Bücher veröffentlicht von University of Virginia Press

Strategies for Survival conveys the experience of bondage through the words of former slaves themselves. The interviews-conducted in Virginia in 1937 by WPA interviewers-are considered among the most valuable of the WPA interviews because in Virginia the interviewers were almost all African Americans; thus the interviewees almost certainly spoke more frankly than they would otherwise have done. Dusinberre uses the interviews to assess the strategies by which slaves sought to survive, despite the severe constrictions bondage imposed upon their lives. Religion and escape were common means of coping with the indignity of family disruption, contempt, and the harsh realities of slavery. However, while Dusinberre recognizes the creativity and variety of slaves' responses to oppression, he acknowledges the dispiriting realities of the limits of slave resistance and agency.

Despite their peaceful, bucolic appearance, the tree-lined streets of South African suburbia were no refuge from the racial tensions and indignities of apartheid's most repressive years. In At Home with Apartheid, Rebecca Ginsburg provides an intimate examination of the cultural landscapes of Johannesburg's middle- and upper-middle-class neighborhoods during the height of apartheid (c. 1960-1975) and incorporates recent scholarship on gender, the home, and family. More subtly but no less significantly than factory floors, squatter camps, prisons, and courtrooms, the homes of white South Africans were sites of important contests between white privilege and black aspiration. Subtle negotiations within the domestic sphere between white, mostly female, householders and their black domestic workers, also primarily women, played out over and around this space. These seemingly mundane, private conflicts were part of larger contemporary struggles between whites and blacks over territory and power. Ginsburg gives special attention to the distinct social and racial geographies produced by the workers' detached living quarters, designed by builders and architects as landscape complements to the main houses. Ranch houses, Italianate villas, modernist cubes, and Victorian bungalows filled Johannesburg's suburbs. What distinguished these neighborhoods from their precedents in the United States or the United Kingdom was the presence of the ubiquitous back rooms and of the African women who inhabited them in these otherwise exclusively white areas. The author conducted more than seventy-five personal interviews for this book, an approach that sets it apart from other architectural histories. In addition to these oral accounts, Ginsburg draws from plans, drawings, and onsite analysis of the physical properties themselves. While the issues addressed span the disciplines of South African and architectural history, feminist studies, material culture studies, and psychology, the book's strong narrative, powerful oral histories, and compelling subject matter bring the neighborhoods and residents it examines vividly to life.

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 AD through the moment of colonial contact in 1607 and into the present.

The essays collected in Beastly Natures show how animals have been brought into human culture, literally helping to build our societies (as domesticated animals have done) or contributing, often in problematic ways, to our concept of the wild.

Following the election of Donald Trump, the office of the US president has come under scrutiny like never before. Featuring penetrating insights from high-profile presidential scholars, The Presidency provides the deep historical and constitutional context needed to put the Trump era into its proper perspective.

Following the election of Donald Trump, the office of the US president has come under scrutiny like never before. Featuring penetrating insights from high-profile presidential scholars, The Presidency provides the deep historical and constitutional context needed to put the Trump era into its proper perspective.

Identifies a discursive "theatre-finance nexus" at work in plays by Colley Cibber, Richard Steele, and Susanna Centlivre as well as in the vibrant eighteenth-century media landscape. As Burkert demonstrates, the stock market and the entertainment industry were recognised as interconnected institutions that gave rise to new modes of resistance.

It's often said that we are what we wear. Tracing an American trajectory in fashion, Lauren Cardon shows how we become what we wear. Over the twentieth century, the American fashion industry diverged from its roots in Paris, expanding and attempting to reach as many consumers as possible, and became a tool for social mobility.

Drawing inspiration from Timothy Morton's concept of the "mesh" as a metaphor for the human-nonhuman relationship in the face of climate change, Marco Caracciolo investigates how narratives in genres such as the novel and the short story employ formal devices to channel the entanglement of human communities and nonhuman phenomena.

Traces the usufructuary ethos from the religious and legal writings of the seventeenth century through mid-eighteenth-century poems of colonial commerce, attending to the particular political, economic, and environmental pressures that shaped, transformed, and ultimately sidelined it.

Tells the stories of those who struggle on the margins of armed conflict or who attempt to rebuild their lives after a war. Bringing together the writings of female authors from across the world, this collection animates the wartime experiences of women as military mothers, combatants, supporters, war resisters, and victims.

Tells the stories of those who struggle on the margins of armed conflict or who attempt to rebuild their lives after a war. Bringing together the writings of female authors from across the world, this collection animates the wartime experiences of women as military mothers, combatants, supporters, war resisters, and victims.

Reveals how antebellum authors used words such as "real" and "reality" as key terms for literary discourse and claimed that the "real" was, in fact, central to their literary enterprise. Thomas Finan argues that for many Americans in the early nineteenth century, the "real" was often not synonymous with the physical world.

Reveals how various British texts from the eighteenth century associate female cross-dressing with the possibility of intimate, embodied same-sex relationships. Ula Lukszo Klein reconsiders the role of lesbian desires and their structuring through cross-gender embodiments as crucial to the rise of modern concepts of gender, sexuality, and desire.

Challenging a long tradition that reads the eighteenth century in terms of individualism, atomization, abstraction, and the hegemony of market-based thinking, this study emphasizes the importance of interest as an idiom for thinking about concrete social ties, at court and in families, universities, theatres, boroughs, churches, and beyond.

From the 1950s to the 1970s, the idea of independence inspired radical changes across the French-speaking world. Julie-Francoise Tolliver examines the links that writers from Quebec, the Caribbean, and Africa imagined to unite that world, illuminating the tropes they used to articulate solidarities across the race and class differences.

Set against the backdrop of Herman Melville's literary, philosophical, and scientific influences, Magnificent Decay focuses on four of his most neglected works to demonstrate that, together, literature and science offer collective insights into the past, present, and future turbulence of the Anthropocene.

From the hair of a famous dead poet to botanical ornaments and meat pies, the subjects of this book are dynamic, organic artifacts. A cross-disciplinary collection of essays, Organic Supplements examines the interlaced relationships between natural things and human beings in early modern and eighteenth-century Europe.

From the hair of a famous dead poet to botanical ornaments and meat pies, the subjects of this book are dynamic, organic artifacts. A cross-disciplinary collection of essays, Organic Supplements examines the interlaced relationships between natural things and human beings in early modern and eighteenth-century Europe.

Offers an account of early neuroscience and of the peculiar literary forms it produced. Challenging the divide between science and literature, philosophy and fiction, Jess Keiser draws attention to a distinctive, but so far unacknowledged, mode of writing evident in a host of late seventeenth and eighteenth-century texts: the nervous fiction.

How did enslaved African Americans in the Old South really experience Christmas? In this provocative, revisionist, and sometimes chilling account, Robert E. May chides the conventional wisdom for simplifying black perspectives, uncritically accepting southern white literary tropes about the holiday.

"This book examines the writings and life of Henry Adams during his time in Washington, D.C."--