Bøker utgitt av University of Virginia Press

Snake populations are declining around the globe, but calls for their conservation are muted by fear and prejudice. Saving Snakes offers a new approach to understanding snakes-one built on respect. From Cuba and Nicaragua to Costa Rica and Australia, Nicolette Cagle has traveled the world in search of snakes. She also has spent decades conducting natural science research on snake activity, specifically in regions of the U.S. where urban development encroaches upon their habitat.Beautifully written, Saving Snakes entwines Cagle's personal narrative with deep scientific and historical research. By tracing the author's evolution as a field naturalist, it provides a blueprint for developing a conservation consciousness among young people and paves the way for increased inclusivity in the male-dominated field of herpetology. Fundamentally a book about snakes, this is also the story of one woman's pursuit of her passion as she searches for, studies, and advocates for these enigmatic creatures.

An impressive and complex undertaking, Colossal Ambitions concludes that while some Confederate commentators saw wartime industrialization as pointing towards a different economic future, most Confederates saw their society as revolving once more around coercive labor, staple crop production, and exports in the war's wake.

The wood used by craftsmen to create many of the world's legendary stringed instruments comes from seven near-mythic European forests. Jeffrey Greene takes the reader into those woodlands and into luthiers' workshops to show us how the world's finest instruments not only contribute to great musical art but are prized works of art in themselves.

Using archival sources from three continents written in multiple languages, this book offers a new appreciation for the deep historicity of language and ethnic identity in South Africa, while reconstructing the ways in which colonial forces generate and impose ethnic divides with long-lasting and lethal consequences for indigenous populations.

Explores the unexpected role George Washington's 1793 Neutrality Proclamation played in energizing the US government's constitutional responsibilities to support and promote America's commercial and sovereign interests.

Relates the life of Negley Farson, adventurer, iconoclast, best-selling writer, foreign correspondent, and raging alcoholic who died in oblivion. Born only a few years before Ernest Hemingway, Farson had a life trajectory that paralleled and intersected Hemingway's in ways that compelled writers to compare them.

In his latest book, Terry Eagleton, one of the most celebrated intellects of our time, considers the least regarded of the virtues. His compelling meditation on hope begins with a firm rejection of the role of optimism in life's course. Like its close relative, pessimism, it is more a system of rationalization than a reliable lens on reality, reflecting the cast of one's temperament in place of true discernment. Eagleton turns then to hope, probing the meaning of this familiar but elusive word: Is it an emotion? How does it differ from desire? Does it fetishize the future? Finally, Eagleton broaches a new concept of tragic hope, in which this old virtue represents a strength that remains even after devastating loss has been confronted.In a wide-ranging discussion that encompasses Shakespeare's Lear, Kierkegaard on despair, Aquinas, Wittgenstein, St. Augustine, Kant, Walter Benjamin's theory of history, and a long consideration of the prominent philosopher of hope, Ernst Bloch, Eagleton displays his masterful and highly creative fluency in literature, philosophy, theology, and political theory. Hope without Optimism is full of the customary wit and lucidity of this writer whose reputation rests not only on his pathbreaking ideas but on his ability to engage the reader in the urgent issues of life. Page-Barbour Lectures

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.

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.

Looking at America through the Irish prism and employing a comparative approach, leading and emerging scholars of early American and Atlantic history interrogate anew the relationship between imperial reform and revolution in Ireland and America, offering fascinating insights into the imperial whole of which both places were a part.

Political polarization and unrest are not exclusive to our era, but in the twenty-first century, we are living with seemingly unresolvable disagreements that threaten to tear our country apart. Discrimination, racism, tyranny, religious fundamentalism, political schisms, misogyny, "e;fake news,"e; border walls, the #MeToo moment, foreign intervention in our electoral process-these cultural and social rifts charge our world, and we have failed to find a path toward agreement or unity. Making the World Over is Marie Griffith's thoughtful response to an imperiled nation that has forgotten how to listen and debate productively, at a time when it needs vigorous discourse more than ever. Griffith performs the urgent work of examining the histories behind the issues at the root of our country's conflicts both past and present, from race and immigration to misogyny and reproductive rights. This is more than a study of the issues; it is an attempt to shed real light on how to encourage constructive dialogue and move society forward.