University Of Virginia Press: 345 books
The Making of a Racist
A Southerner Reflects on Family, History, and the Slave Trade
Language: English
Release Date: August 9, 2016
In this powerful memoir, Charles Dew, one of America’s most respected historians of the South--and particularly its history of slavery--turns the focus on his own life, which began not in the halls of enlightenment but in a society unequivocally committed to segregation.
Dew re-creates the...
The Master, the Modern Major General, and His Clever Wife
Henry James's Letters to Field Marshal Lord Wolseley and Lady Wolseley, 1878–1913
Language: English
Release Date: November 14, 2012
As his letters attest, for nearly forty years Henry James enjoyed a warm and gratifying friendship with Britain’s foremost soldier of the last quarter of the nineteenth century and his wife. The Wolseleys were notable figures. Lord Wolseley, the field marshal who became Britain’s commander in...
Resurrections
Authors, Heroes—and a Spy
Language: English
Release Date: October 9, 2018
Jeffrey Meyers’ Resurrections: Authors, Heroes—and a Spy brings to life a set of extraordinary writers, painters, and literary adventurers who turned their lives into art. Meyers knew nine of these figures, in some cases intimately, while five others he admires and regrets never meeting. As he...
Outside the Wire
American Soldiers' Voices from Afghanistan
Language: English
Release Date: April 15, 2013
A riveting collection of thirty-eight narratives by American soldiers serving in Afghanistan, Outside the Wire offers a powerful evocation of everyday life in a war zone. Christine Dumaine Leche—a writing instructor who left her home and family to teach at Bagram Air Base and a forward operating...
Mongrel Nation
The America Begotten by Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings
Language: English
Release Date: January 1, 2009
In this brief manuscript, Clarence Walker uses the Jefferson/Hemings liaison as a point of departure for a series of historical reflections on race, sex, and nation in the Americas. His basic argument, evident in the attached, is that America has been a multiracial society from colonial times, but...
Frederick Douglass
A Life in Documents
Language: English
Release Date: August 6, 2013
Frederick Douglass was born enslaved in February 1818, but from this most humble of beginnings, he rose to become a world-famous orator, newspaper editor, and champion of the rights of women and African Americans. He not only survived slavery to live in freedom but also became an outspoken critic...
A Strife of Tongues
The Compromise of 1850 and the Ideological Foundations of the American Civil War
Language: English
Release Date: June 21, 2018
Near the end of a nine-month confrontation preceding the Compromise of 1850, Abraham Venable warned his fellow congressmen that "words become things." Indeed, in politics—then, as now—rhetoric makes reality. But while the legislative maneuvering, factional alignments, and specific measures...
Marching Masters
Slavery, Race, and the Confederate Army during the Civil War
Language: English
Release Date: March 5, 2014
The Confederate army went to war to defend a nation of slaveholding states, and although men rushed to recruiting stations for many reasons, they understood that the fundamental political issue at stake in the conflict was the future of slavery. Most Confederate soldiers were not slaveholders themselves,...
Rome Reborn on Western Shores
Historical Imagination and the Creation of the American Republic
Language: English
Release Date: October 13, 2009
Rome Reborn on Western Shores examines the literature of the Revolutionary era to explore the ways in which American patriots employed the classics and to assess antiquity's importance to the early political culture of the United States. Where other writers have concentrated on political theory and...
by Michal Jan Rozbicki
Language: English
Release Date: February 1, 2011
Language: English
Release Date: February 1, 2011
In his new book, Michal Jan Rozbicki undertakes to bridge the gap between the political and the cultural histories of the American Revolution. Through a careful examination of liberty as both the ideological axis and the central metaphor of the age, he is able to offer a fresh model for interpreting...
Contract and Consent
Representation and the Jury in Anglo-American Legal History
Language: English
Release Date: February 3, 2010
In Contract and Consent, the renowned legal historian J. R. Pole posits that legal history has become highly specialized, while mainstream political and social historians frequently ignore cases that figure prominently in the legal literature. Pole makes a start at remedying the situation with a series...
Pulpit and Nation
Clergymen and the Politics of Revolutionary America
Language: English
Release Date: January 12, 2017
In Pulpit and Nation, Spencer McBride highlights the importance of Protestant clergymen in early American political culture, elucidating the actual role of religion in the founding era. Beginning with colonial precedents for clerical involvement in politics and concluding with false rumors of Thomas...
Steinbeck in Vietnam
Dispatches from the War
Language: English
Release Date: March 29, 2012
Although his career continued for almost three decades after the 1939 publication of The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck is still most closely associated with his Depression-era works of social struggle. But from Pearl Harbor on, he often wrote passionate accounts of America’s wars based on his...
First in the Homes of His Countrymen
George Washington's Mount Vernon in the American Imagination
Language: English
Release Date: December 14, 2016
Over the past two hundred years, Americans have reproduced George Washington’s Mount Vernon plantation house more often, and in a greater variety of media, than any of their country’s other historic buildings. In this highly original new book, Lydia Mattice Brandt chronicles America’s obsession...