Civic Identity and Orientalism in Britain's Global Eighteenth Century
What does it mean for a nation and its citizens to be virtuous? The term "virtue" is ubiquitous in eighteenth-century British literature, but its definition is more often assumed than explained. Bringing together two significant threads of eighteenth-century scholarship-one on republican civic identity and the mythic legacy of the freeborn Briton ......
Undeniably iconoclastic, and doggedly practical where others were abstract, the late Richard Rorty was described by some as a philosopher with no philosophy. Rorty was skeptical of systems claiming to have answers, seeing scientific and aesthetic schools as vocabularies rather than as indispensable paths to truth. But his work displays a profound ......
Navigating Native Land and Water in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake
It is one thing to draw a line in the sand but another to enforce it. In this innovative new work, Jessica Lauren Taylor follows the Native peoples and the newcomers who built and crossed emerging boundaries surrounding Indigenous towns and developing English plantations in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake Bay. In a riverine landscape defined ......
Navigating Native Land and Water in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake
It is one thing to draw a line in the sand but another to enforce it. In this innovative new work, Jessica Lauren Taylor follows the Native peoples and the newcomers who built and crossed emerging boundaries surrounding Indigenous towns and developing English plantations in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake Bay. In a riverine landscape defined ......
Literature and the Agricultural Trap from Shakespeare to Coetzee
A critical examination of the 'agricultural trap' in literature For thousands of years, agriculture and civilization were essentially synonymous. The superiority of farming over the unsettled, itinerant life of hunting and gathering appeared, to many, self-evident. Only recently has the field of anthropology challenged this assumption by ......
Literature and the Agricultural Trap from Shakespeare to Coetzee
A critical examination of the 'agricultural trap' in literature For thousands of years, agriculture and civilization were essentially synonymous. The superiority of farming over the unsettled, itinerant life of hunting and gathering appeared, to many, self-evident. Only recently has the field of anthropology challenged this assumption by ......
The latest novel by one of Haiti's most brilliant writers The most recent book by renowned Haitian novelist, essayist, and poet RenE Depestre, Popa Singer is a semi-autobiographical chronicle of Haiti in the late 1950s, the very moment when the country first came under decades of despotic rule. To celebrate her son's return home after years of ......
The latest novel by one of Haiti's most brilliant writers The most recent book by renowned Haitian novelist, essayist, and poet RenE Depestre, Popa Singer is a semi-autobiographical chronicle of Haiti in the late 1950s, the very moment when the country first came under decades of despotic rule. To celebrate her son's return home after years of ......
Poplar Forest is one of two personal residences that Thomas Jefferson designed for himself, the other being Monticello. Jefferson's wife, Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson, inherited the land--originally a 6,861-acre parcel--at her father's death in 1773, but Jefferson did not begin construction on the house until 1806, and at his death in 1826, he ......