Examining the American planters' aspirations from the perspective of cultural theory and in the comparative context of a larger British world, Rozbicki asserts that for this emerging elite, the genteel quest was the only feasible route to identity and authority: it became a central dynamic of their lives, crucial to their ambitious struggles with provincialism and the metropolitan condescension toward colonial "upstarts." The author also shows how this determined quest played a vital but little-understood role in the construction of a new American identity, as the European model enabled the colonial elite to achieve sufficient maturity, confidence, and pride in their virtues and rights to defy the British in the 1770s. Originally asserting the gentlemanly ideals of liberty and equality against the British crown, Revolutionary gentry inadvertently cultivated them in the fertile ground of nonelite culture.

Written as a dissertation in history at the U. of Virginia, this study recreates the societal mores displayed at summer resorts at Virginia Springs from 1790-1860, as this was recorded in the letters and other archives of families who sojourned there. Lewis (history, Widener U.) suggests that her history provides a new insight into plantation society by recording responses to unusual events and lack of routine. She supplements the account with some analysis of the sources for the romantic and idealistic views of this culture. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The biography of William Byrd, hailed as the American Pepys reveals the life of a great gentleman in early America and a rich slice of what the country was really like in the early 1700's.

In pre-Revolutionary Virginia, wealthy "gentlemen" shared the political arena with small planters called freeholders. Drawing on a wide variety of primary sources, John Gilman Kolp examines why these freeholders politically supported and voted for runners of the upper class. 18 illustrations.

Across America, universities have become big businesses—and our cities their company towns. But there is a cost to those who live in their shadow. Urban universities play an outsized role in America’s cities. They bring diverse ideas and people together and they generate new innovations. But they also gentrify neighborhoods and exacerbate housing inequality in an effort to enrich their campuses and attract students. They maintain private police forces that target the Black and Latinx neighborhoods nearby. They become the primary employers, dictating labor practices and suppressing wages. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower takes readers from Hartford to Chicago and from Phoenix to Manhattan, revealing the increasingly parasitic relationship between universities and our cities. Through eye-opening conversations with city leaders, low-wage workers tending to students’ needs, and local activists fighting encroachment, scholar Davarian L. Baldwin makes clear who benefits from unchecked university power—and who is made vulnerable. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower is a wake-up call to the reality that higher education is no longer the ubiquitous public good it was once thought to be. But as Baldwin shows, there is an alternative vision for urban life, one that necessitates a more equitable relationship between our cities and our universities.

“The narrative offers informed, exacting characterizations of the uncertain political alliances, strained interactions and ideological growing pains that elites of the post-revolutionary decades put the country through.”—Andrew Burstein, The Washington Post A vivid account of leadership focusing on the first four Virginia presidents—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe—from the bestselling historian and author of James Madison. From a small expanse of land on the North American continent came four of the nation's first five presidents—a geographic dynasty whose members led a revolution, created a nation, and ultimately changed the world. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe were born, grew to manhood, and made their homes within a sixty-mile circle east of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Friends and rivals, they led in securing independence, hammering out the United States Constitution, and building a working republic. Acting together, they doubled the territory of the United States. From their disputes came American political parties and the weaponizing of newspapers, the media of the day. In this elegantly conceived and insightful new book from bestselling author Lynne Cheney, the four Virginians are not marble icons but vital figures deeply intent on building a nation where citizens could be free. Focusing on the intersecting roles these men played as warriors, intellectuals, and statesmen, Cheney takes us back to an exhilarating time when the Enlightenment opened new vistas for humankind. But even as the Virginians advanced liberty, equality, and human possibility, they held people in slavery and were slaveholders when they died. Lives built on slavery were incompatible with a free and just society; their actions contradicted the very ideals they espoused. They managed nonetheless to pass down those ideals, and they became powerful weapons for ending slavery. They inspired Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass and today undergird the freest nation on earth. Taking full measure of strengths and failures in the personal as well as the political lives of the men at the center of this book, Cheney offers a concise and original exploration of how the United States came to be.