Search results for ""University of Virginia Press""

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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In this account of Monticello's ownership after Thomas Jefferson's death, Marc Leepson turns the spotlight on a family that contributed to the preservation of history, providing evidence of the Levys' role in saving the house.

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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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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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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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Most treatments of slavery, politics, and expansion in the early American republic focus narrowly on congressional debates and the inaction of elite ""founding fathers"" such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. In ""Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West"", John Craig Hammond looks beyond elite leadership and examines how the demands of western settlers, the potential of western disunion, and local, popular politics determined the fate of slavery and freedom in the West between 1790 and 1820.By shifting focus away from high politics in Philadelphia and Washington, Hammond demonstrates that local political contests and geopolitical realities were more responsible for determining slavery's fate in the West than were the clashing proslavery and antislavery proclivities of Founding Fathers and politicians in the East. When efforts to prohibit slavery revived in 1819 with the Missouri Controversy, it was not because of a sudden awakening to the problem on the part of northern Republicans, but because the threat of western secession no longer seemed credible.Including detailed studies of popular political contests in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Missouri that shed light on the western and popular character of conflicts over slavery, Hammond also provides a thorough analysis of the Missouri Controversy, revealing how the problem of slavery expansion shifted from a local and western problem to a sectional and national dilemma that would ultimately lead to disunion and civil war.

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Volume 13 of the ""Revolutionary War Series"" documents a crucial portion of the winter encampment at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, when the fate of Washington's army hung in the balance. It begins with Washington's soldiers hard at work erecting huts and preparing for the next campaign.

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This is the ninth volume of George Washington's presidential papers, covering the period September 1791 to February 1792. Over 40 letters concern the problems arising from Pierre L'Enfant's high-handedness as designer of the Federal City.

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Documents Washington's decisions and actions during the heart of the New York campaign, from late summer to early fall 1776, when his opponent, General William Howe, took the offensive and outmanoeuvred the American forces in and around New York City by amphibious landings.

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Volume 4 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 and his brief retirement at Mount Vernon until his death in 1799. These volumes deal with the public papers either written by Washington or presented to him during both of his administrations. Among the documents are Washington's messages to Congress, addresses to him from public and private bodies, applications for public office, and documents concerned with diplomatic and Indian affairs as well as Washington's private papers, which include family letters, farm reports, political letters from friends and acquaintances, and documents relating to the administration of Mount Vernon plantation. Volume 4 covers the fall and early winter of 1789-90 and focuses on the problems facing the new administration. Many documents in this volume deal with the difficulties Washington encountered in his attempt to staff the federal judiciary and his fears that failure to attract viable candidates for the Supreme Court and the federal courts would damage the reputation of the new government. There is extensive correspondence dealing with the administration's unsuccessful attempt to negotiate a treaty with the Creek chief Alexander McGillivray and with the growing threat from Indian tribes in the Northwest. Applications for office continued to pour in, often illustrating the private difficulties and public aspirations of the Revolutionary generation. Letters to Washington come from a cross section of Americans and foreign dignitaries and present a rich resource on such diverse topics as foreign affairs, overseas trade and public attitudes toward the new government. In October 1789, Washington undertook a trip through the New England states to attract support for his administration. His triumphal journey is richly documented by the numerous letters of private and public support. Private letters deal with topics ranging from his attempts to furnish his new greenhouse at Mount Vernon with exotic plants and his acquisition of mares to stock the plantation's paddocks to the settlement of the financial affairs of his stepson's estate and his gift of a bit of chintz to the young daughters of a Connecticut innkeeper.

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Volume three of the Presidential Series continues the fourth chronological series of ""The Papers of George Washington"". The Presidential Series when complete, will aim to cover the eight precedent-setting years of Washington's presidency and his brief retirement at Mount Vernon until his death in 1799. These volumes deal with the public papers either written by Washington or presented to him during both of his administrations. Among the documents are Washington's messages to Congress, addresses to him from public office and documents concerned with diplomatic and Indian affairs as well as Washington's private papers which include family letters, farm reports, political letters from friends and acquaintances, and documents relating to the administration of the Mount Vernon plantation. Volume three covers most of the summer of 1789 and focuses primarily on the problems facing the new administration. Because of the president's serious illness during this period, a larger proportion of the documents than previously are letters and papers sent to Washington, including massive reports from the Board of Treasury describing the financial status of the new nation, detailed descriptions of Indian and military affairs from Henry Knox, and a plethora of applications for public office. The letters to Washington come from a cross section of Americans and present a resource on such diverse topics as foreign affairs, overseas trade and public attitudes toward the new government. Washington in these months was establishing the great departments of the federal government, and he devoted a considerable amount of his time to appointments and to the staffing of the new civil service.

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Entering its fourteenth 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 Papers of Martha Washington is the first scholarly edition of Martha Washington’s correspondence, spanning her entire life, from her youth as a wealthy but largely unknown Virginia plantation mistress through her ascent to becoming an American icon. Her family letters make up most of the volume, bringing to light Martha Washington’s personality in her own words. As she rose to fame, she began to correspond with such significant figures in American history as Mercy Otis Warren, Abigail Adams, Elizabeth Willing Powel, and the Marquis de Lafayette. Her correspondence paints a picture of social life during the Revolutionary War and the early republic. The dozens of people who sent condolence letters after her husband’s death are a who’s who of key Federalist figures at the turn of the nineteenth century. For periods from which few materials survive, the editors have selected financial papers and third-party documents that bridge the gaps in the correspondence. Although Martha burned all but four of the letters between her and George Washington, the remaining documents tell a fascinating story about the early United States from a unique female perspective. This volume offers readers a more three-dimensional, accurate portrait of Martha Washington and enhances our understanding of women’s contributions to early American history. Aside from correspondence, the Papers of Martha Washington also includes directories of key people and places, timelines, maps, editorial essays, a calendar of financial documents, and appendices documenting everything from the inventory of the contents of Mount Vernon to the division of dower slaves, serving as an invaluable historical tool and a readable introduction to the life of America’s first First Lady.

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In this profoundly polarized era, the nation has been transfixed on the politics of Washington and its seemingly impenetrable gridlock. Many of the decisions that truly affect people’s lives, however, are being made not on the federal level but in the states. Faced with Washington’s political standoff, state governments are taking action on numerous vital issues, often impacting citizens and their communities far more than the decision makers in D.C. Despite this, few Americans really understand their state governments or the issues they address. In Fighting Political Gridlock, David Toscano reveals how the states are working around the impasse in Washington and how their work is increasingly shaping society.Long a central figure in one of the most important legislative bodies in the nation, the Virginia House of Delegates, Toscano brings a unique expertise to this urgent and timely discussion. Beginning with an analysis of state responses to COVID-19, including the processes and consequences of declaring states of emergency, he goes on to detail how various states are attacking issues in different ways–from education and voting to criminal justice and climate change–and provides a broad overview of how state actions affect our system of federalism. Toscano concludes with a call to action and civic engagement, including suggestions for how citizens and public officials can revitalize American democracy.

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The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) was the first antislavery and anticolonial uprising led by New World Africans to result in the creation of an independent and slavery-free nation state. The momentousness of this thirteen-year-long war generated thousands of pages of writing. This anthology brings together for the first time a transnational and multilingual selection of literature about the revolution, from the beginnings of the conflicts that resulted in it to the end of the nineteenth century.With over two hundred excerpts from novels, poetry, and plays published between 1787 and 1900, and depicting a wide array of characters including, Anacaona, Makandal, Boukman, Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and Henry Christophe, this anthology provides the perfect classroom text for exploring this fascinating revolution, its principal actors, and the literature it inspired, while also providing a vital resource for specialists in the field. This landmark volume includes many celebrated authors—such as Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Heinrich von Kleist, Alphonse de Lamartine, William Wordsworth, Harriet Martineau, and William Edgar Easton—but the editors also present here for the first time many less-well-known fictions by writers from across western Europe and both North and South America, as well as by nineteenth-century Haitian authors, refuting a widely accepted perception that Haitian representations of their revolution primarily emerged in the twentieth century. Each excerpt is introduced by contextualizing commentary designed to spark discussion about the ongoing legacy of slavery and colonialism in the Americas. Ultimately, the publication of this capacious body of literature that spans three continents offers students, scholars, and the curious reader alike a unique glimpse into the tremendous global impact the Haitian Revolution had on the print culture of the Atlantic world.

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The Italian son of a barber. A failed hydraulic engineer. A giant who performed feats of strength and agility in the circus. Giovanni Belzoni (1778-1824) was all of these before going on to become one of the most controversial figures in the history of Egyptian archaeology. A man of exceptional size with an ego of comparable proportions, he procured for the British Museum some of its largest and still awe-inspiring treasures. Today, however, the typical museum visitor knows nothing of Belzoni, and many modern archaeologists dismiss him as an ignorant vandal.In this captivating new biography, Ivor Noël Hume re-creates an early nineteenth century in which there was no established archaeological profession, only enormous opportunity. Belzoni landed in Egypt, where he was unsuccessful in selling a hydraulic machine of his own invention, and came under the patronage of diplomat Henry Salt, who convinced him to travel to Thebes in search of artifacts. Among the many treasures Belzoni would bring back was the seven-ton stone head of Ramesses II, the ""Young Memnon.""The book includes gripping accounts of Belzoni's wildly productive, and physically brutal, expeditions, as well as an unforgettable portrait of his wife, Sarah, who suffered the hardships of the Egyptian deserts and later bore the brunt of the disillusionment that came with the declining popular perception of her husband. Including numerous illustrations, many in color, this volume brings one of archaeology's most fascinating figures vividly to life.

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In 1850, the legendary Koh-i-noor diamond, gem of Eastern potentates, was transferred from the Punjab in India and, in an elaborate ceremony, placed into Queen Victoria's outstretched hands. This act inaugurated what author Adrienne Munich recognizes in her engaging new book as the empire of diamonds.Diamonds were a symbol of political power—only for the very rich and influential. But, in a development that also reflected the British Empire's prosperity, the idea of owning a diamond came to be marketed to the middle class. In all kinds of writings, diamonds began to take on an affordable romance. Considering many of the era's most iconic voices—from Dickens and Tennyson to Kipling and Stevenson—as well as grand entertainments such as The Moonstone, King Solomon's Mines, and the tales of Sherlock Holmes, Munich explores diamonds as fetishes that seem to contain a living spirit exerting powerful effects, and shows how they scintillated the literary and cultural imagination.Based on close textual attention and rare archival material, and drawing on ideas from material culture, fashion theory, economic criticism, and fetishism, Empire of Diamonds interprets the various meanings of diamonds, revealing a trajectory including Indian celebrity-named diamonds reserved for Asian princes, such as the Great Mogul and the Hope Diamond, their adoption by British royal and aristocratic families, and their discovery in South Africa, the mining of which devastated the area even as it opened the gem up to the middle classes. The story Munich tells eventually finds its way to America, as power and influence crosses the Atlantic, bringing diamonds to a wide consumer culture.

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What exactly is goodness? Where is it found in the literary imagination? Toni Morrison, one of American letters’ greatest voices, pondered these perplexing questions in her celebrated Ingersoll Lecture, delivered at Harvard University in 2012 and published now for the first time.Perhaps because it is overshadowed by the more easily defined evil, goodness often escapes our attention. Recalling many literary examples, from Ahab to Coetzee’s Michael K, Morrison seeks the essence of goodness and ponders its significant place in her writing. She considers the concept in relation to unforgettable characters from her own works of fiction and arrives at conclusions that are both eloquent and edifying. In a lively interview conducted for this book, Morrison further elaborates on her lecture’s ideas, discussing goodness not only in literature but in society and history—particularly black history, which has responded to centuries of brutality with profound creativity.Morrison’s essay is followed by a Series of responses by scholars in the fields of religion, ethics, history, and literature to her thoughts on goodness and evil, mercy and love, racism and self-destruction, Language and liberation, together with close examination of literary and theoretical expressions from her works. Each of these contributions, written by a scholar of religion, considers the legacy of slavery and how it continues to shape our memories, our complicities, our outcries, our lives, our communities, our literature, and our faith. In addition, the Contributors engage the religious orientation in Morrison’s novels so that readers who encounter her many memorable characters such as Sula, Beloved, or Frank Money will learn and appreciate how Morrison’s notions of goodness and mercy also reflect her understanding of the sacred and the human spirit.

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Evangelical Gothic explores the bitter antagonism that prevailed between two defining institutions of nineteenth-century Britain: Evangelicalism and the popular novel. Christopher Herbert begins by retrieving from near oblivion a rich anti-Evangelical polemical literature in which the great religious revival, often lauded in later scholarship as a "moral revolution," is depicted as an evil conspiracy centered on the attempted dismantling of the humanitarian moral culture of the nation. Examining foundational Evangelical writings by John Wesley and William Wilberforce alongside novels by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Bram Stoker, and others, Herbert contends that the realistic popular novel of the time was constitutionally alien to Evangelical ideology and even, to some Extent, took its opposition to that ideology as its core function. This provocative argument illuminates the frequent linkage of Evangelicalism in nineteenth-century fiction with the characteristic imagery of the Gothic–with black magic, with themes of demonic visitation and vampirism, and with a distinctive mood of hysteria and panic.

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For roughly a century, the log cabin occupied a central and indispensable role in the rapidly growing United States. Although it largely disappeared as a living space, it lived on as a symbol of the settling of the nation. In her thought-provoking and generously illustrated new book, Alison Hoagland looks at this once-common dwelling as a practical shelter solution-easy to construct, built on the frontier's abundance of trees, and not necessarily meant to be permanent-and its evolving place in the public memory.Hoagland shows how the log cabin was a uniquely adaptable symbol, responsive to the needs of the cultural moment. It served as the noble birthplace of presidents, but it was also seen as the basest form of housing, accommodating the lowly poor. It functioned as a paragon of domesticity, but it was also a basic element in the life of striving and wandering. Held up as a triumph of westward expansion, it was also perceived as a building type to be discarded in favor of more civilized forms.In the twentieth century, the log cabin became ingrained in popular culture, serving as second homes and motels, as well as restaurants and shops striking a rustic note. The romantic view of the past, combined with the log cabin's simplicity, solidity, and compatibility with nature, has made it an enduring architectural and cultural icon.Preparation of this volume has been supported by Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund

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No genre manifests the pleasure of reading - and its power to consume and enchant - more than romance. In suspending the category of the novel to rethink the way prose fiction works, Without the Novel demonstrates what literary history looks like from the perspective of such readerly excesses and adventures.Rejecting the assumption that novelistic realism is the most significant tendency in the history of prose fiction, Black asks three intertwined questions: What is fiction without the novel? What is literary history without the novel? What is reading without the novel? In answer, this study draws on the neglected genre of romance to reintegrate eighteenth-century British fiction with its classical and Continental counterparts. Black addresses works of prose fiction that self-consciously experiment with the formal structures and readerly affordances of romance: Heliodorus’s Ethiopian Story, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Fielding’s Tom Jones, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and Burney’s The Wanderer. Each text presents itself as a secondary, satiric adaptation of anachronistic and alien narratives, but in revising foreign stories each text also relays them. The recursive reading that these works portray and demand makes each a self-reflexive parable of romance itself. Ultimately, Without the Novel writes a wider, weirder history of fiction organized by the recurrences of romance and informed by the pleasures of reading that define the genre.

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This ambitious book provides the only systematic examination of the American abolition movement's direct impacts on antislavery politics from colonial times to the Civil War and after. As opposed to indirect methods such as propaganda, sermons, and speeches at protest meetings, Stanley Harrold focuses on abolitionists' political tactics—petitioning, lobbying, establishing bonds with sympathetic politicians—and on their disruptions of slavery itself.Harrold begins with the abolition movement's relationship to politics and government in the northern American colonies and goes on to evaluate its effect in a number of crucial contexts-the U.S. Congress during the 1790s, the Missouri Compromise, the struggle over slavery in Illinois during the 1820s, and abolitionist petitioning of Congress during that same decade. He shows how the rise of ""immediate"" abolitionism, with its emphasis on moral suasion, did not diminish direct abolitionists' impact on Congress during the 1830s and 1840s. The book also addresses abolitionists' direct actions against slavery itself, aiding escaped or kidnapped slaves, which led southern politicians to demand the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, a major flashpoint of antebellum politics. Finally, Harrold investigates the relationship between abolitionists and the Republican Party through the Civil War and Reconstruction.

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In this eloquent memoir, already widely read and praised in the author’s native South Africa, Hermann Giliomee weaves together the story of his own life with that of his country-a nation that continues to absorb and inspire him, both despite and because of its tortuous history. An internationally respected historian-his landmark The Afrikaners, writes J. M. Coetzee, ""includes an account of the origins and demise of apartheid that must rank as the most sober, objective and comprehensive we have""- Giliomee has devoted a lifetime to exploring the origins and perpetuation of the deep divisions in South African society. Although he grew up in the heart of the Afrikaner nationalist movement, he soon began to cut his own path in examining the rise and entrenchment of exclusive Afrikaner power and became one of the National Party’s chief critics. As an ""outside insider""-or, to his critics, a ""snake in the grass""-Giliomee has an understanding of Afrikaner power that is informed and nuanced. He has engaged with members on all sides of South Africa’s debates-many of whom appear in these pages through vivid and insightful portraits-and his outspokenness has hit nerves across the political spectrum. The personal journey of this original and courageous thinker will appeal to anyone interested in the complexities of South Africa’s past and present.Reconsiderations in Southern African History

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The site of a thriving literary tradition, Washington, DC, has been the home to many of our nation’s most acclaimed writers. From the city’s founding to the beginnings of modernism, literary luminaries including Walt Whitman, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Henry Adams, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston have lived and worked at their craft in our nation’s capital.In A Literary Guide to Washington, DC, Kim Roberts offers a guide to the city’s rich literary history. Part walking tour, part anthology, A Literary Guide to Washington, DC is organized into five sections, each corresponding to a particularly vibrant period in Washington’s literary community. Starting with the city’s earliest years, Roberts examines writers such as Hasty-Pudding poet Joel Barlow and ""Star-Spangled Banner"" lyricist Francis Scott Key before moving on to the Civil War and Reconstruction and touching on the lives of authors such as Charlotte Forten Grimké and James Weldon Johnson. She wraps up her tour with World War I and the Jazz Age, which brought to the city some writers at the forefront of modernism, including the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Sinclair Lewis. The book’s stimulating tours cover downtown, the LeDroit Park and Shaw neighborhoods, Lafayette Square, and the historic U Street district, bringing the history of the city to life in surprising ways.Written for tourists, literary enthusiasts, amateur historians, and armchair travelers, A Literary Guide to Washington, DC offers a cultural tour of our nation's capital through a lierary lens.

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James Salter’s exalted place in American letters is based largely on the intense admiration of other writers, but his work resonates far beyond the realm of fellow craftsmen, addressing themes--youth, war, erotic love, marriage, life abroad, friendship--that speak to us all.Following the publication of his first novel, Salter left behind a military career of great promise to write full-time and--through decades of searching, exacting work--became one of American literature’s master stylists. Only months before he died, at the age of eighty-nine, he agreed to serve as the first Kapnick Writer-in-Residence at the University of Virginia, where he composed and delivered the three lectures presented in this book and introduced by his friend and fellow novelist, National Book Award-winning author John Casey.Salter speaks to us here with an easy intimacy, sharing his unceasing enchantment with the books that made up his reading life, including works by Balzac, Flaubert, Babel (whose prose is ""like a handful of radium""), Dreiser, Céline, Faulkner. These talks provide an invaluable opportunity to see the way in which a great writer reads. They also offer a candid look at the writing life--the rejection letters, not one but two negative reviews in the New York Times for the same book, writing in the morning or at night and worrying about money during the long afternoons.Salter raises the question, Why does one write? For wealth? For admiration, or a sense of ""importance""? Confronting a blank sheet that always offers too many choices, practicing a vocation that often demands one write instead of live, the answer for Salter was creating a style that captured experience, in a world where anything not written down fades away.Kapnick Foundation Distinguished Writer-in-Residence Lectures

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One of the singular talents in landscape design, Chip Sullivan has shared his expertise through a seemingly unusual medium that, at second glance, makes perfect sense--the comic strip. For years Sullivan entertained readers of Landscape Architecture Magazine with comic strips that ingeniously illustrated significant concepts and milestones in the creation of our landscapes. These strips gained a large following among architects and illustrators, and now those original works, as well as additional strips created just for this book, are collected in Cartooning the Landscape.Framed by a loose narrative in which a young man’s search for wisdom is fulfilled by a comics shop owner who instructs him not only in the essentials of illustrating but in how to see, the book takes us on a whirlwind series of journeys. We visit the living sculptures of the Tree Circus on California’s Highway 17, the vast network of tunnels and fortifications--almost an underground city--of France’s Maginot Line, and take a trip through time that reveals undeniable parallels between the Emperor Hadrian’s re-creation of the Elysian Fields and, of all things, the iconic theme parks of Walt Disney. Sullivan immerses us in the artist’s concepts and tools, from the Claude mirror and the camera obscura to the role of optical illusion in art. He shows us how hot air balloons introduced aerial perspective and reveals exhibition effects that portended everything from Cinerama to Smell-O-Vision.Sullivan’s book is also a plea, in an era increasingly dominated by digitally rendered images, for a new appreciation of the art of hand drawing. The proof of this craft’s value lies in the hundreds of Sullivan’s panels collected in this passionate, humorous, always illuminating tour of the rich landscape surrounding us.

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The buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright are not immune to the social and environmental forces that affect all architecture. Because of the popular recognition and historical significance of his work, however, the stakes are unusually high when his buildings are modified in any way. Any additions or changes must meet the highest standards; how exactly this can be achieved is the debate that fuels this compelling new book. The essays collected here are authored by many of the top professionals in the fields of architecture and preservation. Some of the contributors worked directly on the buildings discussed and provide invaluable firsthand accounts of these projects. This is the most thorough discussion of modifying Wright’s works published to date and a fascinating commentary on preserving our architectural legacy.Contributors:Richard Longstreth on additions to historic buildings, de Teel Patterson Tiller on design in historic districts, Sidney K. Robinson on Taliesin, Anne Biebel and Mary Keiran Murphy on the Hillside School, Mark Hertzberg on the S. C. Johnson Administration Building, Dale Allen Gyure on Florida Southern College, Neil Levine on the Guggenheim Museum, Scott W. Perkins on the Price Tower, Tom Kubala on the First Unitarian Meeting House, Eric Jackson-Forsberg on the Darwin Martin House, Lynda S. Waggoner on Fallingwater, Patrick J. Mahoney on Graycliff, Thomas Templeton Taylor on the Westcott House.

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Restored to its original splendor, Montpelier is now a national shrine, but before Montpelier became a place of study and tribute, it was a home. Often kept from it by the business of the young nation, James and Dolley Madison could finally take up permanent residence when they retired from Washington in 1817. Their lifelong friend Thomas Jefferson predicted that, at Montpelier, the retiring Madison could return to his ""books and farm, to tranquility, and independence,"" that he would be released ""from incessant labors, corroding anxieties, active enemies, and interested friends.""As the celebrated historian Ralph Ketcham shows, this would turn out to be only partly true. Although the Madisons were no longer in Washington, Dolley continued to take part in its social scene from afar, dominating it just as she had during Jefferson’s and her husband’s administrations, commenting on people and events there and advising the multitude of young people who thought of her as the creator of society life in the young republic. James maintained a steady correspondence about public questions ranging from Native American affairs, slavery, and utopian reform to religion and education. He also took an active role at the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1829-30, in the defeat of nullification, and in the establishment of the University of Virginia, of which he was the rector for eight years after Jefferson’s death. Exploring Madison’s role in these post-presidential issues reveals a man of extraordinary intellectual vitality and helps us to better understand Madison’s political thought. His friendships with figures such as Jefferson, James Monroe, and the Marquis de Lafayette-as well as his assessment of them (he outlived them all)-shed valuable light on the nature of the republic they had all helped found.In their last years, James and Dolley Madison personified the republican institutions and culture of the new nation-James as the father of the Constitution and its chief propounder for nearly half a century, and Dolley as the creator of the role of ""First Lady."" Anything but uneventful, the retirement period at Montpelier should be seen as a crucial element in our understanding of this remarkable couple.

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Thomas Jefferson's design for the University of Virginia is widely hailed as a masterpiece. It is his greatest architectural accomplishment, the summation of his quest for intellectual freedom. The story of the University encompasses the political and architectural worlds, as Jefferson struggled against great opposition to establish a new type of educational institution. ""Thomas Jefferson's Academical Village"" offers a comprehensive look at Jefferson's design for the University, at how it came into being, at the different perceptions of its successes and failures, and at the alterations that have taken place down through the years. The revised edition incorporates research that has been ongoing since the book first appeared in 1993, and includes a preface by Richard Guy Wilson, essays on architecture and education and the Lawn, additional architectural drawings and historic photographs, a foreword by President John T. Casteen III, and numerous color illustrations.

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Including nearly nine hundred new and replacement markers that have been installed along the commonwealth's roadways since the last edition was published in 1994, this third edition of ""A Guidebook to Virginia's Historical Markers"" brings together and updates the texts of more than 1,850 official state historical markers placed along Virginia's highways since 1927. Divided for the first time into six geographic-cultural regions, this edition contains maps and three individual indexes that assist the reader in locating markers by title, number, or subject matter. The subject index covers African American, Native American, and women's history; maps out key places in such areas as European exploration and settlement, industry and agriculture, and transportation and communication; and canvasses the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Civil War, and such notable sites as courthouses, houses of worship, educational institutions, forts, and famous homes and homesites. Vacationers and those simply out for a drive will stumble across sites as diverse as Jamestown and the birthplace of Booker T. Washington, the graves of country music's Carter family and the original locations of northern Virginia's Nike missile installations, the places where paramount chief Powhatan first met with the English and where the artist Georgia O'Keeffe taught art, and Langley Field, which played a significant role in the history of manned space flight. Virginia has one of the oldest marker systems in the country, established in 1927. The markers are no longer state funded, and so the program illustrates a collaborative effort between committed sponsors who offer financial support, the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, and the Virginia Department of Transportation. The network holds great appeal for tourists and serves as a source of pride for local citizens. Travelers along Virginia's highways will find this guide both useful and informative. The great legacy of Virginia's past is revealed on these markers, making the book both a handy reference and a stimulus to greater study of the history of the commonwealth. It is published in association with the Virginia Department of Historic Resources.

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The Shenandoah Valley is famous for its role in Civil War history and for its great natural beauty. But there is something else: it is a tremendous place to fish. Fishing the Shenandoah Valley: An Angler's Guide is the latest stop in author M. W. Smith's continuing tour of the Commonwealth's great fishing spots. Surveying the entire Shenandoah River drainage system, including the Allegheny Mountains to the west, Smith looks in depth at these remarkably diverse waters. The book takes you by county through many of the region's stocked trout streams, as well as the wild trout streams of Shenandoah National Park, with advice for both spinning and fly-fishing. The area's largest impoundments, Lakes Frederick and Shenandoah, are thoroughly covered, from access points and contact information to the best techniques for landing largemouth bass, crappie, bluegill, and catfish. The book also devotes an entire chapter to the Shenandoah River, and includes more than just sound advice on catching smallmouth bass - you also get details on float trips, including tips on the river's rapids, as well as adjustments for winter and spring fishing. As with all of M. W. Smith's fishing guides, Fishing the Shenandoah Valley takes your complete fishing trip into account, answering questions about guide services, tackle shops, campsites - as well as providing detailed descriptions of the various species, so you know what you're catching, not simply how to catch it. There's always more to fishing than just getting a line wet.

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What is household government? To the vast majority of those living in America from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century it was the government. The head of a household, invariably an adult male, had authority over the property, labor, and mobility of not only his minor children but also his wife, servants, slaves, and the occasional debtors, indigents, or orphans the county paid him to board in the absence of institutional facilities. A History of Household Government in America tells the story of the seldom noted expansion and then the dramatic contraction in household authority and the effects these changes had on the governmental system. The disintegration of household powers during the mid-nineteenth century - the household's ""civil war"" - is much more central to what makes that period seem modern than industrialization or urbanization. Carole Shammas offers new explanations for why the American household head became such an early victim of household egalitarianism. Previous theories involving the frontier or the Revolution have ignored other factors unique to the American household system such as testamentary freedom, weak lineage controls, and the lack of an established church, all of which left the head vulnerable to challenges by dependents. These factors also affected the development of social services: In the United States, public and private welfare agencies originated largely out of concerns about the adequacy of household management and discipline. Religious rivalries eventually forced a partial return to household solutions through a welfare state system. That history helps explain why even today any departure from heterosexual two-parent family units continues to be viewed as dysfunctional by a significant portion of the population.

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