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Praised at the time as the most emphatically “American” book ever written, Margaret is a breathtaking combination of female bildungsroman, utopian novel, and historical romance. First published in 1845, Sylvester Judd's novel centers on the fictional New England village of Livingston, where the young Margaret Hart strives to escape the poverty and vice of her surroundings by learning from a mysterious teacher, the “Master,” and by entwining herself with the powers of nature. But when Margaret's brother is tried and hanged for murder, this rural community collapses, forcing Margaret to face the temptations of an urban underworld and to confront the intrigue of her family history. Margaret is the story of a young woman's attempt to create a new social order, founded on beauty and truth, in a land plagued by violence, debauchery, and political instability.

As Gavin Jones points out in his new introduction, Margaret perhaps stands alone in its creation of a female character who grows in social rather than domestic power. The novel also remains unique in its exploration of transcendental philosophy in novelistic form. Part eco-criticism, part seduction novel, part temperance tract, and part social history, Margaret is a virtual handbook for understanding the literary culture of mid-nineteenth-century America, the missing piece in puzzling out connections between writers such as Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and Thoreau. 

Margaret was widely read and deeply influential on both British and American writers throughout the nineteenth century but controversial for its representations of alcoholism and capital punishment. Judd's novel remains resonant for today's readers as it overturns conventional views of the literary representation of women and the origins of the American Renaissance.

The Ideal of the Practical is a study of efforts by a segment of the upper class in an aristocratic Latin American society to alter cultural values in the society, creating stronger orientations toward the technical and the practical. Frank Safford describes attempts by members of Colombia’s nineteenth-century political elite to use technical education as a means of nurturing energetic upper-class entrepreneurs and an industrious working class in a static agrarian economy. In the course of his analysis, Safford sketches the historical development of scientific and technical education and of the engineering profession in Colombia.

The book opens with a description of the economic and social context of early nineteenth-century Colombia. It then discusses some early experiments with manual industrial training between 1820 and 1850. Later chapters deal with the careers of upper-class youths sent abroad for scientific and technical training, the growth of indigenous engineering education, and the crystallization of a Colombian engineering profession. While the book primarily explores the nineteenth century, it also touches on eighteenth-century Spanish Bourbon antecedents and provides an epilogue on the twentieth-century evolution of technical elites in Colombia.

The author focuses on the reasons why the implantation of technical education and technical orientations proved difficult. He examines the interplay between various obstructions: on the one hand, a hierarchical social structure and aristocratic social values and, on the other, obstructions created by fundamental geographic and economic conditions. He concludes that, while Colombian leaders had hoped that technical education and the development of values oriented toward the technical would spearhead economic growth, in fact economic growth proved a prerequisite for the effective implantation of technical orientations and training.