University of Virginia Press

09/15/2026

Check out this new episode of "Off the Road: A Podcast about the Environmental Humanities" with Joel Duncan, author of "Poetic Drive: American Poetry in the Age of Automobility"

What does poetry have to do with driving? And what insights can poetry from the driver’s seat provide about our environmental crisis? In this episode, Jannis talks with a former colleague of his, Joel Duncan, author of the recently published Poetic Drive (University of Virginia Press, 2025), about...

09/08/2026

"I hope readers will come away with a sense of just how many ways people’s religious lives were touched and transformed by the Revolution."

Read an interview with editor Katherine Carté: https://upress.virginia.edu/author-corner/authors-corner-with-katherine-cart%C3%A9-editor-of-revolutionary-turns/

Happy to "Revolutionary Turns: Religion and America's Founding Era," edited by Katherine Carté!

Religion lies at the heart of how many Americans understand the birth of their nation, giving rise to passionate calls for national unity and principled struggles for religious freedom. For the first time in thirty years, scholars of the founding era have joined together to reassess this central topic for our present moment. From fast-day proclamations to wartime crises of conscience, from Americans caught between multiple political interests to citizens of the new republic trying to reconcile revivalistic faith with the voices of the Enlightenment, the historians gathered here address timeless topics and open new terrain. Together, they present a world in which Americans of many faiths responded to new challenges and unprecedented situations.

This fascinating portrait of religion in the Revolutionary era takes readers through topics as varied as the circulation of radical theological manuscripts in New England to the ways that the Revolutionary generation demanded more religious protections in their new governing documents. It examines the complex relationship between freedom, emancipation, and religion within and across new borders, elucidating the complex relationship between religion, revolution, and the new United States.

"An engaging, robust, and humane book that will shape our ongoing conversations about the founding era."
- Mark Valeri, Washington University in St. Louis

"As we celebrate the 250th, what better gift than this diverse, accomplished, and deeply researched set of essays by a set of gifted scholars who collectively come to no simple conclusion about such a social upheaval that was at once democratizing and conservative, liberating and restraining, potentially revolutionary and practically reactionary, all at the same time. No one, experts in the field included, will come from this collection without having learned much and reflected further and more deeply on religion and the revolution."
- Paul Harvey, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs

https://upress.virginia.edu/title/10229/

09/08/2026

T. H. Breen explores how a court case against an American colonel and the response of American military officers to a British general provided the setting for the new nation to assert its political and cultural independence

A dramatic trial during the Revolutionary War helped Americans reck...

09/08/2026

Happy to "Revolutionary Turns: Religion and America's Founding Era," edited by Katherine Carté!

Religion lies at the heart of how many Americans understand the birth of their nation, giving rise to passionate calls for national unity and principled struggles for religious freedom. For the first time in thirty years, scholars of the founding era have joined together to reassess this central topic for our present moment. From fast-day proclamations to wartime crises of conscience, from Americans caught between multiple political interests to citizens of the new republic trying to reconcile revivalistic faith with the voices of the Enlightenment, the historians gathered here address timeless topics and open new terrain. Together, they present a world in which Americans of many faiths responded to new challenges and unprecedented situations.

This fascinating portrait of religion in the Revolutionary era takes readers through topics as varied as the circulation of radical theological manuscripts in New England to the ways that the Revolutionary generation demanded more religious protections in their new governing documents. It examines the complex relationship between freedom, emancipation, and religion within and across new borders, elucidating the complex relationship between religion, revolution, and the new United States.

"An engaging, robust, and humane book that will shape our ongoing conversations about the founding era."
- Mark Valeri, Washington University in St. Louis

"As we celebrate the 250th, what better gift than this diverse, accomplished, and deeply researched set of essays by a set of gifted scholars who collectively come to no simple conclusion about such a social upheaval that was at once democratizing and conservative, liberating and restraining, potentially revolutionary and practically reactionary, all at the same time. No one, experts in the field included, will come from this collection without having learned much and reflected further and more deeply on religion and the revolution."
- Paul Harvey, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs

https://upress.virginia.edu/title/10229/

09/01/2026

Daniel J. Philippon, author of "The Farmer, the Gastronome, and the Chef: In Pursuit of the Ideal Meal," remembers Wendell Berry, the subject of his book's first chapter.

"Today the world lost a towering figure in both literature and sustainable food. Wendell Berry was the moral conscience of millions of readers and eaters seeking better relationships with the lands on which we live and work. The sincerity and depth of his thought, as well as the eloquence of his words, will remain touchstones for generations of people in pursuit of their own ideal meals."

https://upress.virginia.edu/title/10011/

09/01/2026

Happy to "'Capitalism and Slavery' Revisited: The Impact and Legacy of Eric Williams's Trailblazing Work," edited by Trevor Burnard, Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy, and Laura R. Sandy!

Eric Williams’s 'Capitalism and Slavery' (1944), with its insightful and provocative theses about the relationship between Caribbean slavery and the growth of the British economy and the Industrial Revolution, has proved an enduring and controversial book. Never out of print since its publication, it is constantly being reevaluated and reassessed in the light of changing scholarship and new understandings of race, slavery, and capitalism. Recent years have seen considerable interest in the topics that first motivated Williams’s lively and polemical work. The essays in this collection dissect the links between the existence of racial slavery in the Americas, the concomitant rise of capitalism, and the vital role of both slavery and capitalism in the making of the modern world—essential topics not just in the reevaluation of Williams’s ideas for the twenty-first century but as areas of fierce interest and even fiercer debate in contemporary intellectual life.

"Eric Williams' 'Capitalism and Slavery' is one of those books — a book that continues to demand close attention and inspire serious engagement. These essays pull forward Williams' legacy even as they tug on forgotten threads and twist new meanings out of old questions. It is a delight to be again in the intellectual company of Williams, joined here by a new generation of interlocutors."
- Walter Johnson, Harvard University



https://upress.virginia.edu/title/10218/

09/01/2026

https://mrlib.libcal.com/event/17350391

08/31/2026

"A chance encounter with a book of arresting paintings from colonial Mexico and Peru sparked my reckoning with what we today call race, and the deeper I went, the more intriguing—and unsettling—the story became."

Read an interview with the author: https://upress.virginia.edu/author-corner/authors-corner-with-ruth-hill-author-of-reckoning-with-race-in-new-worlds/

Happy to "Reckoning with Race in New Worlds" by Ruth Hill!

A landmark treatment of a pivotal historical question, 'Reckoning with Race in New Worlds' reveals how the empires of Spain and Portugal debated and came to determine who was white and who was not during their colonial era. How did free people with partial Native American, Asian, or African lineage either become or cease to be blancos or brancos—white people? Ruth Hill explains how, in unexpected ways, science and religion joined forces in the early modern era to shape the concepts of purity, mixture, and degeneration that would decide these questions. Fixing the thresholds of whiteness—degrees of blood, generations spent in a foreign environment—instigated centuries-long controversies with enormous consequences. By putting into dialogue archival sources as well as extensive engagement with secondary literature, paintings, and maps, 'Reckoning with Race in New Worlds' crafts a history of human diversity in the colonial era, with profound implications for our understandings of the natural and social sciences and of our racial present.

"From Spanish and Portuguese America to the British Caribbean, from Benito Jerónimo Feijóo to Benjamin Rush, 'Reckoning with Race in New Worlds' is an essential and comprehensive account of how eighteenth-century racial concepts came to be created across a stunning array of geographies, doctrines, and disciplines."
—Neil Safier, Brown University

"Its historical reach and multilingual archival breadth are encyclopedic; its scholarly erudition and cross-disciplinary exigence are nothing short of breathtaking."
—Ralph Bauer, University of Maryland

https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/10164/

08/31/2026

"When adults turn fairy tales into national history, they are shackled to a make believe world."

Read an interview with the author: https://upress.virginia.edu/author-corner/authors-corner-with-kenneth-j-banks-author-of-a-sea-of-possibilities/

Happy to "A Sea of Possibilities: The Revolutionary Atlantic World of Captain Thomas Allen" by Kenneth J. Banks!

This is the gripping tale of how ambitious sea captain Thomas Allen and his family navigated the gales of the American Revolution. Starting as a rogue and smuggler, Allen won and lost several fortunes before eventually establishing himself as a wealthy merchant with Loyalist leanings in Connecticut. Then, imprisoned by the Patriots during the War for Independence, Allen lost nearly everything and everyone. Rather than fleeing, he stayed and rebuilt, emerging from the crucible of revolution as an outspoken and influential champion of the new Constitution and new nation.

This telling of Allen’s experience captures the everyday lives, material circumstances, and values of a middling settler family working hard and scheming harder to gain respectability and wealth in the colonial Atlantic World. In vivid detail, Kenneth Banks shows that maritime life is as crucial to our understanding of the Revolutionary era as the debates over taxation in colonial legislatures, migration and violent agitation in the backcountry, or the rise of a market-driven society. Like the Revolution itself, Allen's story is one of reinvention in a rapidly changing world.

"Banks offers nothing less than an essential and compelling corrective to the canonical interpretation of the Revolution."
—David J. Hancock, University of Michigan

"Kenneth J. Banks offers us a masterful correction to our land-bound biases. By following Thomas Allen from the quarterdeck to the coffeehouse, this book restores the Atlantic Ocean to its rightful place at the epicenter of the American Revolution."
—Christopher O. Magra, University of Tennessee



https://upress.virginia.edu/title/10219/

08/31/2026

Happy to "A Sea of Possibilities: The Revolutionary Atlantic World of Captain Thomas Allen" by Kenneth J. Banks!

This is the gripping tale of how ambitious sea captain Thomas Allen and his family navigated the gales of the American Revolution. Starting as a rogue and smuggler, Allen won and lost several fortunes before eventually establishing himself as a wealthy merchant with Loyalist leanings in Connecticut. Then, imprisoned by the Patriots during the War for Independence, Allen lost nearly everything and everyone. Rather than fleeing, he stayed and rebuilt, emerging from the crucible of revolution as an outspoken and influential champion of the new Constitution and new nation.

This telling of Allen’s experience captures the everyday lives, material circumstances, and values of a middling settler family working hard and scheming harder to gain respectability and wealth in the colonial Atlantic World. In vivid detail, Kenneth Banks shows that maritime life is as crucial to our understanding of the Revolutionary era as the debates over taxation in colonial legislatures, migration and violent agitation in the backcountry, or the rise of a market-driven society. Like the Revolution itself, Allen's story is one of reinvention in a rapidly changing world.

"Banks offers nothing less than an essential and compelling corrective to the canonical interpretation of the Revolution."
—David J. Hancock, University of Michigan

"Kenneth J. Banks offers us a masterful correction to our land-bound biases. By following Thomas Allen from the quarterdeck to the coffeehouse, this book restores the Atlantic Ocean to its rightful place at the epicenter of the American Revolution."
—Christopher O. Magra, University of Tennessee



https://upress.virginia.edu/title/10219/