Recent Publications

VICTORIANS AND THE VIRGIN MARY

Carol Engelhardt Herringer

This interdisciplinary study of competing representations of the Virgin Mary examines how anxieties about religious and gender identities intersected to create public controversies that, whilst ostensibly about theology and liturgy, were also attempts to define the role and nature of woman.

Drawing on a variety of sources, this book seeks to revise our understanding of the Victorian religious landscape by retrieving Catholics from the cultural margins to which they are usually relegated.  By showing that the Roman Catholics and Anglo-Catholics constituted a significant proportion of Victorian society that was opposed to the Protestant majority, this analysis more accurately evaluates their contributions to Victorian culture.  In addition, this analysis of the Protestant hostility toward the Virgin Mary and preference toward a more ordinary woman suggests that Protestant clergymen, who are generally associated with promoting the feminine ideal associated with nineteenth-century culture, were actually uneasy about the ideal when they realised it could give women a great deal of public power.

This book will be useful to advanced students and scholars in a variety of disciplines including history, religious studies, Victorian studies, women’s history and gender studies, as well as to the educated lay reader who is interested in changing views of the Virgin Mary.

THE DRILLMASTER OF VALLEY FORGE

THE BARON DE STEUBEN and the Making of the American Army

Paul D. Lockhart

In the first book on Steuben since 1937, Paul Lockhart, an expert in European military history, finally explains the significance of Steuben's military experience in Europe.  Steeped in the traditions of the Prussian amry of Frederick the Great - the most ruthlessly effective in Europe - he taught the soldiers of the Continental Army how to fight like Europeans.  His guiding hand shaped the army that triumphed over the British at Monmouth, Stony Point, and Yorktown.  And his influence did not end with the Revolution.  Steuben was instrumental in creating West Point, and in writing the "Blue Book" - the first official regulations fo the American Army.  His principles have guided the American armed forces to this day.

Steuben's life is also a classic immigrant story.  A failure in midlife, he uprooted himself from his native Europe to seek one last chance at glory and fame in the New World.  In America he managed to reinvent himself - making his background quite a bit more glamorous than was the reality - but redeeming himself by his exceptional service and becoming, in a sense, the man he claimed to be.

A VERY MUTINOUS PEOPLE

The Struggle for North Carolina, 1660-1713

Noeleen McIlvenna

Historians have often glorified eighteenth-century Virginia planters' philosophical debates about the meaning of American liberty. But according to Noeleen McIlvenna, the true exemplars of egalitarian political values had fled Virginia's plantation society late in the seventeenth century to create the first successful European colony in the Albemarle, in present-day North Carolina.

Making their way through the Great Dismal Swamp, runaway servants from Virginia joined other renegades to establish a free society along the most inaccessible Atlantic coastline of North America. They created a new community on the banks of Albemarle Sound, maintaining peace with neighboring Native Americans, upholding the egalitarian values of the English Revolution, and ignoring the laws of the mother country.

Tapping into previously unused documents, McIlvenna explains how North Carolina's first planters struggled to impose a plantation society upon the settlers and how those early small farmers, defending a wide franchise and religious toleration, steadfastly resisted. She contends that the story of the Albemarle colony is a microcosm of the greater process by which a conglomeration of loosely settled, politically autonomous communities eventually succumbed to hierarchical social structures and elite rule. Highlighting the relationship between settlers and Native Americans, this study leads to a surprising new interpretation of the Tuscarora War.

NEXUS

Jonathan Reed Winkler

In an illuminating study that blends diplomatic, military, technology, and business history, Jonathan Reed Winkler shows how U.S. officials during World War 1 discovered the enormous value of global communications. 

At the outbreak of war in 1914, British control of the cable network affected the Americans' ability to communicate internationally, and the development of radio led to concerns in the Navy about hemispheric security.  The benefits of a U.S. network became evident during the war, especially in the gathering of intelligence.  This led to the creation of a peacetime intelligence operation, later termed the "Black Chamber," that was the forerunner of the National Security Agency.

After the war, U.S. companies worked to expand network service around the world but faced industrial limitations.  Focused on security concerns, the Wilson administration objected to any collaboration with British companies that might alleviate this problem.  Indeed, government officials went so far as to create a radio monopoly and use warships to block the landing of a cable at Miami.

The American efforts set important precedents for later developments in telephony, shortwave radio, satellites - even the internet.  In this absorbing history, Winker sheds light on the early stages of the global infrastructure that helped launch the United States as the predominant power of the century.

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