By Valeria Finucci (NHC Fellow, 2009–10) Defining the proper female body, seeking elective surgery for beauty, enjoying lavish spa treatments, and combating impotence might seem like today’s celebrity infatuations. However, these preoccupations were very much alive in the early modern period. Valeria Finucci recounts the story of a well-known patron of arts and music in Renaissance Italy, … Continued
By David E. Shi (NHC Fellow, 1982–83) Looking across three centuries of want and prosperity, war and peace, this work introduces a cast of practitioners and proponents of the simple life, among them Thomas Jefferson, Scott and Helen Nearing, Jimmy Carter and Jane Addams. It finds that nothing is simple about our mercurial devotion to … Continued
By Michael A. Lofaro (NHC Fellow, 1980–81) These never before collected or reprinted tales, were part of the original primary force that created the tall tale Davy Crockett. The Nashville almanacs significantly contributed to the development of the Davy Crockett myths. Two-thirds of the tales found in this edition have never before been collected or … Continued
By Martin Jay (NHC Fellow, 2005–06) When Michael Dukakis accused George H. W. Bush of being the "Joe Isuzu of American Politics" during the 1988 presidential campaign, he asserted in a particularly American tenor the near-ancient idea that lying and politics (and perhaps advertising, too) are inseparable, or at least intertwined. Our response to this … Continued
Edited by Merrill D. Peterson (NHC Fellow, 1980–81) Now fully represented in this Library of America volume is the most comprehensive testimony of the writings of our third president and foremost spokesperson for democracy. Thomas Jefferson, a brilliant political thinker, is perhaps best known for the Declaration of Independence, but he was a man of … Continued
By Lawrence Stone (NHC Fellow, 1990–91; 1991–92)
By Timothy Tackett (NHC Fellow, 2000–01) On a June night in 1791, King Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette fled Paris in disguise, hoping to escape the mounting turmoil of the French Revolution. They were arrested by a small group of citizens a few miles from the Belgian border and forced to return to Paris. Two years … Continued
By Madeline C. Zilfi (NHC Fellow, 2005–06) Madeline C. Zilfi’s latest book examines gender politics through slavery and social regulation in the Ottoman Empire. In a challenge to prevailing notions, her research shows that throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries female slavery was not only central to Ottoman practice, but a critical component of imperial … Continued
By Blyden Jackson (NHC Fellow, 1981–82; 1982–83)
By W. Fitzhugh Brundage (NHC Fellow, 1995–96) This first book-length study of the Ruskin colonies shows how several hundred utopian socialists gathered as a cooperative community in Tennessee and Georgia in the late nineteenth century. The communitarians' noble but fatally flawed act of social endeavor revealed the courage and desperation they felt as they searched … Continued