Bruce Ronda

What connected the writers, thinkers, and social reformers who belonged to the American transcendentalist movement of the 1830s-50s? Despite their use of religious language, the answer is a thoroughly secular world view. For most of these figures, human flourishing was the goal of all human culture. A similar goal pervades their twentieth and twenty-first century […]

K. Dawn Grapes

This book looks at the musical culture of death in early modern England. In particular, it examines musical funeral elegies and the people related to commemorative tribute – the departed, the composer, potential patrons, and friends and family of the deceased – to determine the place these musical-poetic texts held in a society in which […]

Zachary Hutchins

“The volume ably demonstrates that the new “American” nationality was, to a large degree, fictitious, as it excluded women, non-Europeans and members of the lower classes.”—H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Review An important reconsideration of the Stamp Act as prelude to the American Revolution The first book-length study of the Stamp Act in decades, this […]

Sasha Steensen

Gatherest defiantly attests to intimacy and our binding humanness amidst an alienating present. In three elegant poems, brushes with contemporary violence are met with meditations on kinship and communication alongside coursing reflections on the elemental foundations that borne and ground our existence. “Daughter,” she addresses, “people are not bad / not evil / people want […]