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Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution

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In his new book, Michal Jan Rozbicki undertakes to bridge the gap between the political and the cultural histories of the American Revolution. Through a careful examination of liberty as both the ideological axis and the central metaphor of the age, he is able to offer a fresh model for interpreting the Revolution. By establishing systemic linkages between the histories of the free and the unfree, and between the factual and the symbolic, this framework points to a fundamental reassessment of the ways we think about the American Founding.Rozbicki moves beyond the two dominant interpretations of Revolutionary libertyone assuming the Founders invested it with a modern meaning that has in essence continued to the present day, the other highlighting its apparent betrayal by their commitment to inequality. Through a consistent focus on the interplay between culture and power, Rozbicki demonstrates that liberty existed as an intricate fusion of political practices and symbolic forms. His deeply historicized reconstruction of its contemporary meanings makes it clear that liberty was still understood as a set of privileges distributed according to social rank rather than a universal right. In fact, it was because the Founders considered this assumption self-evident that they felt confident in publicizing a highly liberal, symbolic narrative of equal liberty to represent the Revolutionary endeavor. The uncontainable success of this narrative went far beyond the circumstances that gave birth to it because it put new cultural capitala conceptual arsenal of rights and freedomsat the disposal of ordinary people as well as political factions competing for their support, providing priceless legitimacy to all those who would insist that its nominal inclusiveness include them in fact.

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In this second edition of Bob Goochs Virginia Fishing Guide, M. W. Smith offers an updated version of a classic work of Virginia outdoor literature. Providing a new preface and appendices, Smith also recasts the volumes introduction and site listings to reflect such changes as new "catch and release only" designations and stocking schedules (for trout streams). This edition features a fresh design with new maps and photographs.

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This book represents a continuation of Jean-Luc Marions work on givenness as a foundational concept. A former student of Jacques Derrida, Marion is known for his work in seventeenth-century French philosophy, for his theory of "God without being," and for his reformulation of phenomenology. Marions groundbreaking work on givenness is articulated through attentive readings in a striking array of philosophical texts. The four pieces collected here, based on the fall 2008 Richard Lectures at the University of Virginia, expand upon and go beyond the lines of Marions previous work and exemplify the intersection of his own constructive brilliance with his talent and rigor as a historian of philosophy. Reengaging philosophers long central to Marions own work (Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas) and highlighting the significance of lesser-known but decisive influences (Natorp, Rickert, Meinong), these lectures will be valuable to readers interested in the ongoing conversation seeking to bridge the divide between Continental and analytic philosophies, particularly through the exploration of common points of origin. These pieces tackle some of the most pressing debates in contemporary European philosophy and offer students of Marion material to ponder as they seek to further understand his influences. Taken together, these essays form an important volume by a major figure in contemporary philosophy.

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Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere

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Bringing together the most exciting recent archival work in anglophone, francophone, and hispanophone Caribbean studies, Raphael Dalleo constructs a new literary history of the region that is both comprehensive and innovative. He examines how changes in political, economic, and social structures have produced different sets of possibilities for writers to imagine their relationship to the institutions of the public sphere. In the process, he provides a new context for rereading such major writers as Mary Seacole, Jose Marti, Jacques Roumain, Claude McKay, Marie Chauvet, and George Lamming, while also drawing lesser-known figures into the story. Dalleos comparative approach will be important to Caribbeanists from all of the regions linguistic traditions, and his book contributes even more broadly to debates in Latin American and postcolonial studies about postmodernity and globalization.

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The Untold Story of the Founder of the Weather Channel

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Frank Batten Sr. (19272009) created the Weather Channel in 1982, despite mocking by colleagues in the media that around-the-clock weather broadcasts would be as exciting as watching paint dry. The network, and later its companion website, Weather.com, became the largest private weather company in the world and an American cultural icon.Yet few have heard of Batten, a media pioneer whose Virginia newspaper was the only major daily to back school integration. At a time when American corporate greed was making headlines, without fanfare and limelight Batten built a media empire centered on honesty, integrity, and ethics.Starting out in his uncles newspaper business in Norfolk, Virginia, as a reporter and advertising salesman, he assumed leadership of the Virginian-Pilot and Ledger-Star at the age of twenty-seven and grew Landmark Communications into a media powerhouse. He championed racial equality, a position not often taken in Virginia during the 1950s. His flagship newspaper, the Pilot, was the only daily paper in Virginia to back court-ordered school desegregation. He created two billion-dollar businesses and gave away more than $400 million to charity, nearly all of it to education. As chairman of the Associated Press from 1982 to 1987, he helped guide the news agency back on a sound financial footing. Batten also faced a tremendous personal challenge that would have sidelined many: he lost his vocal cords to cancer two years before starting the Weather Channel.This is the untold story of a man whose name few recognize, yet who helped change the face of the media in the twentieth century.

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The Limits of Optimism works to dispel persistent notions about Jeffersons allegedly paradoxical and sphinx-like quality. Maurizio Valsania shows that Jeffersons multifaceted character and personality are to a large extent the logical outcome of an anti-metaphysical, enlightened, and humility-oriented approach to reality. That Jeffersons mind and priorities changed over time and in response to changing circumstances indicates neither incoherence, hypocrisy, nor pathology.Valsanias reading of Jefferson, the Enlightenment, and negativity helps to make sense of the many paradoxes typically associated with that eighteenth-century thinker. At the same time, it provides a corrective to the common though erroneous equation of Enlightenment thinking with rationalism and shallow optimism.

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Bringing a comparative perspective to the study of autobiography, Edgard Sankara considers a cross-section of postcolonial francophone writing from Africa and the Caribbean in order to examine and compare for the first time their transnational reception. Sankara not only compares the ways in which a wide selection of autobiographies were received locally (as well as in France) but also juxtaposes reception by the colonized and the colonizer to show how different meanings were assigned to the works after publication.Sankaras geographical and cultural coverage of Africa and its diaspora is rich, with separate chapters devoted to the autobiographies of Hampate Ba, Valentin Mudimbe, Kesso Barry, Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphael Confiant, and Maryse Conde. The author combines close reading, reception study, and postcolonial theory to present an insightful survey of the literary connections among these autobiographers as well as a useful point of departure for further exploration of the genre itself, of the role of reception studies in postcolonial criticism, and of the stance that postcolonial francophone writers choose to take regarding their communities of origin.Modern Language Initiative

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The Educational Legacy of Woodrow Wilson

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In The Educational Legacy of Woodrow Wilson, James Axtell brings together essays by eight leading historians and one historically minded political scientist to examine the long, formative academic phase of Wilsons career and its connection to his relatively brief tenure in politics. Together, the essays provide a greatly revised picture of Wilsons whole career and a deeply nuanced understanding of the evolution of his educational, political, and social philosophy and policies, the ordering of his values and priorities, and the seamless link between his academic and political lives. The contributors shed light on Wilsons unexpected rise to the governorship of New Jersey and the presidency, and how he prepared for elective office through his long study of government and the practice of academic politics, which he deemed no less fierce than that of Washington. In both spheres he was enormously successful, propelling a string of progressive reforms through faculty and legislative forums. Only after he was beset by health problems and events beyond his control did he fail to push his academic and postwar agendas to their logical, idealistic conclusions.Contributors: James Axtell, College of William and Mary * Victoria Bissell Brown, Grinnell College * John Milton Cooper Jr., University of Wisconsin * Stanley N. Katz, Princeton University * W. Bruce Leslie, SUNYBrockport * Adam R. Nelson, University of Wisconsin * Mark R. Nemec, Forrester Research * John R. Thelin, University of Kentucky * Trygve Throntveit, Harvard University

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An ambitious but abortive plan to revolt that ended in the conviction and hanging of over two dozen men, Gabriels Conspiracy of 1800 sought nothing less than to capture the capital city of Richmond and end slavery in Virginia. Whispers of Rebellion draws on recent scholarship and extensive archival material to provide the clearest view yet of this fascinating chapter in the history of slaveryand to question much about the case that has been accepted as fact.In his examination of the slave Gabriel and his group of insurgents, Michael Nicholls focuses on the neighborhood of the Brook, north of Richmond, as the plots locus, revealing the areas economic and familial ties, the geographic proximity of the key conspirators, and how their contacts allowed their plan to spread across three counties and into the cities of Richmond and Petersburg.Nicholls explores underdocumented aspects of the conspiracy, such as the participants recruitment and motives, showing them to be less ideologically driven than previously supposed. The author also looks at the states swift and brutal response, and argues persuasively that, rather than the coalition between blacks and whites that has been described in other accounts, the participants were all slaves or free blacks, suffering under an oppressive white population and willing to die for their freedom.

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The crime melodramas of the 1940s known now as film noir shared many formal and thematic elements, from unusual camera angles and lighting to moral ambiguity and femmes fatales. In this book Robert Pippin argues that many of these films also raise distinctly philosophical questions. Where most Hollywood films of that era featured reflective individuals living with purpose, taking action and effecting desired consequences, the typical noir protagonist deliberates and plans, only to be confronted by the irrelevance of such deliberation and by results that contrast sharply, often tragically, with his or her intentions or true commitments. Pippin shows how this terrible disconnect sheds light on one of the central issues in modern philosophy--the nature of human agency. How do we distinguish what people do from what merely happens to them? Looking at several film noirs--including close readings of three classics of the genre, Fritz Langs Scarlet Street, Orson Welless The Lady from Shanghai, and Jacques Tourneurs Out of the Past--Pippin reveals the ways in which these works explore the declining credibility of individuals as causal centers of agency, and how we live with the acknowledgment of such limitations.

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This collection of essays on seventeenth-century Virginia, the first such collection on the Chesapeake in nearly twenty-five years, highlights emerging directions in scholarship and helps set a new agenda for research in the next decade and beyond. The contributors represent some of the best of a younger generation of scholars who are building on, but also criticizing and moving beyond, the work of the so-called Chesapeake School of social history that dominated the historiography of the region in the 1970s and 1980s. Employing a variety of methodologies, analytical strategies, and types of evidence, these essays explore a wide range of topics and offer a fresh look at the early religious, political, economic, social, and intellectual life of the colony.Contributors<br>Douglas Bradburn, Binghamton University, State University of New York * John C. Coombs, Hampden-Sydney College * Victor Enthoven, Netherlands Defense Academy * Alexander B. Haskell, University of California Riverside * Wim Klooster, Clark University * Philip Levy, University of South Florida * Philip D. Morgan, Johns Hopkins University * William A. Pettigrew, University of Kent * Edward DuBois Ragan, Valentine Richmond History Center * Terri L. Snyder, California State University, Fullerton * Camilla Townsend, Rutgers University * Lorena S. Walsh, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

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Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible charts the impact of post-Enlightenment biblical criticism on English literary culture. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw a widespread reevaluation of biblical inspiration, in which the Bibles poetic nature came to be seen as an integral part of its religious significance. Understandably, then, many poets who followed this interpretative revolutionincluding Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Elizabeth Barrett Browningcame to reconceive their highest vocational ambitions: if the Bible is essentially poetry, then modern poetry might perform a cultural role akin to that of scripture. This context equally illuminates the aims and achievements of famous Victorian unbelievers such as Arthur Hugh Clough and George Eliot, who also responded enthusiastically to the poetic ideal of an inspired text.Building upon a recent and ongoing reevaluation of religion as a vital aspect of Victorian culture, Charles LaPorte shows the enduring relevance of religion in a period usually associated with its decline. In doing so, he helps to delineate the midcentury shape of a literary dynamic that is generally better understood in Romantic poetry of the earlier part of the century. The poets he examines all wrestled with modern findings about the Bible's fortuitous historical composition, yet they owed much of their extraordinary literary success to their ability to capitalize upon the progress of avant-garde biblical interpretation.This book's revisionary and provocative thesis speaks not only to the course of English poetics but also to the logic of nineteenth-century literary hierarchies and to the continuing evolution of religion in the modern era.Victorian Literature and Culture Series

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Irony and Meaning in Postcolonial African Fiction

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In her focus on irony and meaning in postcolonial African fiction, Gloria Nne Onyeoziri refers to an internal subversion of the discourse of the wise and the powerful, a practice that has played multiple roles in the circulation of knowledge, authority, and opinion within African communities; in the interpretation of colonial and postcolonial experience; and in the ongoing resistance to tyrannies in African societies. But irony is always reversible and may be used to question the oppressed as well as the oppressor, shaking all presumptions of wisdom. Although the author cites numerous African writers, she selects six works by Chinua Achebe, Ahmadou Kourouma, and Calixthe Beyala for her primary analysis.Modern Language Initiative

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Over his distinguished career as a European intellectual historian and cultural critic, Martin Jay has explored a variety of major themes: the Frankfurt School, the exile of German intellectuals in America during the Nazi era, Western Marxism, the denigration of vision in twentieth-century French thought, the discourse of experience in modern Europe and America, and lying in politics. Essays from the Edge assembles Jays writings from the intersections of this intellectual journey. Several essays focus on methodological debates in the humanities and social sciences: the limits of interdisciplinarity, the issue of national or universal philosophy, cultural relativism and visuality, and the implications of periodization in historical narrative. Others examine the concept of "scopic regime" and the metaphors of revolution and the gardening impulse. Among the theorists treated at length are Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. The essays also include several of Jays Salmagundi columns, dealing with subjects as varied as the new Museum of Modern Art in New York, the impact of Colin Wilsons The Outsider, and the demise of the Partisan Review.All of these efforts can be considered what Arthur Schopenhauer called, to borrow the title of one of his most celebrated collections, "parerga and paralipomena." As essays from the edges of major projects, they illuminate Jays major arguments, elaborate points made only in passing in the larger texts, and explore ideas farther than would have been possible, given the focus of the larger works themselves. The result is a lively, diverse offering from an extraordinary intellect.

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Urban Landscapes in the Twentieth Century

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The modern city is not only pavement and concrete. Parks, gardens, trees, and other plants are an integral part of the urban environment. Often the focal points of social movements and political interests, green spaces represent far more than simply an effort to balance the man-made with the natural. A citys history withand approach toits parks and gardens reveals much about its workings and the forces acting upon it. Our green spaces offer a unique and valuable window on the history of city life.The essays in Greening the City span over a century of urban history, moving from fin-de-siecle Sofia to green efforts in urban Seattle. The authors present a wide array of cases that speak to global concerns through the local and specific, with topics that include green-space planning in Barcelona and Mexico City, the distinction between public and private nature in Los Angeles, the ecological diversity of West Berlin, and the historical and cultural significance of hybrid spaces designed for sports. The essays collected here will make us think differently about how we study cities, as well as how we live in them.Contributors: Dorothee Brantz, Technische Universitat Berlin * Peter Clark, University of Helsinki * Lawrence Culver, Utah State University * Konstanze Sylva Domhardt, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich * Sonja Dumpelmann, University of Maryland * Zachary J. S. Falck, Independent Scholar* Stefanie Hennecke, Technical University Munich * Sonia Hirt, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University * Salla Jokela, University of Helsinki * Jens Lachmund, Maastricht University * Gary McDonogh, Bryn Mawr College * Jarmo Saarikivi, University of Helsinki * Jeffrey Craig Sanders, Washington State University

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Philanthropy and Gender in Nineteenth-Century England

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Was nineteenth-century British philanthropy the "truest and noblest womans work" and praiseworthy for having raised the nations moral tone, or was it a dangerous mission likely to cause the defeminization of its practitioners as they became "public persons"? In Victorian England, womens participation in volunteer work seemed to be a natural extension of their domestic role, but like many other assumptions about gender roles, the connection between charitable and domestic work is the result of specific historical factors and cultural representations. Proponents of women as charitable workers encouraged philanthropy as being ideal work for a woman, while opponents feared the practice was destined to lead to overly ambitious and manly behavior.In The Angel out of the House Dorice Williams Elliott examines the ways in which novels and other texts that portrayed women performing charitable acts helped to make the inclusion of philanthropic work in the domestic sphere seem natural and obvious. And although many scholars have dismissed womens volunteer endeavors as merely patriarchal collusion, Elliott argues that the conjunction of novelistic and philanthropic discourse in the works of women writersamong them George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell, Hannah More and Anna Jamesonwas crucial to the redefinition of gender roles and class relations.In a fascinating study of how literary works contribute to cultural and historical change, Elliotts exploration of philanthropic discourse in nineteenth-century literature demonstrates just how essential that forum was in changing accepted definitions of women and social relations.

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Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction

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Is literature dangerous? In the romantic view, writers were rebels--Shelley's "unacknowledged legislators of mankind"--poised to change the world. In relation to twentieth-century literature, however, such a view becomes suspect. By looking at a range of novels about terrorism, Plotting Terror raises the possibility that the writer's relationship to actual politics may be considerably reduced in the age of television and the Internet.Margaret Scanlan traces the figure of the writer as rival or double of the terrorist from its origins in the romantic conviction of the writer's originality and power through a century of political, social, and technological developments that undermine that belief. She argues that serious writers like Friedrich Durrenmatt, Doris Lessing, and Don DeLillo imagine a contemporary writer's encounter with terrorists as a test of the old alliance between writer and revolutionary.After considering the possibility that televised terrorism is replacing the novel, or that writing, as contemporary theory would have it, is itself a form of violence, Scanlan asks whether the revolutionary impulse itself is dying--in politics as much as in literature. Her analyses take the reader on a fascinating exploration of the relationship between actual bombs and stories about bombings, from the modern world to its electronic representation, and from the exercise of political power to the fiction writer's power in the world.

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Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War

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In late 1860 and early 1861, state-appointed commissioners traveled the length and breadth of the slave South carrying a fervent message in pursuit of a clear goal: to persuade the political leadership and the citizenry of the uncommitted slave states to join in the effort to destroy the Union and forge a new Southern nation.

Directly refuting the neo-Confederate contention that slavery was neither the reason for secession nor the catalyst for the resulting onset of hostilities in 1861, Charles B. Dew finds in the commissioners' brutally candid rhetoric a stark white supremacist ideology that proves the contrary. The commissioners included in their speeches a constitutional justification for secession, to be sure, and they pointed to a number of political "outrages" committed by the North in the decades prior to Lincoln's election. But the core of their argumentthe reason the right of secession had to be invoked and invoked immediatelydid not turn on matters of constitutional interpretation or political principle. Over and over again, the commissioners returned to the same point: that Lincoln's election signaled an unequivocal commitment on the part of the North to destroy slavery and that emancipation would plunge the South into a racial nightmare.

Dew's discovery and study of the highly illuminating public letters and speeches of these apostles of disunionoften relatively obscure men sent out to convert the unconverted to the secessionist cause--have led him to suggest that the arguments the commissioners presented provide us with the best evidence we have of the motives behind the secession of the lower South in 186061.

Addressing topics still hotly debated among historians and the public at large more than a century after the Civil War, Dew challenges many current perceptions of the causes of the conflict. He offers a compelling and clearly substantiated argument that slavery and race were absolutely critical factors in the outbreak of warindeed, that they were at the heart of our great national crisis.

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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 missionmeat, hides, fursthey 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 independentoften illicitefforts, 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.

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Ex-Slave Families and Citizenship in the Age of Emancipation

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Emancipation and the citizenship that followed conferred upon former slaves the right to create family relationships that were sanctioned, recognized, and regulated by the laws that governed the families of all American citizens. Elizabeth Regosin explores what the acquisition of this legal familial status meant to former slaves, personally, socially, and politically.The Civil War pension system offers a fascinating source of documentation for this study of ex-slave families in transition from slavery to freedom. Because the provisions made to compensate eligible Union veterans and surviving family members created a vast bureaucracypension officials required and verified extensive proof of qualificationformer slaves were obliged to reproduce and represent the inner workings of their familial relationships.Regosin reveals through both their personal histories and pension narratives how former slaves constructed identities as individuals and as family members while they negotiated the boundaries of "family" as defined by the pension system. The stories told by ex-slaves, their witnesses, and the government officials who played a role in the pension process all serve to provide us with a richer understanding of life for newly emancipated African Americans.