University of Virginia Press

2015 IPPY Silver Medalist, Best Mid-Atlantic NonfictionTwice the size of Central Park, Rock Creek Park is the wild, wooded heart of Washington, DC, offering refuge from a frantic city pace to...

A memoir in reading, this book reflects anew on how reading can become a transformative path to self-discovery. Jane Tompkins treats in particular works by Paul Theroux and V. S. Naipaul but also...

In what has become the era of the mass shooting, we are routinely taken to scenes of terrible violence. Often neglected, however, is the long aftermath, including the efforts to effect change in the...

This book analyzes how Shakespeare and Milton influenced classic American novelists in their depictions of gender, sexuality, and race--Author: David GrevenPublisher: University of Virginia...

The koan is among the most recognizable of Zen Buddhist genres, a riddle or puzzle used during meditation to help unravel greater truths about the world or those meditating. In American Koan, Ben Van...

Are the United States and China on a collision course? In response to remarks made by Donald Trump's secretary of state, China's state-run newspaper Global Times asserted, "Unless Washington plans to...

The role of nineteenth-century French literature in a distinctively modern political movement When Parisian workers took to the streets in February 1848, they adopted the rallying cry of droit au...

In this controversial history the author tells the story of how the Civil Warand slavery were intertwined, and how internal social conflict undermined theConfederacy in the end.Author: Armistead L...

The vital influence of Black American intellectuals on the legacy of Thomas Jefferson's ideas The lofty Enlightenment principles articulated by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, so...

How one organization took on industrial pollution--and the lessons for our new century In 1977, one forward-thinking judge took an ecological disaster--the poisoning of the James River by Allied...

Postwar culture and anxiety over the reintegration of veterans into American society Millions of GIs returned from overseas in 1945. A generation of men who had left their families and had learned to...

When hate groups descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, triggering an eruption of racist violence, the tragic conflict reverberated throughout the world. It also had a profound effect on the...

Nationalism in nineteenth-century America operated through a collection of symbols, signifiers citizens could invest with meaning and understanding. In Confederate Visions, Ian Binnington examines...

Of all the founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson stood out as the most controversial and confounding. Loved and hated, revered and reviled, during his lifetime he served as a lightning rod for dispute...

Is the presidency a position one must learn on the job, or can one learn from others' experience? No common thread runs through the list of forty-five presidents; no playbook provides the answers to...

Daydreams and Nightmares uses the private letters and other records of an Upshur County, Virginia, family to reveal through their own words and experiences how the secession crisis during the winter...

On the cusp of the American Revolution, various groups in the Northern Susquehanna River Valley competed for land and political sovereignty, and the increasing turmoil between them set the terms of...

In political speech, Thomas Jefferson is the eternal flame. No other member of the founding generation has served the agendas of both Left and Right with greater vigor. When Franklin Roosevelt...

Histories of designed landscapes frequently propel a limited narrative in which a landscape's early history-often referred to as its period of significance"-is presented as the definitive chapter...

A novel set in the final years of the Haitian Revolution at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Trouillot constructs an intricate narrative web from the varied experiences of freedmen and -women,...

Both personal memoir and political history, this book recounts the decisions that fully embroiled the United States in the Vietnam War. Trueheart chronicles the ways in which the breakdown between...

This book evaluates in a comparative international fashion the theory that the better off in society tend to prevail in litigation -- what is known to law professionals and political scientists as...

A novel set in the final years of the Haitian Revolution at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Trouillot constructs an intricate narrative web from the varied experiences of freedmen and -women,...

A groundbreaking study situating the Mississippi River valley at the heart of the early American republic's political economy Shortly after the ratification of the US Constitution in 1789,...

Tracing the influence of Faulkner's screenwriting on his literary craft and depictions of women William Faulkner's time as a Hollywood screenwriter has often been dismissed as little more than an...

George Washington was the unanimous choice of his fellow founders for president, and he is remembered to this day as an exceptional leader, but how exactly did this manifest itself during his...

Many are aware that gerrymandering exists and suspect it plays a role in our elections, but its history goes far deeper, and its impacts are far greater, than most realize. In his latest book, Brent...

In 1845, seven years after fleeing bondage in Maryland, Frederick Douglass was in his late twenties and already a celebrated lecturer across the northern United States. The recent publication of his...

Victorians' views of water and its role in how the social fabric of Victorian Britain was imagined Water matters like few other substances in people's daily lives. In the nineteenth century, it left...

Humboldt and Jefferson explores the relationship between two fascinating personalities: the Prussian explorer, scientist, and geographer Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) and the American statesman,...