Although individually and collectively Americans have many histories, the dominant view of our national past focuses on the colonial era. The reasons for this are many and complex, touching on stories of the country's origins and of the founding fathers, the privileged position in history granted the thirteen original colonies, and the ways in which the nation has adjusted to change and modernity. But no matter the cause, the result is obvious: images and forms derived from and related to America's colonial past are the single most popular form of cultural expression.

Often conceived solely in architectural terms, from the red-brick and white-trimmed buildings that recall eighteenth-century James River estates to the clapboarded saltboxes that recall early New England, Colonial Revival is in fact better understood as a process of remembering. In Re-creating the American Past, architectural historian Richard Guy Wilson and a host of other scholars examine how and why Colonial Revival has persisted in modern times. The volume contains essays that explore Colonial Revival expressions in architecture, landscape architecture, historic preservation, decorative arts, and painting and sculpture, as well as the social, intellectual, and cultural background of the phenomena.

Based on the University of Virginia's landmark 2000 conference "The Colonial Revival in America," Re-creating the American Past is a comprehensive and handsome volume that recovers the origins, characteristics, diversity, and significance of the Colonial Revival, situating it within the broader history of American design, culture, and society.

Richard Guy Wilson is Commonwealth Professor of Architectural History at the University of Virginia and author of The Colonial Revival House among other books. Shaun Eyring is Manager, Resource Planning and Compliance, Northeast Region, National Park Service. Kenny Marotta is a writer and editor living in Charlottesville, Virginia.

432 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
132 b&w illustrations
Cloth ISBN 0-8139-2348-4 • $49.50
Available February 2006

Our nation has produced comparatively few statesmen since the eighteenth century—only Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt seem to clearly qualif—whereas the American Revolution elevated several of its key players to a status of the first political order. Even the shortest list must include Franklin, Hamilton, and the first four presidents.

The opening essays in Don Higginbotham’s new collection look at the epochal achievements of the Revolutionary era through the perspectives of war, leadership, and state formation. Higginbotham examines how the blend of key personages influenced the creation of a federal system and led to the establishment of a new kind of militia and of West Point, a military academy distinctly different from its counterparts in Europe. The collection also provides a fascinating view into the character of George Washington through an essay examining his relationships with women.

The concluding essays turn to the post-Revolutionary era to examine how the North and South, despite profound and persistent bonds, began to grow apart. Higginbotham traces the deepening sectional crisis within the context of the election of Lincoln, and he ends his book with the approach of a second revolution—that of the Confederacy.

All of the essays demonstrate Higginbotham's belief that history is not shaped simply by vast, impersonal forces but that, on the contrary, significant and lasting change is to a large extent brought about by the interaction and decisions of individuals. Our unique and remarkable history is a reflection of remarkable people.

Don Higginbotham, author of George Washington and the American Military Tradition and George Washington Reconsidered (Virginia), among numerous other books, is Dowd Professor of History and Peace, War, and Defense at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

240 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Cloth ISBN 0-8139-2383-2 • $49.50
Paper ISBN 0-8139-2384-0 • $19.50
Available October 2005

Contributors:
Tom Webster (University of Edinburgh) * Mark Peterson (University of Iowa) * David Hall (Harvard Divinity School) * Alexandra Walsham (University of Exeter) * Alden Vaughan (Emeritus, Columbia University) * Virginia Vaughan (Clark University) * Richard Ross (University of Illinois Law School) * James Hart (University of Oklahoma) *Richard Godbeer (University of Miami) * Mark Valeri (Union Theological Seminary of Virginia)

Francis J. Bremer is Professor of History at Millersville University, editor of the Massachusetts Historical Society’s Winthrop Papers, and the author of John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father. Lynn A. Botelho, Associate Professor of History at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, is the author of Old Age and the English Poor Law, 1500–1700.

220 pages, 6 x 9 1/4
Cloth ISBN 0-934909-88-1 • $50.00
Massachusetts Historical Society

Americans did not at first cherish the idea of political severance from their mother country. In just a few years, however, they came to desire independence above all else. What brought about this change of feeling and how did it affect the lives of their citizens? To answer these questions, Edmund S. Morgan looks at three men who may fairly be called the "architects of independence," the first presidents of the United States. Anecdotes from their letters and diaries recapture the sense of close identity many early Americans felt with their country's political struggles. Through this perspective, Morgan examines the growth of independence from its initial declaration and discovers something of its meaning, for three men who responded to its challenge and for the nation that they helped create.
The Meaning of Independence, first published in 1976, has become one of the standard short works on the first three presidents of the United States—George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. When the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association and the Organization of American Historians asked 1,500 historians to name the ten best books about George Washington, this book was one of those selected. In this updated edition, the author provides a new preface to address a few remaining concerns he has pondered in the quarter century since first publication.

Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown

Helen C. Rountree

Pocahontas may be the most famous Native American who ever lived, but during the settlement of Jamestown, and for two centuries afterward, the great chiefs Powhatan and Opechancanough were the subjects of considerably more interest and historical documentation than the young woman. It was Opechancanough who captured the foreign captain "Chawnzmit"--John Smith. Smith gave Opechancanough a compass, described to him a spherical earth that revolved around the sun, and wondered if his captor was a cannibal. Opechancanough, who was no cannibal and knew the world was flat, presented Smith to his elder brother, the paramount chief Powhatan. The chief, who took the name of his tribe as his throne name (his personal name was Wahunsenacawh), negotiated with Smith over a lavish feast and opened the town to him, leading Smith to meet, among others, Powhatan's daughter Pocahontas. Thinking he had made an ally, the chief finally released Smith. Within a few decades, and against their will, his people would be subjects of the British Crown.

Despite their roles as senior politicians in these watershed events, no biography of either Powhatan or Opechancanough exists. And while there are other "biographies" of Pocahontas, they have for the most part elaborated on her legend more than they have addressed the known facts of her remarkable life. As the 400th anniversary of Jamestown's founding approaches, nationally renowned scholar of Native Americans, Helen Rountree, provides in a single book the definitive biographies of these three important figures. In their lives we see the whole arc of Indian experience with the English settlers - from the wary initial encounters presided over by Powhatan, to the uneasy diplomacy characterized by the marriage of Pocahontas and John Rolfe, to the warfare and eventual loss of native sovereignty that came during Opechancanough's reign.

Writing from an ethnohistorical perspective that looks as much to anthropology as the written records, Rountree draws a rich portrait of Powhatan life in which the land and the seasons governed life and the English were seen not as heroes but as Tassantassas (strangers), as invaders, even as squatters. The Powhatans were a nonliterate people, so we have had to rely until now on the white settlers for our conceptions of the Jamestown experiment. This important book at last reconstructs the other side of the story.

Helen C. Rountree , Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Old Dominion University, is the author and editor of numerous works on the Native Americans of the East Coast, including   Powhatan Foreign Relations, 1500-1722 and, with Thomas E. Davidson, Eastern Shore Indians of Virginia and Maryland (both Virginia).

The Maddens of Culpeper County, Virginia, A 200-Year Family History

T. O. Madden

with Ann L. Mille, Foreword by Nell Irvin Painter

In August of 1758, in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, a poor Irish immigrant named Mary Madden bore a child, Sarah Madden, whose father was said to be a slave and the property of Colonel James Madison, father of the future president of the United States. This daughter, though born to a free mulatto, became indentured to the Madisons. There she worked as a seamstress to pay off the fine of her birth until she was thirty-one years old.

Sarah Madden bore ten children; when the term of her indenture was over, she and her youngest son, Willis, struck out for themselves--Sarah as a seamstress, laundress, and later, with Willis, a dairy farmer and tavern keeper.

  Spanning two hundred years of American history, We Were Always Free tells its story with remarkable completeness. We can thank Sarah Madden and her descendants for keeping their family narrative alive--and for saving hundreds of important documents detailing their freedom, hardship, and daily work.

These documents came to light in 1949 when T. O. Madden Jr. discovered a hidebound trunk originally belonging to his great-grandfather Willis. Stored in the trunk were papers dating back to the mid-eighteenth century, freedom papers, papers of indenture, deeds of land, Sarah Madden's laundry and seamstress record books, letters, traveling passes. The trunk even held a full set of business records from the nineteenth century when Madden's Tavern flourished as a center of activity in Orange County and as a rest stop on the road to Fredericksburg.

From that day forward, T. O. Madden deeply researched his family, using census reports, other official sources, family, and friends. All have led to his ably reconstructed family history, and to his own remarkable story.

We Were Always Free is a unique and very American family saga.

T. O. Madden, Jr. was born in 1903 on the Maddenville farm in Culpeper County, Virginia, where he continued to live until shortly before his death in 2000. Ann L. Miller is historian for the Virginia Transportation Research Council and a consultant historian to Montpelier, the former home of President James Madison in Orange County, Virginia.

Dumas Malone

6-volume boxed set

Dumas Malone's classic biography Jefferson and His Time --originally published in six volumes over a period of thirty-four years, between 1948 and 1982--was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in history and became the standard work on Jefferson's life. The University of Virginia Press is pleased to announce that the complete, illustrated six-volume biography is available for the first time in a handsome boxed set. Merrill Peterson, editor of the Library of America edition of Thomas Jefferson's writings, has contributed a new foreword to the Virginia edition.

  Volume 1. Jefferson the Virginian

  This first volume explores the early phases of Jefferson's life, from his youth, education, legal career, and marriage, to the building of Monticello, writing of the Declaration of Independence and his highly contentious governorship.

Volume 2. Jefferson and the Rights of Man

In this second volume, Malone recounts the eventful middle years of Jefferson's life, beginning with the European mission and Jefferson's ministry to France and continuing through his role in the French revolution and his memorable service as secretary of state in the first cabinet of George Washington.

  Volume 3. Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty

Beginning with Jefferson's final year of service as secretary of state in Washington's cabinet, this volume takes on one of the most significant and controversial years in Jefferson's life and indeed in modern Western history, while also exploring Jefferson's retirement to Monticello, his decision to lead the opposition party, and his own election as president in 1801.

  Volume 4. Jefferson the President; First Term, 1801-1805

Examining the first four years of Jefferson's presidency, this volume provides a fascinating account of the Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson's continuing opposition to Hamilton's charge for an overriding central government, and his battle with the Supreme Court.

Volume 5. Jefferson the President; Second Term, 1805-1809

Covering the climax of Jefferson's forty-year career, this fifth and penultimate volume follows Jefferson through his demanding second term as president, when he famously sponsors the Lewis and Clark expedition, confronts the trial of Aaron Burr, and concludes the naval "war" with the Barbary pirates.

Volume 6. The Sage of Monticello

  "[W]ith splendid insight and artistry, Professor Dumas Malone has reconstructed the world through which Jefferson passed, and preserved and presented to us a complex and engaging Jefferson, in a masterpiece of humanistic scholarship." National Endowment for the Humanities, The Chairman's Citation, presented to Dumas Malone April 30, 1979

This final volume provides an all-encompassing account of Jefferson's accomplishments, friendships, and family difficulties in his last seventeen years, revealing his shift from the realm of politics to his roles as family man, architect, and educational enthusiast. Describing Jefferson's retirement from Washington, this volume recounts the events that formed Jefferson's final years, particularly the founding of the Library of Congress and the University of Virginia, in which he played a major role.

Dumas Malone , 1892-1986, spent thirty-eight years researching and writing Jefferson and His Time. In 1975 he received the Pulitzer Prize in history for the first five volumes. From 1923 to 1929 he taught at the University of Virginia; he left there to join the Dictionary of American Biography , bringing that work to completion as editor-in-chief. Subsequently, he served for seven years as director of the Harvard University Press. After serving on the faculties of Yale and Columbia, Malone retired to the University of Virginia in 1959 as the Jefferson Foundation Professor of History, a position he held until his retirement in 1962. He remained at the university as biographer-in-residence and finished his Jefferson biography at the University of Virginia, where it was begun.

6-volume boxed set

6 x 9 129 b&w illustrations
Cloth ISBN 0-8139-2354-9·
$150.00 Available June 2005

"Albemarle is more than a high-end picture book, though it's sure to look magnificent on many a holiday coffee table... Llewellyn's photographs are superb, and Chenoweth's essay provocative; the two together represent nothing short of a new genre of art book."
—The Hook Weekly (Charlottesville, VA)

In Albemarle, photographer Robert Llewellyn and writer Avery Chenoweth explore how the landscape of Albemarle County, where the Virginia piedmont meets the Blue Ridge Mountains, and its people have helped create an American sense of identity.

Complemented by Llewellyn's luxurious color photography, the narrative rolls back 15,000 years to the first signs of human habitation, continues through the Colonial period, and arrives in the modern era. The story traces the evolving culture of landscape as it has been played out in the lives of historic figures, from the Monacans to the Moderns, Thomas Jefferson to Lady Bird Johnson, Edgar Allan Poe to Teddy Roosevelt. With a sweeping view of aesthetics, spirituality, religion, and history, the book itself is a work of art, essential reading, and viewing, for anyone who has lived in, or been inspired by, the landscape of Albemarle County.

Excerpt
"From the vast pattern of a landscape to the small enclosure behind the house, we blend the elements of water and flower and fruit into an atmosphere of spiritual intimacy. In this manner of taking care, we follow an ancient path into an emotional landscape where all things are in harmony. And yet the story that we found in the Albemarle landscape is one that expands into larger spaces altogether. This landscape, which we believe is unique, encompasses our earliest ideas of America."

Avery Chenoweth is a Charlottesville writer whose work has appeared in Harper's, Spy, Lingua Franca, and the New York Times. His novel-in-stories, Wingtips, was short-listed for the Library of Virginia Fiction Prize and nominated for the Sue Kaufman prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Robert Llewellyn has more than 30 books of photography to his credit, including Upland Virginia, The Academical Village, and Williamsburg, Jamestown, Yorktown: America's Historic Triangle. His book, Washington, the Capital, was an official diplomatic gift of the White House and the State Department.

175 pages, 10 1/4 x 12 1/2
100 color illustrations
Cloth ISBN 0-9742707-0-9 • $49.95

William M. Kelso

Originally published in 1984
New introduction 2003

In 1971 William Kelso happened almost by chance on an archaeological find that would open a new door on the rural history of colonial Tidewater Virginia. Erosion had revealed a brick well shaft in a cliff on the James River; above this was an earthen fort and, a bit farther downriver, the remains of a plantation manor. These would be the first of many intriguing discoveries to be made in the area known as Kingsmill. Though the land’s owners agreed to cooperate with, and even fund, an archaeological study of the area, the excavation schedule would have to keep one step ahead of the work on a major residential development. For centuries, time had stood still in Kingsmill; now the clock was suddenly ticking.

Kingsmill Plantations, Kelso’s first-hand account of a great feat of rescue archaeology, covers a three-year period and the excavation of 15 separate sites. The various properties dated as far back as 1619—placing them among the earliest of American settlements—and continued up through the 18th century. Because the division of labor on the Kingsmill plantations was typical of the era, the settlement could provide an invaluable microcosmic view of colonial Virginia. Meticulous study of the structures and their surroundings—including faunal analyses and inventories of entire households—allowed Kelso and his colleagues to construct a remarkably detailed picture of life in Kingsmill over the course of nearly 200 years.

At once scholarly and highly readable, Kingsmill Plantations speaks to both expert and amateur. An extensive collection of illustrations—including maps, diagrams, and contemporary and archival photographs—makes the narrative especially vivid.

Distributed for WMK Press

William M. Kelso is Director of Archaeology for the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities’ Jamestown Rediscovery project. His collection of short accounts of the project, Jamestown Rediscovery, is published by Virginia.

250 pages, 7 1/2 x 9 1/4
139 b&w illustrations
Paper ISBN 0-917565-12-6 • $19.95

Because colonialism entailed, indeed required, controlling how history is told, native and non-native scholars have tended to write parallel histories without ever examining points of intersection. Reinterpreting New England Indians and the Colonial Experience is the first volume specifically designed to examine the intersection, overlapping, and conflict of the scholar’s past and the native present. The chapters include work by younger as well as established scholars, work by natives and non-natives, and collaborative efforts by Indian and non-Indian scholars. Collectively, the essays suggest some of the new directions scholars are pursuing, as well as some ways of thinking about history that are new to academia but very old in native communities. The authors peer beneath the surface history of events to understand how non-Indian peoples projected and perpetuated colonialism and how Indian peoples in southern New England experienced and responded to it. Although differences in emphasis and interpretation will continue to characterize their scholarship, the authors transform our sense of the New England past, as lived and as written about, and the ways it continues to shape the present.

Colin G. Calloway is Professor of History and Native American Studies and Chair of Native American Studies at Dartmouth College. The most recent of his many books is One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark. Neal Salisbury, Professor of History at Smith College, is the author of numerous books, including Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England.

368 pages, 6 x 9
17 b&w illustrations
Cloth ISBN 0-9620737-6-8 • $39.50

The Papers of George Washington
Revolutionary War SeriesThe massive Revolutionary War Series (1775-1783) presents in documents and annotation the myriad military and political matters with which Washington dealt during the long war for American independence.

Volume 14: March-April 1778
Volume 14 of the Revolutionary War Series opens in March 1778 with Washington praising his troops for their "uncomplaining Patience" at Valley Forge. By late April, he is ready to consult his generals about his upcoming camapaign, and whether it is best to attempt to drive the British from Philadelphia by assualt or siege, to shift the campaign with a strike against New York City, or remain in camp drilling the Army until the British took the field.

832 pages • 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
$75.00 S • cloth
ISBN 0-8139-2282-8 • Available June 2004

The American army was badly in need of reform. Attrition and ineffective recruitment had left most of the Continental regiments dangerously weak, and the rising pace of officer resignations made apparent the need for an equitable pay and pensionary establishment. At the same time the battle losses of the previous summer and autumn had exposed severe problems in military organization, drill, and discipline. Washington hoped that a congressional camp committee would rectify some of these problems, and after consulting his officers on army organization, he submitted to the committee one of the longest, most detailed, and most thoughtful letters he ever wrote. The arrival in camp of a Prussian volunteer who styled himself the Baron von Steuben, meanwhile, promised to bring about improvements in drill and discipline. Washington also had to look to his own authority, as a dispute with Major Generals Thomas Conway and Horatio Gates seemingly threatened to undermine his command of the Continental army.

The turning point of the Valley Forge encampment came in February 1778, when a provision shortage led to what Washington called a “fatal crisis” that threatened the continued existence of the army. Poor management of the commissary department and a breakdown of transport, resulting from bad weather and an insufficiency of wagons, combined to bring about a logistical collapse that brought provision supplies almost to a halt. For many days bread was scarce and meat almost nonexistent. Soldiers, many dressed literally in rags because of the incompetence of the clothier general, threatened mutiny. Washington’s efforts to save his army in this crisis mark one of the highest points of his military career and make up an important part of this volume.

832 pages • 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
$75.00 S • cloth
ISBN 0-8139-2220-8

The Papers of George Washington
Revolutionary War Series

The massive Revolutionary War Series (1775-1783) presents in documents and annotation the myriad military and political matters with which Washington dealt during the long war for American independence.

Volume 12: October-December 1777
Edited by Frank E. Grizzard Jr.

Volume 12 of the Revolutionary War Series documents Washington's unsuccessful efforts to capitalize on the American victory at Saratoga and his decision to encamp the Continental army for the winter at Valley Forge. The volume opens with the British forces at Philadelphia, where they had returned following the Battle of Germantown, and the Continental army, in Washington's words, "hovering round them, to distress and retard their operations as much as possible." Recognizing the importance of restricting communication between General William Howe and the British fleet, Washington dispatched a brigade to New Jersey to assist in the defense of Forts Mifflin and Mercer, key components in the American effort to obstruct the Delaware River.

Upon receiving news of the surrender of British general John Burgoyne's army to Major General Horatio Gates at Saratoga, Washington called a council of war to consider his army's options. Although his generals advised against an immediate assault on Philadelphia, Washington perceived an opportunity to defeat Howe and dispatched his aide-de-camp Alexander Hamilton to the northern department to urge upon General Gates the "absolute necessity" of sending a "very considerable" reinforcement to the main army. If those troops arrived before the British could open a supply route on the Delaware or be reinforced from New York, then the American forces could "in all probability reduce Genl Howe to the same situation in which Genl Burgoine now is." There was little further that Washington could do to strengthen the Delaware River defenses, however, and despite the determined efforts of Fort Mifflin's defenders, the Americans were forced to evacuate the fort in mid-November following a sustained bombardment from British land and naval artillery. Moreover, British and Hessian troops from New York arrived before Washington's reinforcement and joined in the British occupation of Fort Mercer a few days later.

After the fall of the Delaware River forts, Washington and his generals began extensive deliberations about the related questions of a possible winter campaign and where to quarter the troops for the winter. The generals were nearly unanimous that a winter campaign was not feasible, but they were divided between quartering the troops at Wilmington, Delaware, or in Pennsylvania along a line from Bethlehem to Lancaster. Washington settled on the third option discussed: hutting in the Great Valley of Pennsylvania. Consequently, the volume closes in December with Washington establishing his headquarters at Valley Forge, about twenty miles northwest of Philadelphia. Valley Forge provided the army with an adequate defensive position to guard against a British surprise attack, the ability to limit British depredations in Pennsylvania, and a base to cover Lancaster and York, where the Pennsylvania state government and the Continental Congress, respectively, had moved after the evacuation of Philadelphia.
Other subjects arising in the correspondence include Thomas Conway's reputedly disparaging letter to Gates about Washington; a variety of army reforms embracing reorganization of the cavalry, the establishment of a maréchaussée, or provost corps, and the improvement of the lot of the officers and enlisted men; and a purported British peace proposal. Private correspondence discusses Mount Vernon and Washington's other landholdings.

768 pages • 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 cloth • 2002
ISBN 0-8139-2077-9• $70.00

The Papers of George Washington Revolutionary Series Volumes 1-9

The Volumes:
Volume 1, June-September 1775
Volume 2, September-December 1775
Volume 3, January-March 1776
Volume 4, April-June 1776
Volume 5, June-August 1776
Volume 6, August-October 1776
Volume 7, October 1776-January 1777
Volume 8, January-March 1777
Volume 9, March-June 1777
Volume 10, June-August 1777
Volume 11, August-October 1777
Volume 12, October-December 1777
Volume 13, December 1777-February 1778

Edited by Kimberly Prothro Williams

A Pride of Place, the result of a quarter-century’s worth of painstaking research and collection, presents the first comprehensive architectural and historic inventory of the widely diverse and irreplaceable rural residences of Fauquier County, Virginia. Hundreds of photographs and illustrations, each accompanied by informative text, provide a fascinating and helpful overview of the county’s rich architectural heritage.
Kimberly Prothro Williams is an architectural historian, employed by a private consulting firm specializing in historic preservation. She is the author of several publications on the built environment, including Chevy Chase: A Home Suburb for the Nation's Capital. Contributing writers and consultants were Cynthia A. McLeod, T. Triplett Russell, Susan Kern, the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, and Bob Barron.

256 pages, 8 1/2 x 11
Cloth ISBN 0-8139-1997-5 • $39.95
Published for Fauquier County by the University of Virginia Press
Available December 2003

by Richard Nash

Wild Enlightenment charts the travels of the figure of the wild man, in each of his guises, through the invented domain of the bourgeois public sphere. We follow him through the discursive networks of novels, broadsheets, pamphlets, and advertisements and through their material locations at fair booths, the Royal Society, Court, and Parliament. He leads us on in various disguises: as Tyson’s Orang-Outang, Swift’s Yahoos, and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Yet Richard Nash is not primarily telling a story of the English gentleman abroad in the realm of the wild man; instead Nash explores the wild man abroad in the realm of the English gentleman. His is the tale of the wild man as complex alter ego to the idealized abstraction of “the citizen of the Enlightenment.”

Nash eloquently argues that following the movements of the wild man through the public sphere helps illuminate the process by which an abstract figure comes to constitute human nature. He contends that expressions such as wild man and noble savage operated as much more than metaphors: if anything, the trajectory was not one of a metaphor being taken literally but rather of the extant terminology’s actually shaping preconceptions by which real beings were observed and recognized by Europeans. Throughout his account, Nash insists on attending to the traffic between literary accounts and real material beings.

Shifting perspective from the thematic approach of intellectual history to a more eclectic cultural criticism, Nash introduces a refreshing means to understanding both the figures of the wild man and the citizen of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century.

“Wild Enlightenment is a stimulating and insightful work that opens up new avenues of understanding into the eighteenth century. While other authors have treated the general topic of the Enlightenment ‘savage,’ Nash provides a provocative, capacious, and original framework for understanding the importance of this phenomenon.”
—Rosemarie Zagarri, George Mason University

Richard Nash, Associate Professor of English at Indiana University, is the author of John Craige’s Mathematical Principles of Christian Theology.

248 pages, 6 x 9
16 b&w illustrations
Cloth ISBN 0-8139-2165-1 • $39.50

Edited by David B. Mattern and Holly C. Shulman

From modest Quaker beginnings as the child of financially insecure parents and the wife of a stolid young lawyer to the excitement and challenges of life as the nation’s first First Lady--arguably the most influential role in the American government’s formative years--Dolley Payne Todd Madison (1768-1849) led an extraordinary life. David B. Mattern and Holly C. Shulman have culled a particularly rich selection of her letters to illuminate the story of the woman widely credited with setting the standard for successive generations of Washington’s political women. This collection will prove an invaluable resource in current political and historical circles, where the role founding mothers played--both as supportive family members and as crucial political negotiators--is increasingly recognized and studied.

Organized chronologically into five sections reaching from her correspondence as a young adult in late-eighteenth-century Philadelphia up to the letters of her widowhood in 1840s Washington, and with a helpful contextualizing introduction to each section, The Selected Letters of Dolley Payne Madison provides a long-overdue biographical sketch of one of the early republic’s most fascinating personalities.

David B. Mattern is Senior Associate Editor of the Papers of James Madison and the editor of James Madison’s “Advice to My Country” (Virginia).

Holly C. Shulman is Research Associate Professor, Studies in Women and Gender, at the University of Virginia.

480 pages, 6 x 9
15 b&w illustrations
Cloth ISBN 0-8139-2152-X • $29.95

by Marc Leepson

“In this excellent account of Monticello's ownership after Thomas Jefferson's death, Leepson . . . turns the spotlight on a family that contributed to the preservation of history. . . . With fascinating detail, Leepson uncovers the facts surrounding Monticello's owners and preservation.”
—Publishers Weekly

“In its own way, the story of the Levys at Monticello is as compelling as the story of Jefferson at Monticello. It’s not simply a story of how a remarkable family saved a special place, it’s a very human story—indeed, a very American story—wonderfully told. I highly recommend it.”
—Richard Moe, President, National Trust for Historic Preservation

Marc Leepson, a freelance writer based in Middleburg, Virginia, has been published in the New York Times, Preservation Magazine, Smithsonian, the Washington Post, and the Baltimore Sun and is a recent contributor to the Encyclopedia Americana.

314 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
8 b&w illustrations
Paper ISBN 0-8139-2219-4 • $14.95

Edited and with a new preface by Richard Brookhiser

As a young man, George Washington admired and copied into a little notebook 110 rules for civil behavior that originated from a Jesuit textbook. Washington took these rules very much to heart, and that handwritten list remained with him throughout his life, serving as inspiring guidance from his military days at Valley
Forge and Yorktown to his two terms as president. Guidance that at first sounds archaic, it is in fact just as relevant as—indeed, possibly more necessary than—it was nearly three hundred years ago. Richard Brookhiser makes clear the pertinence of these rules for modern readers and proposes that now more than ever we will be wise to follow the modest example of such a great man. Witty and insightful, Brookhiser’s commentary offers real-world instruction in the lost art of self-discipline, and his new preface provides a compelling and timely context in which to employ these guidelines today.

Richard Brookhiser, senior editor of the National Review and a columnist for the New York Observer, is the author of Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington; Alexander Hamilton, American, and America’s First Dynasty: The Adamses, 1735-1918.

96 pages, 5 x 7
18 b&w illustrations
Cloth ISBN 0-8139-2218-6 • $17.95

Edited by Jill Hartz

In the summer of 2000, the University of Virginia Art Museum mounted an unusual site-specific exhibition called “Hindsight/Fore-site: Art for the New Millennium,” for which twenty-four artists created artworks inspired by Thomas Jefferson’s legacy. Artists included Agnes Denes, Ann Hamilton, Martha Jackson-Jarvis, Michael Mercil, the Monacan Indian Council, Todd Murphy, Dennis Oppenheim, Lincoln Perry, and Lucio Pozzi; among the sites featured were Montpelier, Ash Lawn-Highland, the Monticello Visitors’ Center, area parks and schools, and the University of Virginia. Charlottesville, longtime home of Jefferson and site of the university he founded, served as an ideal location for the exhibition.

New essays by the art historian and curator John Beardsley and the exhibition’s curator, Lyn Bolen Rushton, explore the art-historical significance of the exhibition and the works’ connection to Jefferson’s life complemented by essays of noted Jefferson scholars, illuminating arenas of particular concern to the artists. The historian Peter S. Onuf writes on slavery and Sally Hemings, University of Virginia’s president John T. Casteen III considers education and democracy, and the Monticello senior historian Lucia Stanton examines agrarian theory and practice.

The projects in “Hindsight/Fore-site” were conceptually ambitious and visually compelling, yet most were ephemeral, making the eighty illustrations and accompanying essays in Siting Jefferson a particularly valuable documentation of a remarkable and largely unreplicable exhibition.

Jill Hartz, Director of the University of Virginia Art Museum, is the editor of Agnes Denes, a monograph produced in conjunction with a major retrospective exhibition of the artist’s work.

120 pages, 6 x 9
60 color, 20 b&w illustrations
Paper ISBN 0-8139-2183-X • $19.95

by Phillip Hamilton

“The Making and Unmaking of a Revolutionary Family is an interesting and carefully crafted study of the family dynamics of the Tuckers in the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary generations. Phillip Hamilton’s questions about how families respond and shape new strategies for maintaining their economic power and social position are vitally important in any consideration of post-Revolutionary Virginia.”
—Herbert E. Sloan, Barnard College, author of Principle and Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt

In mid-April 1814, the Virginia congressman John Randolph of Roanoke had reason to brood over his family’s decline since the American Revolution. The once-sumptuous world of the Virginia gentry was vanishing, its kinship ties crumbling along with its mansions, crushed by democratic leveling at home and a strong
federal government in Washington, D.C. Looking back in an effort to grasp the changes around him, Randolph fixated on his stepfather and onetime guardian, St. George Tucker.

The son of a wealthy Bermuda merchant, Tucker had studied law at the College of William and Mary, married well, and smuggled weapons and fought in the Virginia militia during the Revolution. Quickly grasping the significant changes—political democratization, market change, and westward expansion—that the War for Independence had brought, changes that undermined the power of the gentry, Tucker took the atypical step of selling his plantations and urging his children to pursue careers in learned professions such as law. Tucker’s stepson John Randolph bitterly disagreed, precipitating a painful break between the two men that illuminates the transformations that swept Virginia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Drawing upon an extraordinary archive of private letters, journals, and other manuscript materials, Phillip Hamilton illustrates how two generations of a colorful and influential family adapted to social upheaval. He finds that the Tuckers eventually rejected wider family connections and turned instead to nuclear kin. They also abandoned the liberal principles and enlightened rationalism of the Revolution for a romanticism girded by deep social conservatism. The Making and Unmaking of a Revolutionary Family reveals the complex process by which the world of Washington and Jefferson evolved into the antebellum society of Edmund Ruffin and Thomas Dew.

Phillip Hamilton is Associate Professor of History at Christopher Newport University.

296 pages, 6 x 9
13 b&w illustrations
Cloth ISBN 0-8139-2164-3 • $35.00
Available May 2003

Edited by Kevin R. Hardwick and Warren R. Hofstra

In their introduction to Virginia Reconsidered, Kevin Hardwick and Warren Hofstra note that “Virginia’s history is powerfully situated, in both the popular and the scholarly imagination.” Even recalling only a handful of the many memorable figures and events of Virginia history—George Washington, Stonewall Jackson, Patrick Henry’s declamation at St. John’s Church—it is difficult to disagree. But Virginia Reconsidered, a richly diverse and innovative collection of pioneering essays, goes beyond simply recounting the exploits of famous figures or the major turning points in the state’s history. Probing deep currents of historical change and the revealing experiences of lesser-known Virginians, the fourteen essays offer teachers and general readers a fuller approach to Virginia’s history, one that gives important context to the state’s disparate people and events. Darrett B. and Anita H. Rutman’s essay on seventeenth-century Middlesex County, for example, details the decades-long effort of men like Arthur Nash to buy land and the struggle of subsequent generations to make the land into viable farms. This essay provides both a tale of economic independence and a history of early Virginia land development in miniature. Woody Holton explores the aspirations of enslaved Virginians during the revolutionary crisis, and demonstrates the connections between their hopes and actions and the decision of Virginia’s planters to declare independence from Great Britain. Essays like Holton’s investigate the fascinating but forgotten corners of Virginia history that are indeed its true foundation.

Kevin R. Hardwick, Assistant Professor of History at James Madison University, teaches the history of British colonial America and Virginia history.

Warren R. Hofstra, Stewart Bell Professor of History and director of the Community History Project at Shenandoah University, is the author of A Separate Place: The Formation of Clarke County, Virginia, editor of George Washington and the Virginia Backcountry, and coeditor of After the Backcountry: Rural Life in the Great Valley of Virginia, 1800–1900.

448 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Paper ISBN 0-9668-9191-0 • $29.50
Available May 2003

by Stephen Conrad Ausband

In 1728, William Byrd, the wealthy, English-educated master of Westover plantation, undertook a journey with a troop of commissioners, surveyors, and woodsmen to determine the exact boundary between North Carolina and Virginia. Byrd was not only an indefatigable explorer but also an amateur naturalist and diarist of considerable skill. He recorded the journey in two classics of colonial literature—The History of the Dividing Line and The Secret History of the Line—which showcase in varying measure his keen observations of natural phenomena, his erudition, his predilection for exercise and sexual conquest, and his witty and elegant prose.

William Byrd and Stephen Ausband are separated by almost three hundred years, but they share a similar literary inclination complemented by an amateur interest in nature. Like Byrd, Ausband has tramped the dividing line and returned with a lively, informative book.

Byrd's Line is Ausband's dialogue with Byrd across the years. It still requires a hike or a four-wheel-drive vehicle to reach the remote beach where Byrd began his survey. As Ausband slogs through the Great Dismal Swamp and the thickets and forests that Byrd wrote about, he interlaces his own adventure with quotations from Byrd. These range from descriptions of chestnut trees and passenger pigeons, both gone now, to accounts of the local inhabitants, both native and European.

Byrd often mused about what would happen to the land in the future. While some of the dividing line still feels like wilderness, it is crisscrossed today by bridges and roads, its forests felled and paved over for parking lots and subdivisions, its waters diverted or drained. Ausband's story, therefore, is a natural history of a changed region. It is also an accessible introduction to the mind and words of an extraordinary early American.

The Author
Stephen Conrad Ausband is Professor of English at Averett University. He is the author of Myth and Meaning, Myth and Order and of numerous articles for Virginia Wildlife and other publications.

176 pages, 6 x 9 • 1 map
Cloth ISBN 0-8139-2134-1 • $22.95
October 2002

Waters of Potowmack
by Paul Metcalf

With a new foreword by John Casey

Waters of Potowmack is a documentary history of the Potomac River and its wide, fertile basin—the setting for much of early United States history. A collage of primary accounts, it extends from the first explorers and colonists, the building of the Capitol, and the incidents of the Civil War through our recent past.

Waters of Potowmack records the firsthand impressions of the settlers and surveyors of this river basin, an area that includes parts of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia. In addition to offering an introduction to the geography, geology, and climate of the region, Metcalf's fascinating pastiche includes early descriptions of flora and fauna, and accounts of some of the earliest encounters between European settlers and indigenous peoples.

Here, too, are the voices of Washington and Jefferson, of Robert E. Lee and Abraham Lincoln, as well as the lesser-known stories of revolutionaries, mercenaries, and canal and road builders. And from diary and journal entries we follow the correspondence between Washington, Jefferson, and L'Enfant as they lay out the new Federal City.

Selections from Civil War diaries focus on key battle sites, and primary accounts offer a new understanding of the motives of John Brown and John Wilkes Booth.

The last section of Metcalf's engrossing book looks at the ruinous pollution of the river basin after the Second World War, at the rioting and looting of the 1960s, and at the despoliation of a land that at the book's beginning was described as an Eden, a paradise on earth.

An evocative and moving book, this is a history of exploring, settling, rebelling, governing, rioting, building, and cultivating, all on the "waters of Potowmack."

The Author
Poet and author Paul Metcalf, the great-grandson of Herman Melville and a student of Conrad Aiken and Charles Olson, was the celebrated author of more than twenty books, including Apache, Patagonia, and The Middle Passage. Metcalf died in January 1999 at the age of eighty-one.

John Casey is the Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia and won the National Book Award for his novel Spartina.

280 pages • 6 x 9 • 19 b&w illustrations
Paper ISBN 0-8139-2042-6 • $17.95
October 2002

Merrill D. Peterson

Few figures hold as mythic a place in America's historical consciousness as John Brown. A fervent abolitionist, his New England reserve tempered by a childhood on the Ohio frontier, Brown advocated arming fugitive slaves to fight for their freedom, an idea that impressed Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. In 1855, answering the call of his five sons to join them in the desperate struggle for freedom in the new territories, John Brown became a hero of "Bleeding Kansas." When he returned east, the fiery leader launched his ambitious campaign to rouse the slaves to freedom with a raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in 1859.

Labeled a madman for his failed military adventure, and repudiated even by prominent antislavery leaders, Brown was tried in a Virginia court and sentenced to hang for treason and sundry other crimes. In The John Brown Legend Revisited, the eminent historian Merrill D. Peterson brings the same blend of sharp-eyed analysis and narrative elegance to bear on Brown's legacy that he has used to unravel the images of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln.Brown's reputation has undergone a series of tectonic shifts since he met his death on the gallows just before the Civil War. Southerners viewed his exploits with apprehension, seeing Harpers Ferry as a harbinger of servile insurrection, while Brown's eloquence before the court won him sympathy in the North and confirmed his place there as a hero and martyr. Thoreau, the author of passive resistance, wrote of Brown as a man of conscience. Perhaps most important historically, Brown's exploits convinced Southerners that Lincoln's election meant secession and a call to arms.

Peterson gives us Brown in his own day, but he also shows how the flaming abolitionist warrior's image, celebrated in art, literature, and journalism, has shed some of the infamy conferred by "Bleeding Kansas" to become a symbol of American idealism and fervor to activists along the political spectrum. And so in the civil rights battles of the twentieth century, Brown became a hero to African Americans.

Reviews
"With wonderful writing, an eye for telling detail, thorough research, the insights of a superb historian, and an ability to encapsulate that borders on genius, Merrill D. Peterson traces the legend of this fascinating and complex man from Brown's own era to the present day. John Brown: The Legend Revisited is, in many ways, a tour de force."
—Charles B. Dew, Williams College, author of Bond of Iron and Apostles of Disunion

The Author
Merrill D. Peterson, Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Virginia, is the editor of the Library of America edition of the writings of Thomas Jefferson and author of numerous books, including Lincoln in American Memory and The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (Virginia).

176 pages, 6 x 8 • 14 b&w illustrations
Cloth ISBN 0-8139-2064-7 • $23.95
October 2002