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Jeffersonians in Power: The Rhetoric of Opposition Meets the Realities of Governing (Jeffersonian America)
By James E. Lewis Jr.. 2019
In the 1790s, the Jeffersonian Republicans were the party of "no." They opposed attempts to expand the government’s role in…
society, criticized the Washington administration’s national bank, railed against a standing army, and bemoaned the spirit of the Federalist regime, which, they claimed, favored elite over ordinary Americans. Accordingly, Thomas Jefferson asserted that his election as President in 1801 was a "revolution": with Jeffersonians in power, the government could be stripped down in size and strength. But there was a paradox at the heart of this image. Maintaining the security, stability, and prosperity of the republic required aggressive statecraft, and as a result, Jeffersonians deployed state power to reduce taxes and the debt, enforce a shipping embargo, go to war, and ultimately to support a national bank during Madison’s administration.This book explores the logic and logistics of Jeffersonian statesmanship. Focusing on Jeffersonian Republican statecraft in action, Jeffersonians in Power maps the meeting place of ideology and policy as Jeffersonians shifted from being an oppositional party to exercising power as the ruling coalition.Contributors: Andrew Burstein, Louisiana State University * Benjamin L. Carp, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York * Christa Dierksheide, University of Missouri * Kevin R. C. Gutzman, Western Connecticut State University * James E. Lewis Jr., Kalamazoo College * Martin Öhman, Gothenburg University * Robert G. Parkinson, Binghamton University * John A. Ragosta, Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello * Leonard J. Sadosky III * Richard Samuelson, California State University, San Bernardino * Brian Schoen, Ohio University * Mark Smith, John Burroughs School, St. Louis * Andrew Trees, Roosevelt UniversityAfter the Revolution, Americans realized they lacked the common, deep, or meaningful history that might bind together their loose confederation…
of former colonies into a genuine nation. They had been conquerors yet colonials, now politically independent yet culturally subordinate to European history and traditions. To resolve these paradoxes, some early republic "historians" went so far as to reconstruct pre-Columbian, transatlantic adventures by white people that might be employed to assert their rights and ennoble their identities as Americans.In Colonizing the Past, Edward Watts labels this impulse "primordialism" and reveals its consistent presence over the span of nineteenth-century American print culture. In dozens of texts, Watts tracks episodes in which varying accounts of pre-Columbian whites attracted widespread attention: the Welsh Indians, the Lost Tribes of Israel, the white Mound Builders, and the Vikings, as well as two ancient Irish interventions. In each instance, public interest was ignited when representations of the group in question became enmeshed in concurrent conversations about the nation’s evolving identity and policies. Yet at every turn, counternarratives and public resistance challenged both the plausibility of the pre-Columbian whites and the colonialist symbolism that had been evoked to create a sense of American identity. By challenging the rhetoric of primordialism and empire building, dissenting writers from Washington Irving to Mark Twain exposed the crimes of conquest and white Americans’ marginality as ex-colonials.Sucking Up: A Brief Consideration of Sycophancy
By Mark Parker. 2017
Suck-up. Ass-kisser. Brownnoser. Bootlicker. Lickspittle. Toadeater... Found in every walk of life, both real and imagined, sycophants surround us. But…
whether we grumble about sycophancy or grudgingly tolerate it as a price of getting along in a complex society, we rarely examine it closely. This book humorously considers that slavish art from the historical past to our current political environment, and particularly through the revealing lens of literature. Some of the grandest examples of yes-men appear in these pages--from Dante’s flatterers and Dickens’s Uriah Heep to Kellyanne Conway, who urged us to "go buy Ivanka’s stuff," and the obsequious soul who apologized to Vice President Cheney for being shot by him.More relevant now than ever, as sucking up becomes the master trope of the Trump era, this choice romp through the spectacular world of bowing and scraping will entertain and enlighten.On the morning of May 24, 1921, a force of eight hundred white policemen and soldiers confronted an African prophet,…
Enoch Mgijima, and some three thousand of his followers. Called the Israelites, they refused to leave their holy village of Ntabelanga, where they had been gathering since early 1919 to await the end of the world. While the Israelites maintained they were there to pray and worship in peace, the white authorities viewed them as illegally squatting on land that was not theirs. After many months of fruitless negotiations, the South African government sent an armed force to Bulhoek, a village in the Eastern Cape, to expel them. In the event that has come to be known as the Bulhoek massacre, police armed with rifles, machine guns, and cannons killed nearly two hundred Israelites wielding knobkerries, swords, and spears.In The Finger of God, Robert Edgar reveals how and why the Bulhoek massacre occurred. Edgar asks: Why did Mgijima prophesize that the end of the world was imminent, and why did he summon his followers to Ntabelanga? Why did the South African government regard the Israelite encampment as a threat? Examining this clash between a government and a millenial movement, Edgar considers the Bulhoek massacre both as a signal event in South African history and as an example of similar conflicts worldwide.A Single, Numberless Death
By Nora Strejilevich. 2002
Nora Strejilevich was a young woman when her brother and other family members and friends disappeared at the hands of…
the military junta that held power in Argentina from 1976 to 1983. Ostensibly part of a systematic campaign to eliminate left-wing terrorism, the violence perpetrated by the junta far exceeded anything the leftists ever dreamed of, enveloping not only the violent left but other dissidents and innocent civilians as well, and particularly targeting the Jewish population. A desaparecida herself, Strejilevich survived kidnapping and torture to speak of her experience with a dignified voice and a clear-eyed realism that extends from one end of the political spectrum to the other.In the first English translation of her elegant fictional memoir Una sola muerte numerosa, Strejilevich combines autobiography, documentary journalism, fiction, magical realism, and poetry to express the "choir of voices" of the more than 30,000 souls who were imprisoned and abused. She engages the reader in the history of a bloody military coup and state-sanctioned anti-Semitism, exploring themes of exile, identity, and violence. Above all, A Single, Numberless Death is Nora Strejilevich’s gripping story of survival.The site of a thriving literary tradition, Washington, DC, has been the home to many of our nation’s most acclaimed…
writers. From the city’s founding to the beginnings of modernism, literary luminaries including Walt Whitman, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Henry Adams, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston have lived and worked at their craft in our nation’s capital. In A Literary Guide to Washington, DC, Kim Roberts offers a guide to the city’s rich literary history. Part walking tour, part anthology, A Literary Guide to Washington, DC is organized into five sections, each corresponding to a particularly vibrant period in Washington’s literary community. Starting with the city’s earliest years, Roberts examines writers such as Hasty-Pudding poet Joel Barlow and "Star-Spangled Banner" lyricist Francis Scott Key before moving on to the Civil War and Reconstruction and touching on the lives of authors such as Charlotte Forten Grimké and James Weldon Johnson. She wraps up her tour with World War I and the Jazz Age, which brought to the city some writers at the forefront of modernism, including the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Sinclair Lewis. The book’s stimulating tours cover downtown, the LeDroit Park and Shaw neighborhoods, Lafayette Square, and the historic U Street district, bringing the history of the city to life in surprising ways.Written for tourists, literary enthusiasts, amateur historians, and armchair travelers, A Literary Guide to Washington, DC offers a cultural tour of our nation's capital through a literary lens.The Dhamma Man
By Vilas Sarang. 2011
Siddharth Gautam, prince of Kapilavastu and heir to the throne has everything. Yet he is dissatisfied. The fundamental problem of…
suffering — dukkha — bothers him. He leaves home. Renouncing crown and family, he becomes a wandering seeker. Siddharth finds gurus to guide him and practices extreme asceticism — at one point nearly starving himself to death — and then rejects everything. The knowledge he seeks constantly eludes him. He then meditates and one epiphanic night enlightenment comes to him — the startling insight into the human condition which makes him the Buddha. The Dhamma Man explores, sensitively and with great objectivity, Buddha as man — as son, husband and father. Even as Sarang tries to understand the effect Siddharth’s renunciation of the world had on his family, he celebrates Buddha who not only launched a religion but has continued relevance today, more than two millennia after his death. Richly imagined and refreshingly original; The Dhamma Man is a whole new way to read the story of Buddha.Innovation in the Italian Counter-Reformation (Early Modern Exchange)
By Shannon McHugh and Anna Wainwright. 2020
The enduring "black legend" of the Italian Counter-Reformation, which has held sway in both scholarly and popular culture, maintains that…
the Council of Trent ushered in a cultural dark age in Italy, snuffing out the spectacular creative production of the Renaissance. As a result, the decades following Trent have been mostly overlooked in Italian literary studies, in particular. The thirteen essays of Innovation in the Italian Counter-Reformation present a radical reconsideration of literary production in post-Tridentine Italy. With particular attention to the much-maligned tradition of spiritual literature, the volume’s contributors weave literary analysis together with religion, theater, art, music, science, and gender to demonstrate that the literature of this period not only merits study but is positively innovative. Contributors include such renowned critics as Virginia Cox and Amadeo Quondam, two of the leading scholars on the Italian Counter-Reformation.Distributed for UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE PRESS"What Shall We Do with the Negro?": Lincoln, White Racism, and Civil War America
By Paul D. Escott. 2009
Throughout the Civil War, newspaper headlines and stories repeatedly asked some variation of the question posed by the New York…
Times in 1862, "What shall we do with the negro?" The future status of African Americans was a pressing issue for those in both the North and in the South. Consulting a broad range of contemporary newspapers, magazines, books, army records, government documents, publications of citizens' organizations, letters, diaries, and other sources, Paul D. Escott examines the attitudes and actions of Northerners and Southerners regarding the future of African Americans after the end of slavery. "What Shall We Do with the Negro?" demonstrates how historians together with our larger national popular culture have wrenched the history of this period from its context in order to portray key figures as heroes or exemplars of national virtue. Escott gives especial critical attention to Abraham Lincoln. Since the civil rights movement, many popular books have treated Lincoln as an icon, a mythical leader with thoroughly modern views on all aspects of race. But, focusing on Lincoln's policies rather than attempting to divine Lincoln's intentions from his often ambiguous or cryptic statements, Escott reveals a president who placed a higher priority on reunion than on emancipation, who showed an enduring respect for states' rights, who assumed that the social status of African Americans would change very slowly in freedom, and who offered major incentives to white Southerners at the expense of the interests of blacks.Escott's approach reveals the depth of slavery's influence on society and the pervasiveness of assumptions of white supremacy. "What Shall We Do with the Negro?" serves as a corrective in offering a more realistic, more nuanced, and less celebratory approach to understanding this crucial period in American history."The most dishonorable act that can dishonor a man." Such is Félix Grandet’s unsparing view of bankruptcy, adding that even…
a highway robber—who at least "risks his own life in attacking you"—is worthier of respect. Indeed, the France of Balzac’s day was an unforgiving place for borrowers. Each year, thousands of debtors found themselves arrested for commercial debts. Those who wished to escape debt imprisonment through bankruptcy sacrificed their honor—losing, among other rights and privileges, the ability to vote, to serve on a jury, or even to enter the stock market.Arguing that French Revolutionary and Napoleonic legislation created a conception of commercial identity that tied together the debtor’s social, moral, and physical person, In the Red and in the Black examines the history of debt imprisonment and bankruptcy as a means of understanding the changing logic of commercial debt. Following the practical application of these laws throughout the early nineteenth century, Erika Vause traces how financial failure and fraud became legally disentangled. The idea of personhood established in the Revolution’s aftermath unraveled over the course of the century owing to a growing penal ideology that stressed the state’s virtual monopoly over incarceration and to investors’ desire to insure their financial risks. This meticulously researched study offers a novel conceptualization of how central "the economic" was to new understandings of self, state, and the market. Telling a story deeply resonant in our own age of ambivalence about the innocence of failures by financial institutions and large-scale speculators, Vause reveals how legal personalization and depersonalization of debt was essential for unleashing the latent forces of capitalism itself.Educated in Tyranny: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s University
By Andrew Johnston, Kirt von von Daacke, Louis P. Nelson, Maurie D. McInnis, Benjamin Ford, James Zehmer, Jessica E. Sewell. 2019
From the University of Virginia’s very inception, slavery was deeply woven into its fabric. Enslaved people first helped to construct…
and then later lived in the Academical Village; they raised and prepared food, washed clothes, cleaned privies, and chopped wood. They maintained the buildings, cleaned classrooms, and served as personal servants to faculty and students. At any given time, there were typically more than one hundred enslaved people residing alongside the students, faculty, and their families. The central paradox at the heart of UVA is also that of the nation: What does it mean to have a public university established to preserve democratic rights that is likewise founded and maintained on the stolen labor of others? In Educated in Tyranny, Maurie McInnis, Louis Nelson, and a group of contributing authors tell the largely unknown story of slavery at the University of Virginia. While UVA has long been celebrated as fulfilling Jefferson’s desire to educate citizens to lead and govern, McInnis and Nelson document the burgeoning political rift over slavery as Jefferson tried to protect southern men from anti-slavery ideas in northern institutions. In uncovering this history, Educated in Tyranny changes how we see the university during its first fifty years and understand its history hereafter.Monacan Millennium: A Collaborative Archaeology and History of a Virginia Indian People
By Jeffrey L. Hantman. 2018
While Jamestown and colonial settlements dominate narratives of Virginia’s earliest days, the land’s oldest history belongs to its native people.…
Monacan Millennium tells the story of the Monacan Indian people of Virginia, stretching from 1000 A.D. through the moment of colonial contact in 1607 and into the present.Written from an anthropological perspective and informed by ethnohistory, archaeology, and indigenous tribal perspectives, this comprehensive study reframes the Chesapeake’s early colonial period—and its deep precolonial history—by viewing it through a Monacan lens. Shifting focus to the Monacans, Hantman reveals a group whose ritual practices bespeak centuries of politically and culturally dynamic history. This insightful volume draws on archeology, English colonial archives, Spanish sources, and early cartography to put the Monacans back on the map. By examining representations of the tribe in colonial, postcolonial, and contemporary texts, the author fosters a dynamic, unfolding understanding of who the Monacan people were and are.Race: The American Cauldron (Miller Center Studies on the Presidency)
By Michael Eric Dyson, Orlando Patterson, Douglas A. Blackmon, Elizabeth Hinton. 2007
In an increasingly polarized political environment, the first year of the new president’s term will be especially challenging. With a…
fresh mandate, however, the first year also offers opportunities that may never come again. The First Year Project is a fascinating initiative by the Miller Center of the University of Virginia that brings together top scholars on the American presidency and experienced officials to explore the first twelve months of past administrations, and draw practical lessons from that history, as we inaugurate a new president in January 2017.This project is the basis for a new series of digital shorts published as Miller Center Studies on the Presidency. Presented as specially priced collections published exclusively in an ebook format, these timely examinations recognize the experiences of past presidents as an invaluable resource that can edify and instruct the incoming president.Contributors: Michael Eric Dyuson, Georgetown University * Elizabeth Hinton, Harvard University * Orlando Patterson, Harvard University * Douglas A. Blackmon, Georgia State UniversityNovel Ventures: Fiction and Print Culture in England, 1690-1730
By Leah Orr. 2017
The eighteenth century British book trade marks the beginning of the literary marketplace as we know it. The lapsing of…
the Licensing Act in 1695 brought an end to pre-publication censorship of printed texts and restrictions on the number of printers and presses in Britain. Resisting the standard "rise of the novel" paradigm, Novel Ventures incorporates new research about the fiction marketplace to illuminate early fiction as an eighteenth-century reader or writer might have seen it. Through a consideration of all 475 works of fiction printed over the four decades from 1690 to 1730, including new texts, translations of foreign works, and reprints of older fiction, Leah Orr shows that the genre was much more diverse and innovative in this period than is usually thought. Contextual chapters examine topics such as the portrayal of early fiction in literary history, the canonization of fiction, concepts of fiction genres, printers and booksellers, the prices and physical manufacture of books, and advertising strategies to give a more complex picture of the genre in the print culture world of the early eighteenth century. Ultimately, Novel Ventures concludes that publishers had far more influence over what was written, printed, and read than authors did, and that they shaped the development of English fiction at a crucial moment in its literary history.The Life of William Faulkner: This Alarming Paradox, 1935–1962
By Carl Rollyson. 2020
By the end of volume 1 of The Life of William Faulkner ("A filling, satisfying feast for Faulkner aficianados"— Kirkus),…
the young Faulkner had gone from an unpromising, self-mythologizing bohemian to the author of some of the most innovative and enduring literature of the century, including The Sound and the Fury and Light in August. The second and concluding volume of Carl Rollyson’s ambitious biography finds Faulkner lamenting the many threats to his creative existence. Feeling, as an artist, he should be above worldly concerns and even morality, he has instead inherited only debts—a symptom of the South’s faded fortunes—and numerous mouths to feed and funerals to fund. And so he turns to the classic temptation for financially struggling writers—Hollywood. Thus begins roughly a decade of shuttling between his home and family in Mississippi—lifeblood of his art—and the backlots of the Golden Age film industry. Through Faulkner’s Hollywood years, Rollyson introduces such personalities as Humphrey Bogart and Faulkner’s long-time collaborator Howard Hawks, while telling the stories behind films such as The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not. At the same time, he chronicles with great insight Faulkner's rapidly crumbling though somehow resilient marriage and his numerous extramarital affairs--including his deeply felt, if ultimately doomed, relationship with Meta Carpenter. (In his grief over their breakup, Faulkner—a dipsomaniac capable of ferocious alcoholic binges—received third-degree burns when he passed out on a hotel-room radiator.) Where most biographers and critics dismiss Faulkner’s film work as at best a necessary evil, at worst a tragic waste of his peak creative years, Rollyson approaches this period as a valuable window on his artistry. He reveals a fascinating, previously unappreciated cross-pollination between Faulkner’s film and literary work, elements from his fiction appearing in his screenplays and his film collaborations influencing his later novels—fundamentally changing the character of late-career works such as the Snopes trilogy. Rollyson takes the reader on a fascinating journey through the composition of Absalom, Absalom!, widely considered Faulkner’s masterpiece, as well as the film adaptation he authored—unproduced and never published— Revolt in the Earth. He reveals how Faulkner wrestled with the legacy of the South—both its history and its dizzying racial contradictions—and turned it into powerful art in works such as Go Down, Moses and Intruder in the Dust. Volume 2 of this monumental work rests on an unprecedented trove of research, giving us the most penetrating and comprehensive life of Faulkner and providing a fascinating look at the author's trajectory from under-appreciated "writer's writer" to world-renowned Nobel laureate and literary icon. In his famous Nobel speech, Faulkner said what inspired him was the human ability to prevail. In the end, this beautifully wrought life shows how Faulkner, the man and the artist, embodies this remarkable capacity to endure and prevail.The Cosmic Clues
By Manjiri Prabhu. 2004
Sonia Samarth couldn't have predicted it. It had only been a day, but her first advertisement had drawn dozens of…
responses. In the bustling city of Pune, with its winding alleys and exotic customs, Sonia has launched a brand new business - private investigation guided by Hindu astrology. Her unique brand of investigation might raise eyebrows but before long, she seems to have found her niche. When a cat leads Sonia to her very first investigation, she uses astrology to unmask the killer. Suddenly, clients begin streaming in a persistent, handsome TV personality, a terrified bride to be a missing husband with suicidal tendencies. These cases initially seem like isolated experiences, but Sonia soon finds that they are bound by an invisible thread. Very soon she will have to look closely at her own stars as a notorious international criminal has just crossed Sonia's path and has his own plans for her future.The Wild Within: Histories of a Landmark British Zoo
By Andrew Flack. 2018
Established in 1836, the Bristol Zoo is the world’s oldest surviving zoo outside of a capital city and has frequently…
been at the vanguard of zoo innovation. In The Wild Within, Andrew Flack uses the experiences of the Bristol Zoo to explore the complex and ever-changing relationship between human and beast, which in many cases has altered radically over time.Flack recounts a history in which categories and identities combined, converged, and came into conflict, as the animals at Bristol proved to be extremely adaptive. He also reveals aspects of the human-animal bond, however, that have remained remarkably consistent not only throughout the zoo’s existence but for centuries, including the ways in which even the captive animals with the most distinct qualities and characteristics are misunderstood when viewed through an anthropocentric lens.Flack strips back the layers of the human-animal relationship from those rooted in objectification and homogenization to those rooted in the recognition of consciousness and individual experience. The multifaceted beasts and protean people in The Wild Within challenge a host of assumptions--both within and outside the zoo--about what it means to be human or animal in the modern world.Diverging from the studies of southern African migrant labor that focus on particular workplaces and points of origin, Bound for…
Work looks at the multitude of forms and locales of migrant labor that individuals—under more or less coercive circumstances—engaged in over the course of their lives. Tracing Mozambican workers as they moved between different types of labor across Mozambique, Rhodesia, and South Africa, Zachary Kagan Guthrie places the multiple venues of labor in a single historical frame, expanding the regional historiography beyond the long shadow cast by the apartheid state while simultaneously exploring the continuities and fractures between South Africa, southern Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa.Kagan Guthrie’s holistic approach to migrant labor yields several important conclusions. First, he highlights the importance of workers’ choices, explaining not just why people moved but why they moved in the ways they did: how they calculated the benefits of one destination over another, and how they decided when circumstances made it necessary to move again. Second, his attention to mobility gives a much clearer view of the mechanisms of power available to colonial authorities, as well as the limits to their effectiveness. Finally, Kagan Guthrie suggests a new explanation for the divergent trajectories of southern and sub-Saharan Africa in the aftermath of World War II.Contradictory ideals of egalitarianism and self-reliance haunt America’s democratic state. We need look no further than Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential…
campaign and victory for proof that early twentieth-century anxieties about individualism, race, and the foreign or intrusive "other" persist today. In Stranger America, Josh Toth tracks and delineates these anxieties in America’s aesthetic production, finally locating a potential narrative strategy for circumnavigating them.Toth’s central focus is, simply, strangeness—or those characters who adamantly resist being fixed in any given category of identity. As with the theorists employed (Nancy, i ek, Derrida, Freud, Hegel), the subjects and literature considered are as encompassing as possible: from the work of Herman Melville, William Faulkner, James Weldon Johnson, and Nella Larsen to that of Philip K. Dick, Woody Allen, Larry David, and Bob Dylan; from the rise of nativism in the early twentieth century to object-oriented ontology and the twenty-first-century zombie craze; from ragtime and the introduction of sound in American cinema to the exhaustion of postmodern metafiction.Toth argues that American literature, music, film, and television can show us the path toward a new ethic, one in which we organize identity around the stranger rather than resorting to tactics of pure exclusion or inclusion. Ultimately, he provides a new narrative approach to otherness that seeks to realize a truly democratic form of community.Inventing the Critic in Renaissance England
By William M. Russell. 2020
The turn of the seventeenth century was an important moment in the history of English criticism. In a series of…
pioneering works of rhetoric and poetics, writers such as Philip Sidney, George Puttenham, and Ben Jonson laid the foundations of critical discourse in English, and the English word "critic" began, for the first time, to suggest expertise in literary judgment. Yet the conspicuously ambivalent attitude of these critics toward criticism—and the persistent fear that they would be misunderstood, marginalized, scapegoated, or otherwise "branded with the dignity of a critic"—suggests that the position of the critic in this period was uncertain. In Inventing the Critic in Renaissance England, William Russell reveals that the critics of the English Renaissance did not passively absorb their practice from Continental and classical sources but actively invented it in response to a confluence of social and intellectual factors.Distributed for UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE PRESS