University of Virginia Press

by Stephen Conrad Ausband

http://www.upress.virginia.edu/books/ausband.html

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
Available October 2002

Waters of Potowmack
by Paul Metcalf

With a new foreword by John Casey

http://www.upress.virginia.edu/books/metcalf.html

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
Available October 2002

by Merrill D. Peterson

http://www.upress.virginia.edu/books/peterson_merrill.html

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
Available October 2002

Edited by Jeannine Falino and Gerald W. R. Ward
 
http://www.upress.virginia.edu/books/falino.html

New England, especially Boston, was a center of the silversmith’s art and
craft in early America. In this volume, eleven distinguished scholars from
museums and universities examine the styles, forms, and functions of silver
from the time of John Hull and Robert Sanderson in the mid-seventeenth
century through the career of Paul Revere in the federal period.

Among the diverse topics considered are the etiquette connected with the
use of silver tobacco, snuff, and patch boxes, and the social significance of
Boston’s rare silver chocolate pots. An analysis of the narrative hunting
scenes and other imagery on Boston rococo silver reveals much about early
patterns of courtship and social interaction. A close study of John Singleton
Copley’s portrait of Paul Revere and Revere’s Sons of Liberty bowl
provides fresh insights into these icons of Americana, while a statistical
analysis of Revere’s patrons sheds new light on the career of this famous
craftsman. Two essays discuss the profound significance of silver objects
within New England’s ecclesiastical history, and another documents the use
of silver at Harvard College in its early days. A biography of Samuel
Bartlett, a Concord silversmith, and a survey of silver on the early Maine
frontier suggest the importance of regional studies, writ both small and
large.

These essays, based on presentations made at a conference cosponsored by
the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Colonial Society of
Massachusetts, are published here in revised and expanded form. As a
whole, they provide for an understanding of silver objects as part of New
England’s material world and as reflections of the attitudes and values of
their makers and users.

Contributors

Richard Lyman Bushman, Columbia University

Edwin A. Churchill, Maine State Museum

Madeleine Siefke Estill, Ithaca, New York

Jonathan L. Fairbanks, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Jeannine Falino, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Patricia E. Kane, Yale University Art Gallery

Karen Parsons, Loomis Chaffee School

Janine E. Skerry, Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia

John W. Tyler, Colonial Society of Massachusetts

Barbara McLean Ward, Museum Studies Program, Tufts University

Gerald W. R. Ward, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

David F. Wood, Concord Museum, Concord, Massachusetts

The Editors

Jeannine Falino is the Carolyn and Peter Lynch Curator of Decorative Arts
and Sculpture, Art of the Americas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Gerald W. R. Ward is the Katharine Lane Weems Curator of Decorative
Arts and Sculpture, Art of the Americas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
 
256 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Cloth ISBN 0-9620737-5-X • $65.00

Nicolas W. Proctor

http://www.upress.virginia.edu/books/proctor.html

The hunt, like the church, courthouse, and family, played an integral role in southern
society and culture during the antebellum era. Regardless of color or class, southern men
hunted. Although hunters always recognized the tangible gains of their mission—meat,
hides, furs—they also used the hunt to communicate ideas of gender, race, class,
masculinity, and community. Hunting was very much a social activity, and for many white
hunters it became a drama in which they could display their capacity for mastery over
women, blacks, the natural world, and their own passions.

Nicolas Proctor argues in Bathed in Blood that because slaves frequently accompanied
white hunters into the field, whites often believed that hunting was a particularly effective
venue for the demonstration of white supremacy. Slaves interpreted such interactions
quite differently: they remained focused on the products of the hunt and considered the
labor performed at the behest of their owners as an opportunity to improve their own
condition. Whether acquired as a reward from a white hunter or as a result of their own
independent—often illicit—efforts, game provided them with an important supplementary
food source, an item for trade, and a measure of autonomy. By sharing their valuable
resources with other slaves, slave hunters also strengthened the bonds within their own
community. In a society predicated upon the constant degradation of African Americans,
such simple acts of generosity became symbolic of resistance and had a cohesive effect
on slave families.

Proctor forges a new understanding of the significance of hunting in the antebellum
South through his analyses of a wealth of magazine articles and private papers, diaries,
and correspondence.

Reviews
"No scholar has studied hunting in the antebellum period in such detail, and no one has
analyzed hunting narratives with such care and sophistication. Bathed in Blood takes
very seriously a body of literature few historians have bothered to investigate: the hunting
narratives within Southwestern Humor literature and in antebellum sporting publications.
. . . The people who read southern social history will be amazed by the number and
richness of these sources."
—Ted Ownby, University of Mississippi, author of Subduing Satan: Religion,
Recreation, and Manhood in the Rural South, 1865-1920

The Author

Nicolas W. Proctor is Assistant Professor of History at Simpson College.

240 pages, 8 illustrations, 6 x 9
Cloth ISBN 0-8139-2087-6 • $45.00
Paper ISBN 0-8139-2091-4 • $16.50

Parlor Politics
In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a
City and a Government

by Catherine Allgor            

http://www.upress.virginia.edu/books/allgor.html

"An extraordinary piece of work, easily one of the most
intellectually original and stylishly elegant first books I have
ever read. Allgor's treatment of the role of women brings
them into the center of the story of America's early political
history and demonstrates that the republican values so central
to the ideology of the post-Revolutionary era actually required
the presence of women to permit the federal government to
function. It's the kind of argument that seems utterly
self-evident but in fact no one has made it before in anything
like this persuasive way. Throughout the text, one encounters
a truly lyrical presence, cajoling, whispering, taking us aside
(as at an elegant dinner party) to talk interestingly about what
the evidence means."

--Joseph J. Ellis, author of Founding Brothers: The
Revolutionary Generation and American Sphinx: The
Character of Thomas Jefferson

When Thomas Jefferson moved his victorious Republican administration into
the new capital city in 1801, one of his first acts was to abolish any formal
receptions, except on New Year's Day and the Fourth of July. His successful
campaign for the presidency had been partially founded on the idea that his
Federalist enemies had assumed dangerously aristocratic trappings--a sword
for George Washington and a raised dais for Martha when she received
people at social occasions--in the first capital cities of New York and
Philadelphia. When the ladies of Washington City, determined to have their
own salon, arrived en masse at the president's house, Jefferson met them in
riding clothes, expressing surprise at their presence. His deep suspicion of
any occasion that resembled a European court caused a major problem,
however: without the face-to-face relationships and networks of interest
created in society, the American experiment in government could not
function.

Into this conundrum, writes Catherine Allgor, stepped women like Dolley
Madison and Louisa Catherine Adams, women of political families who used
the unofficial, social sphere to cement the relationships that politics needed to
work. Not only did they create a space in which politics was effectively
conducted; their efforts legitimated the new republic and the new capital in
the eyes of European nations, whose representatives scoffed at the city's few
amenities and desolate setting. Covered by the prescriptions of their gender,
Washington women engaged in the dirty business of politics, which allowed
their husbands to retain their republican purity.

Constrained by the cultural taboos on "petticoat politicking," women rarely
wrote forthrightly about their ambitions and plans, preferring to cast their
political work as an extension of virtuous family roles. But by analyzing their
correspondence, gossip events, "etiquette wars," and the material culture that
surrounded them, Allgor finds that these women acted with conscious
political intent. In the days before organized political parties, the social
machine built by these early federal women helped to ease the transition
from a failed republican experiment to a burgeoning democracy.

The Author

Catherine Allgor, winner of dissertation awards from Yale University and the
Organization of American Historians, is Assistant Professor of History at
Simmons College.

Jeffersonian America Series

Cloth ISBN 0-8139-1998-3 • 352 pages, 6 x 9 • $29.95
Paper ISBN 0-8139-2118-X • 320 pages, 6 x 9 • $14.95

 by Midori Takagi

http://www.upress.virginia.edu/books/takagi.html

RICHMOND WAS NOT only the capital of Virginia and of the
Confederacy; it was also one of the most industrialized cities south of the
Mason-Dixon Line. Boasting ironworks, tobacco processing plants, and
flour mills, the city by 1860 drew half of its male workforce from the local
slave population. "Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction" examines this
unusual urban labor system from 1782 until the end of the Civil War. Many
urban bondsmen and women were hired to businesses rather than working
directly for their owners. As a result, they frequently had the opportunity to
negotiate their own contracts, to live alone, and to keep a portion of their
wages in cash. Working conditions in industrial Richmond enabled
African-American men and women to build a community organized around
family networks, black churches, segregated neighborhoods, secret societies,
and aid organizations. Through these institutions, Takagi demonstrates,
slaves were able to educate themselves and to develop their political
awareness. They also came to expect a degree of control over their labor
and lives. Richmond's urban slave system offered blacks a level of economic
and emotional support not usually available to plantation slaves. "Rearing
Wolves to Our Own Destruction" offers a valuable portrait of urban slavery
in an individual city that raises questions about the adaptability of slavery as
an institution to an urban setting and, more importantly, the ways in which
slaves were able to turn urban working conditions to their own advantage.

The Author

Midori Takagi is Assistant Professor of History at Fairhaven College,
Western Washington University.

238 pages, 6 x 9 • Cloth $37.50
ISBN 0-8139-1834-0
200 pages, 6 x 9 • Paper $16.50

http://www.upress.virginia.edu/books/walsh.html

Does every increase in the power of government entail a loss of liberty for the people?
James H. Read examines how four key Founders--James Madison, Alexander Hamilton,
James Wilson, and Thomas Jefferson--wrestled with this question during the first two
decades of the American Republic.

Power versus Liberty reconstructs a four-way conversation--sometimes respectful,
sometimes shrill--that touched on the most important issues facing the new nation: the
Constitution, the Bill of Rights, federal authority versus states' rights, freedom of the
press, the controversial Bank of the United States, the relation between nationalism and
democracy, and the elusive meaning of "the consent of the governed."

Each of the men whose thought Read considers differed on these key questions.
Jefferson believed that every increase in the power of government came at the expense of
liberty: energetic governments, he insisted, are always oppressive. Madison believed that
this view was too simple, that liberty can be threatened either by too much or too little
governmental power. Hamilton and Wilson likewise rejected the Jeffersonian view of
power and liberty but disagreed with Madison and with each other.

The question of how to reconcile energetic government with the liberty of citizens is as
timely today as it was in the first decades of the Republic. It pervades our political
discourse and colors our readings of events from the confrontation at Waco to the
Oklahoma City bombing to Congressional debate over how to spend the government
surplus. While the rhetoric of both major political parties seems to posit a direct
relationship between the size of our government and the scope of our political freedoms,
the debates of Madison, Hamilton, Wilson, and Jefferson confound such simple
dichotomies. As Read concludes, the relation between power and liberty is inherently
complex.

Reviews

James Wilson. Portrait by Jean Pierre
Henri Elouis. National Museum of
American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

"Power versus Liberty provides fresh perspectives on the political thought of James
Madison, Alexander Hamilton, James Wilson, and Thomas Jefferson, statesmen and
theorists who played crucial roles in shaping the American experiment in republican
government. Read shows how these revolutionaries struggled to reconcile tensions
between liberty and power; his important book succeeds admirably in reconstructing a
fascinating debate over fundamental questions that continue to command our attention.
Historians and theorists alike will gain much from Read's judicious and thoughtful
analysis."

--Peter S. Onuf, University of Virginia

"James Read in effect returns to the themes Bernard Bailyn put at the center of his classic
study of the American Revolution and rescues them from the so-called Republican
Synthesis. He extends Bailyn's analysis into the period of the early republic and shows
how much insight the related themes of power and liberty can give when deployed by a
deft hand."

--Michael Zuckert, University of Notre Dame

"In these deft essays, James Read offers an astute introduction to the four leading original
architects of the American constitutional tradition: Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton, and
James Wilson. Few writers have captured their essential ideas so concisely or
appreciatively."

--Jack N. Rakove, Stanford University
Thomas Jefferson. Portrait by Rembrandt
Peale. White House Collection, courtesy
of White House Historical Association.

The Author

James H. Read is Associate Professor of Political Science at the College of St. Benedict
and St. John's University of Minnesota.

224 pages • 6 x 9 • 4 b&w illustrations
Cloth ISBN 0-8139-1911-8 $47.50 • Paper ISBN 0-8139-1912-6 $16.50

The great architectural significance of Albemarle County and Charlottesville, Virginia,
rests, not surprisingly, on the continuing influence of Thomas Jefferson. Not only did
Jefferson design the State Capitol in Richmond, his home Monticello, his country retreat
Poplar Forest, and the University of Virginia; after his death, master builders continued to
construct important examples of Jeffersonian classicism in Albemarle County and
beyond.

But what is less well known are the many important examples of other architectural
idioms built in this Piedmont Virginia county, many by nationally renowned architects.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the renewed interest of wealthy clients in eclectic
architectural styles attracted some of the finest Beaux Arts architects in the country to the
Charlottesville area. Grand new buildings complemented and competed with the
Jeffersonian models of a hundred years earlier. In addition, throughout its history
Albemarle County has seen construction of a great variety of public architectural
landmarks: mills and churches, movie theaters and hospitals, gas stations and taverns.

For many years K. Edward Lay has been teaching, guiding tours of, and writing about
this rich architectural legacy. Here at last is his definitive treatment of a topic that has
been his life's work, presented in an elegantly illustrated volume. Following a general
introduction by John S. Salmon, Lay divides his book into six chronological chapters:
"The Georgian Period," "Thomas Jefferson and His Builders," "The Roman Revival
(1800-1830)," "The Greek Revival (1830-1860)," "Beyond the Classical Revival," and
"The Eclectic Era (1890-1939)." He discusses over 800 buildings, from a Sears house to
grand estates, the Abell-Gleason house and the Albemarle County Jail to Wavertree Hall
and Zion Baptist Church, with 26 color photographs and 369 black-and-white
illustrations complementing his text. A final chapter discusses the University of Virginia.
Maps of the area allow readers and visitors to trace the locations of individual buildings
and to recognize trends of settlement and construction in the area.

As an elegant giftbook or reference, The Architecture of Jefferson Country gives
architects, historians, visitors, and residents an unprecedented view of the wealth of
buildings in Charlottesville and Albemarle County.

Reviews

"Professor K. Edward Lay gives us not only a splendid county architectural history but a
rich and detailed local context for Jefferson's Monticello and the University of Virginia,
which he rightly calls 'two of the world's great examples of the building arts.'"

--William Seale, author of The President's House

"The Architecture of Jefferson Country is an amazing compendium of research and
documentation and a model study of a county's architectural legacy. Albemarle County's
architecture mirrors national trends, but also from its soil sprang some of the United
States' most refined and historically significant creations and styles. From Thomas
Jefferson's important essays at Monticello and the University of Virginia to the
sophisticated work of twentieth-century Colonial Revivalists, Albemarle County and
Charlottesville contain critically important architecture of interest to the entire nation,
indeed, to the world."

--Richard Guy Wilson, author of Thomas Jefferson's Academical Village: The
Creation of an Architectural Masterpiece and coauthor of The Making of Virginia
Architecture

"In The Architecture of Jefferson Country Professor Lay draws upon decades of
fieldwork and research to provide a detailed portrait of the architectural riches of
Albemarle County and Charlottesville. The generous illustrations--old and new
photographs, and drawings of floor plans and architectural features--demonstrate the
quality and diversity of local building from the eighteenth century into the twentieth, with
special emphasis on the nineteenth century. Clearly, Monticello and the University of
Virginia are stars in a remarkable constellation."

--Catherine Bishir, author of North Carolina Architecture

"Thomas Jefferson is as significant to Charlottesville and the United States as Palladio to
Vicenza and Italy. This welcome study expands and deepens our understanding of our
most important American architect."

--Michael Dennis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Author

K. Edward Lay is Cary D. Langhorne Professor of Architecture at the University of
Virginia. He is coauthor of A Virginia Family and Its Plantation Houses (Virginia).

352 pages • 8 1/2 x 11 • 26 color and 369 b&w illustrations
ISBN 0-8139-1885-5 • $49.95 cloth

Reviews

"Jefferson's Empire is brilliant work by the historian best qualified to give us a new and thorough analysis of Jefferson's concepts of empire, nation, and union. It offers both a
fresh angle of vision on Jefferson himself and a superb contribution to the renewed understanding of the importance of federalism to the founding generation."

Lance Banning, University of Kentucky

"Peter Onuf has written a fine study of Jefferson's political thought approached as a coherent body of principles and affirmations formed during the critical years between his
entering the lists as a polemicist for the patriot cause and his move to form an opposition to the Federalist policies in Washington's administration twenty years later. Jefferson's
Empire is tightly argued, forcefully written, and intellectually challenging."

Joyce Appleby, University of California, Los Angeles

The Author

Peter S. Onuf, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor of History at the
University of Virginia, is the editor of Jeffersonian Legacies and, with Jan Lewis, of
Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture

240 pages 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 cloth
ISBN 0-8139-1930-4 • $27.95
APRIL 2000