstruction, and slavery—as expounded at monument dedications and political rallies—were crucial to Jim Crow. He questions the persistent myth of the Confederate army as one of history’s greatest, revealing a convenient disregard of deserters, dissent, and Unionism, and exposes how pension fraud facilitated a myth of unwavering support of the Confederacy among nearly all white Southerners. Domby shows how the dubious concept of "black Confederates" was spun from a small number of elderly and indigent African American North Carolinians who got pensions by presenting themselves as "loyal slaves." The book concludes with a penetrating examination of how the Lost Cause narrative and the lies on which it is based continue to haunt the country today and still work to maintain racial inequality.

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This inspiring memoir begins in 1983, on the day John Charles Thomas was sworn in as the first Black—and, at thirty-two years of age, the youngest—justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia in the commonwealth’s history. This high point was preceded, however, by a life that began in a home broken by poverty, alcoholism, and violence, and the segregated schools and neighborhoods of postwar Norfolk. How this triumph against such tremendous odds came about is no feel-good story or fable but a real-life journey full of poignant stories.This eloquent memoir is the work of a man who cares deeply about language. In addition to being a social justice pioneer, Judge Thomas is an accomplished poet who has recited his poetry to a Carnegie Hall audience and who here reflects on his twin loves of poetry and the law. As he chronicles his trajectory from the "wrong side of the tracks" in Norfolk to the supreme court bench in Richmond, he takes us from his difficult beginnings to a professional life as a Virginia lawyer, recounts his international travels, and shares his encounters with world leaders such as Chuck Robb and Mikhail Gorbachev. Thomas’s memoir highlights these lofty meetings but also relates with candor the challenges he encountered as he battled the systemic racism that suffuses U.S. society to this day.

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A revolution has been taking place in the ranks of higher education. University and college presidents—once almost invariably the products of ""traditional"" scholarly, tenure-track career paths, up through the provost’s office—are rapidly becoming a group with diverse skills and backgrounds. The same is true for many deans and administrative leaders.In Higher Calling: The Rise of Nontraditional Leaders in Academia, Scott C. Beardsley, dean of the University of Virginia’s prestigious Darden School of Business, offers a new vision of leadership for today’s higher education. Grounded in the author’s own inspirational story of leaving McKinsey & Company in pursuit of a new source of meaning in his professional life, Higher Calling employs research gathered from search firm executives who now play king or queen maker in presidential and dean searches. It also takes into account information from U.S. liberal arts colleges—considered by many to be the bellwethers of change—to explore what set of strengths an institution of higher education needs in a leader in the twenty-first century. Beardsley explores the widely varying definitions and associated numbers of traditional and nontraditional leaders and asks, Why are U.S. colleges and universities hiring nontraditional candidates to lead them into the future? How are the skills required to lead higher education institutions changing? Or has the search process changed, resulting in a more diverse set of candidates?Providing not only an analysis of nontraditional leaders in higher education but also strategies for developing skills and selecting leaders, Beardsley offers a wealth of information for the modern university in the face of change.

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The Dooleys of Richmond is the biography of a dynamic and philanthropic Irish Catholic immigrant family who came to Virginia in the nineteenth century. While most Irish Catholic immigrants of the period were poor and illiterate, John and Sarah Dooley possessed both sophistication and capital. He established a large hat manufacturing enterprise and became a leader in business, education, and politics in Virginia.Mary Lynn Bayliss recounts the family’s fortunes during their prosperous antebellum years, John and his sons’ service in the Confederate army, John’s exploits as leader of the Richmond Ambulance Committee, and the loss of the entire Dooley retail and manufacturing operations during the final days of the Civil War. The Dooleys’ son James, a leading Richmond lawyer and philanthropist, devoted half a century to developing railroad networks across the United States and became a key figure in the industrialization of the New South. He and his wife, Sallie, built Maymont, the famed Gilded Age estate that remains a major attraction of Richmond. The story of the Dooleys is a fascinating window on southern society and the people who shaped its grand and turbulent history.

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During the period around volume 3 of the Retirement Series, James Madison remained largely at Montpelier, except for occasional visits to neighbors and attendance at ceremonial dinners and semiannual meetings of the Board of Visitors of the University of Virginia. Madison’s correspondence in this period was wide-ranging and included replies to requests for advice from President James Monroe. His exchange of letters with Thomas Jefferson dealt primarily with the construction and financing of the university and the search for professors. In addition to responding to the host of individuals who sent him books and pamphlets and requested letters of introduction and recommendation to political office, Madison also engaged with such eminent men as Richard Rush, James Barbour, Henry Clay, Mathew Carey, Edward Livingston, and George Hay. In these letters he offers his opinion on constitutional issues, reiterates his support for strict separation between church and state, and expresses his views on the tariff, political parties, the common law, and public education. Finally, his private letters deal with daily life at Montpelier and the management of the plantation. Access to people, places, and events is facilitated by detailed annotation and a comprehensive index.

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When Michael Dukakis accused George H. W. Bush of being the ""Joe Isuzu of American Politics"" during the 1988 presidential campaign, he asserted in a particularly American tenor the near-ancient idea that lying and politics (and perhaps advertising, too) are inseparable, or at least intertwined. Our response to this phenomenon, writes the renowned intellectual historian Martin Jay, tends to vacillate - often impotently - between moral outrage and amoral realism. In The Virtues of Mendacity, Jay resolves to avoid this conventional framing of the debate over lying and politics by examining what has been said in support of, and opposition to, political lying from Plato and St. Augustine to Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss. Jay proceeds to show that each philosopher's argument corresponds to a particular conception of the political realm, which decisively shapes his or her attitude toward political mendacity. He then applies this insight to a variety of contexts and questions about lying and politics. Surprisingly, he concludes by asking if lying in politics is really all that bad. The political hypocrisy that Americans in particular periodically decry may be, in Jay's view, the best alternative to the violence justified by those who claim to know the truth.

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The Haiti of Yanick Lahens' path-breaking short fiction is a country demanding our compassion as it reveals to us its horrors. For decades among the forefront of Haitian writers. Lahens has embarked on a renewal of the genre of short stories that she inherited from Caribbean - and especially Haitian - traditions. Through her elliptical and sharp style she succeeds in conveying the authenticity of her people's tragic fight for survival within the scope of our shared human experience. Here is day-to-day life, packed with its myriad emotions, desires, and contradictions, against a backdrop of extraordinary circumstances. The men and women glimpsed in Lahens' stories are confronted with the overwhelming task of simply staying alive. 'The Survivors' unfolds under the Duvalier dictatorship. The story, centered on a group of men who dream of somehow striking out against the regime, shows how fear is passed down from generation to generation. Life is no simpler in the post-Duvalier world of the title story, in which a young man is caught between a mother who lives a devout life filled with self-imposed restrictions and an aunt who religiously serves the spirits of Vodou but makes no apologies for working in the black market. The twelve-year-old girl who narrates 'Madness Had Come with the Rain' finds herself swept up in a violent riot following the death of a modern Robin Hood. Lahens' women, although they may act as the poto mitan (or 'central pole') in family life and society, experience a particularly grim fate. In the eviction tale, 'And All This Unease' a beautiful girl reminisces about her happy childhood in the country in order to forget her current life as a prostitute. Yanick Lahens presents testimonies, opens intimacies, sometimes offers hope, but always returns to the despair afflicting Haiti, because lying within it is the key to her country. The first collection of Lahens' unforgettable short stories available in English, this volume will bring one of the most important voices in contemporary literature to the wider audience it deserves.

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Over the past decade, The Civilizations of Africa has established itself as the most authoritative text on early African history. Addressing the glaring lack of texts concentrating on earlier African eras, Christopher Ehret’s trailblazing book has been combined with histories of Africa since 1800 to build a full and well-rounded understanding of the roles of Africa’s peoples in human history. Examining inventions and civilizations from 16,000 BCE to 1800 CE, Ehret explores the wide range of social and cultural as well as technological and economic change in Africa, relating all these facets of African history to developments in the rest of the world.This updated edition incorporates new research, as well as an extensive new selection of color images.

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Captain John Smith's voyages throughout the New World did not end - or, for that matter, begin - with the trip on which he was captured and brought to the great chief Powhatan. Partly in an effort to map the region, Smith covered countless leagues of the Chesapeake Bay and its many tributary rivers, and documented his experiences. In this ambitious and extensively illustrated book, scholars from multiple disciplines take the reader on Smith's exploratory voyages and reconstruct the Chesapeake environment and its people as Smith encountered them.

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George Washington, acutely aware of the accomplishments and potential of the American Revolution, used his Mount Vernon estate both to preserve the memory of events that had created a new nation and to forward his keen vision of what that nation might become. During the 1780s and 1790s, an era when neither public museums nor a national library existed, visitors to Mount Vernon viewed John Trumbull's iconic image of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Houdon's famous bust of the country's preeminent hero, and Washington's voluminous wartime correspondence. More important, they listened as the Washingtons recalled the remarkable events that had forged independence and the unique American experiment in representative government. At Mount Vernon, too, Washington and his guests discussed how best to secure the success and well-being of the United States. Here was a place to contemplate ""what the nation, at its best, might be."" Following George and Martha Washington's deaths, the estate passed to four successive heirs, the last of whom deeded it to the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association in 1860. While still in private hands, the property nonetheless attracted thousands of visitors each year, most of whom arrived after a fifteen-mile overland trek from Washington, D.C. With the establishment of regular steamboat access in the 1850s, the numbers swelled to ten thousand annually. The public claimed Mount Vernon as its own. In the words of a nineteenth-century Washington family member, ""the Nation shares it with us."" In a remarkable display of civic religion that testified to the site's enormous hold on the public imagination, Americans pronounced Mount Vernon sacred ground and made it the nation's most important site of revolutionary memory and inspiration. The sacred ground was, nonetheless, contested ground: visitors criticized the heirs' management of the property; northerners abhorred the persistence of slavery at the estate. As pilgrims contemplated the highest ideals of the Revolution at Washington's home and tomb, they often found their own society wanting. Amid escalating sectional strife in the 1850s, some argued that if Mount Vernon could be saved for the nation, the nation might be preserved from ruin. In letters and journals, newspaper and magazine articles, and public speeches, visitors recorded, often in detail and with intense emotion, their varied reactions to the site. ""Experiencing Mount Vernon"" presents the most informative of these accounts, as well as selected documents from the Washington owners (beginning with Washington himself, who in 1784 prematurely wrote Lafayette that, at his beloved home, he had ""retired from all public employments""). Numerous maps, contemporary images, and annotations complement the texts. This book constitutes the only eyewitness chronicle we have of the Washington estate's ascent to the status of national shrine, and it offers the closest possible evidence of Mount Vernon's singular role in helping forge American national identity.

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Traditionally, Socrates has been linked to the view of reason as the most important element in human behavior, the means through which our irrational capacities are tamed. Yet, one might ask, if his legacy were solely derived from his having been a master reasoner, why would he have been able to maintain his place in our imaginations for so long? In ""Socrates and the Irrational"", James Hans argues that when Socrates speaks for himself, he reveals a far more complex portrait of the nature of human existence than the Platonic conception of him has conveyed. Exploring Socratic thought through four key dialogues - the Ion, the Apology, the Phaedrus, and the Republico Hans offers a larger vision of both Socrates and human potential that goes beyond the reductive placement of reason on the side of the good and unreason on the side of the bad. Embracing Socrates' reverence for poets, his reliance on feeling and intuition, his attitude toward death, and his defense of prophecy and love, Hans shows how thoroughly the Socratic idea of reason is based on the affective aspects of bodily existence that traditional approaches to his thought ignore. For those who have a philosophical interest in the foundation of Western thought as well as those whose interests in the humanities encompass the nature of the examined life, ""Socrates and the Irrational"" is both an accessible and an erudite journey into the mind of this central figure of our civilization.

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Lincoln Perry is justly celebrated for his murals and edgy narrative figure paintings, with their saturated palette and multifaceted architectural compositions - Poussin refracted through de Chirico. This beautiful new book showcases his images of Charlottesville, Virginia - many of them multipanel compositions featuring the University of Virginia and its environs - accompanied by an essay and interview by his wife, the writer Ann Beattie. Perry's mural ""The Student's Progress"", which depicts a woman's education and social experience from matriculation through graduation, is familiar to University of Virginia students, faculty, and visitors, but Perry has been painting Charlottesville subjects on and off since 1985, when he first moved to town. From his early explorations of the complex relationships between professors and students, played out against the backdrop of Jefferson's Lawn, through his intriguing depictions of the city's domestic interiors, buildings, and streets, Perry illuminates a different side of a place widely appreciated for its history and natural beauty. ""Charlottesville"", writes Beattie, ""both disturbs and calls to [Perry]: it's a paradoxically comfortable and uncomfortable not-quite-home he has been drawn to many times for reasons he can't easily articulate...I think that Lincoln likes the town's quirkiness and its lack of uniformity. It's also a place that allows him to practice the x-ray vision so many visual people have for underpinnings: the contradictions that can be drawn upon and aesthetically dramatized...The place sparks his imagination, and with his paintbrush, he sparks it, charging the air with a bit of unexpected - but very recognizable - light."" Together, Perry and Beattie give us a view of Charlottesville, of place and artistic production that carries with it the warmth of recognition and the thrill of discovery.

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Long treated with skepticism in literary and cultural studies, love as a subject of serious scholarly inquiry is now attracting intense interest and renewed attention. Love, Etc. centers on two key themes: representations of love in literature and culture and love as a relationship to literature and culture.

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In this lively analysis, Daniel Wirls examines the Senate in relation to our other institutions of government and the constitutional system as a whole, exposing the role of the "world’s greatest deliberative body" in undermining effective government and maintaining white supremacy in America.As Wirls argues, from the founding era onward, the Senate constructed for itself an exceptional role in the American system of government that has no firm basis in the Constitution. This self-proclaimed exceptional status is part and parcel of the Senate’s problematic role in the governmental process over the past two centuries, a role shaped primarily by the combination of equal representation among states and the filibuster, which set up the Senate’s clash with modern democracy and effective government and has contributed to the contemporary underrepresentation of minority members. As he explains, the Senate’s architecture, self-conception, and resulting behavior distort rather than complement democratic governance and explain the current gridlock in Washington, D.C. If constitutional changes to our institutions are necessary for better governance, then how should the Senate be altered to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem? This book provides one answer.

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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 individual among a generation of formidable personalities. This record hints at an enigmatic perfection; however, Washington was a flesh-and-blood man. In First and Always, celebrated historian Peter Henriques illuminates Washington’s life, more fully explicating his character and his achievements.Arranged thematically, the book’s chapters focus on important and controversial issues, achieving a depth not possible in a traditional biography. First and Always examines factors that coalesced to make Washington such a remarkable and admirable leader, while also chronicling how Washington mistreated some of his enslaved workers, engaged in extreme partisanship, and responded with excessive sensitivity to criticism. Henriques portrays a Washington deeply ambitious and always hungry for public adoration, even as he disclaimed such desires. In its account of an amazing life, First and Always shows how, despite profound flaws, George Washington nevertheless deserves to rank as the nation's most consequential leader, without whom the American experiment in republican government would have died in infancy.

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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 school desegregation. That step ultimately brought this rural, agricultural county to the Supreme Court of the United States as one of five consolidated cases in the historic 1954 ruling, Brown v. Board of Education. Unique among those cases, Prince Edward County took the extreme stance of closing its public school system entirely rather than comply with the desegregation ruling of the Court. The schools were closed for five years, from 1959 to 1964, until the Supreme Court ruling in Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County ordered the restoration of public education in the county.This historical anthology brings together court cases, government documents, personal and scholarly writings, speeches, and journalism to represent the diverse voices and viewpoints of the battle in Prince Edward County for—and against—educational equality. Providing historical context and contemporary analysis, this book offers a new perspective of a largely overlooked episode and seeks to help place the struggle for public education in Prince Edward County into its proper place in the civil rights era.

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The relationship between public opinion and the actions of institutions such as the Supreme Court has come under increased scrutiny in recent years. In this timely book, Eileen Braman explores how American citizens think about government across all three branches, applying a rigorous political scientific methodology to explore why citizens may support potentially risky changes to our governing system.As Braman highlights, Americans value institutions that they perceive as delivering personal and societal gains, and citizens who see these institutions as delivering potential losses are more supportive of fundamental constitutional change. In the face of growing resentment of government and recurring warnings of constitutional crisis, Braman offers a hopeful note: her findings suggest that politicians can channel discontent toward meaningful reform and the healthy evolution of our democratic system.

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Looking at America through the Irish prism and employing a comparative approach, leading and emerging scholars of early American and Atlantic history interrogate anew the relationship between imperial reform and revolution in Ireland and America, offering fascinating insights into the imperial whole of which both places were a part. Revolution would eventually stem from the ways the Irish and Americans looked to each other to make sense of imperial crisis wrought by reform, only to ultimately create two expanding empires in the nineteenth century in which the Irish would play critical roles.

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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 writing produced by Spanish American exiles, travelers, and immigrants who Settled and passed through Philadelphia during this vibrant era, when the city’s printing presses offered a vehicle for the voices advocating independence in the shadow of Spanish colonialism.The first book-length study of Philadelphia publications by intellectuals such as Vicente Rocafuerte, José María Heredia, Manuel Torres, Juan Germán Roscio, and Servando Teresa de Mier, Letters from Filadelfia offers an approach to discussing their work as part of early Latino literature and the way in which it connects to the United States and other parts of the Americas. Lazo’s book is an important contribution to the complex history of the United States’ first capital. More than the foundation for the U.S. nation-state, Philadelphia reached far beyond its city limits and, as considered here, suggests new ways to conceptualize what it means to be American.

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Anecdotes of Enlightenment is the first literary history of the anecdote in English. In this wide-ranging account, James Robert Wood explores the animating effects anecdotes had on intellectual and literary cultures over the long eighteenth century. Drawing on extensive archival research and emphasizing the anecdote as a way of thinking, he shows that an intimate relationship developed between the anecdote and the Enlightenment concept of human nature. Anecdotes drew attention to odd phenomena on the peripheries of human life and human history. Enlightenment writers developed new and often contentious ideas of human nature through their efforts to explain these anomalies. They challenged each other's ideas by reinterpreting each other's anecdotes and by telling new anecdotes in turn.Anecdotes of Enlightenment features careful readings of the philosophy of John Locke and David Hume; the periodical essays of Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, and Eliza Haywood; the travel narratives of Joseph Banks, James Cook, and James Boswell; the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth; and Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. Written in an engaging style and spotlighting the eccentric aspects of Enlightenment thought, this fascinating book will appeal to historians, philosophers, and literary critics interested in the intellectual culture of the long eighteenth century.

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