The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 35: 1 August to 30 November 1801
Thomas Jefferson
Edited by Barbara B. Oberg
For the first two months covered by this volume, Thomas Jefferson is residing at Monticello, avoiding the "rather sickly" season in the nation's capital. His mountaintop house finally has a roof and both daughters and their families come to stay with him. Using cowpox vaccine received from Benjamin Waterhouse, he undertakes what he calls "my experiment," the systematic inoculation of family members and slaves against the smallpox.
In Washington, the construction of buildings for the nation's capital moves forward. The walls of the chamber of the House of Representatives now extend "up to the window heads," with only three feet more to go. Jefferson considers the erection of this chamber as well as completion of a "good gravel road" along Rock Creek as crucial for "ensuring the destinies of the city." The interior decoration of the President's House also progresses, with draperies, girandoles, and a chandelier furnishing the circular room. His carriage is ready to be shipped from Philadelphia.
As the city takes shape, so too do the operating principles of Jefferson's administration. He dispatches a letter to his heads of department outlining "the mode & degrees of communication" for conducting their business. In mid-November, he enters a period of intense activity in the preparation of his first annual message to Congress, soliciting suggestions but personally drafting the document that he will submit in writing in early December.
Barbara B. Oberg, senior research scholar and lecturer with the rank of professor at Princeton University, is general editor of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson.
Series:
• Papers of Thomas Jefferson
Barbara B. Oberg, General Editor
Cloth | February 2009 | $99.50 / £59.95
874 pp. | 6 x 9 | 8 duotones. 10 line illus.
Cloth: $99.50 ISBN13: 978-0-691-13773-5
The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series: Volume 5: 1 May 1812 to 10 March 1813
Thomas Jefferson
Edited by J. Jefferson Looney
Volume Five of the definitive edition of Thomas Jefferson's papers from the end of his presidency until his death includes 592 documents from 1 May 1812 to 10 March 1813. America declares war on Great Britain on 18 June 1812, and Jefferson counsels domestic reconciliation while suggesting that America recruit British incendiaries to burn London if necessary. Jefferson receives many requests for governmental patronage, responds insightfully to an assortment of authors and inventors, is mildly diverted by a fraudulent perpetual-motion machine, and spends considerable time on legal troubles. A dispute with David Michie over land in Albemarle County nearly leads to a duel between Michie and Jefferson's agent. A conflict with Samuel Scott over property in Campbell County further vexes Jefferson, who prepares an extensively researched answer to Scott's complaint. Despite the conflict, Jefferson graciously writes a letter of introduction for Scott's son. Jefferson remains accessible to the public, receives anonymous letters urging him to convert to Christianity, and settles a wager for one correspondent who asks if Jefferson ever met the British king. Jefferson gloomily observes that "the hand of age is upon me" and complains that his faculties are failing. He still has thirteen years to live.
J. Jefferson Looney is editor of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series, which is sponsored by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Charlottesville, Virginia.
Series:
• Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series
J. Jefferson Looney, Editor
812 pp. | 6 x 9 | 8 duotones. 10 line illus. 2 maps.
Cloth: $99.50 ISBN13: 978-0-691-13771-1
The Transatlantic Indian, 1776-1930
Kate Flint
This book takes a fascinating look at the iconic figure of the Native American in the British cultural imagination from the Revolutionary War to the early twentieth century and examines how Native Americans regarded the British, as well as how they challenged their own cultural image in Britain during this period. Kate Flint shows how the image of the Indian was used in English literature and culture for a host of ideological purposes, and she reveals its crucial role as symbol, cultural myth, and stereotype that helped to define British identity and its attitude toward the colonial world.
Through close readings of writers such as Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and D. H. Lawrence, Flint traces how the figure of the Indian was received, represented, and transformed in British fiction and poetry, travelogues, sketches, and journalism, as well as theater, paintings, and cinema. She describes the experiences of the Ojibwa and Ioway who toured Britain with George Catlin in the 1840s; the testimonies of the Indians in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show; and the performances and polemics of the Iroquois poet Pauline Johnson in London. Flint explores transatlantic conceptions of race, the role of gender in writings by and about Indians, and the complex political and economic relationships between Britain and America.
The Transatlantic Indian, 1776-1930 argues that native perspectives are essential to our understanding of transatlantic relations in this period and the development of transnational modernity.
Kate Flint is professor of English at Rutgers University. She is the author of The Victorians and the Visual Imagination and The Woman Reader, 1837-1914.
Endorsements:
"This is an important work of scholarship. By examining British responses to the presence of Indians in the Americas, and especially in North America, Flint offers a genuinely original perspective on both the history of representation of the figure of the Indian and the history of Indian-white relations. Her readings are smart and always judicious."--Lucy Maddox, Georgetown University
"Truly brilliant. Flint does what very few writers have done before, which is to acknowledge the role Native Americans--and the often contradictory representations of them--played in the British imagination. She brings her keen literary sensibility and her wonderful ability to read the visual culture of the Victorian era to this book in ways that do considerable justice to the complexity and importance of this topic."--Joseph W. Childers, University of California, Riverside
"An impressively comprehensive, ambitious, and informed book. Flint analyzes the cultural myths, stereotypes, and ideological constructions that shaped the understanding of Native Americans in a variety of British contexts and media, and also turns her lens upon Native American understandings of British culture. This is a very important book."--Amanda Anderson, Johns Hopkins University
Cloth: $35.00 ISBN13: 978-0-691-13120-7Cloth | February 2009 | $35.00 / £19.95
344 pp. | 6 x 9 | 40 halftones.
American Christians and Islam:
Evangelical Culture and Muslims from the Colonial Period to the Age of Global Terrorism
Thomas Kidd
In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, many of America's Christian evangelicals have denounced Islam as a "demonic" and inherently violent religion, provoking frustration among other Christian conservatives who wish to present a more appealing message to the world's Muslims. Yet as Thomas Kidd reveals in this sobering book, the conflicted views expressed by today's evangelicals have deep roots in American history.
Tracing Islam's role in the popular imagination of American Christians from the colonial period to today, Kidd demonstrates that Protestant evangelicals have viewed Islam as a global threat--while also actively seeking to convert Muslims to the Christian faith--since the nation's founding. He shows how accounts of "Mahometan" despotism and lurid stories of European enslavement by Barbary pirates fueled early evangelicals' fears concerning Islam, and describes the growing conservatism of American missions to Muslim lands up through the post-World War II era. Kidd exposes American Christians' anxieties about an internal Islamic threat from groups like the Nation of Islam in the 1960s and America's immigrant Muslim population today, and he demonstrates why Islam has become central to evangelical "end-times" narratives. Pointing to many evangelicals' unwillingness to acknowledge Islam's theological commonalities with Christianity and their continued portrayal of Islam as an "evil" and false religion, Kidd explains why Christians themselves are ironically to blame for the failure of evangelism in the Muslim world.
American Christians and Islam is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the causes of the mounting tensions between Christians and Muslims today.
Thomas Kidd is associate professor of history at Baylor University. He is the author of The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America and The Protestant Interest: New England after Puritanism.
Endorsements:
"American Christians and Islam gives historical perspective on a timely topic. Kidd provides a thorough examination of the prism through which American evangelicals have viewed Islam, a prism consisting of fears, challenges, and opportunities. He offers an important chapter in the story of American attitudes toward Muslims. This book fills a gap in the scholarship of American religious culture."--Frank Lambert, author of Religion in American Politics
"American Christians and Islam combines a timely subject, stylistic directness, and a broad scope to create an effective and useful historical survey of evangelical attitudes about Islam that is accessible to a wide audience. Kidd provides succinct readings and elucidates important patterns and shifts that offer readers a revealing overview of the engagements of U.S. evangelical culture with the Islamic world."--Timothy W. Marr, author of The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism
"A significant contribution to the field. There have been plenty of books on Western views of Islam, but none has focused exclusively or comprehensively on American Christian attitudes over such a long period. The scope and targeting of this book make it unique and pathbreaking."--Gerald R. McDermott, Roanoke College
216 pp. | 6 x 9 | 10 halftones.
ISBN13: 978-0-691-13349-2
Prices subject to change without notice
Taxation in Colonial America
Alvin Rabushka
Taxation in Colonial America examines life in the thirteen original American colonies through the revealing lens of the taxes levied on and by the colonists. Spanning the turbulent years from the founding of the Jamestown settlement to the outbreak of the American Revolution, Alvin Rabushka provides the definitive history of taxation in the colonial era, and sets it against the backdrop of enormous economic, political, and social upheaval in the colonies and Europe.
Rabushka shows how the colonists strove to minimize, avoid, and evade British and local taxation, and how they used tax incentives to foster settlement. He describes the systems of public finance they created to reduce taxation, and reveals how they gained control over taxes through elected representatives in colonial legislatures. Rabushka takes a comprehensive look at the external taxes imposed on the colonists by Britain, the Netherlands, and Sweden, as well as internal direct taxes like poll and income taxes. He examines indirect taxes like duties and tonnage fees, as well as county and town taxes, church and education taxes, bounties, and other charges. He links the types and amounts of taxes with the means of payment--be it gold coins, agricultural commodities, wampum, or furs--and he compares tax systems and burdens among the colonies and with Britain.
This book brings the colonial period to life in all its rich complexity, and shows how colonial attitudes toward taxation offer a unique window into the causes of the revolution.
Alvin Rabushka is the David and Joan Traitel Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His books include The Flat Tax.
Endorsements:
"A significant contribution. There is no other book like this one. It is a grand synthesis of mountains of previous work and colonial records. It pulls together a vast amount of scholarship of the past century or two, and in a convenient and accessible way. For anyone doing serious work on colonial taxation, it is the one book to have."--Richard Sylla, New York University
"Encyclopedic and definitive. I was deeply impressed by the wealth of detail quite unknown to me. This is the fruit of intensive and extensive scholarship."--Niall Ferguson, Harvard University
Cloth: $60.00 ISBN13: 978-0-691-13345-4
Cloth | 2008 | $60.00 / £35.00
968 pp. | 6 x 9 | 10 halftones. 1 map.
The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Volume 34: 1 May to 31 July 1801
Edited by Barbara B. Oberg
In Volume 34, covering May through July 1801, the story of Thomas Jefferson's first presidential administration continues to unfold. He quickly begins to implement his objectives of economy and efficiency in government. Requesting the chief clerk of the War Department to prepare a list of commissioned army officers, Jefferson has his secretary Meriwether Lewis label the names on the list with such descriptors as "Republican" or "Opposed to the administration, otherwise respectable officers." The president calls his moves toward a reduction in the army a "chaste reformation." Samuel Smith, interim head of the Navy Department, in accordance with the Peace Establishment Act, arranges for the sale of surplus warships. Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin gathers figures on revenues and expenses and suggests improvements in methods of collecting taxes. Jefferson delivers an eloquent statement on his policy of removals from office to the merchants of New Haven, who objected to his dismissal of the collector of the port of New Haven. He makes clear that while his inaugural address declared tolerance and respect for the minority, it did not mean that no offices would change hands. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Fourth of July, Jefferson entertains around one hundred citizens, including a delegation of five Cherokee chiefs. And on 30 July, Jefferson leaves the Federal City for two months at Monticello.
Barbara B. Oberg, senior research scholar and lecturer with the rank of professor at Princeton University, is general editor of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson.
Series:
* Papers of Thomas Jefferson
Barbara B. Oberg, General Editor
Cloth: $99.50 ISBN13: 978-0-691-13557-1
Cloth | 2008 | $99.50 / £59.95
816 pp. | 6 x 9 | 8 duotones.
The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series: Volume 4: 18 June 1811 to 30 April 1812
Edited by J. Jefferson Looney
Volume Four of this definitive edition of Thomas Jefferson's papers from the end of his presidency until his death includes 581 documents from 18 June 1811 to 30 April 1812. Between these two dates, Jefferson famously declares that, "tho' an old man, I am but a young gardener"; expresses hostility to dogs and joins in a petition for a tax to reduce their numbers; calculates lines for a horizontal sundial; surveys part of his Bedford County estate; and draws up work schedules for his Poplar Forest plantation and detailed slave lists for Poplar Forest and Monticello. Jefferson also takes readings of a solar eclipse; attempts to determine Monticello's longitude; measures Willis Mountain; and calls for a fixed international standard for measures, weights, and coins. Joseph Milligan publishes a revised edition of Jefferson's Manual of Parliamentary Practice in March 1812, and Jefferson sends William Wirt a detailed and colorful but largely negative portrait of Patrick Henry for use in his biography of the Virginia orator. Finally, and perhaps of greatest importance to posterity, in January 1812 correspondence resumes between Jefferson and his old friend John Adams, after a long hiatus resulting from their rivalry for the presidency in 1800.
J. Jefferson Looney is editor of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series, which is sponsored by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Charlottesville, Virginia.
Series:
* Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series
J. Jefferson Looney, Editor
Cloth | 2008 | $99.50 / £59.95
808 pp. | 6 x 9 | 10 duotones. 3 maps.
The Importance of Feeling English:
American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750-1850
Leonard Tennenhouse
American literature is typically seen as something that inspired its own conception and that sprang into being as a cultural offshoot of America’s desire for national identity. But what of the vast precedent established by English literature, which was a major American import between 1750 and 1850?
In The Importance of Feeling English, Leonard Tennenhouse revisits the landscape of early American literature and radically revises its features. Using the concept of transatlantic circulation, he shows how some of the first American authors--from poets such as Timothy Dwight and Philip Freneau to novelists like William Hill Brown and Charles Brockden Brown--applied their newfound perspective to pre-existing British literary models. These American “re-writings” would in turn inspire native British authors such as Jane Austen and Horace Walpole to reconsider their own ideas of subject, household, and nation.
The enduring nature of these literary exchanges dramatically recasts early American literature as a literature of diaspora, Tennenhouse argues--and what made the settlers’ writings distinctly and indelibly American was precisely their insistence on reproducing Englishness, on making English identity portable and adaptable. Written in an incisive and illuminating style, The Importance of Feeling English reveals the complex roots of American literature, and shows how its transatlantic movement aided and abetted the modernization of Anglophone culture at large.
Leonard Tennenhouse is professor of English, comparative literature, and modern culture and media at Brown University. He is the author of Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare’s Genres.
Endorsements:
“This book challenges the very notion of ‘American Literature’--what it is and how we date it--by daring not to assume ‘that different national governments mean different national literatures.’ It does so from a transatlantic perspective that, in Tennenhouse’s hands, achieves a new maturity and power. In reconceiving American literature, The Importance of Feeling English also points the way to a new understanding of British literary history.”--Clifford Siskin, New York University
“This book advances a bold and compelling new paradigm for understanding early American literature. Tennenhouse unsettles the long-standing premise that literature and culture are best understood within the framework of the nation; in so doing, he offers a fundamentally novel and revealing new account of early American literature.”--Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Yale University
Cloth | 2007 | $35.00 / £19.95
170 pp. | 6 x 9
Cloth: $35.00 ISBN13: 978-0-691-09681-0
Prices subject to change without notice
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8514.html
Benjamin Franklin's Numbers:
An Unsung Mathematical Odyssey
Paul C. Pasles
Few American lives have been as celebrated--or as closely scrutinized--as that of Benjamin Franklin. Yet until now Franklin's biographers have downplayed his interest in mathematics, at best portraying it as the idle musings of a brilliant and ever-restless mind. In Benjamin Franklin's Numbers, Paul Pasles reveals a side of the iconic statesman, scientist, and writer that few Americans know--his mathematical side.
In fact, Franklin indulged in many areas of mathematics, including number theory, geometry, statistics, and economics. In this generously illustrated book, Pasles gives us the first mathematical biography of Benjamin Franklin. He draws upon previously unknown sources to illustrate Franklin's genius for numbers as never before. Magic squares and circles were a lifelong fascination of Franklin's. Here, for the first time, Pasles gathers every one of these marvelous creations together in one place. He explains the mathematics behind them and Franklin's hugely popular Poor Richard's Almanac, which featured such things as population estimates and a host of mathematical digressions. Pasles even includes optional math problems that challenge readers to match wits with the bespectacled Founding Father himself. Written for a general audience, this book assumes no technical skills beyond basic arithmetic.
Benjamin Franklin's Numbers is a delightful blend of biography, history, and popular mathematics. If you think you already know Franklin's story, this entertaining and richly detailed book will make you think again.
Paul C. Pasles is associate professor of mathematical sciences at Villanova University.
Reviews:
"Pasles...speculates gleefully on the oft-denied mathematical genius of Benjamin Franklin...Drawing on Franklin's letters and journals as well as modern-day reconstructions of his library, Pasles touches on Franklin's fondness for magazines of mathematical diversions; publication of arithmetic problems in Poor Richard's Almanac; startlingly accurate projections of population growth and cost-benefit arguments against slavery."--Publisher's Weekly
"Pasles delivers surprising news to Sudoku lovers: Benjamin Franklin once shared their passion...Pasles illuminates Franklin's innovative use of mathematical logic in settling moral questions and in assessing population trends. Franklin's mathematical pursuits thus emerge as a complement to his much-lauded work in politics and science. An unexpected but welcome perspective on the genial genius of Philadelphia." -Bryce Christensen, Booklist
Endorsements:
"Here's a book like no other, in which the life and times of Benjamin Franklin are viewed through a mathematical lens. It is at once lively and scholarly, and contains much fascinating material that will be new to mathematicians, historians, and everyone else. Did you know that the success of the American Revolution may have depended on magic squares? Paul Pasles tells why. Don't worry--the book is equation free."--Underwood Dudley, author of Numerology
"As a mathematician and Philadelphian, I was delighted to learn of how extensive were Franklin's contributions to mathematics. Ranging from topics in 'social arithmetic' such as demographics, utility theory, the twin scourges of hereditary advantage and slavery, daylight savings time, and even war and peace to puzzles, combinatorics, and magic squares, his work, as revealed in Paul Pasles's wonderful new book, reveals another facet of this polymathic statesman."--John Allen Paulos, author of Innumeracy
For customers in the U.S., Canada, Latin America, Asia, and Australia
Cloth: $26.95 ISBN13: 978-0-691-12956-3War, Wine, and Taxes:
The Political Economy of Anglo-French Trade, 1689-1900
John V. C. Nye
In War, Wine, and Taxes, John Nye debunks the myth that Britain was a free-trade nation during and after the industrial revolution, by revealing how the British used tariffs--notably on French wine--as a mercantilist tool to politically weaken France and to respond to pressure from local brewers and others. The book reveals that Britain did not transform smoothly from a mercantilist state in the eighteenth century to a bastion of free trade in the late nineteenth.
This boldly revisionist account gives the first satisfactory explanation of Britain's transformation from a minor power to the dominant nation in Europe. It also shows how Britain and France negotiated the critical trade treaty of 1860 that opened wide the European markets in the decades before World War I. Going back to the seventeenth century and examining the peculiar history of Anglo-French military and commercial rivalry, Nye helps us understand why the British drink beer not wine, why the Portuguese sold liquor almost exclusively to Britain, and how liberal, eighteenth-century Britain managed to raise taxes at an unprecedented rate--with government revenues growing five times faster than the gross national product.
War, Wine, and Taxes stands in stark contrast to standard interpretations of the role tariffs played in the economic development of Britain and France, and sheds valuable new light on the joint role of commercial and fiscal policy in the rise of the modern state.
John V. C. Nye is Professor of Economics and History at Washington University in St. Louis. From the Fall of 2007, he will be Professor of Economics at George Mason University and will occupy the Frederic Bastiat Chair in Political Economy at the Mercatus Center.
Endorsements:
"In War, Wine, and Taxes John Nye overturns the widespread belief that Britain promoted the free trade that eventually brought so many benefits in the nineteenth century. Britain, it turns out, was surprisingly protectionist, and the political economy of its tariffs has left a mark on French winemaking and on British pubs that still survives today."--Philip T. Hoffman, author of Growth in a Traditional Society: The French Countryside, 1450-1815
"The humorist Artemus Ward famously said, 'It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us into trouble. It's the things we do know that just ain't so.' Everyone knows that England was the first European nation to move, largely unilaterally, toward a free-trade regime. And everyone also knows that this was the cause of British prosperity and power. The problem is that it just ain't so, as Nye shows in this remarkable book. Using data that have long been available, but that have never been compiled and compared in any systematic manner, Nye meticulously discredits the conventional wisdom. And the history he writes of the economics of trade in beer and wine is a tour de force, well written and with as many strange characters and unexpected twists as a detective novel. It is no exaggeration to say that this is the most controversial, and possibly the most important, book on political economy yet published in the new millennium."--Michael Munger, Duke University
Series: Princeton Economic History of the Western World
Joel Mokyr, Editor
Cloth: $29.95 ISBN13: 978-0-691-12917-4
Cloth | 2007 | $29.95 / £17.95192 pp. | 6 x 9 | 29 line illus.35 tables.
The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Retirement Series, Volume 3: 12 August 1810 to 17 June 1811
Edited by J. Jefferson Looney
Volume Three of the definitive edition of Thomas Jefferson’s papers from the end of his presidency until his death presents 567 documents covering the period from 12 August 1810 to 17 June 1811. Jefferson is now firmly ensconced in retirement at Monticello and Poplar Forest. He is not free from legal and political concerns, however, with the controversy over the 1807 federal seizure of the Batture Sainte Marie at New Orleans looming particularly large. Jefferson prepares for his defense against Edward Livingston’s lawsuit by corresponding at length with his counsel and involved public officials, and seeking out documents and legal authorities to vindicate himself. He also seeks to end Philadelphia journalist William Duane’s growing estrangement from mainstream Republican politics, lobbies for the appointment of a committed Republican to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court, and argues with the Rivanna Company over its proposed encroachments on his property. Other highlights are Jefferson’s draft constitution for an agricultural society, his astronomical calculations, his notes on plantings at Poplar Forest, and his estimate of the cost of shipping flour. Documents on slaves and slavery include discussions of schemes for colonizing freed slaves in Africa, information on the medical condition of some of Jefferson’s slaves, and an account of a visit to Monticello with a distinctly unflattering portrayal of the ex-president’s standing in the community and his relations with his slaves.
J. Jefferson Looney is Editor of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series, sponsored by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc., Charlottesville, Virginia.
Cloth | 2007 | $99.50 / £65.00 | ISBN13: 978-0-691-12867-2 | 768 pp. | 6 x 9 | 8 duotones. 3 maps.
Series: Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, J. Jefferson Looney, EditorSovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic
Jeremy Adelman
A pioneering account of Spain's and Portugal's empires in the age of revolutions, this book argues that modern notions of sovereignty in the Atlantic world have been unstable, contested, and equivocal from the start. It shows how much contemporary notions of statehood in the Americas grew out of a response to European imperial crises. Jeremy Adelman reveals how many modern-day uncertainties about property, citizenship, and capitalism were forged in an epic contest over the nature of state power in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic offers a new understanding of history, one that blurs traditional distinctions between the "imperial" and the "colonial." It follows the arc from imperial revival to imperial breakup. As European conflicts and revolutions swept across the Atlantic, colonists were forced to question their loyalties and shift their interests. The emergence of Latin American nations--indeed many of our notions of sovereignty--was the effect, and not the cause, of the breakdown of ancien regime empires.
Jeremy Adelman is Walter Samuel Carpenter III Professor of Spanish Civilization and Culture, and Chair of the History Department, at Princeton University. His most recent book, Republic of Capital: Buenos Aires and the Legal Transformation of the New World, won the American Historical Association's Atlantic History Prize.
Endorsements:
"A splendid book. Jeremy Adelman's stimulating and important work should shake up the study of nationalism, while contributing to a recent body of scholarship that emphasizes the long-lasting importance of empire."--Frederick Cooper, New York University, author of Colonialism in Question
"Jeremy Adelman has written a book of impressive architecture, offering a broadly researched and sophisticated interpretation of the independence era in Spanish South America and Brazil. Adelman's innovative interpretation is likely to spark a lively debate on ways of understanding the independence process in Latin America."--Frank Safford, Northwestern University
Cloth | January 2007 | $39.95 / £26.95 | ISBN: 0-691-12664-X408 pp. | 6 x 9 | 5 halftones. 1 table.
Culture and Redemption:
Religion, the Secular, and American Literature
Tracy Fessenden
Many Americans wish to believe that the United States, founded in religious tolerance, has gradually and naturally established a secular public sphere that is equally tolerant of all religions--or none. Culture and Redemption suggests otherwise. Tracy Fessenden contends that the uneven separation of church and state in America, far from safeguarding an arena for democratic flourishing, has functioned instead to promote particular forms of religious possibility while containing, suppressing, or excluding others. At a moment when questions about the appropriate role of religion in public life have become trenchant as never before, Culture and Redemption radically challenges conventional depictions--celebratory or damning--of America's "secular" public sphere.
Examining American legal cases, children's books, sermons, and polemics together with popular and classic works of literature from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, Culture and Redemption shows how the vaunted secularization of American culture proceeds not as an inevitable by-product of modernity, but instead through concerted attempts to render dominant forms of Protestant identity continuous with democratic, civil identity. Fessenden shows this process to be thoroughly implicated, moreover, in practices of often-violent exclusion that go to the making of national culture: Indian removals, forced acculturations of religious and other minorities, internal and external colonizations, and exacting constructions of sex and gender. Her new readings of Emerson, Whitman, Melville, Stowe, Twain, Gilman, Fitzgerald, and others who address themselves to these dynamics in intricate and often unexpected ways advance a major reinterpretation of American writing.
Tracy Fessenden is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Women's and Gender Studies at Arizona State University. She is the coeditor of The Puritan Origins of American Sex: Religion, Sexuality, and National Identity in American Literature.
Endorsements:
"Culture and Redemption is a wonderfully refreshing book about anomalies of power among America's religions and cultures. Tracy Fessenden's expansive and often surprising readings demonstrate that strongly Protestant and broadly religious concerns persistently upended the seemingly natural triumph of secularism in America, with powerful effects on our literature and ethics alike. In short, a fascinating book."--Jon Butler, Yale University
"Tracy Fessenden's Culture and Redemption is an important work of scholarship. The book makes a compelling case for seeing particular forms of Protestant religion as an 'unmarked category' in American cultural analysis and urges a rethinking of some major works of American literature in relation to that category. The book is tightly argued, thoroughly researched, and consistently well written."--Lucy Maddox, Georgetown University
"This extraordinary, potentially landmark work is thickly textured, intellectually nuanced, and relentlessly insightful. Analyzing Puritan sermons, early school primers, and the nineteenth-century canon, Tracy Fessenden reveals the religious legacies and hidden agendas of American secularism. Her chapter on The Great Gatsby is a tour de force."--Thomas J. Ferraro, Duke University
Cloth | December 2006 | $35.00 / £22.95 | ISBN: 0-691-04963-7352 pp. | 6 x 9 | 6 line illus.
The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series: Volume 2: 16 November 1809 to 11 August 1810
Thomas Jefferson
Edited by J. Jefferson Looney
The definitive edition of Thomas Jefferson's papers from the end of his presidency until his death continues with Volume Two, which covers the period from 16 November 1809 to 11 August 1810. Both incoming and outgoing letters are included, totaling 518 documents printed in full. General themes include Jefferson's financial troubles, which eventually led him to loan himself a large sum of money he was managing for Tadeusz Kosciuszko; his preparations to face a lawsuit stemming from his decision as president to remove Edward Livingston from a valuable property in New Orleans; other legal complications involving his landholdings and the settlement of estates he had inherited long before; his plans to breed merino sheep and share them gratis with his fellow Virginians; and his ongoing interest in the Republican party's success.
Highlights include a long list of books on agriculture that Jefferson probably compiled to guide the Library of Congress in its purchases; descriptions of inventions by Robert Fulton and more obscure figures such as the New Orleans engineer Godefroi Du Jareau; Jefferson's draft letter criticizing the Quakers as unpatriotic, much of which he later deleted; the letter in which he ordered a set of silver tumblers that have become known as the Jefferson Cups; and an important treatise on taxation by the distinguished French political economist Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours, published here for the first time.
J. Jefferson Looney is Editor of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series, sponsored by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc., Charlottesville, Virginia. He was formerly editor and project director of the Dictionary of Virginia Biography, and author or editor of several works on the history of Princeton University.
Series: Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series
J. Jefferson Looney, Editor
Subject Area: American History
For customers in the U.S., Canada, Latin America, Asia, and Australia
Cloth: $99.50 ISBN: 0-691-12490-6
Cloth: £65.00 ISBN: 0-691-12490-6
Cloth | 2006 | $99.50 / £65.00 | ISBN: 0-691-12490-6
812 pp. | 6 x 9 | 8 halftones. 6 line illus. 2 maps.
The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Volume 32: 1 June 1800 to 16 February 1801
Thomas Jefferson
Edited by Barbara B. Oberg
"I have sometimes asked myself whether my country is the better for my having lived at all?" Jefferson muses in this volume. His answer: "I do not know that it is." Required by custom to be "entirely passive" during the presidential campaign, Jefferson, at Monticello during the summer of 1800, refrains from answering attacks on his character, responds privately to Benjamin Rush's queries about religion, and learns of rumors of his own death. Yet he is in good health, harvests a bountiful wheat crop, and maintains his belief that the American people will shake off the Federalist thrall. He counsels James Monroe, the governor of Virginia, on the mixture of leniency and firmness to be shown in the wake of the aborted revolt of slaves led by the blacksmith Gabriel.
Arriving in Washington in November, Jefferson reports that the election "is the only thing of which any thing is said here." He is aware of Alexander Hamilton's efforts to undermine John Adams, and of desires by some Federalists to give interim executive powers to a president pro tem of the Senate. But the Republicans have made no provision to prevent the tie of electoral votes between Jefferson and Aaron Burr. Jefferson calls Burr's conduct "honorable & decisive" before prospects of intrigue arise as the nation awaits the decision of the House of Representatives. As the volume closes, the election is still unresolved after six long days of balloting by the House.
Barbara B. Oberg, Senior Research Scholar and Lecturer with the Rank of Professor at Princeton University, is General Editor of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson.
Series:
Papers of Thomas Jefferson
Barbara B. Oberg, Editor
Subject Area: American History
718 pp. | 6 x 9 | 8 halftones. 4 line illus.
Cloth: $99.50 ISBN: 0-691-12489-2
May 13, 2008