The Mind of a Patriot:
Patrick Henry and the World of Ideas
Kevin J. Hayes
192 pages, 5 1/2 x 9
Cloth 978-0-8139-2758-9 • $22.95
September 2008
The Mind of a Patriot presents an intellectual life of a major figure who has traditionally been seen as an anti-intellectual “child of nature.” This was the view of Patrick Henry that William Wirt presented in his Life of Henry, and it has pervaded every biography since. Hayes presents a very different view of Henry. Starting with neglected pieces of evidence-the inventory of Henry's library-Hayes's unique perspective allows him to position Henry's life within the intellectual currents of the day. After the opening chapter, which shows how Thomas Jefferson's opinions of Henry influenced Wirt's depiction of him, the author traces Henry's life through his relationship with the world of books. Individual chapters examine Henry's education; his legal career; his use of books to improve his speaking style; his relationship to the antislavery movement; his use of books as a legislator, a farmer, and a father; and, ultimately, the place of books in his life during his waning years. In a lengthy appendix, Hayes reconstructs Henry's library, presenting a detailed catalogue of its contents.
Kevin J. Hayes is Professor of English at the University of Central Oklahoma and the author of several books, including The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson and The Library of William Byrd of Westover, for which he received the Virginia Library History Award.
The Founders on the Founders:
Word Portraits from the American Revolutionary Era
Edited by John P. Kaminski
624 pages, 5 x 8 1/4
30 b&w illustrations
Cloth 978-0-8139-2757-2 • $29.95
October 2009
“I never indeed thought him an honest, frank-dealing man, but considered him as a crooked gun, or other perverted machine, whose aim or stroke you could never be sure of.”
—Thomas Jefferson on Aaron Burr
“[A]lways an honest Man, often a wise one, but sometimes, and in some things, absolutely out of his senses.”
— Benjamin Franklin on John Adams
“I do now know [Jefferson] to be one of the most artful, intriguing, industrious and double-faced politicians in all America.”
— John Nicholas to George Washington
“I shall really regret to leave Mr. Jefferson, he is one of the choice ones of the Earth.”
— Abigail Adams
More than two centuries after the ground-breaking events of the American struggle for independence, its key figures strike us more as players in a myth than as people who lived, worked, and interacted with one another. To recover the human dimension of the founders, we need look no further than their own words. Through a series of revealing quotations, historian John P. Kaminski profiles thirty of the era’s best-known individuals, including Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, John Hancock, Thomas Paine, and Patrick Henry (“all tongue without either head or heart,” according to Thomas Jefferson), as well as the early presidents and their first ladies.
The discourse is unfailingly respectful, and yet this is no mutual admiration society. The subjects are not afraid to be sharp about one another, but this only makes their words of praise more convincing and poignant. One could hardly ask for a more clear-eyed, and touching, tribute than Thomas Jefferson’s appraisal of George Washington: “He was incapable of fear, meeting personal dangers with the calmest unconcern. . . . His integrity was most pure, his justice the most inflexible I have ever known, no motives of interest or consanguinity, of friendship or hatred, being able to bias his decision. He was, indeed, in every sense of the words, a wise, a good, and a great man.”
Beginning with an introductory essay that provides an overview of the relationships between the founders, the book then presents each individual, providing a biographical sketch and a chronologically arranged series of quotations, clarifying not only each person’s place within the independence movement but the contours of their character. The authors strike us with their candor, their insight, and their eloquence as they make their subjects come alive for us. As this book reveals, greatness is not only a matter of responding to the times; the people themselves were remarkable.
John P. Kaminski is the founder and director of the Center for the Study of the American Constitution at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the coeditor of The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights and the editor of The Quotable Jefferson.
Jefferson vs. the Patent Trolls:
A Populist Vision of Intellectual Property Rights
Jeffrey H. Matsuura
192 pages, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2
Cloth 0978-0-8139-2758-9 • $22.95
October 2008
Of all the founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson had the most substantial direct experience with the issues surrounding intellectual property rights and their impact on creativity, invention, and innovation. In our own digital age, in which IP has again become the object of intense debate, his voice remains one of the most vital in American history on this crucial subject.
Jefferson lived in a time of immense change, when inventions and other creative works impacted the world profoundly. In this atmosphere it became clear that the developers of creative works and the users of those works often have competing interests. Jefferson appreciated as well as anyone that the originators of ideas needed legal protection. He also knew that innovation was crucial for a nation’s economic prosperity as well as its political health, and that rights should not become barriers.
Jefferson was in a unique position to understand the issues of intellectual property rights. His pronouncements on these issues were those not of a scholar but, rather, of a practitioner. As a scientist, author, and inventor, he was a prolific creator. He was also a tireless consumer of others’ works. As America’s first patent commissioner, he decided which ideas merited protection and effectively created the patent review process. Jeffrey Matsuura profiles Jefferson’s diverse and substantial experience with these issues and discusses the lessons Jefferson’s efforts offer us today, as we grapple with many of the same challenges of balancing IP rights against an effort to foster creativity and innovation. Without inserting Jefferson anachronistically into the current debate, Matsuura does not shy away from positing where in the spectrum of opinion Jefferson’s ideas lie. For lawyers, legal and technology historians, and entrepreneurs, Matsuura offers a fresh, historically informed perspective on a current issue of major importance.
Jeffrey H. Matsuura, former Director of the Program in Law and Technology at the University of Dayton School of Law, is currently counsel at the Alliance Law Group in Northern Virginia. He is the author of several books on intellectual property, technology, and law, including Managing Intellectual Assets in the Digital Age.
The Long Farewell:
Americans Mourn the Death of George Washington
Gerald E. Kahler
208 pages, 6 x 9
14 b&w illustrations
Cloth 978-0-8139-2750-3 • $30.00
September 2008
The news of the death of George Washington at Mount Vernon on December 14, 1799, was reported to have been “felt as an electric shock throughout the union.” Martha Washington gave permission for Congress to have her husband's body reinterred under a marble monument to be constructed in the new capital in Washington, D.C. Grieving Americans organized and participated in over four hundred funeral processions and memorial services during the sixty-nine-day mourning period that culminated on February 22, 1800, the National Day of Mourning.
Washington's death came in a highly contentious period in American political history, and a variety of groups and individuals tried to take advantage of the occasion to advance their own agendas. Federalist officials, including President John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, themselves at odds on a number of issues, took a leading role in ceremonies that included mock funerals with empty caskets orchestrated by Hamilton, who also used the occasion to advocate for a large standing army. Although Jefferson and his Democratic Republicans were about to knock the Federalists out of political contention, in what Jefferson termed the “Revolution of 1800,” in 1799 Federalists predominated in ceremonial and print commemorations of Washington. Religious leaders, whose moral authority was on the wane, tried to Christianize Washington, while Masons used the most illustrious member of their secret brotherhood to rehabilitate an image tarnished by charges of religious infidelity and association with the excesses of the French Revolution. Women of various stations and political stripes also took advantage of the occasion to help legitimize their participation in public life.
The biographical sketches included in over three hundred eulogies provide a unique historical perspective on who George Washington was in the eyes of his contemporaries.
"Gerald Kahler has written one of the most original George Washington books of our generation. By focusing on how the mourning for the first president became a battleground for competing notions of national development, he has provided a compelling argument for the importance, and even divisiveness, of Washington the symbol in American life."
—Edward G. Lengel, author of General George Washington
• "Gerald Kahler has written one of the most original George Washington books of our generation. By focusing on how the mourning for the first president became a battleground for competing notions of national development, he has provided a compelling argument for the importance, and even divisiveness, of Washington the symbol in American life."
—Edward G. Lengel, author of General George Washington and This Glorious Struggle: George Washington’s Revolutionary War Letters
•"The Long Farewell is beautifully written, well organized, soundly researched, and highly original. It skillfully examines an important but neglected topic.”
—Stuart Leibiger, La Salle University, author of Founding Friendship: George Washington, James Madison, and the Creation of the American Republic
Gerald E. Kahler is an independent scholar. He resides in Texas.
"In the Hands of a Good Providence"
Religion in the Life of George Washington
Mary V. Thompson
264 pages, 6 x 9
10 b&w illustrations
Cloth 978-0-8139-2763-3 • $29.95
October 2008
Attempts by evangelical Christians to claim Washington and other founders as their own, and scholars' ongoing attempts to contradict these claims, are nothing new. Particularly after Washington was no longer around to refute them, legends of his Baptist baptism or secret conversion to Catholicism began to proliferate. Mount Vernon researcher Mary Thompson endeavors to get beyond the current preoccupation with whether Washington and other founders were or were not evangelical Christians to ask what place religion had in their lives. Thompson follows Washington and his family over several generations, situating her inquiry in the context of new work on the place of religion in colonial and postrevolutionary Virginia and the Chesapeake.
Thompson considers Washington's active participation as a vestryman and church warden as well as a generous donor to his parish prior to the Revolution, and how his attendance declined after the war. He would attend special ceremonies, and stood as godparent to the children of family and friends, but he stopped taking communion and resigned his church office. Something had changed, but was it Washington, the church, or both? Thompson concludes that he was a devout Anglican, of a Latitudinarian bent, rather than either an evangelical Christian or a Deist. The meaning of this description, Thompson allows, when applied to eighteenth-century Virginia gentlemen, is far from self-evident, leaving ample room for speculation.
Mary V. Thompson is Research Historian in the Collections Department of the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association.
The Citizenship Revolution:
Politics and the Creation of the American Union, 1774-1804
Douglas Bradburn
416 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
5 figures, 1 table
Cloth 978-0-8139-2801-2 • $35.00
Jeffersonian America
January 2009
• "This excellent and enjoyable book provides a far richer historical account of the political orchestration over citizenship in the early Republic than any we have. It is a major contribution."
—Rogers Smith, University of Pennsylvanaia, author of Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History
Most Americans believe that the ratification of the Constitution in 1788 marked the settlement of post-Revolutionary disputes over the meanings of rights, democracy, and sovereignty in the new nation. In The Citizenship Revolution, Douglas Bradburn undercuts this view by showing that the Union, not the Nation, was the most important product of independence.
In 1774, everyone in British North America was a subject of King George and Parliament. In 1776 a number of newly independent “states,” composed of “American citizens,” began cobbling together a Union to fight their former fellow countrymen. But who was an American? What did it mean to be a “citizen” and not a “subject”? And why did it matter?
Bradburn's stunning reinterpretation requires us to rethink the traditional chronologies and stories of the American revolutionary experience. He places battles over the meaning of “citizenship” in law and in politics at the center of the narrative. He shows that the new political community ultimately discovered that it was not really a “Nation,” but a “Union of States”—and that it was the states that set the boundaries of belonging and the very character of rights, for citizens and everyone else. To those inclined to believe that the ratification of the Constitution assured the importance of national authority and law in the lives of American people, the emphasis on the significance and power of the states as the arbiter of American rights and the character of nationhood may seem strange. But, as Bradburn argues, state control of the ultimate meaning of American citizenship represented the first stable outcome of the crisis of authority, allegiance, and identity that had exploded in the American Revolution—a political settlement delicately reached in the first years of the nineteenth century. So ended the first great phase of the American citizenship revolution: a continuing struggle to reconcile the promise of revolutionary equality with the pressing and sometimes competing demands of law, order, and the pursuit of happiness.
Douglas Bradburn is Assistant Professor in the History Department at SUNY, Binghamton.
Declaring Independence:
The Origin and Influence of America's Founding Document
Edited by Christian Y. Dupont and Peter S. Onuf
104 pages, 9 7/8 x 13 3/8
134 color illustrations
Cloth 978-0-9799997-0-3 • $29.95
Featuring the Albert H. Small Declaration of Independence Collection at the University of Virginia Library
From the preface “The Declaration of Independence is a statement of conviction and intent. When Jefferson wrote that ‘all men are created equal,’ he, a slave master, knew perfectly how much had still to be done by those who would follow to attain such a society in fact not theory. But that is part of our strength, that we Americans are called on, one generation after another, to achieve the promise. We have a star to steer by.”—David McCullough, author of 1776 and John Adams, and two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award
From the epilogue “If we are to survive as a nation, it is critical that our citizenry know and understand the beliefs and tenets that underwrite the Declaration of Independence. . . . Its origins and influences have much to teach us, and I can think of no better way to pursue that study than through the Albert H. Small Declaration of Independence Collection at the University of Virginia.”—Justice Sandra Day O’Connor
The Declaration of Independence is the touchstone of American nationhood, the document that marks the beginning of our history as a people. Eloquently articulating the principles and sentiments that drove patriotic subjects of King George III to resistance and revolution, the Declaration has served as a sacred text for subsequent generations of Americans.
This volume asks us to reread and rethink our founding document. The Declaration as we now understand it—the stirring passages that define our democratic creed—is not the Declaration that Thomas Jefferson and his congressional colleagues drafted, nor the document that inspired or provoked contemporaneous readers and listeners at home and abroad.
Essays by four of the Declaration’s leading students—David Armitage, Pauline Maier, Robert M. S. McDonald, and Robert G. Parkinson—make the historic text come alive, enabling us to hear what it had to say in its own time and what it might have to say to us today. Copiously illustrated with selections from the Albert H. Small Declaration of Independence Collection at the University of Virginia and complemented by biographical sketches of the Declaration signers, this volume offers a rich resource for discovering the origin and influence of America’s founding document.
Distributed for the University of Virginia Library
Religion and the Making of Nat Turner's Virginia:
Baptist Community and Conflict, 1740-1840
Randolph Ferguson Scully
320 pages, 6 x 9
11 tables
Cloth 978-0-8139-2738-1 • $42.50
The American South Series
August 2008
Religion and the Making of Nat Turner's Virginia provides a new interpretation of the rise of evangelical Christianity in the early American South by reconstructing the complex, biracial history of the Baptist movement in southeastern Virginia. This region and its religious history became a subject of intense national scrutiny in the wake of the 1831 revolt led by the enslaved preacher and prophet Nat Turner. But by the time Turner led his fellow slaves on their deadly march across the fields and swamps of Southampton County, Virginia's religious landscape had already been shaped by more than eighty years of conflict about the implications of evangelical faith for the evolving cluster of interrelated ideas about race, slavery, household, family, and patriarchy that constituted the state's social order.
For both black and white Virginians, evangelical discourses of authority, community, and meaning provided the material for a wide variety of interpretations of Christianity's social and spiritual message during the Revolutionary and early national eras. Even as some white church leaders sought to institutionalize a white, paternalist vision of evangelicalism's meanings, rapidly increasing black participation in Baptist congregations in the early nineteenth century provided fertile ground for new, alternative interpretations of Baptist concepts and practices. The Turner rebellion brought these diverse subterranean currents of dissent to the surface in ways that upset the delicate balance between white institutional authority and black spiritual independence that had evolved in the previous decades. Reaction to the uprising intensified the trend toward separation and segregation of black and white religion in the antebellum period and had powerful, lasting effects on race relations and religious culture in America.
Randolph Ferguson Scully is Assistant Professor of History at George Mason University.
Red Gentlemen and White Savages:
Indians, Federalists, and the Search for Order on the American Frontier
David Andrew Nichols
272 pages, 6 x 9
1 map
Cloth 978-0-8139-2768-8 • $39.50
Jeffersonian America
December 2008
Red Gentlemen and White Savages argues that after the devastation of the American Revolutionary War, the main concern of Federalist and Indian leaders was not the transfer of land, but the restoration of social order on the frontier. Nichols focuses on the “middle ground” of Indian treaty conferences, where, in a series of encounters framed by the rituals of Native American diplomacy and the rules of Anglo-American gentility, U.S. officials and Woodland Indian civil chiefs built an uneasy alliance. The two groups of leaders learned that they shared common goals: both sought to control their “unruly young men”-disaffected white frontiersmen and Native American warriors-and both favored diplomacy, commerce, and established boundaries over military confrontation. Their alliance proved unstable. In their pursuit of peace and order along the frontier, both sets of leaders irreparably alienated their own followers. The Federalists lost power in 1800 to the agrarian expansionists of the Democratic-Republican Party, while civil chiefs lost influence to the leaders of new pan-Indian resistance movements. This shift in political power contributed to the outbreak of war between the United States, Britain, and Britain's Indian allies in 1812, and prepared the way for Indian Removal.
"Red Gentlemen and White Savages is clearly and cogently written, well organized, and supported by ample research and wide reading in the relevant secondary literature. It is an original and substantial contribution to work on the Federalists and Indians, and the best book on this subject to date."
— Alan Taylor, University of California, Davis, author of The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution
"Anyone who thinks that the American Revolution came to a military conclusion at Yorktown must now consider the continuing pattern of military, diplomatic, and cultural encounters that David Nichols chronicles so thoroughly in this fresh and engaging book. With an appreciation of complexity, but also with great clarity, he shows us how the American Revolution never really ended in the frontier regions of North America, at least not when the ‘rest’ of the Revolution did. In doing so, he challenges us to locate the Revolution in a much larger chronological and cultural context and, above all, to see it not just as a two-sided conflict between the Crown and the colonies, but as a multi-sided series of struggles that enveloped Native Americans and Euro-Americans long after the formal treaty in 1783. Nowhere is that large historical landscape displayed more comprehensively than here in Nichols’s work."
—Gregory Nobles, Georgia Institute of Technology, author of American Frontiers: Cultural Encounters and Continental Conquest
David Andrew Nichols is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Indiana State University.
From Oratory to Scholarship:
Two Centuries of Talks on the American Revolution Given Before the Society of Cincinnati in the State of New Jersey
Edited by Denis B. Woodfield, John W. Gareis, and John Saunders
With an introduction by Vincent C. De Baun
476 pages, 7 x 10
22 illustrations
Cloth 978-0-615-19637-4 • $40.00
When the Revolutionary Army disbanded in 1783, a group of officers who had served in the Continental Line under George Washington formed the nation's first patriotic organization-the Society of the Cincinnati. Named for Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus, the Society today has fourteen semi-independent constituent societies-one in each of the thirteen original American states and one in France, our nation's great ally in its time of crisis. This collection is drawn from talks given to the Society of the Cincinnati in the State of New Jersey. The selections range in focus from the late eighteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. In form, they vary from ceremonious orations, packed with classical references and scriptural allusions, to genealogical studies, independent research on little-known military clashes, and scholarly considerations of the stresses that played themselves out in the forming of our Constitution. The wide-ranging lectures, papers, addresses, and studies collected in this volume appear in chronological order and offer a unique view of the way our knowledge and understanding of the American Revolution and its aftermath have evolved over more than two centuries.
Distributed for the Society of the Cincinnati
Denis B. Woodfield, Treasurer of The Society of the Cincinnati in the State of New Jersey, is the author of English Armorial Bookbindings and Surreptitious Printing in England, 1550-1640. John W. Gareis has served as Regent for the Sons of the Revolution in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and is now the Assistant Secretary of The Society of the Cincinnati in the State of New Jersey. John Van Dyke Saunders was Professor of English at Mississippi State University and is now retired. Vincent De Baun served as President of Cazanovia College and Director of the Development Office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The Papers of Francis Bernard: Governor of Colonial Massachusetts, 1760-1769
Edited by Colin Nicolson
544 pages, 7 x 10
17 b&w illustrations
Cloth 978-0-9794662-1-2 • $49.50
Sir Francis Bernard (1712-1779), royal governor of colonial Massachusetts from 1760 to 1769, witnessed the rapid dissipation of happy sentiment stemming from Anglo-American victory in the French and Indian War and the first stirrings of colonial radicalism. The writs of assistance case, the Stamp Act riots, and the ensuing boycotts of British manufactures all happened on his watch. Bernard himself proved to be a controversial figure. His most vociferous opponents accused him of aggressively pursuing customs violations to augment his own income. Others believed that he had deliberately misrepresented political conditions in Boston in order to persuade authorities in England to dispatch troops to support his troubled administration. At the end of his governorship, the Massachusetts House of Representatives petitioned for his recall, even as the king awarded him a baronetcy for his loyal service. Once home in England, Bernard slipped easily into the role of an expert on colonial affairs and helped devise imperial policies that would exacerbate the growing crisis.
Bernard's letters and other incidental papers provide abundant insight into the personalities and bitter controversies agitating Boston in the pre-Revolutionary period. Often consulted by scholars in transcripts and on microfilm, they constitute one of the most important sources on the period, yet this edition is the first comprehensive selection of his letters to be published. The explanation for this neglect can only be that, as far as American readers are concerned, he was on the wrong side of the conflict. Read side-by-side with the papers of John and Samuel Adams, Bernard's letters allow us to understand fully events in Massachusetts leading up to the Revolution.
This is the first of three volumes of selected letters, to be followed upon completion by a calendar of documents covering his life and career.
Distributed for the Colonial Society of Massachusetts
• "The Papers of Francis Bernard is a tremendously significant collection, and once completed, a British scholar will have published the single most important addition to the source materials not just for the coming of the American Revolution in Massachusetts, but for late-eighteenth-centuryimperial historiography in general, to have appeared in at least a generation."
—Stephen Conway, University College, London, author of Britain and America Go to War: The Impact of War and Warfare in Anglo-America, 1754–1815
Colin Nicolson is the author of The “Infamas Govener”: Francis Bernard and the Origins of the American Revolution, and he lectures at the University of Stirling, Scotland.
Buildings of Delaware
W. Barksdale Maynard
The latest volume in the Society of Architectural Historians' prestigious Buildings of the United States series, Buildings of Delaware is the first book to document the state's architectural history from all periods. Extensively illustrated with photographs and maps, and supplemented by a glossary and bibliography, the volume covers buildings of many styles, types, and materials, from grand mansions to vernacular structures, and from urban to rural settings. The noted architectural historian W. Barksdale Maynard spent much of 2002 through 2004 canvassing the rich cultural heritage of the state and investigating its relationship to the built environment--from an ancient Dutch dyke of 1660 to a cutting-edge cable-stay bridge recently completed, from colonial smokehouses in the countryside of Kent County to a rare, intact, International Style 1940s elementary school in the city of Wilmington. Among the architectural forms discussed are industrial and agricultural buildings and structures that characterize the state's rivers, canals, and shoreline, from gristmills to bridges and lighthouses. Major cities such as Newark and Wilmington are considered at length, with entries on homes, churches, schools, and government buildings, and the state's natural landscape, parks, and such renowned gardens as Winterthur are also described. Buildings of Delaware will provide scholars with valuable information on the architecture of the state, and will spark the imagination of general readers and local historians as well.
A volume in the Buildings of the United States series of the Society of Architectural Historians
W. Barksdale Maynard, Lecturer in the art history departments at Johns Hopkins and Princeton, is the author of Walden Pond: A History, Architecture in the United States, 1800-1850 and Woodrow Wilson: The Battle of Princeton and the Making of an American President.
352 pages, 7 x 10259 photographs, 46 maps
Cloth 978-0-8139-2702-2 • $45.00
April 2008
Representation in the American Revolution, revised edition
Gordon S. Wood
From one of America’s most celebrated historians, the Pulitzer Prize winner Gordon S. Wood, comes an early work whose relevance is undiminished. Originally published in 1969, now revised and with a new preface, Representation in the American Revolution examines the ways in which a government is created and how, in the face of great difficulties as well as great possibilities, its citizens are represented. Written immediately after the completion of Wood’s Bancroft Award-winning The Creation of the American Republic, this book elaborates on issues also explored in that landmark work.
The subject is one that lies at the heart of any discussion of democracy. Establishing a proper method of representation was a goal and measure of the American Revolution, or as Thomas Jefferson said in 1776, "the whole object of the present controversy." A fine example of political and constitutional history, this timeless little book will serve as an excellent introduction to issues of representation for students in the fields of political science, as well as history and law.
Gordon S. Wood is Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History at Brown University. He is a regular contributor to the New Republic and the New York Review of Books and is the author of numerous bestselling books, including most recently Revolutionary Characters and The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin.
96 pages, 5 x 8Paper 0-8139-2722-6 • $14.95
2008
Thomas Jefferson:
Draftsman of a Nation
Natalie S. Bober
"Bober has taken on an extremely vital, but difficult, task: writing a history that speaks to young people, black and white alike, in a way that is respectful to both cultures. . . . Hits all the relevant points that young readers should know about the third president, while adding new perspectives that are always nuanced. The detail is rich and her presentation is elegant."
—Annette Gordon-Reed, New York Law School, author of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy
Thomas Jefferson's was one of history's greatest voices for the importance of individual freedom. His eloquence on this fundamental right became the cornerstone of our nation and a central theme of the Enlightenment. And yet, Jefferson presided over a society that depended on slavery and was himself the holder of numerous slaves. How are students of history to reconcile this contradiction in the third president? Now celebrated biographer and historian Natalie Bober presents a life of Jefferson that does not evade this difficult question. Bober explores the slave community that built and maintained his home, Monticello—and what their lives under Jefferson tell us about him and about slavery as an early American institution.
To assess fully what Jefferson might mean to our time, we must first understand what it meant to be a man of his own time. From the first page, the world he inhabited is made vivid—and so, too, is Jefferson himself, standing before us as a freckled and, for the eighteenth century, unusually tall young man. Bober follows him through a life in which the presidency was just one of many accomplishment. As designer of Monticello, he was one of the great architects of his era; as founder of the University of Virginia, he was one of the nation’s early champions of higher education. His greatest legacy is perhaps as author of the Declaration of Independence, a nearly unrivaled instance of words giving tangible meaning to life. The Jefferson revealed here is distinguished by his often contradictory nature but also by his optimism, his curiosity, his exceptional sense of history (including the history still to be made).
While primarily aimed at young readers, the book is a substantial work of scholarship, based on several years research of primary-source materials (including black oral history) and the most current writings, and like Bober's earlier works should attract students of history of all ages. This book faces the fact that Jefferson was a flawed human being—and insists that this does not disqualify him as a hero.
Natalie S. Bober is the author of numerous books of history for young readers, including Countdown to Independence: A Revolution of Ideas in England and Her American Colonies 1760-1776 and Abigail Adams: Witness to a Revolution.
352 pages, 6 x 948 b&w illustrations, 2 maps
cloth 978-0-8139-2632-2 • $22.95
Available April 2007
John Smith’s Chesapeake Voyages, 1607-1609
Helen C. Rountree, Wayne E. Clark, and Kent Mountford
“Not only an engaging account of Smith’s travels around Chesapeake Bay but also a fresh and exciting introduction to the native peoples in their natural environment at the time of English exploration and settlement. . . . Crisply and clearly written. The style should delight the general reader.”
--Brooks Miles Barnes, Eastern Shore Public Library, coeditor of Seashore Chronicles: Three Centuries of the Virginia Barrier Islands
Captain John Smith’s voyages throughout the new world did not end--or, for that matter, begin--with the trip on which he was captured and brought to the great chief Powhatan. Partly in an effort to map the region, Smith covered countless leagues of the Chesapeake Bay and its many tributary rivers, and documented his experiences. In this ambitious and extensively illustrated book, scholars from multiple disciplines take the reader on Smith’s exploratory voyages and reconstruct the Chesapeake environment and its people as Smith encountered them.
Beginning with a description of the land and waterways as they were then, the book also provides a portrait of the native peoples who lived and worked on them--as well as the motives, and the means, the recently arrived English had at their disposal for learning about a world only they thought of as “new.” Readers are then taken along on John Smith’s two expeditions to map the bay, an account drawn largely from Smith’s own journals and told by the coauthor, an avid sailor, with a complete reconstruction of the winds, tides, and local currents Smith would have faced.
The authors then examine the region in more detail: the major river valleys, the various parts of the Eastern Shore, and the head of the Bay. Each area is mapped and described, with added sections on how the Native Americans used the specific natural resources available, how English settlements spread, and what has happened to the native people since the English arrived. The book concludes with a discussion on the changes in the region’s waters and its plant and animal life since John Smith’s time--some of which reflect the natural shifts over time in this dynamic ecosystem, others the result of the increased human population and the demands that come with it.
Published by the University of Virginia Press in association with Chesapeake Bay Gateways Network, and the U.S. National Park Service, Virginia Department of Historic Resources, and Maryland Historical Trust.
Helen C. Rountree, Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Old Dominion University, is the author most recently of Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown (Virginia). Wayne E. Clark is Executive Director of the Tri-County Council of Southern Maryland. Ecologist and environmental historian Kent Mountford is the author of Closed Sea: From the Manasquan to the Mullica.
368 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/460 b&w illustrations, 3 b&w maps, 31 color maps
Cloth 978-0-8139-2644-5• $29.95
Available June 2007
A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia
Thomas Hariot
The 1590 Theodor de Bry Latin edition, in facsimile form, accompanied by the modernized English text
For more than 400 years, scholars from an array of disciplines have recognized Theodor de Bry’s 1590 edition of Thomas Hariot’s A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia as a book whose influence shaped contemporary European perceptions of North America, as well as subsequent research on that period for centuries to come.
The book, upon which the present volume is based, is from the collections of the Library at the Mariners’ Museum. It is extremely rare, containing hand-colored illustrations from the period, and is one of only three recorded copies with colored plates. This complete facsimile edition presents de Bry’s exceptional engravings, based on John White’s sixteenth-century watercolors, in their original hand-colored form. The book is available in paperback and as a limited cloth edition of two hundred numbered copies. Both editions are printed by the award-winning Stinehour Press.
As the first volume in de Bry’s celebrated Grand Voyages, a series of publications chronicling many of the earliest expeditions to the Americas, this book, which incorporates a 1588 text by Thomas Hariot, was illustrated and published in four languages. It became for many Europeans their first glimpse of the American continent. Accompanying the Latin facsimile is an English text. The first section is modernized from earlier versions of the English, and the second part, which accompanies the plates, is newly translated from the original Latin.
In addition to a valuable introduction, the book includes two illuminating essays. The first, by Karen Ordahl Kupperman, examines the early American settlement and tells how a collaboration between the writer and mathematician Thomas Hariot and the artist John White (later governor of the Roanoke Colony) evolved into a rich study not only of English colonial life but of the Indian culture and the natural resources of the region. The second essay, by Peter Stallybrass, uncovers new information in the much studied plates and presents an intriguing theory about the creation and importance of the engravings.
This facsimile edition will appeal to students and scholars in several fields of study, from American history and ethnography to fine arts and the history of the book, and will provide the reader with the best illustration of the New World as it was first presented to the Old.
Published for the Library at the Mariner’s Museum
Susan Berg, former Vice President and Director of the Library at the Mariner’s Museum, is author of Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg Imprints. Karen Kupperman is Silver Professor of History at New York University and author of Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America.Peter Stallybrass is Annenberg Professor of Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania and the coauthor of Benjamin Franklin, Writer and Printer.
224 pages, 9 x 1250 text and 86 facsimile illustrations
Paper 978-0-8139-2605-6 • $35.00
Cloth and slipcased limited edition of 200 978-0-8139-2604-9 • $200.00
Available April 2007
Old Dominion, New Commonwealth
Ronald L. Heinemann, John G. Kolp, Anthony S. Parent Jr., and William G. Shade
“For decades, we have lacked a modern account of Virginia’s rich, tumultuous, and consequential history, which has shaped so much of our nation’s past. Now we have it. In the hands of these four authors, the Old Dominion’s story unfolds with compelling force. Theirs is a familiar tale, to be sure, but they tell it here in a new voice that speaks to our own day. All Virginians, indeed all Americans, will find their story appealing.”
--Nelson D. Lankford, editor of the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
“On the morning of 26 April 1607, three small ships carrying 143 Englishmen arrived off the Virginia coast of North America, having spent four months at sea. . . . All hoped for financial success and perhaps a little adventure; as it turned out, their tiny settlement eventually would evolve from colony into a prominent state in an entirely new nation.” So begins Old Dominion, New Commonwealth: A History of Virginia, 1607-2007 and the remarkable story behind the founding not only of the state of Virginia but of our nation. With this book, the historians Ronald L. Heinemann, John G. Kolp, Anthony S. Parent Jr., and William G. Shade collaborate to provide a comprehensive, accessible, one-volume history of Virginia, the first of its kind since the 1970s.
In seventeen narrative chapters, the authors tackle the four centuries of Virginia’s history from Jamestown through the present, emphasizing the major themes that play throughout Virginia history, change and continuity, a conservative political order, race and slavery, economic development, and social divisions, and how they relate to national events. Including helpful bibliographical listings at the end of each chapter as well as a general listing of useful sources and Websites, the book is truly a treasure trove for any student, scholar, or general-interest reader looking to find out more about the history of Virginia and our nation. Timed to coincide with the 2007 quadricentennial, Old Dominion, New Commonwealth will stand as a classic for years to come.
Ronald L. Heinemann is Professor Emeritus of History at Hampden-Sydney College. John G. Kolp, now retired, was Professor of History at the United States Naval Academy. Anthony S. Parent Jr. is Associate Professor of History at Wake Forest University. William G. Shade is Professor Emeritus of History at Lehigh University.
432 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/458 b&w illustrations, 8 maps
Cloth 978-0-8139-2609-4 • $29.95
Available April 2007
The Buildings of Pittsburgh
Franklin Toker
A volume in the Buildings of the United States series of the Society of Architectural Historians
At the forefront of national and international change, Pittsburgh has long been portrayed as a place for innovative architecture. From its origins as a fort built in 1753 at the urging of a twenty-one-year-old George Washington, through its industrial boom, and into contemporary times, when it has become a pioneer for the ideals and philosophy of environmentally friendly architecture, the city has a history of development that exemplifies the transformative nature of America’s built environment. With The Buildings of Pittsburgh, we now have a substantive reference book (organized by area, with subsets of geographical entries) that relates the architectural history of this ever-changing city up to the present day.
Franklin Toker examines Pittsburgh’s architectural transformations from its early architecture following the Federal and Gothic Revival styles, to the city’s importation in the mid-nineteenth century of new styles in the Romantic tradition, to industrial Pittsburgh with all its factories and huge institutional buildings, and finally to the city’s environmentally conscious renaissance that began in the mid-twentieth century. In doing so, he shows why Pittsburgh has consistently been rated among the top three American cities for buildings by the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, and how the city once famous for embracing industry and pollution is now preaching the gospel of clean air and “green” architecture.
Franklin K. Toker is Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh and a former Guggenheim Fellow. His books include Fallingwater Rising: Frank Lloyd Wright, E. J. Kaufmann, and America’s Most Extraordinary House and Pittsburgh, An Urban Portrait. His first book, The Church of Notre-Dame in Montreal, was awarded the Hitchcock Book Award, granted annually by the Society of Architectural Historians for the best new book published in the previous two years by a North American author. He is currently at work on a four-volume archaeological history of early medieval Florence and its cathedral.
272 pages, 6 3/4 x 9
160 b&w illustrations
Cloth 978-0-8139-2650-6 • $24.95
Distributed for the Center of American Places and the Society of Architectural Historians
Available June 2007
“Let a Common Interest Bind Us Together”
Associations, Partisanships, and Culture in Philadelphia, 1775-1840
Albrecht Koschnik
“‘Let a Common Interest Bind Us Together’ is an extremely important work in the political history of the early republic, and it will prove to be of considerably wider consequence. Offering the first major study of the post-revolutionary construction of ‘civil society’ in an important American city, this book will be the benchmark study for reconsidering the rise of American political parties in their cultural and social context. The result will require a wholesale reevaluation of Tocquevillian nostrums about state and society.”
—John L. Brooke, Ohio State University
After examining American society in 1831-32, Alexis de Tocqueville concluded, “In no country in the world has the principle of association been more successfully used or applied to a greater multitude of objects than in America.” What he failed to note, however, was just how much experimentation and conflict, including partisan conflict, had gone into the evolution of these institutions. In “Let a Common Interest Bind Us Together”: Associations, Partisanship, and Culture in Philadelphia, 1775-1840, Albrecht Koschnik examines voluntary associations in Philadelphia from the Revolution into the 1830s, revealing how--in the absence of mass political parties or a party system--these associations served as incubators and organizational infrastructure for the development of intense partisanship in the early republic. In this regard they also played a central role in the creation of a political public sphere, accompanied by competing visions of what the public sphere ought to comprise.
Despite the central role voluntary associations played in the emergence of a popular political culture in the early republic, they have not figured prominently in the literature on partisan politics and public life. Koschnik looks specifically at how Philadelphia Federalists and Republicans used fraternal societies and militia companies to mobilize partisans, and he charts the transformation of voluntary action from a common partisan tool into a Federalist domain of interlocking cultural, occupational, and historical institutions after the War of 1812. In the long run, Federalists--a political minority of less and less significance--shaped and dominated the associational life of Philadelphia.
“Let a Common Interest Bind Us Together” lays the groundwork for a new understanding of the political and cultural history of the early American republic.
Albrecht Koschnik is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Florida State University.
384 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/49 b&w illustrations, 10 tables
Cloth 978-0-8139-2648-3 • $45.00
Jeffersonian America
Available July 2007
Building the Bay Colony:
Local Economy and Culture in Early Massachusetts
James E. McWilliams
“McWilliams has crafted a wonderful book. Through extensive research and lively prose he has constructed a complex and captivating picture of daily life in early New England. He has shown us why minute details about fish, grain, timber, and cloth are not just fun to read but important to understanding the broader historical developments in early American settlement.”
—Phyllis Whitman Hunter, author of Purchasing Identity in the Atlantic World
Historians often consider transatlantic trade and the export of staples to have been the driving forces behind economic development in virtually all of colonial America. In From the Ground Up: How the Massachusetts Bay Colony Achieved Economic Success, James E. McWilliams challenges this assumption, showing how internal economic development, rather than exports that shareholders hoped would provide a handsome return on their investments, actually served as the backbone of the Massachusetts economy.
Starting with the basics, the building of farms, fences, stables, roads, and bridges, McWilliams demonstrates through careful analyses of farmer and merchant account books how these small infrastructure improvements established the foundation for more ambitious, overseas adventures. Using an intensely local lens, McWilliams explores the century-long process whereby the Massachusetts Bay Colony went from a distant outpost of the incipient British Empire to a stable society integrated into the transatlantic economy.
An inspiring story of men and women overcoming adversity to build their own society, From the Ground Up reconceptualizes how we have normally thought about New England’s economic development
James E. McWilliams, Assistant Professor of History at Texas State University, San Marcos, is the author of A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America.
224 pages, 6 x 9Cloth 978-0-8139-2636-0 • $35.00
Available July 2007
Irons in the Fire:
The Business History of the Tayloe Family and Virginia’s Gentry, 1700-1860
Laura Croghan Kamoie
“One of the most well-researched economic studies ever undertaken on the early modern South. Kamoie has demonstrated beyond a doubt that the Tayloes were diversified businessmen, who dealt mainly in agriculture, but who were also open to an array of commercial and industrial activities, an array which changed over time. Irons in the Fire makes a very significant contribution to the economic history of early America.”
—Peter Coclanis, University of North Carolina, coeditor of The South, the Nation, and the World: Perspectives on Southern Economic Development
Irons in the Fire chronicles the agricultural, industrial, and commercial activities of four generations of the Tayloe family of Northern Virginia, revealing a greater complexity in the southern business culture of early America than scholars have generally recognized. Through the story of one representative family, Laura Croghan Kamoie illustrates how entrepreneurship and a broadly skilled slave-labor force combined to create economic diversification well before the American Revolution. Contrary to general historical perceptions, southern elite planters were, at least until the 1790s, very like their northern counterparts.
The Tayloes were planters and businessmen who, crucially, saw no distinction or conflict between these two roles. In this they were not unique: diversification, combined with an entrepreneurial inclination among the elite of the planter class, formed the basis of the Chesapeake’s regional economy and contributed to its development.
This diversity was reflected in the slave community. Demonstrating a versatility exceeding later generations of slaves, and occupying a central position in the daily operations of the South’s business culture, the Chesapeake slaves made the planters’ relatively sophisticated enterprises not only profitable but possible.
Spanning more than a century of early American history, the story begins in 1700, when John Tayloe I managed the family’s concerns, and concludes with his six great-grandsons, who lived into the Civil War era. Through the generations, the Tayloes demonstrated the same essential qualities—enterprise, risk-taking, business savvy, innovation, ambition, and pursuit of profit--as their northern counterparts. As the eighteenth century ended, however, cotton plantation agriculture—and, in Virginia, the internal slave trade in support of it—increasingly began to take over, working against economic diversification.
Irons in the Fire provides an exceptional view of early American business, each generation of Tayloes approaching the family’s welfare within the social, political, economic, and cultural contexts of their day. This business-family saga also contributes a pivotal perspective to contemporary debates about the economic modernity of the South.
Laura Croghan Kamoie is Assistant Professor of History at the United States Naval Academy.
256 pages, 6 x 98 b&w illustrations, 1 map
Cloth 978-0-8139-2637-7 • $35.00
Available July 2007
Empires in the Forest
Jamestown and the Beginning of America
Avery Chenoweth and Robert Llewellyn
From the author and photographer who brought us “a new genre of art book” in Albemarle: A Story of Landscape and American Identity comes a new collaborative effort detailing the story of our nationís birth: Jamestown and the Making of America. This beautiful work of photography and prose traces the ways in which American culture grew out of the conflict that characterized the first contact between Native Americans and Europeans. Expanding in their unique treatment of Albemarle County, the artists use photographs from our time to suggest both the ancient and recent pasts, creating a virtual experience from the Colonial era into modern times. Telling this great story in modern terms by dusting off the history to reveal the main players as fresh and alive today as they were then, Jamestown and the Making of America beautifully depicts a landscape synonymous with American history, from its tumultuous beginning through today.
Robert Llewellyn is a photographer with more than thirty books of his work in print, 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 State Department. He and his family live in the Albemarle countryside, an area he has photographed extensively for more than thirty years. Avery Chenoweth is a Charlottesville writer whose 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. He has written for a number of national magazines, including Harper’s, Spy, Lingua Franca, and the New York Times Magazine.
176 pages, 10 1/4 x 12 1/2100 color photographs
Cloth 978-0-9742707-1-5 • $49.95
Available October 2006
First People
The Early Indians of Virginia, 2nd Edition
Keith Egloff and Deborah Woodward
Incorporating recent events in the Native American community as well as additional information gleaned from publications and public resources, this newly redesigned and updated second edition of First People brings back to the fore this concise and highly readable narrative. Full of stories that represent the full diversity of Virginia’s Indians, past and present, this popular book remains the essential introduction to the history of Virginia Indians from the earlier times to the present day.
Published in association with the Virginia Department of Historic Resources
Keith Egloff is Assistant Curator at the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. Deborah Woodward, an editor and writer, develops and produces Web content, books, magazines, and films.
112 pages, 7 x 1045 b&w illustrations, 2 charts
Paper 978-0-8139-2548-6 • $12.95
Available September 2006
Jamestown, the Buried Truth
William M. Kelso
“The unearthing of Jamestown is truly the autopsy of America, an amazing dissection and reconstruction of four-hundred-year-old artifacts and human remains that reveal how the first settlers spent their days, how they lived and died, and what they accomplished and suffered. Without chief archaeologist William Kelso’s almost mystical vision that the original site still existed and his persistence against all odds to unearth it, we would have little to rely on but legend to tell us how modern America began. Jamestown: The Buried Truth, is brilliantly written, a story and adventure unlike any other that will forever change the way we think about what happened when John Smith and his brave followers sailed to Virginia in 1607 and established the first permanent English settlement.”
—Patricia Cornwell
What was life really like for the band of adventurers who first set foot on the banks of the James River in 1607? Important as the accomplishments of these men and women were, the written records pertaining to them are scarce, ambiguous, and often conflicting, and those curious about the birthplace of the United States are left to turn to dramatic and often highly fictionalized reports. In Jamestown, the Buried Truth, William Kelso takes us literally to the soil where the Jamestown colony began, unearthing the James Fort and its contents to reveal fascinating evidence of the lives and deaths of the first settlers, of their endeavors and struggles, and of their relationships with the Virginia Indians. He offers up a lively but fact-based account, framed around a narrative of the archaeological team’s exciting discoveries. Once thought to have been washed away by the James River, James Fort still retains much of its structure, including palisade walls, bulwarks, interior buildings, a well, a warehouse, and several pits, and more than 500,000 objects have been cataloged, half dating to the time of Queen Elizabeth and King James. Artifacts especially reflective of life at James Fort include an ivory compass, Cabasset helmets and breastplates, glass and copper beads and ornaments, ceramics, tools, religious icons, a pewter flagon, and personal items. Dr. Kelso and his team of archaeologists have discovered the lost burial of one of Jamestown’s early leaders, presumed to be Captain Bartholomew Gosnold, and the remains of several other early settlers, including a young man who died of a musket ball wound. In addition, they’ve uncovered and analyzed the remains of the foundations of Jamestown’s massive capitol building. Refuting the now decades-old stereotype that attributed the high mortality rate of the Jamestown settlers to their laziness and ineptitude, Jamestown, the Buried Truth produces a vivid picture of the settlement that is far more complex, incorporating the most recent archaeology to give Jamestown its rightful place in history and thus contributing to a broader understanding of the transatlantic world.
William M. Kelso is Head Archaeologist of the Jamestown Rediscovery Project.
256 pages, 6 1/2 x 9 1/4121 color and 30 b&w illustrations
Cloth 978-0-8139-2563-9 • $29.95
Available September 2006
Realistic Visionary
A Portrait of George Washington
Peter R. Henriques
" A deeply thoughtful appraisal of Washington's career and character. . . . The chapters on slavery and religion are especially beguiling. Henriques's approach allows him to zoom in on the most salient and controversial issues with a focused clarity not possible in a conventional biography."
—Joseph J. Ellis, Mount Holyoke College, author of His Excellency: George Washington
In Realistic Visionary the renowned George Washington scholar Peter Henriques seeks to humanize the first president without diminishing him. Washington makes mistakes, is sensitive to criticism, and is slow to accept blame, but he is also the greatest man of his age, a relentless pragmatist who could nonetheless envision what a free and united America could be for "millions unborn."
Rather than revisiting Washington's life in its entirety, Henriques constructs a biographical portrait by addressing the vital themes and events through which Washington the man is revealed. He engages recent biographies—including many of the bestsellers to come from the Founding Fathers publishing boom—and draws on his own unparalleled knowledge of Washington's numerous writings (he was our most prolific president, authoring several thousand letters and keeping a lifelong diary).
Washington's wife, Martha Custis Washington, emerges as his most important supporter in his great successes, but Henriques also explores Washington's feelings for Sally Cary Fairfax, who appears to have always held a special place in his affections. Washington's political life is examined through penetrating studies of his friendship with Thomas Jefferson, which to the regret of both men deteriorated, and his increasingly productive relationship with Alexander Hamilton. Henriques tackles the complex role slavery played in Washington's life—he freed his slaves in his will—and the continuing controversy surrounding his religious beliefs, which many have misinterpreted in efforts to claim Washington as one of their own. The book closes with a moving re-creation of Washington's final days and finds inspiration in how he faced his own illness and death.
What emerge most clearly in Realistic Visionary are Washington's successful struggle to channel his monumental personal ambition into public service and his unrivaled ability to turn his ambitious visions for the fledgling nation into reality.
Peter R. Henriques, Professor of History Emeritus at George Mason University, is the author of The Death of George Washington: He Died as He Lived.
256 pages, 6 x 915 b&w illustrations
Cloth 0-8139-2547-9 • $26.95
April 2006
Experiencing Mount Vernon
Eyewitness Accounts, 1784-1865
Edited by Jean B. Lee
George Washington, acutely aware of the accomplishments and potential of the American Revolution, used his Mount Vernon estate both to preserve the memory of events that had created a new nation and to forward his keen vision of what that nation might become. During the 1780s and 1790s, an era when neither public museums nor a national library existed, visitors to Mount Vernon viewed John Trumbull's iconic image of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Houdon's famous bust of the countryís preeminent hero, and Washington's voluminous wartime correspondence. More important, they listened as the Washingtons recalled the remarkable events that had forged independence and the unique American experiment in representative government. At Mount Vernon, too, Washington and his guests discussed how best to secure the success and well-being of the United States. Here was a place to contemplate "what the nation, at its best, might be."
Following George and Martha Washington's deaths, the estate passed to four successive heirs, the last of whom deeded it to the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association in 1860. While still in private hands, the property nonetheless attracted thousands of visitors each year, most of whom arrived after a fifteen-mile overland trek from Washington, D.C. With the establishment of regular steamboat access in the 1850s, the numbers swelled to ten thousand annually. The public claimed Mount Vernon as its own. In the words of a nineteenth-century Washington family member, "the Nation shares it with us."
In a remarkable display of civic religion that testified to the siteís enormous hold on the public imagination, Americans pronounced Mount Vernon sacred ground and made it the nationís most important site of revolutionary memory and inspiration. The sacred ground was, nonetheless, contested ground: visitors criticized the heirs' management of the property; northerners abhorred the persistence of slavery at the estate. As pilgrims contemplated the highest ideals of the Revolution at Washington's home and tomb, they often found their own society wanting. Amid escalating sectional strife in the 1850s, some argued that if Mount Vernon could be saved for the nation, the nation might be preserved from ruin.
In letters and journals, newspaper and magazine articles, and public speeches, visitors recorded, often in detail and with intense emotion, their varied reactions to the site. Experiencing Mount Vernon presents the most informative of these accounts, as well as selected documents from the Washington owners (beginning with Washington himself, who in 1784 prematurely wrote Lafayette that, at his beloved home, he had "retired from all public employments"). Numerous maps, contemporary images, and annotations complement the texts. This book constitutes the only eyewitness chronicle we have of the Washington estate's ascent to the status of national shrine, and it offers the closest possible evidence of Mount Vernonís singular role in helping forge American national identity.
Jean B. Lee, Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is the author of The Price of Nationhood: The American Revolution in Charles County.
304 pages, 6 x 948 b&w illustrations
Cloth 0-8139-2514-2 • $45.00
Paper 0-8139-2515-0 • $19.95
May 2006
Sweet Negotiations
Sugar, Slavery, and Plantation Agriculture in Early Barbados
Russell R. Menard
Intending at first simply to do further research on the mid-seventeenth-century ìsugar revolutionî in Barbados, Russell Menard traveled to the island. But once there, he quickly found many discrepancies between the historical understanding of the way in which this ìrevolutionî fueled the institution of slavery and the actual, quotidian, records documenting the prominence of slavery on the island even before sugar spurred its economic growth. In Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery, and Plantation Agriculture in Early Barbados, Menard reveals that black slaveryís emergence in Barbados actually preceded the rise of sugar; in doing so he both reverses the long-held understanding of slavery as a consequence of the islandís economic boom and repositions the impact that this surge of slavery had on Americaís slave trade.
Based on fresh archival research conducted on the island and in England, Sweet Negotiations shows that Barbados was well on its way to becoming a plantation colony and a slave society before sugar emerged as the dominant crop. Menard sheds new light on the origins of the integrated plantation, gang labor, the slave economy, agricultural productivity, the organization of commerce, and the character of the planters who built the sugar industry. Despite its small size (166 square miles) and distant location, Barbados loomed large in Englandís American empire. With Menardís findings, the islandís importance becomes that much more pronounced: because Barbados was a major site for the development and dissemination of the slave plantation system in the Americas, Menardís correction of the historical record has implications that reach far beyond the tiny islandís shores. Russell R. Menard is Professor of History faculty at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of five books and numerous articles on various aspects of early American economics and social history.
Russell R. Menard is Professor of History faculty at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of five books and numerous articles on various aspects of early American economics and social history.
224 pages, 5 1/2 x 8 1/230 tables, 5 maps, 6 figures
Cloth 0-8139-2540-1 • $39.50
May 2006
The Papers of George Washington
Revolutionary War Series, Volume 15: May-June 1778
Philander D. Chase, Editor
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 15: May-June 1778
Volume 15 of the Revolutionary War Series documents a period that includes the Continental Army’s last weeks at Valley Forge, the British evacuation of Philadelphia, and the Battle of Monmouth Court House. The volume begins with George Washington’s army at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, celebrating the new alliance between the United States and France.
832 pages • 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, 3 maps$85.00 S • cloth
ISBN 0-8139-2522-3
Cloth , Vol. 15: May-June 1778
April 2006
August 11, 2008