University of Virginia Press

06/16/2026

Happy to "Shifting Solidarities: The South African Anti-Apartheid Movement's Perceptions of Zionism" by Asher Lubotzky!

In recent decades, scholars and activists have increasingly drawn on the language of apartheid to describe the sociopolitical situation in Israel and Palestine. In South Africa today, Israel is notorious for its collaboration with the former white minority regime. This prevailing association, however, belies a more complex relationship between radical South Africans and the state of Israel that existed from the 1940s to the 1960s. During these years, Israel and Zionism divided opinion within South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement.

'Shifting Solidarities' traces the transition among anti-apartheid activists from support for a Jewish state in 1948 to anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian stances by the 1970s, showing how various ideologies—from Trotskyism to Pan-Africanism—shaped changing attitudes over time. Both an intellectual and a diplomatic history, the book illustrates how for several decades many South African radicals thought of Israel as a potential ally and admired its struggle for independence and postindependence achievements, but eventually came to see it as an apartheid-like state perpetuating the same kinds of injustices they had confronted for years.

"Brilliantly researched and lucidly written. There is no other systematic treatment of how the South African anti-apartheid resistance dealt with the Israel-Palestine question across time. Lubotzky not only makes a salient contribution to African studies; he also speaks to global issues of the politics of antisemitism, Zionism, Black nationalism, and anti-fascism."
—Jonathan Hyslop, Colgate University

https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/10204/

06/12/2026

Happy to "Suffering for the Crown: The Hudson Valley Loyalists and the Violence of Revolution" by Kieran J. O'Keefe!

In many respects, the American Revolution was a civil war, pitting Americans loyal to the Crown against other Americans loyal to the vision of a new nation they sought to create. Neighbor fought against neighbor, brother against brother, father against son. One of the epicenters of this desperate struggle was New York’s Hudson Valley.

In 'Suffering for the Crown,' Kieran O’Keefe offers an in-depth, long-term look at what many scholars consider the most fiercely contested region of the entire conflict, analyzing the effects of violence on Loyalist communities—which included white, Black, and Native peoples—in stunning detail. O’Keefe reveals the brutal reality of the war and examines its enduring psychological and social legacies, providing readers with a nuanced understanding of the Revolution’s human cost. Caught up in this crucible, he shows, suffering became central to how Loyalists came to define themselves and their ordeal, as the dark side of the nation’s birth fundamentally and permanently reshaped American civil society.

https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/10202/

06/09/2026

UVA Press is saddened to learn of the death of iconic historian Gordon S. Wood. His distinguished career is second to none in the field, and we are proud to have published a revised edition of "Representation in the American Revolution." May he rest in peace.

https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/3948/

06/05/2026

June is Pride Month!

Explore incredible stories, outstanding scholarship, and beautiful books

Take 30% off select titles using promo code at checkout

https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/10093/

06/04/2026

As the U.S. celebrates its 250th anniversary, explore an abundance of great history from your university press!

UVA Alumni Association

05/22/2026

Fascinating background fom University of Virginia Library on THE BURIED CAUSE: UNEARTHING HIDDEN HISTORY IN THE LEE MONUMENT CORNERSTONE. More on the book here: https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/10161/

‘Buried Cause’: In a new book, two UVA librarians analyze the unearthed Robert E. Lee monument cornerstone box

Conservator Sue Donovan was on the team who opened the 134-year-old commemorative box that had been buried beneath the Lee statue. Historian Ervin L. Jordan Jr. analyzed the contents inside for clues about the lives of Black Richmonders in the 1890s. Both had much to say about what they found.

https://library.virginia.edu/news/2026/buried-cause-new-book-two-uva-librarians-analyze-unearthed-robert-e-lee-monument

05/22/2026

Happy to "Becoming Stendhal: The Performance of Authenticity and the Making of a Novelist" by Hadley Suter!

Is there such a thing as an authentic self? Can an author translate an authentic self onto the written page? Stendhal—considered one of the earliest and foremost practitioners of French realism—addressed these questions with style and acumen in his celebrated novels The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma at a time when authenticity was increasingly becoming a preoccupation of nineteenth-century French culture.

In this book, Hadley Suter draws on Stendhal’s novels—as well as his travel narratives, criticism, biographies, and private journals—to examine the writer’s conception of authenticity as a theater composed of three distinct performances: the private, the social, and the written. In accessible terms, Suter argues that Stendhal’s notion of authenticity appears not so much as an ontological conundrum as a crisis of literacy—the story of how the self relates to the written word. Becoming Stendhal reveals how the famed author became the first proponent in Western literature of our prevailing idea of the authentic self.

"An original piece of scholarship that breathes new life into Stendhal studies by solving conundrums related to a perceived contradiction in Stendhal’s work. Suter manages to change how we think about authenticity in a way that radically questions contemporary identity politics, allowing for a more flexible and politically viable way of self-fashioning."
—Patrick M. Bray, University College London, author of The Price of Literature: The French Novel's Theoretical Turn



https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/10205/

05/21/2026

Happy to "Bale After Bale: How Cotton Defined the Twentieth-Century South," edited by David A. Davis!

There are few places on earth as thoroughly identified with a crop as the American South is with cotton. Burgundy is known for wine, and Java has coffee. In the South, for most of its history, cotton was king. Through much of the twentieth century, cotton cultivation determined nearly every aspect of life in the region. In Bale After Bale, leading historians and cultural critics offer multifaceted examinations and multimedia approaches to understanding the place of cotton in the twentieth-century South.

The essays in this collection examine the history of the hands that picked and processed cotton, the communities who celebrated cotton, the unions who organized cotton workers, the connections between cotton farmers in the South and banana farmers in Latin America, the portrayal of cotton in Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, the poems and songs of the boll weevil, the role of cotton in blues music, the depiction of cotton on the silver screen, and the memories of people displaced by mechanical cotton pickers. As these essays demonstrate, understanding the nature of cotton’s persistence into the twentieth century and the decline of the cotton economy are crucial to understanding the contemporary South and today’s United States.

"Takes us beyond readings of cotton's symbolic meanings to materializing its impact on relations of power, practices of labor, and forms of cultural production."
—Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Princeton University

"These important essays sparkle with fresh insights, and they remind us that the inequalities of the present are also rooted in the violent injustices of a very recent past."
—Sven Beckert, Harvard University

https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/10190/

05/21/2026

‘Buried Cause’: In a new book, two UVA librarians analyze the unearthed Robert E. Lee monument cornerstone box

Conservator Sue Donovan was on the team who opened the 134-year-old commemorative box that had been buried beneath the Lee statue. Historian Ervin L. Jordan Jr. analyzed the contents inside for clues about the lives of Black Richmonders in the 1890s. Both had much to say about what they found.

https://library.virginia.edu/news/2026/buried-cause-new-book-two-uva-librarians-analyze-unearthed-robert-e-lee-monument

05/15/2026

"As a scholar, I believe that documented facts can help build bridges across the racial divide. But we must confront the full story."

https://library.virginia.edu/news/2026/buried-cause-new-book-two-uva-librarians-analyze-unearthed-robert-e-lee-monument

University of Virginia Library

By Molly Minturn | May 14, 2026 In late 2021, a team of conservators and archivists opened a copper “cornerstone” box that had been buried for 134 years beneath the (recently removed) statue of Robert E. Lee on Monument Avenue in Richmond. Sue Donovan, Conservator for Special Collections at UVA ...