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A classic work that launched the career of one of the most influential scholars of their generation.

Lauren Berlant influenced generations of scholars in gender studies, affect theory, literary criticism, anthropology, sociology, and beyond. Her first book, The Anatomy of National Fantasy, was published in 1991, and it marked the start of an extraordinary career of groundbreaking essays, editorial collaborations, and monographs. This new edition reintroduces Berlant’s earliest work with a new foreword by Caleb Smith, who connects Berlant’s initial investigations as a scholar of nineteenth-century American literature to her more widely known interventions in how we understand the entanglements of national ideology, citizenship, affect, and everyday life.

In 1898, the Dreyfus Affair plunged French society into a yearlong frenzy. In Paris and provincial villages throughout the country, angry crowds paraded through the streets, threatening to attack Jews and destroy Jewish-owned businesses. Anger about the imagined power of Jewish capital, as well as fears of treason and racial degeneration, made anti-Semitism a convenient banner behind which social and political factions could fall in line. Anti-Semitic feelings that had been simmering in France for decades came boiling to the surface.

Here Pierre Birnbaum guides readers on a tour of France during this crisis. He shows that in the midst of violence, Jewish citizens bravely and effectively defended themselves and were aided by a police force determined to maintain order. Birnbaum paints a vivid portrait of French Jewish culture at the time and explains why the French state remained strong in this time of widespread unrest.

When Nashville became a Catholic diocese in 1837, it was mostly an aspirational exercise. The few Catholics scattered throughout the state were ministered to only occasionally by missionary priests who traveled by horseback from Kentucky. It is believed that Hugh Rogan, who arrived in Middle Tennessee in 1780 after working as a surveyor for the Continental Army, did not see a priest for fifty years.

That all changed when the Italian-born Father Aloysius “Luigi” Orengo arrived in Nashville in 1848. He traveled all over the state, sleeping in the woods, using his saddle for a pillow, and eating cheese and crackers. He’s credited with building churches in Franklin, Columbia, Pulaski, East Nashville, Tracy City, Gallatin, Humboldt, Brownsville, Grand Junction, Covington, Jackson, and McEwen.

But as influential as he was, Father Orengo’s story remained untold—until now.

The political and cultural fantasy of home as a retreat from the pressures of the world first emerged in the U.S. alongside two major nineteenth-century literary movements: Romanticism and domestic fiction. Upending accepted gendered narratives from this period, The Art of Retreat posits that these movements originated from a domestic culture already in transition, in which home was frequently a more complicated site of self-interested pleasure, coerced labor, creole social reproduction, homosocial intimacy, bachelor whimsy, petty tyranny, racial abuse, and transgender capacity. The early national periodicals, sketches, and novels examined here lend themselves to this interpretation. Hankins argues that the literary tradition emerging from these decades—one that aligned creative genius with domestic retreat—reminds us that a politics that appeals to private feeling must reckon with new interpretations of labor, kinship, and reform in exchange for the promise of consensual citizenship.

Many people are generally familiar with the fact that Boston was once known as “the Athens of America.” Very few, however, are clear about exactly why, except for their recollections of the famous writers and poets who gave the city a reputation for literature and learning.

In this book, historian Thomas H. O'Connor sets the matter straight by showing that Boston's eminence during the first half of the nineteenth century was the result of a much broader community effort. After the nation emerged from its successful struggle for independence, most Bostonians visualized their city not only as the Cradle of Liberty, but also as the new world's Cradle of Civilization. 

According to O'Connor, a leadership elite, composed of men of prominent family background, Unitarian beliefs, liberal education, and managerial experience in a variety of enterprises, used their personal talents and substantial financial resources to promote the cultural, intellectual, and humanitarian interests of Boston to the point where it would be the envy of the nation. Not only did writers, scholars, and philosophers see themselves as part of this process, but so did physicians and lawyers, ministers and teachers, merchants and businessmen, mechanics and artisans, all involved in creating a well-ordered city whose citizens would be committed to the ideals of social progress and personal perfectibility. 

To accomplish their noble vision, leading members of the Boston community joined in programs designed to cleanse the old town of what they felt were generations of accumulated social stains and human failures, and then to create new programs and more efficient institutions that would raise the cultural and intellectual standards of all its citizens. Like ancient Athens, Boston would be a city of great statesmen, wealthy patrons, inspiring artists, and profound thinkers, headed by members of the “happy and respectable classes” who would assume responsibility for the safety, welfare, and education of the “less prosperous portions of the community.”

Designed for the general reader and the historical enthusiast, The Athens of America is an interpretive synthesis that explores the numerous secondary sources that have concentrated on individual subjects and personalities, and draws their various conclusions into a single comprehensive narrative.

A raw, firsthand account of feuds, fiddling, moonshining, and survival in a small Alabama town, told by its most colorful chronicler and shaped through careful historical insight.

The Ballad of Fiddling Tom Freeman is a riveting portrait of a forgotten America, drawn from the handwritten memoirs of a bootlegger, fiddler, and chronicler of life in Bug Tussle, Alabama, in the first half of the twentieth century. Today, rural voices are often drowned out by polished narratives, but this book resurrects the unfiltered perspective of a man who lived through—and candidly documented—the chaos and violence in his home place as he shared stories of the large close-knit families who lived there.

Freeman’s storytelling is as wild and tangled as the lives he describes, and author Joyce H. Cauthen, with the assistance of historical researcher Robin Sterling, brings clarity and context to his tales without sanding down their rough edges. The result is a vivid, bottom-up history of a place where lawlessness and loyalty often walked hand in hand.

The Ballad of Fiddling Tom Freeman stands out as a testament to the power of personal narrative. Not just a story about one man, it’s a window into a community shaped by hardship, music, and survival, told in a voice that refuses to be forgotten. This book is essential reading for historians, folklorists, musicians, and anyone drawn to the untamed stories of America’s backroads and backwoods.
 

Traces the little-known story of the bitter contest for the fate of the University of Alabama after the Civil War.

In The Battle for the University of Alabama, William Warren Rogers Jr. gives a fascinating account of the fierce struggle over the nature of the University of Alabama after the Civil War. Union forces reduced the campus to ruins as the war ended, and the university did not reopen until 1869. In the interregnum, powerful forces shifted the trajectory of the school. Alabama Republicans authored an egalitarian state constitution that delivered oversight of the university to the Republican Party. That set the stage for turmoil and confrontation. This book tells the story of that conflict.

In the next few years, Democrats charged Republicans with turning the university into a “radical” institution. They alleged that a handful of unqualified individuals had gained faculty positions because of their political allegiance, which resulted in the university’s academic desecration. Professors were bitterly denounced in the state newspaper press and quite personally in Tuscaloosa. Administration of the university became part of the fratricidal political debate in the state. Political violence and questions concerning race, specifically the possible integration of the university, illuminated the controversies of the Reconstruction years. Many of these questions resonate even today.

This authoritative account sets events at the University of Alabama against the backdrop of what occurred at other state universities in the Reconstruction South. The University of North Carolina experienced controversy similar to Alabama’s. At the University of Georgia, however, calm prevailed. This story of the incendiary events at Alabama’s flagship university charts new ground and provides a revelatory look into the extraordinary partisanship that characterized the South after the Civil War.

The Confederate Navy’s Savannah Squadron, its relationship with the people of Savannah, Georgia, and its role in the city’s economy

In this well-written and extensively researched narrative, Maurice Melton charts the history of the unit, the sailors (both white and black), the officers, their families, and their activities aboard ship and in port.

The Savannah Squadron worked, patrolled, and fought in the rivers and sounds along the Georgia coast. Though they saw little activity at sea, the unit did engage in naval assault, boarding, capture, and ironclad combat. The sailors finished the war as an infantry unit in Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, fighting at Sayler’s Creek on the road to Appomattox.

Melton concentrates on navy life and the squadron’s place in wartime Savannah. The book reveals who the Confederate sailors were and what their material, social, and working lives were like.

The Best Station of Them All is an essential piece of historical literature for anyone interested in the Civil War, its navies, or Savannah.
 

The first in-depth study of the Freemasons during the Civil War

One of the enduring yet little examined themes in Civil War lore is the widespread belief that on the field of battle and afterward, members of Masonic lodges would give aid and comfort to wounded or captured enemy Masons, often at great personal sacrifice and danger. This work is a deeply researched examination of the recorded, practical effects of Freemasonry among Civil War participants on both sides.

From first-person accounts culled from regimental histories, diaries, and letters, Michael A. Halleran has constructed an overview of 19th-century American freemasonry in general and Masonry in the armies of both North and South in particular, and provided telling examples of how Masonic brotherhood worked in practice. Halleran details the response of the fraternity to the crisis of secession and war, and examines acts of assistance to enemies on the battlefield and in POW camps.

The author examines carefully the major Masonic stories from the Civil War, in particular the myth that Confederate Lewis A. Armistead made the Masonic sign of distress as he lay dying at the high-water mark of Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg.

A haunting, resonant novel of passion and betrayal—in its first English translation since 1928

“When we bring true passions into our works, we don’t fear the cries of the offended.” So declared Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly in 1853 as he prepared to publish The Bewitched in book form, restoring the sections that were unceremoniously deleted from its serialized release by an editor who deemed them too explicit, irreverent, and inflammatory. Newly translated into English for modern readers, The Bewitched is a beguiling tale of politics, obsession, and horror set against the backdrop of Normandy in postrevolutionary France.

Late at night in a foggy moor, the far clock tower rends the still air to mark the midnight hour. As the darkness settles back into silence, another bell rings out, slow and somber, calling all who hear it to the abbé de La Croix-Jugan’s Mass of the Dead. Returned to the priesthood in shame after breaking his vows by shedding blood in battle and attempting suicide in defeat, the disfigured man enthralls the inhabitants of this small village. Before long, a young married woman becomes infatuated with the enigmatic priest, and their fates are irrevocably intertwined. When she succumbs to despair over her unrequited love, her husband is consumed by jealousy and vows revenge.

Layering stories within stories and continually shifting points of view, Barbey d’Aurevilly engages a mosaic of narrators to depict the era’s tensions between the aristocracy, the peasant class, and the church. Raymond N. MacKenzie’s lively translation is accompanied by his detailed introduction and notes that ground the novel in its historical, political, and literary contexts. A classic of French Gothic literature, The Bewitched blends religious transgression, satanic possession, and political upheaval into a fatal love story that is as gripping now as it was nearly two centuries ago.

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The Bilingual Muse analyzes the work of seven Russian poets who translated their own poems into English, French, German, or Italian. Investigating the parallel versions of self-translated poetic texts by Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky, Andrey Gritsman, Katia Kapovich, Marina Tsvetaeva, Wassily Kandinsky, and Elizaveta Kul’man, Adrian Wanner considers how verbal creativity functions in different languages, the conundrum of translation, and the vagaries of bilingual identities.

Wanner argues that the perceived marginality of self-translation stems from a romantic privileging of the mother tongue and the original text. The unprecedented recent dispersion of Russian speakers over three continents has led to the emergence of a new generation of diasporic Russians who provide a more receptive milieu for multilingual creativity.