Search results for ""university of virginia press""

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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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 seventeenth 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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How do we create the new from the old? The Architecture of Influence explores this fundamental question by analysing a broad swath of twentieth-century architectural works--including some of the best-known examples of the architectural canon, modern and postmodern--through the lens of influence. The book serves as both a critique of the discipline’s long-standing focus on "genius" and a celebration of the creative act of revisioning and reimagining the past. It argues that all works of architecture not only depend on the past but necessarily alter, rewrite, and reposition the traditions and ideas to which they refer. Organized into seven chapters--Replicas, Copies, Compilations, Generalizations, Revivals, Emulations, and Self-Repetitions--the book redefines influence as an active process through which the past is defined, recalled, and subsequently redefined within twentieth-century architecture.

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The first prose collection by the award-winning poet and educator Brenda Hillman. These short essays on six Ms of the art of poetry make the form accessible in a novel way, exploring words that might appear incompatible but become dancing partners in Hillman's artistic vision: metaphor and metonymy; meaning and mystery; magic and morality.

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Seven Virginians, the culmination of a lifetime of erudition by one of America’s leading historians, reveals the integral role played by seven major Virginians before, during, and after the American Revolution: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, George Mason, Patrick Henry, and John Marshall.Most accounts of the founding generation focus only on the activities of the "big three"—Washington, Jefferson, and Madison—but Boles incorporates the key contributions of these other four important figures to the political and legal structures that govern the United States to this day. At the same time, Boles is clear-eyed about the Revolutionary generation’s problems and their fading from the scene, inaugurating the beginnings of Virginia’s political decline in the early nineteenth century. In so doing, Boles provides the crucial Virginian piece to the ongoing reevaluation of the United States’ founding moment.

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What would it mean to reorient the study of Haitian literature toward ethics rather than the themes of politics, engagement, disaster, or catastrophe? Looking for Other Worlds engages with this question from a distinct feminist perspective and, in the process, discovers a revelatory lens through which we can productively read the work of contemporary Haitian writers.Régine Michelle Jean-Charles explores the "ethical imagination" of three contemporary Haitian authors—Yanick Lahens, Kettly Mars, and Evelyne Trouillot—contending that ethics and aesthetics operate in relation to each other through the writers’ respective novels and that the turn to ethics has proven essential in the twenty-first century. Jean-Charles presents a useful framework for analyzing contemporary literature that brings together Black feminism, literary ethics, and Haitian studies in a groundbreaking way.

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What would it mean to reorient the study of Haitian literature toward ethics rather than the themes of politics, engagement, disaster, or catastrophe? Looking for Other Worlds engages with this question from a distinct feminist perspective and, in the process, discovers a revelatory lens through which we can productively read the work of contemporary Haitian writers.Régine Michelle Jean-Charles explores the "ethical imagination" of three contemporary Haitian authors—Yanick Lahens, Kettly Mars, and Evelyne Trouillot—contending that ethics and aesthetics operate in relation to each other through the writers’ respective novels and that the turn to ethics has proven essential in the twenty-first century. Jean-Charles presents a useful framework for analyzing contemporary literature that brings together Black feminism, literary ethics, and Haitian studies in a groundbreaking way.

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At the turn of the twentieth century, Amélie Rives was one of the most famous women in America. A member of Virginia’s First Families—and granddaughter of a U.S. senator, she belonged to the southern aristocracy. Considered one of the great beauties of her time, Rives leveraged both her connections and her own considerable talent to become a best-selling author and then married into the wealthy Astor family. As Jane Turner Censer makes clear in this long overdue biography, Rives’s personal story—filled with enormous triumphs and calamities—was, if anything, as fascinating as her art.Rives’s most famous novel, The Quick or the Dead?, published when she was just twenty-four, was a sensation in its time, but soon she began to grapple with marital woes, an addiction to morphine and cocaine, and reams of unfavorable press coverage. Dramatically she took control of her celebrity: she divorced her husband and married a Russian prince, broke free of addiction, and changed her image to that of a European princess. Rives then regained her writing career, including plays produced on Broadway.Censer draws from Rives’s early diaries, correspondence, and publications as well as the massive newspaper coverage she received during her lifetime to provide insights into the limits imposed on and actions taken by ambitious, elite young women in the late nineteenth-century South. As a trailblazer, Rives used her beauty, brains, and wayward behavior to make a splash in a manner later adopted by southern women as disparate as Zelda Fitzgerald and Tallulah Bankhead.

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The Elections of 2020 is a timely, comprehensive, scholarly, and engagingly written account of the 2020 elections. It features essays by an all-star team of political scientists in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 general election, chronicling every stage of the presidential race as well as the coterminous congressional elections, paying additional attention to the role of the media and campaign finance in the process. Broad in coverage and bolstered by tables and figures presenting exit polls and voting results in the primaries, caucuses, and the general election, these essays discuss the consequences of these elections for the presidency, Congress, and the larger political system.

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The question "Do black landscapes matter?" cuts deep to the core of American history. From the plantations of slavery to contemporary segregated cities, from freedman villages to northern migrations for freedom, the nation's landscape bears the detritus of diverse origins. Black landscapes matter because they tell the truth. In this vital new collection, acclaimed landscape designer and public artist Walter Hood assembles a group of notable landscape architecture and planning professionals and scholars to probe how race, memory, and meaning intersect in the American landscape.Essayists examine a variety of U.S. places - ranging from New Orleans and Charlotte to Milwaukee and Detroit—exposing racism endemic in the built environment and acknowledging the widespread erasure of black geographies and cultural landscapes. Through a combination of case studies, critiques, and calls to action, contributors reveal the deficient, normative portrayals of landscape that affect communities of color and question how public design and preservation efforts can support people in these places. In a culture where historical omissions and specious narratives routinely provoke disinvestment in minority communities, creative solutions by designers, planners, artists, and residents are necessary to activate them in novel ways. Black people have built and shaped the American landscape in ways that can never be fully known. Black Landscapes Matter is a timely and necessary reminder that without recognizing and reconciling these histories and spaces, America's past and future cannot be understood.

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Jane Tompkins, a renowned literature professor and award-winning author, thought she knew what reading was until, struck by a debilitating illness, she finds herself reading day and night because it is all she can do. A lifelong lover of books, she realizes for the first time that if you pay close attention to your reactions as you read, literature can become a path of self-discovery. Tompkins's inner journey begins when she becomes captivated unexpectedly by an account of friendship between two writers to whom she'd given little thought, Paul Theroux and V. S. Naipaul. Theroux's memoir launches her on a path of introspection that stretches back to the first weeks of her life in a Bronx hospital, and forward to her relationship with her mother and the structure of her present marriage. Her reading experience, intensified by the feelings of powerlessness and loss of self that come with chronic illness, expands to include writers such as Henning Mankell and Ann Patchett, Alain de Botton, Elena Ferrante, and Anthony Trollope. As she makes her way through their books, she recognizes herself in them, stumbling across patterns of feeling and behavior that have ruled her without her knowing it—envy, a desire for fame, fear of confronting the people she loves, a longing for communion. The reader, along with Tompkins, comes to the realization that literature can be not only a source of information and entertainment, not only a balm and a refuge, but also a key to unlocking long-forgotten memories that lead to a new understanding of one's life.

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Following the defeat of Hillary Clinton in the presidential election of 2016, many prominent scholars and political pundits argued that a successful Democratic Party in the future must abandon identity politics. While these calls for Democrats to distance themselves from such strategies have received much attention, there is scant academic work that empirically tests whether nonracial campaigns provide an advantage to Democrats today. As Christopher Stout explains, those who argue for deracialized appeals to voters may not be considering how several high-profile police shootings and acquittals, increasing evidence of growing racial economic disparities, retrenchments on voting rights, and the growth of racial hate groups have made race a more salient issue now than in the recent past. Moreover, they fail to account for how demographic changes in the United States have made racial and ethnic minorities a more influential voting bloc.The Case for Identity Politics finds that racial appeals are an effective form of outreach for Democratic candidates and enhance, rather than detract from, their electability in our current political climate.

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Throughout volume 20 of the Presidential Series, George Washington looked forward to retirement from public life, preparing a farewell address to announce his intention and leave behind guiding principles for the nation. Relations with Great Britain and France dominated foreign policy, as the House of Representatives agreed to implement the provisions of the Jay Treaty and as the president responded to a looming diplomatic crisis by recalling James Monroe, U.S. minister to France. Washington also remained involved with his private affairs, taking pains to retrieve Martha Washington's runaway slave Ona (Oney) Judge, actions that did not square easily with aspirations expressed in his farewell address regarding "the happiness of the people of these States, under the auspices of liberty.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the most important figures in American nature writing, yet until now readers have had no book devoted to this central theme in his work. The Best Read Naturalist fills this lacuna, placing several of Emerson’s lesser-known pieces of nature writing in conversation with his canonical essays. Organized chronologically, the thirteen selections—made up of sermons, lectures, addresses, and essays—reveal an engagement with natural history that spanned Emerson’s career. As we watch him grapple with what he called the “book of nature,” a more environmentally connected thinker emerges—a “green” Emerson deeply concerned with the physical world and fascinated with the ability of science to reveal a correspondence between the order of nature and that of the mind. The Best Read Naturalist illuminates the vital influence that the study of natural history had on the development of Emerson’s mature philosophy.

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Guns had an enormous impact on the social, economic, cultural, and political lives of civilian men, women and children of all social strata in early modern England. In this study, Lois Schwoerer identifies and analyzes England’s domestic gun culture from 1500 to 1740, uncovering how guns became available, what effects they had on society, and how different sectors of the population contributed to gun culture.The rise of guns made for recreational use followed the development of a robust gun industry intended by King Henry VIII to produce artillery and military handguns for war. Located first in London, the gun industry brought the city new sounds, smells, street names, shops, sights, and communities of gun workers, many of whom were immigrants. Elite men used guns for hunting, target shooting, and protection. They collected beautifully decorated guns, gave them as gifts, and included them in portraits and coats-of-arms, regarding firearms as a mark of status, power, and sophistication. With statutes and proclamations, the government legally denied firearms to subjects with an annual income under £100?about 98 percent of the population?whose reactions ranged from grudging acceptance to willful disobedience.Schwoerer shows how this domestic gun culture influenced England’s Bill of Rights in 1689, a document often cited to support the claim that the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution conveys the right to have arms as an Anglo-American legacy. Schwoerer shows that the Bill of Rights did not grant a universal right to have arms, but rather a right restricted by religion, law, and economic standing, terms that reflected the nation's gun culture. Examining everything from gunmakers’ records to wills, and from period portraits to toy guns, Gun Culture in Early Modern England offers new data and fresh insights on the place of the gun in English society.

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Robert Riley has been a renowned figure in landscape studies for over fifty years, valued for his perceptive, learned, and highly entertaining articles, reviews, and essays. Much of Riley’s work originally ran in Landscape, the pioneering magazine at which Riley succeeded the great geographer J. B. Jackson as editor. The Camaro in the Pasture is the first book to collect this compelling author’s writing. With diverse topics ranging from science-fiction fantasies to problems of academic design research, the essays in this volume cover an entire half-century of Riley’s observations on the American landscape. The essays – several of which are new or previously unpublished – interpret changing rationales for urban beautification, the evolution and transformation of the strip, the development of a global landscape of golf and resorts replacing an older search for exoticism, and the vernacular landscape as wallpaper rather than quilt. Ultimately, Riley envisions our future landscape as a rapidly fluctuating electronic net draped over the more slowly changing and familiar land- and building-based system. Throughout, Riley emphasizes the vernacular landscape of contemporary America – how we have shaped and use it, what it is becoming, and, above all, how we experience it.

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In Intimate Reconstructions, Catherine Jones considers how children shaped, and were shaped by, Virginia’s Reconstruction. Jones argues that questions of how to define, treat, reform, or protect children were never far from the surface of public debate and private concern in post–Civil War Virginia. Through careful examination of governmental, institutional, and private records, the author traces the unpredictable paths black and white children traveled through this tumultuous period. Putting children at the center of the narrative reveals the unevenness of the transitions that defined Virginia in the wake of the Civil War: from slavery to freedom, from war to peace, and from secession to a restored but fractured union. While some children emerged from the war under the protection of families, others navigated treacherous circumstances on their own. The reconfiguration of postwar households, and disputes over children’s roles within them, fueled broader debates over public obligations to protect all children.The reorganization of domestic life was a critical proving ground for Reconstruction. Freedpeople’s efforts to recover children strained against white Virginians’ efforts to retain privileges formerly undergirded by slavery. At the same time, orphaned children, particularly those who populated the streets of Virginia’s cities, prompted contentious debate over who had responsibility for their care, as well as rights to their labor.By revisiting conflicts over the practices of orphan asylums, apprenticeship, and adoption, Intimate Reconstructions demonstrates that race continued to shape children’s postwar lives in decisive ways. In private and public, children were at the heart of Virginians’ struggles over the meanings of emancipation and Confederate defeat.

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Over the past three decades, American evangelical Christians have undergone unexpected, progressive shifts in the area of race relations, culminating in a national movement that advocates racial integration and equality in evangelical communities. The movement, which seeks to build cross-racial relationships among evangelicals, has meant challenging well-established paradigms of church growth that built many megachurch empires. While evangelical racial change (ERC) efforts have never been easy and their reception has been mixed, they have produced meaningful transformation in religious communities. Although the movement as a whole encompasses a broad range of political views, many participants are interested in addressing race-related political issues that impact their members, such as immigration, law enforcement, and public education policy. Ambivalent Miracles traces the rise and ongoing evolution of evangelical racial change efforts within the historical, political, and cultural contexts that have shaped them. Nancy D. Wadsworth argues that the stunning breakthroughs this movement has achieved, its curious political ambivalence, and its internal tensions are products of a complex cultural politics constructed at the intersection of U.S. racial and religious history and the meaning-making practices of conservative evangelicalism. Employing methods from the emerging field of political ethnography, Wadsworth draws from a decade’s worth of interviews and participant observation in ERC settings, textual analysis, and survey research, as well as a three-year case study, to provide the first exhaustive treatment of ERC efforts in political science.

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The New York Times–bestselling author Donald McCaig has established an expansive literary career, founded equally on books about working sheepdogs and the Civil War novels Jacob’s Ladder and Rhett Butler’s People, the official sequel to Gone with the Wind. In his new book, Mr. and Mrs. Dog, McCaig draws on twenty-five years of experience raising sheepdogs to vividly describe his—and his dogs June and Luke’s—unlikely progress toward and participation in the World Sheepdog Trials in Wales. McCaig engagingly chronicles the often gruelling experience—through rain, snow, ice storms, and brain-numbing heat—of preparing and trialling Mrs. Dog, June, ""a foxy lady in a slinky black-and-white peignoir,"" and Mr. Dog, Luke, ""a plain worker—no flash to him."" Along the way, he relays sage advice from his decades spent talking with America’s most renowned dog experts, from police-dog trainers to positive-training gurus. As readers of McCaig’s novels will expect, Mr. and Mrs. Dog delivers far more than straightforward dog-training tips. Revealing an abiding love and respect for his dogs, McCaig unveils the life experiences that set him on the long road to the Welsh trial fields. Starting with memories of his first dog, Rascal, and their Montana roadtrip in a ’48 Dodge, McCaig leads us into his thirties, when he abandons his New York advertising career to move to a run-down Appalachian sheep farm in the least populous county in Virginia. This 1960s agrarian adventure ultimately brings McCaig, Luke, and June to the Olympics of sheepdog trials. In his narration of one man’s love for his dogs, McCaig offers a powerful portrayal of the connection between humans and their animal companions.

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Nationalism in nineteenth-century America operated through a collection of symbols, signifiers citizens could invest with meaning and understanding. In Confederate Visions, Ian Binnington examines the roots of Confederate nationalism by analysing some of its most important symbols: Confederate constitutions, treasury notes, wartime literature, and the role of the military in symbolising the Confederate nation.Nationalisms tend to construct a glorified past, an idyllic picture of national strength, honor, and unity, with a past often based on a vision of what should be true rather than what actually was. Binnington considers here the ways in which the Confederacy was imagined by antebellum Southerners through a group of intertwined mythic concepts—the ""Worthy Southron,"" the ""Demon Yankee,"" the ""Silent Slave,"" and a sense of shared history deemed Confederate Americanism. These symbols were repeatedly invoked and entwined by the producers of Confederate nationalism. The Worthy Southron, the constructed Confederate self, was imagined as a champion of liberty, counterposed to the Demon Yankee other, a fanatical abolitionist and enemy of Liberty. The Silent Slave, meanwhile, was a companion to the vocal Confederate self, loyal and trusting, reliable and honest. The road to the creation of an American identity was fraught with struggle, political conflict, and ultimately bloody Civil War. Confederate Visions examines literature, newspapers and periodicals, visual imagery, and formal state documents to explore the origins and development of these symbols of wartime Confederate nationalism.

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In the nearly two centuries since the first building’s completion in Thomas Jefferson’s academical village, programs and facilities at the University of Virginia have been continually expanded and updated. This second edition of Susan Tyler Hitchcock’s The University of Virginia: A Pictorial History, first published in 1999 and updated in 2003, traces Mr. Jefferson’s favorite project through an appropriately rich pageant of images and text. The book’s main chapters, arranged chronologically, follow the rise of the university from its founding to the accomplishments of John T. Casteen III’s presidency and the appointment of Teresa A. Sullivan as the university’s eighth, and first female, president. In this second edition, Casteen’s legacy is considered, including AccessUVa, the university’s groundbreaking full-need financial aid program; initiatives to position the University of Virginia as a global leader; and major expansion of the physical facilities, including the Arts Precinct, the South Lawn Project, John Paul Jones Arena, the Harrison Institute and Small Special Collections Library, and groundbreaking for the Emily Couric Clinical Cancer Center. The final chapter includes an essay on the historic preservation of the Academical Village and looks forward with new president Teresa A. Sullivan as Mr. Jefferson’s university sits poised on the eve of its bicentennial celebration. Highlights include interviews with John T. Casteen III and Teresa A. Sullivan.

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This collection of essays on seventeenth-century Virginia, the first such collection on the Chesapeake in nearly twenty-five years, highlights emerging directions in scholarship and helps set a new agenda for research in the next decade and beyond. The contributors represent some of the best of a younger generation of scholars who are building on, but also criticizing and moving beyond, the work of the so-called Chesapeake School of social history that dominated the historiography of the region in the 1970s and 1980s. Employing a variety of methodologies, analytical strategies, and types of evidence, these essays explore a wide range of topics and offer a fresh look at the early religious, political, economic, social, and intellectual life of the colony.ContributorsDouglas Bradburn, Binghamton University, State University of New York * John C. Coombs, Hampden-Sydney College * Victor Enthoven, Netherlands Defense Academy * Alexander B. Haskell, University of California Riverside * Wim Klooster, Clark University * Philip Levy, University of South Florida * Philip D. Morgan, Johns Hopkins University * William A. Pettigrew, University of Kent * Edward DuBois Ragan, Valentine Richmond History Center * Terri L. Snyder, California State University, Fullerton * Camilla Townsend, Rutgers University * Lorena S. Walsh, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

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This wild and entertaining novel expands on the true story of the West Indian slave Tituba, who was accused of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts, arrested in 1692, and forgotten in jail until the general amnesty for witches two years later. Maryse Condé brings Tituba out of historical silence and creates for her a fictional childhood, adolescence, and old age. She turns her into what she calls "a sort of female hero, an epic heroine, like the legendary ‘Nanny of the maroons,’" who, schooled in the sorcery and magical ritual of obeah, is arrested for healing members of the family that owns her.This book has been supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agencY.

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Women have practiced as landscape architects for over a century, since the founding of the practice as a profession in the United States in the 1890s. They came to landscape architecture as gardeners, garden designers, horticulturalists, and fine artists. They simultaneously shaped the profession while reflecting contemporary practice. It is all the more surprising, then, that the history of women in American landscape design has received relatively little attention. Thaisa Way corrects this oversight in ""Unbounded Practice: Women and Landscape Architecture in the Early Twentieth Century"". Describing design practice in landscape architecture during the first half of the twentieth century, the book serves as a narrative both of women - such as Beatrix Jones Farrand, Marian Cruger Coffin, Annette Hoyt Flanders, Ellen Biddle Shipman, Martha Brookes Hutcheson, and Marjorie Sewell Cautley - and of the practice as it became a profession.

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The twenty essays collected here explore the Virginia story throughout the Civil War era. Some contributors examine Robert E. Lee and the issues confronting his men, such as soldier morale and religious conversion. Others emphasize the wartime home front - in some cases reexamining its connection with the battlefront - or explore questions of gender, race, or religion. Several essays extend the story into the postwar years and consider various Virginia individuals or groups in the context of the conflict's aftermath. Building on current knowledge, but often contesting conventional thinking, the essays give the most comprehensive view yet of Civil War Virginia and suggest avenues of inquiry that remain to be explored.

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During the last four months of 1793, the period documented by volume 14 of the ""Presidential Series"", George Washington and his administration remained chiefly involved with maintaining the neutrality of the United States. The activities of French privateers in American waters required the administration to respond to requests from state governors for guidance about implementing the neutrality policy and to complaints from British minister George Hammond about seizures of British ships. As a result, the administration had to decide on the extent of America's territorial waters. Another threat to neutrality arose from reports of French-sponsored expeditions into Spanish Florida and Luisiana. These problems were made more difficult by the administration's increasingly public poor relations with French minister Edmond Genet.Other topics of interest include frontier defense and concerns about British retention of northwestern forts; news from Europe, including reports that a truce with Portugal would free corsairs from Algiers to attack American commerce; problems associated with the arrival of refugees from Saint Domingue; and the ubiquitous applications for appointments to federal office. The volume also records the preparation of Washington's annual message - an extended process that involved input from each member of the cabinet.The signature event of these four months, however, was the yellow fever epidemic at Philadelphia. Identified in August, the growing epidemic soon depopulated the city through departures and deaths. Perhaps speeded by the progress of the disease, Washington himself left the city on September 10, making a previously planned trip to Mount Vernon. Some questioned whether Congress could safely meet at the capital in December, and Washington sought advice about whether he had the constitutional power to alter the location at which Congress would convene and about where the government might move. Washington himself took lodgings at Germantown in November, and ultimately, the waning of the disease made action unnecessary.Among personal matters, the management of Mount Vernon claimed much of Washington's attention. He signed a contract with a new farm manager, William Pearce, and his letters to Pearce and to interim manager Howell Lewis convey information and advice. Moreover, in a letter to the English agriculturalist Arthur Young, he broached a proposal to rent out four of the five farms at Mount Vernon to immigrant farmers, describing his estate in considerable detail.

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